Photo By Nick Lancaster

In this Issue:

l Bluedog Photo News

l Workshops

l Exhibitions

l Checking Out Web Sites

l Photo Tip

l Competitions & For Sale

l Photo Trivia/Dedication:

What's On: Workshops, Retreats and Outings:
For further details refer to Photography Workshops and Retreats
Don't forget to let us know if there is anything specific you would like covered in any workshop or during a retreat. Our workshop calendar will be on the web site and updated regularly as you make your requests and we are now trying to plan all workshops well in advance so you have plenty of time to prepare. Remember once you start with us, our advice does not stop when you leave the workshop you can e-mail us with questions and images for further continued advice.

The Bluedog Team of wonderfully talented professional photographers have a wealth of knowledge to share and have taught various aspects of photography throughout Australia. You may be a good photographer but that does not mean you can teach. We all continue to work as professional photographers and have the confidence and patience to take you on exciting paths with your work.

Registration and receipt of place is essential as numbers are limited. We want the workshops to continue to be very personalised so that you may gain the maximum from the workshops. Remember we do need you to book your place and after you book you receive a registration form. Once we receive this back with payment to secure your position then your place is confirmed.

An outline of each workshop and retreat itinerary is listed on Photography Workshops and Retreats

Photo Tip: Add Depth to Your Image

Photographs are 2D objects but we want our scenes to look 3D that is so the viewer's eye will go into the image and not over it and out.

Composition and lighting play a big part in this but so does the placement of the objects in the photograph.

One of the best ways to add depth is to have something in the foreground close to the camera. This technique works if you are photographing anything - people, places whatever. Place it close, go wide and achieve depth to take your viewers eye on an journey into your image.

Checking Out Web Sites:
With a wide variety of photography check out
The American Museum of Photography

www.photographymuseum.com
If you have come across a great web site
send it to us and it may just be featured!

What's On: Photography Exhibitions

l Picture Paradise - The first century of Asia-Pacific photography 1840's-1940s
The exhibition chronicles the developments in photography throughout South and Southeast Asia, Australia and the Pacific to the west coast of North America. Early photography in the Asia–Pacific region reveals the beauty and cultural diversity of the region.
Venue: National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Date/s: 10th July to 9 November 2008

l Indigenous Connections: Sidney Nolan's Rite of Spring, photographed by Axel Poignant
Delight in this rare selection of Axel Poignant’s photographs of painter Sidney Nolan’s set designs and costumes for the 1962 Royal Ballet production of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. Nolan’s work was inspired by Poignant’s photographs of several Arnhem Land communities in the Northern Territory during the 1950s.This meeting of creative minds resulted in a truly extraordinary collaboration between two Australian artists.
Venue: Philip Bacon Heritage Gallery, level 4, Queensland State Library
Date/s: 16 June - 28 Sept Entry Free

l Water Trees and Roots :: Stories from the Vietnamese community
From refugees to inspiration, Water, trees and roots celebrates the journey, challenges and successful establishment of Queensland's Vietnamese community through photographs and stories.
Venues & Dates:
Rockhampton North Library, North Rockhampton 13th-30th Sept
Yeppoon Library 8th-24th October
Blackwater Library 13th - 5th December
Charleville Library - 27th-31 January 2009

l Vivid: The National Photography Festival, is being held for the first time in Canberra celebrating the vital role of photography in Australian life and history. Dates: 11 July to 12 October 2008. For more info: www.nla.gov.au/vivid

Fifty venues
One hundred exhibitions
One festival

Photo Trivia: Did You Know?

Autochromes, an early color photography process, are amongst the world's oldest and rarest colour pictures.

Patented in 1903 by the Lumière brothers (Auguste and Louis) in France and first marketed in 1907, it remained the principal color photography process available until it was superseded by the advent of color film during the mid 1930s.When Kodacolor being was released in 1936 the Autochrome process came to an end.

Autochromes are extremely fragile and the majority of autochromes found are made by mostly amateurs. Many of them have been destroyed, so if you find one its worth a bob or two! This one by Edward Steichen dates back to 1908.

Dedication to the Masters of the Lens
W. Eugene Smith
(1918-1978 )

In the opinion of many, William Eugene Smith was one of the worlds greatest photojournalists. He was a photographer of technical competence matched by very few and with consummate skills in the darkroom. Above all he was dedicated to his mission as a photographer and his passion for truth invariably placed the integrity of the picture far above such matters as monetary gain or personal safety. Often regarded by editors as "troublesome" because of his steadfast refusal to allow his pictures, their layout, and often the text that accompanied them to be molded by the policy of the magazine or anything else other than his personal vision, Smith endured personal hardships for the sake of his work, but he always had the satisfaction of being true to himself and he has probably, more than any other individual, raised the art of the photographic essay to unequalled heights.

