Views of Lennox Head
The Road Flatrock
From the Author
MY AIM AS AN ARTIST:
To fill your senses with the Uplifting, Beautiful and !Buzz! of LIFE!
My experience in photography has evolved since the 1960’s.
As an artist I picked up the brushes in the mid-1990’s and painted acrylic watercolours onto ceramic tiles.
Around 2005 I commenced experimenting with the Digital Imaging of my artworks. My methods include taking photos of my original paintings (or working from original photographs) and altering on Photoshop into many different ‘evolved images’. So now many images have become a varied ‘Digital Image Original’ of its own.
Over the years I have found it difficult to part with any of my original creations and rarely sold my painted tiles and usually only parted with them as gifts to a few lucky relatives and friends.
Now via the VILARTTIO website when you discover any treasures to make your own they can be purchased by contacting me.
At present there is no shopping-cart but I look forward to communicating more personally about your order.
My Image Evolution
Many years of evolutionary work have gone into my Artworks.
For 50 years I have worked through the evolution of a variety of mediums, equipment and technology. From a child in the 1960’s, with my ‘plastic toy’ Kodak camera impatiently waiting a month to see the results of my fuzzy Black and White photos, to today’s instant result devices.
As a kid I was also drawn to my father’s hobby as a Super 8 Film Home Movie Fanatic and I would assist him with filming, lighting and post production, splice, cut and editing.
I was most fascinated watching Dad create special effects for his movies as he painstakingly filmed for hours ‘frame by frame’ time-lapse footage of letters and objects moving across a background.
When the movies were finally developed and eventually delivered (Super 8 took 6 weeks!) we would watch the result of these letters somehow appearing to move magically into position across the screen and become actual words, titles and credits!!!
The old days of hobby photography and home movie making were far from economical. To shoot and develop just a 3 minute Super 8 movie in comparison today would costs hundreds of dollars. And that’s Super 8 with no sound!
By the early 80’s as the Super 8 era drew to a close, another good photographer mate had bought one of the first model Panasonic ‘portable’ videotape cameras. After the initial set-up costs the overall long-term process was becoming far more economical. Now we even virtually had instant playback! And so off we went filming our surfing and camping adventures.
However these videotape cameras were quite big and alone weighed a few kilos. PLUS they had to be plugged into a video-cassette and supported battery source the size of a carry-on luggage suit case. If you were to board an aircraft today with this gear you would already be over the weight limit before you even packed a pair of socks and undies.
I continued shooting with a variety of film stills and video cameras until eventually in 1999 reaching the digital age when I started my job as a Photographer with the iconic Australian publisher the ‘Trading Post’. While the company constantly updated their digital cameras it wasn’t until 2005 that I had enough faith in the developing technology to purchase my own digital SLR camera.
As an artists I seriously picked up the brushes in the mid 90’s using watercolours on ceramic tiles. And so now armed with my own digital camera I commenced shooting my artworks. A couple of years later I started experimenting with Digital Imaging the artworks in Photoshop.
In today’s ‘instant’ hi-tech world there is still a lot of time consumed in the editing and development process, resizing and applying different formats for print or downloading to websites & social media etc. PLUS the continued learning curve associated with rapidly changing I.T. and technology in general.
The great thing about today’s technology is with Digital Imaging we can basically vary image sizes, shapes, colours, the print mediums and more to suit any persons individual taste or preferences.
In reality, when we add to this the time spent on the creative processes, then even in today’s world, quality works of art are still not produced in an ‘instant’ and still take time to master.
SO YES: many years of evolution have formed and fashioned my artworks that you see today.
M.L.A. Throw another Steak on the Barbie
Meat and Livestock Australia (MLA) in the summer of 2012 -13 launched a campaign to ditch Shrimp – (Prawn) and get back to the true Aussie tradition of “throwing another STEAK on the barbie”…
As part of the campaign the MLA staged a media stunt to not only protest against Ballina’s world famous ‘Big Prawn’ but also get rid of it all together and then replace it rightly with the ‘Big Steak’…
The MLA gave me the job as official photographer to document this historic event … (click on images to enlarge)
Sharon’s Stones Business Card
I shot some photos of Sharon and her jewellery and created this Business Card on Photoshop. Sharon insisted on the correct English spelling version of ‘jewellery’.
Both Sharon and I had no hesitation in deciding to use as a background this magnificent, almost opal like paua (abalone) shell she had brought home from one of her visits to New Zealand.
Flyer – Blue Sky Paddle Day
The Dawn Treader
After the end of days filming of Narnia “Voyage of the Dawn Treader”. These colours are all natural with Dawn Treader under lights and the natural light of dusk and a rising full moon. The ‘Treader’ sits on the set location at Morton Bay QLD Australia. NOTE: The ship is built the size of Captain Cook’s Endeavour and for scale compare the tree, crane and the white cabins of the mid-size trucks.