This month’s feature story
Nic van Oudtshoorn ARPS
Photographer of the Year
"Abstract (Professional)" category of the international reFocus 2025 World Photo Annual competition
Pondering Pollard
Unconditional Surrender
To Margaret River with Love
A Photographic Essay
Hon. Secretary:
Elaine Herbert ARPS PH (03) 9866 3538 E: elaineherbert39@gmail.com
Newsletter Editor: Ian Brown PH 0403 036 119 E: ian@ianbrowndesign.com.au
When
Elaine Herbert ARPS
Hon Secretary, Australian Chapter
Welcome, everyone, to this first issue of the Australian Chapter’s Newsletter for 2025. Our Newsletter Editor is now Ian Brown who has taken over from Rob Morgan and brings a ‘new look’ to the Newsletter. Thank you, Rob, for all your wonderful work editing the Newsletter over the past six years. And welcome, Ian, as we move into the New Year.
• Congratulations to Nic Van Oudtshoorn ARPS (from Jamberoo, NSW) for his success in the ‘refocus’ 2025 World Photo Annual competition – see the separate article about Nic and his photography on page 6. That’s wonderful news, Nic. Well done!
• And congratulations also to Bryan Timmons LRPS of Margaret River in WA for the forthcoming exhibition of his photographs of the local community titled To Margaret River with Love. See more on page 12.
December 2024 marked a momentous anniversary for Palli Gajree OAM HonFRPS as it was seventy years since he joined the RPS, way back in December 1954! Palli is still an active a member of several RPS Special Interest Groupsincluding the Creative Eye Group which featured Palli’s lifetime contribution to photography and The Society in its January Creative Eye magazine. It includes a great selection of Palli’s images, from his portraiture, through to wildlife, and now his experimental work. Here’s the link to this article.
As international members of RPS we have all been asked to vote for an RPS International Representative. Eight members from across the world volunteered to put their names forward for this role, including one of our own
Australian members, Jacky Lee. The others are from Belgium, USA (East Coast), Hong Kong & China, India, Spain and Switzerland, and this clearly demonstrates the international range of the RPS. The response to the call for volunteers was a most encouraging one as it is really important that we international members have a voice on the RPS Committees. Voting closed on 26 January and we expect the result to be announced shortly.
This is a recent initiative to help international members of the RPS become more engaged and inspired by their RPS membership even though we live outside the UK and usually far from other members. It’s a quarterly on-line publication produced by a small support group of volunteers led by Janet Haines ARPS which we receive by email, and it’s going from strength to strength with 52 pages in the latest issue (November 2024).
Regular features include a Member’s Project, a Member Interview, an RPS Chapter, My Home, plus more - with information about meetings and projects that can be enjoyed by those living in different time zones, either live or watching the recordings later.
And we in Australia have been part of it too! There was a great interview with Gigi and Robin Williams (both ASIS FRPS) in the February 2024 issue with a selection of their superb images. And the November issue included an overview of the Australian Chapter – plus a feature interview with our Newsletter Editor Ian Brown
All the back issues may be found on line here
Ian Brown Editor, Australian Chapter
For my first edition as editor, I thought I’d introduce myself and briefly outline what I do and have done for the last thirty years or so.
In the design world, I’d be described as a generalist. While I’m not a jack of all trades, I have mixed being a graphic designer, multi-media designer, and design teacher for years. Way back when, I trained a photographer, though I had to put it on the back burner as my design career took over.
More recently, my teaching has been in photography courses, teaching students how photographers and designers work together. This has rekindled my enjoyment of photography, and I started to shoot again, so much so that I have begun to study again.
During my career, I have worked as a designer for over 30 years and as a design lecturer for over 20. I have worked on multi-national brands, creating, building, maintaining and protecting their brands. I trained in the UK and began my career working on multi-national Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) brands before heading to Australia for the wedding of two long-lost and long-divorced friends and I decided to stay.
For 20 years, I lived in Sydney before moving to Melbourne 12 years ago. Since arriving here in Australia, I have worked with design and advertising agencies as well as clients directly developing marketing material, including brand identities, brand guidelines, packaging, brochures, signage, point-of-sale and other promotional material. As well as multi-nationals, I have developed branding and packaging for boutique brands and small businesses.
