I am an amateur photographer based in the bustling beachside Eastern suburbs of Sydney, Australia. I specialise in surf and dive photography, shooting almost exclusively on black and white film with aging Nikonos V waterproof cameras. My catalogue explores surf breaks, underwater subjects and reefscapes up and down Australia's East coast, Fiji and Malaysia.
The Nikonos V cameras are temperamental things by today's standards. They are prone to flooding, and require a shooter to finely tune a shot's focus and aperture settings with clunky manual dials. This guesswork is adjusted (and adjusted again) through the prism of a bulky scuba mask, and often as one's subject tortuously glides by. With Hawai'i hosting the last outpost of qualified technicians equipped to service the cameras, a shooter enters the water knowing that the session may well be the camera's last.
There is magic, however, in the fiddly toil. While it's digital descendants can crisply collect a scene as it was, the Nikonos V seizes instead how a moment feels when the shutter is released. The film strikingly captures light and movement as either a surfer careens down a break or when a school of fish shimmers past. At the same time, a monochrome shot with grain, film scratches, and an (at times) ill-focused subject embeds in the roll the imperfect vantage point of the shooter, which is often obscured by the water pooling in one's scuba mask, or the salt stinging in their sinuses.
I shoot for myself, and the enjoyment of my instagram followers. I have recently started developing my own film at home with an indulgent DYI kit, and I partner with a local high-res scanning and fine-art printing shop in Bronte, without whom my first rolls would never have made it out of the cannister. I frame the occasional print for friends and loved ones, with the hope that selling them (to you!) may eventually offset my mounting film costs.