Although work probably takes me up to Cairns two or three times a year I rarely seem to have the time to take a few days holiday and make the most of being out of Brisbane. Although I still didn’t have the time I decided that this time I would take a couple of days leave and look to go out diving.

It’s been over 2 years since my last dive, when I did a day trip out of Port Douglas on a previous occasion when work had taken me up to Cairns. As I was in Cooktown I did look to go out to the Cod Hole or Coral Sea but the trips out there didn’t fit in with when I was there, plus the cost is pretty expensive, with the cheapest places being over $1,200 mark for a 4 day trip. However, I did notice when I was in Cairns that last minute empty places were being advertised in the region of $700 so if you find yourself in Cairns and aren’t constrained by time that you should look to try to get a last minute cheap deal. Surprisingly the liveaboard trips out of Cairns only have a 48 hour cancellation notice so you could book one of those as backup and cancel it fairly last minute in favour of a Cod Hole/Coral Sea trip should a cheap deal become available.

Day 1
A 5:30am alarm, picked up at 6am, first to the shop to sort out gear and then to the boat. The trip to the outer reef took 3 hours and wasn’t too bad considering the high winds earlier in the week. For Day 1 am buddied up with a 20 year old girl from Portland, Oregon. These days it might be a while between dives but I am trying to keep the old BUDC traditions going on the other side of the world… First dive at Milln Reef was a pleasant swim around a few bommies at 20m. On the way back to the boat we spot some clownfish, stop to have a play and one shoots out of his anemone, bites me on my finger and makes a very quick retreat. Thanks to Finding Nemo everyone thinks Clownfish are cute but they’re pure evil really….

Dive 2 and it’s the joys of getting into a wet wetsuit. This time it’s a 50 minute dive, maxing out at 16m but mostly at about 6m amongst the shallower coral. Almost got run over by a turtle doing about 100 miles/hour, but my buddy managed to miss it.

The boat moved to a different part of the reef after the 2nd dive and Dive 3 was on ‘The Whale’. Had forgotten all the Dive Supervisor’s information and bearings by the time we hit the water and so most of the dive was spent wondering whether we were in the right place. Saw another turtle and spent some time checking it out.

Dive 4 of the day was a night dive. Every night dive you do on the Great Barrier Reef will be made out by the crew to be the event horizon of diving where you will see everything and just about every night dive on the Great Barrier Reef will be a huge anti-climax where you don’t see anything. And true to form we saw nothing.

After 4 dives in a wetsuit it’s pretty cold and after long day go to bed at about 9:30am. The only trouble is my dorm is at the back of the boat near the generator and although the earplugs block out some of the noise they don’t block out that the whole room is vibrating…. So it’s not the best of sleeps.

Day 2
We are given a bit of a lie in on Day 2 so it’s just the 6am alarm call. Day 2 finds me buddied up with a girl from Perth called Tania. Dive 5 is similar to the day before’s Dive 3 when we forgot everything we’d been told about the dive site. This time we remember a bit better. Down to 20m again and saw a few white tip reef sharks patrolling the edge of the reef but nothing that we could get close to. A bit later on in the dive we saw another turtle and checked it out as it had a bit of a feed on some seaweed. On the second swim around the site we find the swim through that we’d missed on the first swim around the bommie and so head through that before surfacing.

By now my ear were starting to squeak quite a bit, and the joys of the wet wetsuit were not being helped by a cold day on the reef and a cold wind. But there were plenty of dives left to do and the boat moved over to Flynn Reef for the next set of dives. Dive 6 was an 18m dive on the outside of a reef, where we saw a few blue spotted rays in the sand but not much else. The coral was in pretty bad shape. We came onto the shelf and the coral and fish life was considerably better, in good shape and plenty of it.