Feel free to check out some of my work here
In the next month or so, I will rebrand my business from Ian Brown Design to accommodate some of my photography work. I’ll keep you posted. I do not intend to become a commercial photographer, but I want to showcase my work. It doesn’t feel right to lump photography on the end of a design website, so it is time for a change.
My teaching experience includes teaching graphic design at Billy Blue, Karl von Busse Institute, CATC, Federation University, Melbourne Polytechnic, RMIT and Tractor. I have been responsible for creating and delivering various face-toface and online design courses, from Diploma level to Associated Degrees and Degrees.
I also have a side hustle, called The Known Knowns, I’m building with a couple of friends. It is a resource for creatives to build their knowledge of the industry and software through mentors, projects and videos. We have started with design and will expand into photography and other creative disciplines.
Here is a link to the website and a link to the YouTube channel.
I look forward to working with you as the editor and sharing my new brand. Please find time to share your work and stories so we can build a vibrant and informative newsletter over the following months.
A warm welcome to a year of photographing differently.
2025 will be a ‘make or break’ year for our Chapter. As you have read in the Newsletter late last year, Elaine is looking to retire as our Hon Secretary by the end of this year, and so we are looking for someone to take over this role. The arithmetic is clear: New Hon Sec = Active Chapter vs. No Hon Sec = No Chapter. I too, have taken up the role of Convenor for just this year (similar equation). So if you are interested in joining our committee in the near future with a view to taking on one of these roles in 2026, please contact Elaine.
We will be holding our first Chapter Committee meeting in February (via Zoom). If there is any matter you would like the committee to consider, again please contact Elaine ASAP.
We have many new members in our Chapter and we would all love to hear about you and your photography. Robin Williams ASIS FRPS, has been doing a wonderful job with his informative and entertaining series ‘Pondering Pollard’. We do not expect any newer member to make such an major contribution (though we are happy if you do!), but we would like to hear a little about you. Robin has suggested newer members could provide our Editor with “A Pic and a Para”. The idea is that you send Ian an image you have taken, which really appeals to you (see Ian’s note elsewhere in the Newsletter about file sizes) and accompany your image with a paragraph about what you like about it, or how you took it, or simply what your photographic interests are. This Newsletter is not Twit-X, so you can be as expansive as you like. May I encourage each of you who has joined us in the past year or three to send Ian a ‘pic and a para’, so we can enjoy seeing and hearing about you and your photography.
"Abstract (Professional)" category of the international reFocus 2025 World Photo Annual competition
Nic van Oudtshoorn ARPS is a multiaward-winning photographer, including the 2024 Abstract Photographer of the Year in the professional category of the prestigious international ReFocus World Photo Annual competition. Photographers from over 60 countries submitted entries.
Nic has been a photojournalist and documentary film maker for almost 50 years, now specialising in close-up and macro, as well as black-and-white and wildlife photography.
Nic's photos have appeared in books, calendars, newspapers and magazines (including Time and Reader’s Digest) around the world.
His footage has been seen on TV around the world, including National Geographic and Discovery channels. He has won numerous international awards for his photographs, both colour and black-and-white.
Nic is a qualified instructor with a Master’s degree from Sydney University. He is the author of 14 books, including The Photographer’s Guide to Close-up, Macro and Focus Stacking, available from Amazon as a paperback, as well as a Kindle edition.
I have always been fascinated by macro photography, experimenting with a wide range of lenses, extension tubes, bellows and the like to get ever-larger images of smaller and smaller subjects. Focus stacking added a new dimension and made possible images we could only dream about in the film days.
Working as a photojournalist for most of my life, macro photography provided a very different intellectual challenge. Now retired, I can devote much more time to macro, which I teach at three NSW community colleges as well as online at Udemy.com
A few years ago, I came across the pioneering work of Canadian photographer Dr Robert Berdan (rberdan@scienceandart.org) who is an expert on photographing crystals using a polarising light microscope.
Inspired by his images, I felt a microscope would give a whole new dimension to macro photography, while the brilliant colours and strange shapes of crystals were really intriguing.
