My name’s Murray Foote and I’ve been pursuing photography for over thirty years. For much of that time, I’ve been involved with the Canberra Photographic Society, including as President, Vice-President and Competition Director.
Torres del Paine National Park, Chilean Patagonia
This blog currently contains images from recent trips; in 2011 to Patagonia, Antarctica, Falkland Islands, Iguazu Falls, Easter Island & Tahiti, in 2012 to Japan and also in 2012 to New York.
The image in the header is of Lake Hume, near Old Tallangatta, in Victoria near the border with New South Wales. I shot this on film on 6x17mm film format using a Gaoersi panorama camera and a 75mm Rodenstock Grandagon f6.8 lens. It is a long exposure after dark, not sure how long, maybe 5 or 10 minutes.
In 1987 I was sent around Australia taking photographs of lighthouses for a history of Australian lighthouses, From Dusk Till Dawn. This was published in 1988 and contains about ninety of my images. I am currently posting images from this on the blog.
Tthe lighthouse on Deal Island in Bass Strait from a worker’s cottage (the workers were convicts)
I took most of the images on large format (5×4″ film size) and some on 35mm (mainly fisheyes inside the lighthouses). The image above is from a 1937 Rollieflex twin-lens reflex.
I am official photographer for Thredbo, Sydney and Narooma Blues Festivals. I had exhibitions of live music images at Mogo in 2009 and 2010 at the time of the Narooma/ Bateman’s Bay Blues Festival. Here is one from those exhibitions:
Diunna Greenleaf, a powerful singer from Texas, at the 2009 Narooma Blues Festival
There are many links to live music images under the Blues tab in this blog.
Hi Murray
I enjoyed reading you comprehensive description and viewing your excellent images. I guess not too many people know much about this place .
Cheers
Dave.
Thanks, Dave.
It does take quite a while not just to prepare the images but to do the research so I can be sure of what I am saying. Not a huge number of viewers, though I did have over 100 one day. I think very few go past the main page to scroll through all the posts.
Regards,
Murray
HI Murray…
I love the details. There is a lot of stuff… You should write a book. I am specially interested in Antarctica. I have not read all the posts but I have book marked them. Will surely go through them.
Lisa
Hi Lisa and thanks.
When I finish the updates I expect to explore generating a book using Blurb. I’ll post about that when and if it happens.
Regards,
Murray
Dear Murray,
congratulations for your work and you journey!! It has been very useful for my graduate thesis..
So… Could you tell me (by e-mail) the passage of Gonzalez’s Journal you have reported in Easter Island reportage?
Excuse my english
Greeting
Ruggero
Thanks very much, Ruggero.
Emails sent.
Your English is fine (especially compared to my Italian)
Regards,
Murray
Decent content. I will content some of this into my facebook account, will that be okay ? Feel free to check out my site
Sure. Feel free to go ahead.
Superb photography and commentary. Was a pleasure to happen upon this site.
Thanks very much, Dennis.
Actually, I know another Dennis Aubrey. He’s a musician in Sydney.
Im getting a tiny problem. I cant get my reader to pickup your rss feed, Im using bing reader by the way.
RSS feed works OK for me in Outlook.
I Am Going To have to visit again when my course load lets up – nevertheless I am taking your Feed so i can read your site offline. Thanks.
Thank you.
It looks to me that this website doesnt load in a Motorola Droid. Are other people getting the same problem? I enjoy this website and dont want to have to skip it when Im away from my computer.
rather valuable material, all round I picture this is worthy of a book mark, many thanks
Thank you .
Brilliant, thanks, I will subscribe to you RSS soon!
Thank you!
You must take part in a contest for among the finest blogs on the web. I’ll suggest this web site!
Thank you very much for the sentiment though most nomination advices I’ve seen seem more like chain letters than anything.
Very interesting throughout his career. When I read Patagonia caught my attention because I work long in the Patagonia of Argentina in the oil fields. Congratulations on your blog. My pseudonym is Southern Cross …
Thank you. Patagonia is a very wonderful region. I had some great times and saw some wonderful places there.
I just want to tell you that I am all new to blogging and actually liked your blog. Very likely I’m want to bookmark your blog post . You really have wonderful posts. Cheers for sharing with us your web site.
Thanks very much, Lizbeth.
Hey this is kind of of off topic but I was wanting to know if blogs use WYSIWYG editors or if you have to manually code with HTML. I’m starting a blog soon but have no coding expertise so I wanted to get guidance from someone with experience. Any help would be enormously appreciated!
No coding required. You can get a standard WordPress blog up and running in about 20 minutes.
Do you mind if I quote a couple of your articles as long as I provide credit and sources back to your website? My blog site is in the very same area of interest as yours and my visitors would genuinely benefit from some of the information you present here. Please let me know if this alright with you. Thanks!
Sure. No problem.
Howdy! Do you use Twitter? I’d like to follow you if that would be okay. I’m definitely enjoying your blog and look forward to new updates.