With the three day dives done it was time for dinner and preparation for the night dive. The instructions were to swim on a bearing of 180° for 9 –11 minutes until we hit a bommie, swim around the bommie and find Brian The Turtle sleeping, then use the lights from the boat as a guide to get back. So off we set and after 14 minutes we still haven’t found Brian. And suddenly there he is. I’d like to think it was my excellent underwater navigation in the dark that got us here but when we’re back on the boat it turns out it was more fluke than anything as I thought we were on the other side of the bommie. When my buddy gave a signal to swim off in a certain direction I gave a funny look as I thought that was swimming away from the boat. So I made us go around the bommie a second time… Apparently we saw Brian again on our second lap but I wasn’t paying attention… We use the boat lights to get back and see a few reef sharks circling the sand under the boat. Then we ascend to the bar they’ve got under the boat for safety stops and watch the big snapper and big barracudas circling around us, and the reef sharks beneath us in the shadows. It was really awesome, a welcome change from previous night dives on the Great Barrier Reef.

Day 3
The final day starts with a 5:45am alarm call, despite the fact that it’s still pitch black outside. By the time we get in the water just after 6:30am in our still wet wetsuits it’s beginning to get light. After the initial cold water shock of hitting the water it’s a fairly leisurely dive and we see a lion fish, couple more turtles, a really big grouper/cod hiding in a hole and a reef shark on the way back to the boat.

Gotta squeeze those final day dives in so we only get about a hour back on the boat before we’re back in the water. We’ve moved site again in that hour and our instructions for Dive 10 are to swim along the edge of the reef and follow it as it bends around, then sit there and watch all the big fish, big rays, big sharks. And turn back when you hit 100 bar. So we get about half way to all the big exciting stuff and one of my two buddies for the day hits 100 bar. So we come back. A few people did make it to the place where all the big exciting stuff was. And saw nothing. And so finally to Dive 11, which was a bit of an anti-climax in the shallow reefs. Then it was time to pack up and head back to shore.

It wouldn’t be a proper dive trip without some sort of kit faff/loss and this trip lived up to expectations with my dive computer deciding to die on me. Apparently it turned to the dark side somewhere along the way and decided that I did a 140m dive for 999 minutes. And then it decided when I was back on the boat that I was doing a rapid ascent and didn’t stop beeping every few seconds for three days…

A good trip all-in-all even though it was pretty exhausting doing 11 dives in 3 days. And I miss my dry suit. The dive computer is off being fixed and I’m back up to Cairns at the end of the month so probably going to try and fit another dive or 11 in while I’m up there.

The photos are from my cheap Vivitar underwater film camera, essentially a camera similar in picture quality to a disposal camera but with the ability to change the film. I kicked it old school and decided to do b+w with Kodak’s c41 BW400CN film. As would be expected got a few ok shots and lots of blurry/out of focus/badly composed shots (due to the difficulting in composing shots without a proper viewfinder). Might have to get around to getting a digital camera and casing at some point…

Whilst my week in the historic Far North Queensland town of Cooktown was for work, I did get some time to have a bit of a look around. When I first got there on the Sunday I had a walk down the riverfront and around the town and my work finished up early on the Thursday afternoon so I had a couple of hours of daylight to walk up to the lighthouse on Grassy Hill and then take the path down to Cherry Tree Bay, across to Finch Bay and back through the Botanical Gardens.

I then had enough time to drive back up Grassy Hill for sunset and take some photos for a time-lapse movie. It got dark quicker than expected so I adjusted my camera settings after a few minutes to make the images lighter and capture more of the sunset. You might be able to see this in the movie about 3 seconds in, when despite the setting sun it becomes slightly lighter.

Work took me up to Cooktown in Far North Queensland for a week. Although it’s a short flight from Cairns to Cooktown I decided to take the more leisurely drive up there. I don’t mind flying but when work takes me away from Brisbane I prefer to drive, take in the scenery and have a look around.

The road from Cairns to Mossman follows the coastline, with some spectacular views over the sea and, as such, it’s a pretty slow road, full of Sunday drivers admiring the scenery. From Mossman there are two options; keep going on the coast road through Cape Tribulation and Wujal Wujal or take the inland road. As the coast road is 4×4 only, with my hire car I only had the choice of the inland road, the final section of which was only sealed in 2006.