I invested in a trinocular Motic BA310 POL microscope and two very important attachments for crystal photomicroscopy -- a Full Wave Plate and the 1/4 Wave Plate. These two items are responsible for revealing some of the most brilliant colours in polarizing photography.
Getting to grips with the polarising microscope was a bit of a learning curve. So was growing the crystals, which involved some trial and error in selecting the best chemicals, then diluting them in water, different types of alcohol (including vodka!), or a combination of both.
I tried everything from powdered vitamin C (ascorbic acid) to caffeine, beta-alanine, Epson salts and citric acid. I tried beer, wine and spirits. I dissolved them in different combinations of water and alcohol at different temperatures. I almost boiled some, while other went in the freezer.
Then I placed drops of the various solutions on microscope slides under a cover skip. Some I left for weeks to evaporate naturally, others I heated in the microwave oven to speed up crystallisation.
Those dissolved in water took longest to evaporate, while alcohol solutions formed crystals within hours.
I mounted a Canon 5D MkIII on the trinocular port of the microscope, attached to an external monitor via HDMI. This allowed me to accurately adjust focus as I switched between different magnifications, from 40x to 400x.
The slide was placed on the microscope. When focused, I then slowly moved the slide sideways and up and down. At the same time, I rotated the polarising filter between the lens and the specimen with my filter until the best colours emerged.
My most dramatic and unusual results came from the sweetener Stevia, followed by caffeine, which won me the award.
At these magnifications, depth of field even of crystals is extremely shallow and I often use Photoshop or Helicon Focus to stack up a number of shots taken at various focal points. Adjusting even the fine focus knob of the microscope in such small increments takes practice, but it can be done when using an external monitor.
I now use a WeMacro Micromate to do the fine-focus adjustments for me in steps measured in microns. This article explains
in detail how the Micromate works.
A dedicated polarising microscope is quite expensive, but it is possible to adapt even a low-cost student microscope, albeit with varying results in terms of quality. This YouTube video explains how.
RPS member Bryan Timmon’s work will feature in an exhibition from 6 February to 17 March at Margaret River. For any of our Western Australian members who are able to visit, the details are in the poster to the left.
Arriving in Margaret River from the UK in January 2005, my wife Claire and I very soon found ourselves in the warm embrace of a special community here in south-west WA.
We have now lived here for twenty very happy years, and count our blessings every day. The photographs in this exhibition, captured over several years, represent my impressions and feelings about this unique place and the diversity of its inhabitants. It is my love letter to a community and a place that we are proud to call home.
Photography has been a retirement project for me, and it is a happy place in which I can be totally absorbed. It gives me a purpose, as well as a means of self-expression. Working in black and white enables me to see light and form in my subjects in a way that colour cannot.
Bryan Timmons LRPS – January 2025.
Top right: At the Coffee Van – at the regular Saturday morning Margaret River Farmers Market
Bottom left: Pruning the Vines – a feature of life in the Margaret River Wine Region.
Bottom right: The Mermaids – a group of Ladies who swim in the ocean at Gnarabup beach every day 365 days a year.
Fig.2: ‘Unconditional Surrender’ or ‘The Kiss’, VJ Day, New York, 1945.
Robin Williams ASIS FRPS
‘Eisenstaedt on Eisenstaedt,’ Peter Adam, British Broadcasting Corporation, London, 1985.
This is a companion book to The BBC ‘Masters of Photography’ series, which can be found on YouTube (click here) but be aware that it will shock you how poor the quality of broadcast television was in the 1980s!
On the afternoon of the 14th August 1945 hundreds of Americans began gathering in Times Square in anticipation of the public announcement of the end of World War II; there were shouts of joy when the ‘Zipper’ (News Ticker) on the side of The Times building announced the end of hostilities. President Harry S. Truman would officially announce Japan’s ‘Unconditional Surrender’ at seven o’clock that evening. Fuelled by the huge sense of relief that loved ones would return safely home or the thought that they did not have to return to the war front, a huge party atmosphere developed, assisted, I’m sure, by much alcohol consumption. People hugged each other and kissed. An iconic image from these celebrations, known colloquially as ‘The Kiss’, seemed to capture the absolute essence of the event: almost everyone knows the image – a sailor kissing a dental nurse – almost no one can name the photographer.