At the age of 14, he was interested in aeronautical engineering and borrowed a camera from his mother (also an enthusiastic photographer) to take pictures of the planes at the local airport. Soon photography became his major interest and he spent his high-school years photographing for local newspapers in Wichita. The subjects of most of these early pictures were sports, aviation, and significantly the Depression tragedy of the Dust Bowl. Later Smith destroyed most of the work of this period as too poor to preserve. "I had an intuitive sense of timing, an impossibly poor technique, and excitement to the fact of the event rather than of interpretive insight. Although I often was deeply moved, I did not have the power to communicate it," he says.

In 1936, at age 18, Gene Smith entered Notre Dame University where his pictures so impressed the faculty and administration that a special photographic scholarship was created for him. A year later, Smith left the University because of "friendly but hackneyed" demands that were made on his work. The emergence at that time of an exciting new picture magazine, Life, turned young Smith’s eyes toward the challenge of New York. Soon he joined the staff of Newsweek but within a year was fired for using "miniature" cameras (2¼ X 2¼) on assignment after he had been given specific orders not to. Smith’s reason for this was that he felt the smaller cameras gave him more freedom of seeing. Over the years to come Smith worked with any camera, from a Minox to a 4 X 5 press camera. In most of his work, however, he used 35 mm cameras, often having as many as six or seven around his neck and slung over his shoulders at once.

He turned to freelancing and then came the war. In 1942 Smith became a war correspondent first for Ziff-Davis (Flying and Popular Photography) and later for Life. Smith photographed the war, briefly in the Atlantic but most of the time in the bloody island-to-island fighting in the Pacific. During that time he was involved in 26 carrier combat missions and 13 invasions. He was in Okinawa on D-Day and hitch-hiked twelve hundred miles to Guam to be sure that his pictures would get the fastest possible delivery back to Life. Then he returned to the invasion on the first plane on which a correspondent could arrive.

Always known as a photographer who would take almost any chance if it meant getting the picture, Gene Smith’s good luck throughout the Pacific deserted him on May 23, 1945. While on the east coast of Okinawa photographing an essay titled "A Day in the Life of a Front Line Soldier," he was seriously wounded by a Japanese shell fragment. The missile hit him in the head cutting both cheeks, injuring his tongue and knocking out several teeth. Characteristically, he was taking pictures at the time and the fragment passed through his left hand before entering his cheek just below the eye and near the nose. His comment in the hospital later: "I forgot to duck but I got a wonderful shot of those who did... my policy of standing up when the others are down finally caught up with me."

Smith’s war wounds cost him two painful years of hospitalization and plastic surgery. During these years he took no pictures and whether he would ever be able to return to photography was doubtful. Then one day, during his period of convalescence, Smith took a walk with his two children and even though it was still intensely painful for him to operate a camera, came back with one of the most famous photographs of all time: "A Walk to Paradise Garden." This memorable image was to serve as the final picture in the famous "Family of Man" Exhibition.

In the period from 1947 to 1954, Gene Smith was to produce the great photo-essays for Life that were to redefine the meaning of the term, photojournalism, and to establish Smith as undisputed master of the field. Among these essays were: Country Doctor, Hard Times on Broadway, Spanish Village, Southern Midwife, and Man of Mercy (about Dr. Schweitzer in Africa). In the period from 1947 to 1954, Gene Smith was to produce the great photo-essays for Life that were to redefine the meaning of the term, photojournalism, and to establish Smith as undisputed master of the field. Among these essays were: Country Doctor, Hard Times on Broadway, Spanish Village, Southern Midwife, and Man of Mercy (about Dr. Schweitzer in Africa).

In the two years that followed Smith undertook his monumental picture essay on the city of Pittsburgh. This essay, probably the most complex and ambitious ever attempted by a single photographer, developed Smith’s ideas of relating pictures to layout and to text in a single expressive entity. Although it was largely self-financed and threw Smith heavily into debt, aid was also received from a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1956-1957.

Smith received a second Guggenheim Fellowship in 1958-1959 and began a project of photographing the city as he sees it (day and night and in all seasons of the year) through the window of his New York loft. Some of the window series was published in Life under the title Drama Beneath a Window and part of the Pittsburgh project was published in the Photography Annual, but exhaustion, illness, and personal crises prevented him bringing the text part of the essay to the quality he could find personally acceptable.

In addition to photographing, Smith taught a class in photojournalism (titled "Photography Made Difficult") at New York’s New School for Social Research and served as president of the American Society of Magazine Photographers. Of himself he says: "I am an idealist. I often feel I would like to be an artist in an ivory tower. Yet it is imperative that I speak to people, so I must desert that ivory tower. To do this, I am a journalist—a photojournalist. But I am always torn between the attitude of the journalist, who is a recorder of facts, and the artist, who is often necessarily at odds with the facts. My principle concern is for honesty, above all honesty with myself..."

"A Walk To Paradise Garden" 1946

Dr. Albert Schweitzer - "A Man Of Mercy" Series, 1954

"Saipan" 1944