The road runs through the hills across to Mount Molloy, and then arcs northwards through Lakeland to Cooktown. The road is pretty fast unless you get stuck behind caravans, RVs or trucks, all of which struggle for speed on the hills. As the road is windy and has a lot of dips it can be difficult to overtake slow moving vehicles. In the end, both the trip up and back took almost 4½ hours to cover the 327km as opposed to about a ½ hour each way if I had flown.

theredsunband were one of the first batch of bands I saw when I first moved to Sydney, although I can’t remember the occasion. I know I saw them play at the album launch for their first album at @Newtwon in October 2004 with The Red Riders supporting, and think that my first time of seeing them might have been a combination of going predominantly to see the support band, aided by the fact that the venue was just up the road from where I was living in Enmore at the time.

Almost four years on and they’ve just released their second album and although there’s been a change in drummer, the sound is the same shoegazing, indie pop. On their Wikipeida page, one of their genres as listed as ‘Dream Pop’, which is an apt description. The main obvious drawback to a genre called ‘Dream Pop’ and one that definitively applies to theredsunband’s music is its soporific tendencies. The Globe is the obvious Brisbane venue for them to play, with everyone sat or lying on the floor and whilst there’s nothing wrong musically, there is a definite lack of visual engagement as far as the performance goes (especially with the only light being on singer/guitarist, Sarah Kelly). Even though they’re not an instrumental band, I think they would benefit greatly with some visuals, be it moving images projected onto a backdrop or something less high-tech like a liquid light show.

Sady Butcher Birds couldn’t play, and although The Gin Club were originally mooted as their replacements, in the end Z Rays took up the main support spot. They weren’t particularly exciting, with a Garage/Mersey Beat type sound and a similar rhythm for each song making their short set very monotonous. And not helped much by the centre-stage keyboardist/one drum drummer playing with one hand whilst holding his drink in the other…

The lovely Sienna, ex-Love Outside Andromeda opened the night with a mix of new and old songs and the odd cover. Sounded in really great form, although they probably shouldn’t have played PJ Harvey through the speakers straight after her set…

Some more photos on flickr.

Although I wouldn’t strictly describe Anton Corbijn as a music photographer, even though it was where he started, his photography has always been a huge inspiration and has a large part to play in me wanting to do music photography.

U2 were the first band I really got into and saw in concert, Cardiff Arms Park in 1987 when they were on The Joshua Tree tour. I took a small camera (a Kodak Disc Camera from memory) and have some really bad photos of them and the support bands (The Pretenders and The Alarm) from miles away from the stage, where they are just little dots on the stage, and most of the photo is the back of the heads of the people in front of me…

The cover for ‘The Unforgettable Fire’ always mesmerised me as the photography was just so beautiful (I realised later when I started getting into photography properly that it was done with black and white infrared film), even though half of it is blurry and out of focus. And the same with the ‘Joshua Tree’ album artwork photos; they were (and are) amazing.

At that first gig, by the time that I went to get a t-shirt they had sold out, so I ended up getting a programme, which was full of other photos that were taken when they were out in the desert doing the photos that ended up on the album artwork. So my first bit of proper band memorabilia was a book of photos.

Although I still have that program, I treated myself to a more up-to-date and flashy version a couple of years ago and bought his book ‘U2 and I’ as a birthday present to myself.

I’ve always liked the simplicity of his photos; there’s nothing complicated or flash about his images, there’s no use of elaborate props for the most part. There’s also a seriousness about his images and if photography is about stealing people’s souls I don’t think anyone does it better than Anton Corbijn. I’ve also always liked his use of individual portraits of band members and also his use of alternate printing processes, especially his use of lith printing, both of which I’ve looked to take into my own photos.

On their last tour I was offered the photo op to photograph U2 when they played in Brisbane. However, this opportunity was emailed me and I only had a 20 minute window to get back to them to say if I was available to do it. I was at work but away from my computer and by the time I got back I was too late; the chance had been and gone. It was a really devastating experience. I’d waited 20 years for this – the chance to photograph the first band I really got into, the first band I saw in concert, and whose photos had been hugely influential on my photography. What was especially depressing about the whole thing was that the publication who offered it to me had my mobile number and had used it previously to contact me about things like photographing The Presets. Yet they offered me the opportunity to photograph just about the world’s biggest band, took the chance that I would be sat in front of a computer and able to quickly respond, and so emailed me.