Alfred Eisenstaedt was born on December 6th 1898, in Dirschau West Prussia, the son of a merchant. He moved with his family to Berlin in 1906, where he remained until Adolf Hitler and the National Socialists came to power (the Eisenstaedts were Jewish). In 1935 he settled in New York, where he lived and worked until his death in 1995. He has been called the ‘Father of Photojournalism’, and ‘The Kiss’ was typical of his style. He was renowned for his ability to capture memorable images of important people in the news and for
Fig.3: Dr Joseph Goebbels at the League of Nations meeting in 1933. Left relaxed and candid, Right when he discovered the photographer –Eisenstaedt – was Jewish. ‘Suddenly, he spotted me, and his expression changed; here are the eyes of hate, but when I have a camera in my hand, I know no fear.’
his candid photographs with natural lighting. He began his career in Germany prior to World War II with the Associated Press but achieved prominence as a staff photographer for Life magazine after moving to the USA. Life featured more than 90 of his pictures on its covers and more than 2,500 of his photo stories were published. Despite this prolific output over 60 years, with so many iconic images, he wasn’t recognised until after his death: in 2020 he was posthumously inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame. He has never received recognition from the RPS, save for the briefest of articles by former President Dr Alan Hodgson in 2019, entitled ‘Giants of Photography – Alfred Eisenstaedt.’
Eisenstaedt was fascinated by photography from his youth and began taking pictures at age 11 when he was given his first camera – an Eastman Kodak
Folding Camera – with some roll film. Eisenstaedt began taking photographs professionally as a freelancer for the Pacific and Atlantic Photos’ Berlin office in 1928 (the Associated Press took over in 1931). He became a full-time staffer in 1929, and within a year, he was described as a ‘photographer extraordinaire.’ Four years later, he photographed the famous first meeting between Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini in Italy. Other notable early pictures by Eisenstaedt include his depiction of a waiter at the ice rink of the Grand Hotel in St. Moritz in 1932 and Joseph Goebbels at the League of Nations in Geneva in 1933.
Along with entertainers and celebrities, he photographed politicians, philosophers, artists, industrialists, and authors during his career with Life. With Life's circulation of two million readers, Eisenstaedt's reputation increased substantially. According to one historian,
‘his photographs have a power and a symbolic resonance that made him one of the very best Life photographers.’
Unlike most news photographers at the time who relied on much larger and less portable 4"×5" press cameras with flash attachments, Eisenstaedt preferred the smaller hand-held Leica with natural light, which gave him greater speed and more flexibility when shooting news events or capturing candids of people in action. This undoubtedly helped Eisenstaedt create a more relaxed atmosphere when photographing famous people where he was able to capture more natural poses and expressions: ‘They don't take me too seriously with my little camera,’ he stated, ‘I don't come as a photographer, I come as a friend.’ Despite using 35mm, he still employed a large format approach – he selected his subject and composition carefully and waited for the perfect moment to press
Fig.4: In a series of photographs for Life magazine, Eisenstaedt captured perfectly the emotions of ‘leaving for war at Penn Station’. 1944. ‘You can hold a Rollieflex without raising it to your eye – they never saw me clicking away. For the kind of photography I do, one has to be very unobtrusive and to blend in with the crowd.’
Fig.5: Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer at Princeton in 1947. ‘I was so excited about photographing these two great scientists that at first I forgot to put film in my camera. When I discovered it, I sneaked out to load it, pretending that something was wrong with the camera.’
Fig.6: One of Eisenstaedt’s favourite pictures is ‘A Puppet Theatre in the Tuileries, Paris,1963.’ ‘It took a long time to get the angle I liked. There are some close-ups of the children that are good. But the best picture is the one I took at the climax of the action. It carries all the excitement of the children screaming; the dragon is slain!' The photo sold at Sotheby's in 2006 for an artist-record price of $55,200.
the shutter (an approach that would later be called ‘the decisive moment’ by Henri Cartier Bresson). He claimed he only took more than one shot if the subject moved; he was known at Life magazine as ‘Eisi the under-shooter’ (his editors often imploring him to take more images to better fill out an article).