Thank you. No, sorry, I don’t use Twitter.
Of course, what a fantastic blog and instructive posts, I surely will bookmark your website.Best Regards!
Thank you !
Stunning photos Murray, can’t wait to have more time to go through the rest of your posts.
Thanks very much Ian. I imagine it would take a while. There are nearly 1200 images on the blog now and rising.
It’s very nice to meet you, Murray. Thanks for dropping by my blog!
Nice to meet you, too and you do have a lot of remarkable posts on your blog. I’ve only been traveling outside Australasia since I retired a couple of years ago though I did go round the world when I was 10 and come to Oz from NZ 40 years ago.
Just cause there’s lots of foreign doesn’t necessarily make the blog interesting – your wonderful photographs prove that point. By the way, can you remember a coherent sense of going around the world at 10?
I replied earlier to your last question about my travels at age 10 but it came through as a new comment rather than a reply so you may not have seen it. I’ll try again and delete the earlier one….
I have a partly photographic memory and remember scattered images from that time.
I remember the snake charmer in Colombo and I was the one who volunteered to have the snake draped around me (which was fine) and then the snake shat on me.
I remember the round hills of Aden which was filled with mud brick buildings no more than one or two stories high. Aden was a duty-free port in those days so there were lots of shops with things to buy. I still have a set of brass bells with African motifs that came from there.
I remember going through the Suez Canal and seeing the camel trains walking along the arid banks as they have done for thousands of years (well, not the banks of that canal but in the region including other canals built by the Pharaohs).
I remember Pompeii and the streets with raised pavements and large stones for pedestrian crossings with grooves for the chariots to go through. I still have some 120 negatives somewhere that I took of Suez and Pompeii that I should find sometime, scan them and see what I can do with them.
I can still see Marseilles from the cathedral at the top of the hill after climbing many steps to get there. No skyscrapers, nothing more than a few stories and all red slate roofs. And the Chateau d’If out in the harbour – significant to me because I had read The Count of Monte Cristo by then.
I don’t remember much of Gibraltar except for the general shape of the Rock from the sea.
I remember St Pauls in London standing intact with acres and acres of bombed-out foundations around it. They still hadn’t rebuilt fifteen years after the war. And there were some sheets of corrugated iron leaning to in some of those foundations with people living underneath them.
I spent a term in a boarding school in Sussex while my parents toured around the continent. The oldest age was 10 and all of the boys were going to join the army which I found very strange. I remember the dozens of canes of different sizes in the Headmaster’s study and the boy who was deaf in one ear after the Headmaster had boxed him in the ears there. (These days, there’d be a court case).
We had horse riding lessons there at a nearby farm. One day I found a kind of wooden tunnel that I climbed through and found myself in the farmer’s barn, a kind of impromptu agricultural museum with perhaps hundreds of years of cast off agricultural machinery.
I remember what Le Havre looked like from the top of a building but it was just a boring modern city.
I remember the wide vistas of the boulevards in Lisbon where they rebuilt after the earthquake, something of the Moorish castle we visited up on a hill, the live lobsters in a tank in a restaurant and the tiny back streets where people had to step into doorways so the taxi could go through.
I remember being on a beach in Trinidad at a tourist hotel and there were locals living in run-down shacks beside the beach. I thought they were the poorest people I had seen but they were happy and playing guitars, not necessarily for the benefit of the tourists.
One night when we were in the Caribbean, the Hurricane Donna was nearby. It had ripped part of the superstructure out of another liner in mid-ocean and ended up halfway up the Mississippi. We had the island of Curacao in between us and the hurricane, though. Where we were was flat calm and all through the night there was a distant rumble of thunder and a continuous display of sheet lighting across 180 degrees of the far horizon.
I remember a little of the locks in the Panama Canal.
I wasn’t impressed with Los Angeles but I do remember the house of a TV star which took the form of a television set.
I don’t remember much of San Francisco apart from a vague memory of the steep streets and the streetcars (aka trams).
In Vancouver we went up in the hills to an Indian village and I remember the huge totem pole. I also vaguely remember the view with the sea and Vancouver Island.
In Hawaii we surfed in on a wave from about 800 metres out in a huge outrigger canoe. There was a man on the same wave on a surfboard with his dog. About halfway in the dog fell off so he jumped off too.
I don’t remember much of Suva.
But, yes, I remember quite a lot and fairly coherently.
You certainly do, Murray. It’s fascinating. You should use this and write something.
Maybe. I’d need some images that would work. Maybe some I took at the Suez and Pompeii and I have a few slides of my father’s, so maybe some of those. Not any time soon, though.
One other thing that pops to mind. There was an old sailor (old to a ten-year-old, at least) who would sit around and tell tall tales to a circle of children near the pool on the ship on the way out. That worked well until he got to a story that involved divorce. “Oh, no, that can’t be right!” cried several of the children who evidently had detailed knowledge of what was possible and what wasn’t with divorce laws.