Afterwards I emailed the promoter and pretty much begged for the chance, even saying that I was going down to Sydney to see them (on the Monday night, their third Sydney date) so if there were any available photographer places I could photo them in Brisbane or Sydney, but no dice. Guess there’s always next time…

Another last minute request to cover a show, this time the second night of the 4ZZZ Tater Stomp at The Troubadour.

Like most photographers I am a very wary Troubadour photographer and it comes bottom of the list for requesting shows to cover unless it’s someone that I really, really want to see. Whilst it’s a fantastic venue and post-gig drinking hole, the lighting, even at its very best, is usually really terrible. Sometimes you hit lucky, like I did the last time I photographed here and Bill Callahan was stood in exactly the right place to have some good quality light shining on him, sometimes you don’t, with photographing the Nation Blue last year springing to mind, where ISO 1600, f1.7, and 1/25 was still giving me chronic underexposure and a set of unusable photos.

I photographed the last two acts on Saturday night; Dick Desert And The Shotgun Country Club and Texas Kate. The lighting was average/typical Troubadour fare; my settings were around ISO800, f2.8, 1/50.

The only previous time that I’d seen Dick Desert was a solo show at a Trash Video fundraiser at The Rev all the way back in December 2005. It’s strange that it’s been so long as he’s previously personally requested that Rave send me to photograph when they’ve been covering him; from memory I think once I was away and another time the gig was cancelled last minute.

Was great to see him play again, and Saturday’s show with the Shotgun Country Club was a really fun show of the punk country that Brisbane does so well.

It was also great to see Texas Kate and catch up with her about the recent Texas Tea European tour. Really looking forward to their new album which is out in November; I did some photos for Mess & Noise when they were recording it last November and it’s just been far too long for something so good to remain under wraps.

Some more photos on Flickr.

I recently dusted off my laptop and switched on my laptop for the first time in over a year – I normally use my desktop at home and work laptop if away with work. Whilst looking through the drives to remember what I had stored on their I re-discovered some of the photos I took on my 3½ month drive around Australia in 2005.

I did a warm-up for the main part of the road trip in early January 2005 by driving up the coast from Sydney as far as Brisbane before heading back to Sydney. During this time I hooked up with the best-band-that-should-have-been, The Hauntingly Beautiful Mousemoon, and hung out with them in Byron, Brisbane and the Gold Coast. The band then stayed with me in Newtown after a Sydney show at the Hopetoun in February 2005 and I started my road trip by following them down to Melbourne where they were playing a few gigs, including playing at The Espy during St. Kilda Festival. I think there are some photos from that time that I developed but that have never seen the light of day. I might have to dig them out and scan them in.

But then the real adventure started, with me saying my farewells to the band before they headed back to Newcastle and heading out on the open road.

My trip then took me along the Great Ocean Road to Adelaide, over to and down the Eyre Peninsula to Port Lincoln, back up and across the Nullabor, down to Cape Le Grand near Esperence, along the coast to Perth, all the way up to Exmouth in north WA, back down to Geralton, across via Mount Magnet to Leinster, down to Kalgoorlie, back across the Nullabor to Broken Hill and finally back to Sydney. The original plan was to do a figure-of-eight and keep going from north WA up to Darwin and back down via Uluru and Coober Pedy on the way back to Sydney but in the end I had nowhere near enough time and probably not enough money. And there are some that would have doubted that my $1,900 car would have made it that far…

It’s getting near the time of year when work takes me out of Brisbane – I’m off to Cooktown for work (and staying up in North Queensland for a few extra days holiday) in mid-July and will then be in Melbourne and probably a couple of other places in rural Victoria for much of September. I’m also taking some proper holiday in August, so expect less band photos and more travel/landscape photos in the coming months…

Some more photos on Flickr.