Although “The Kiss” became the iconic image of celebration at war’s end – a black-and-white bookend separating an era of darkness from the beginning of a time of peace – it has also, in recent years, received a sort of #metoo infamy, after the woman in the photo said that the kiss was non-consensual. A statue of the kiss in Florida was tagged with #metoo graffiti.
In an ironic turn of events, even Eisenstaedt was photographed kissing a fellow journalist that August evening in 1945 (see page 22 Fig 10). Eisenstaedt died in August 1995 at the age of 96 at his Martha’s Vineyard vacation cottage named “Pilot House.” Two days earlier, he was photographed signing a copy of ‘The Kiss.’
Scholar with pupils, Jerusalem, 1953. ‘I found a Talmudic scholar in a Jerusalem ghetto, but he didn’t want to pose for me because of his beliefs. But he was kind and sought guidance from the Bible. The book fell open at a page of Genesis, and he read, “And they shall dance before my eyes”, so he obliged.’
Fig.8: Eisenstaedt was at home with both rich and poor; John F Kennedy with daughter Caroline, 1969. ‘JFK and Caroline pose happily together, even though she was pressing chewing gum into his freshly pressed pants.’
Fig.9: The last frames of the contact strip from VJ day clearly show the dental nurse is very uncomfortable with the kiss and is struggling to push away the sailor. It might have been ‘unconditional surrender’ on the part of the Japanese, but some would say that the nurse was definitely not unconditionally surrendering to the sailor’s amorous advances!
Fig.10: Ironically, later that evening, Eisenstaedt is himself caught on film kissing a fellow journalist, much to the disgust of the two women behind. Image by Life photographer William Shrout.
Palli Gajree OAM HonFRPS
Fig 1: Venice chaos
Fig 2: Face from lichen
Fig 3: Begging for repairs
Rob Morgan ARPS
As mentioned in the November Newsletter, Lucy and I went on a two week trip to southern Vietnam and Cambodia in late November. We flew into Ho Chi Minh City, which everyone except government officials still calls Saigon. Our APT tour organisers had booked us into the Park Hyatt and it was certainly a treat: a spacious, quiet room, great breakfasts and an easy walk to many attractions. The ‘Square One’ restaurant was world class, with French and Vietnamese dishes, but avoiding the fad of ‘fusion’. Hotel service was exceptional. I visited the HCMC (Ho Chi Minh City) Museum on a Sunday, when not only could I learn about the city’s history – including its part in the nation’s struggles for independence – but I could talk with brides waiting for their pre-wedding photos to be taken in the grand 1885 building.
After a couple of days taking it easy in Saigon, we met other ‘expeditioners’ and headed off by coach to our river cruise up the Mekong River. Some of them had started in northern Vietnam, while others joined when we did. It was nice to be on a coach, rather than be a pedestrian in
Saigon and risk being run over by one. Did the driver use his GPS to get us there? He certainly took us via a few decidedly ‘local’ roads.
Our vessel was the APT Mekong Serenity (see one of the images in the November issue). Wouldn’t you love to have the job of naming cruise vessels these days? Imagine naming a cruise ship that visits historic battlefields. Somme Serenity? (or perhaps Somme Enchanted Dreaming?) Gettysburg Gentility?
Hastings Harmony? Anyway, once on board we could definitely feel the serenity. As there are no locks to go through, this vessel was wider than the European river cruise ships, and felt very spacious.
Our first stop was Cai Bay (“Guy Bay”), where we were entertained with some rice paper making. Then, as we transferred some of the ship’s weight from the galley to our bellies, we headed up to Sa Dec. Out again on small boats, we landed at the street market. Local people definitely like their food fresh –they come to the market twice a day. The animals appeared to come only once. Nearby was an interesting and colourful Cao Dai (“Gow Die”) temple. This religion is barely 100 years old and combines Buddhism, Christianity, Taoism and Confucianism.
By now we were getting close to the Cambodian border, but first there was a visit to Tan Chau where we went by cyclos/rickshaws to a silk weaving factory, before having a walk through a local village on Evergreen Island. Back on board we headed up to the border, where suddenly it looked quite industrial, with scores of boats and barges, mostly carrying river sand, sitting around in some kind of unhurried and disorganised order. Time for us to relax, mid-river as all the passports and visas were sorted out.
The next morning we made our grand entrance up the river into Phnom Penh at dawn, with the unexpectedly numerous modern office and apartment towers glistening in the early light. All that was missing was a statue of a woman holding a torch. There has been a lot of Chinese investment in Phnom Penh and it is an interesting mix of the traditional and modern. I was struck by how polite people were on the roads (here and elsewhere in Cambodia). 25 or 30 of us
did a cyclo tour of the city, and car drivers simply gave way to our flotilla of cyclos as we passed through major intersections. That wouldn’t happen in Vietnam, where ‘might is right’ – or in most Western countries for that matter.
The next day Lucy ‘took a tuc-tuc’ to check out the shopping opportunities in downtown Phnom Penh, while most of us went by coach to the Vipassana Dhurak Buddhist Centre, out of town, where we got blessed (and where I was blessed with that photo of the young monks, in the November Newsletter). I think they may have found the true way to heaven: in one corner of the main hall is a permanent steel ladder going up the
beautifully painted wall to a manhole in the celestial ceiling. Perhaps this can only be seen if one is blessed.
North of Phnom Penh we parked at Okna Tey on Silk Island (where, you guessed it, they produce silk thread and silk garments), then on to Angkor Ban, a village so spread out along the Mekong that each section is numbered. We visited no. 6, a Buddhist village. Others we passed in this area were Muslim. Everywhere we passed, kids were out near the river, waving to us (it was the weekend). On our last day on the river we walked up to Wat Hanchey Buddhist centre on a nearby hill. There are not too many hills in this region, so it was here
that we got our first elevated view of the river. Then it was back down the river to Kampong Chan and the end of cruising.
The staff on our vessel (all Vietnamese or Cambodian) were incredible. Nothing was too much trouble and they were all so friendly. We were very sorry to say farewell. It was also interesting to observe how much more engaging and easy going the majority of our travellers were, compared with those on the DanubeRhine cruise the previous Christmas/New Year. Back then, when things went wrong (as they inevitably do when rivers are running high) it seemed to bring out the very best in antipodean whingeing in a few too many of them. Perhaps the
Danube-Rhine cruise was a ‘trip of a lifetime’ for many, with accompanying high expectations, whereas the Mekong wasn’t. Or are we simply more polite in an openly polite culture we don’t understand very well?
After philosophising on our northbound coach, and meeting a southbound tour group at a pit stop (who were heading to ‘our’ vessel), we reached Siem Reap (pronounced – as all Cambodian is – without any emphasis on any syllable: ‘See ’em Ree-erp’), located close to Angkor Wat.
As well as going to the main event down the road, we were treated to one evening at the Phare Circus, with its skillful and amusing acrobats and another evening at the Ream art exhibition, with a dancing show and excellent dinner. Siem Reap is very laid back – which is amazing for such a ‘tourist town’ – and there is plenty to see.
But of course the main thing to see is Angkor Wat and other nearby temple ruins. So, up we got at 4 am to see the sunrise, which on this occasion was underwhelming. Usually everyone who’s there at that time stands in front of the left lily pond for reflections and the sunrise, and the right lily pond is less crowded. But this time the left pond was being repaired, so no need to explain where the crowd was standing. Nonetheless, everyone was good natured and it was easy enough to invite yourself in to the front, get some photos and then stand back. Meanwhile, inside the Angkor Wat building was virtually empty. The whole Angkor area is vast and there are very many other temple ruins to see; I visited just a fraction of them on a five day private trip in 2016. Since then there has been much work done to improve tourist facilities. If you want to see the most interesting temples, they have to be Bayon, with all its carved faces, and Ta Promh where trees and vines have been left intertwined in walls and buildings. And it was these two sites that our group tour visited.
Then, all too soon our holiday was over. It really was one to remember.