Hi Murray. Beautiful photos of truly amazing places on this planet. Like you, I love the cold, barren, rocky polar regions. I have visited a lot of the Arctic, and you the Antarctic. The photos radiate the peace, tranquility, and also the amazing power of nature. You are in nature at its rawest and most beautiful. Thanks for sharing!
Greetings from your fellow Australian in Holland!
Hi Matthew. Yes, I love the elemental power of nature in those regions that can make us just a spectator in a place we don’t truly belong.
(p.s. I just noticed I added another comment rather than making a reply so you may not have seen this reply).
Lovely site and great pics you have here. Thanks for stopping by my blog and liking a post.
Thanks very much. Hopefully you’ll soon have the right result for the Presidency and the Senate; turning the House of Reps around may be more of a problem.
Yes, the House is a big problem. It wouldn’t be as bad if they would get rid of the supermajority rule but that’s probably pie in the sky.
Ah, yes I had to look up the supermajority rule. There’s no equivalent in Australia apart from constitutional changes. A majority in the House appears to be out of reach but perhaps just possible if Obama overwhelms Romney in the next debates.
It’s very strange, really. Reagan created far more debt in real terms for no good reason than Obama did for justifiable reflation. The Republicans largely created the financial crisis, hobbled Obama’s reaction to it and now want to get back in under the curious justification that they claim to be good economic managers. All this distracts from moving towards more sustainable development and restoring social equity (without which economic progress will be greatly hampered). Winding back military expenditure wouldn’t go amiss, either.
Well, one day I need a cup of tea with you. Grand blog, just grand…
Thanks very much again and funny you should mention the cup of tea. I’m in the early planning phase for my next expedition and expect to be passing through the Orkneys at some stage next July. At this stage I’ve put down a deposit for a sea voyage from Spitsbergen to Iceland via Greenland but nothing else is fixed. I’m thinking of hiring a car and visiting Skye, Lewis, St Kilda (not by car!), the Highlands, the Orkneys and Shetlands, then visiting the Lofoten Islands on the way to Spitsbergen and driving round Iceland when I get there.
Greenland in summer might be interesting! Iceland with the volcanoes too. You can do your sleeping outside in summer there,and worth it with 24 hr daylight. Just a sleeping bag and camera…. Spitsbergen don’t know much about, but know it is full of polar bears. Everyone seems to like Skye very much. It is spectacular. Highlands – yes, some very dramatic parts, and Orkney can be a good place, as can Shetlands, with lots of folk music festivals on at that time too. I’m in Finland these days! Do come by if you want to add to your journey. Lappland is not bad, with Sami culture, and near to Norway..
Sleeping in a tent in Iceland when it can be rainy and sometimes very windy didn’t sound so attractive so I’m thinking of campervans, a normal one for the circuit and then a 4WD one for the interior. I’m only thinking of staying a day or so in Spitsbergen (due to polar bears and logistics) though we’ll have some zodiac expeditions from the ship.
I don’t know about Finland, though. You’re unlikely to be living up north near the border with Norway and somewhere down near Helsinki is probably a bit too far out of the way.
love your web site. i bought nikon D600 full frame what is the best nikon lens for landscape i am going to europe for vaction thank you very much
Thanks Anthony
It’s a hard question to answer. Almost like saying “I’ve bought a garage. What car should I buy?”. It depends on how you see images, what your budget is, how you take images and what you want to carry. Perhaps as a starting point for “relatively inexpensive” choices that can still produce good quality: 16-35mm f/4G VR plus 50mm f1.8G plus 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6G VR. But there are lots of alternatives. Here’s one opinion by Nasim Mansurov: http://photographylife.com/best-nikon-lenses-for-landscape-photography and here’s another by Thom Hogan: http://www.bythom.com/rationallenses.htm
I am impressed, I must say. Really
Thanks very much.
When I started to read i didn’t consider that it will be useful info for me however currently I am really greatful that I located such webpage to browse. Respect to the journalist.
Thank you.
Greetings Murray,
I really like you biography and love the fact that you’re attempting to document some of your projects. I haven’t been to Canberra for years. Hope all is well in the ACT. All the best
God bless
Greetings Constantine.
Canberra’s great. Lots of live music. Very close to the bush. I haven’t been to Melbourne for years and never stayed more than a few days there. I always suspected Melbourne would be a better place to live than Sydney but never put it to the test. Yes, I’ve definitely become project focused; for me, pursuing disconnected single images can only take you so far.
Regards,
Murray
Hello Murray, I’ve lived in both cities. I think that Sydney is a more interesting place to visit as a tourist but Melbourne is definitely a better city to live in from a cultural sense. There are vibrant outposts to be found everywhere away from the city centre. After all you cant be voted “the most liveable city in the world” on two occasions for naught. If you ever come to Melbourne, let me know as I’d love to catch up with you for a coffee and share our life experiences. Take good care of yourself Murray.
God bless
OK, I’ll bear that in mind
Some genuinely prize articles on this site, saved to favorites .
Thank you.
I’m still learning from you, as I’m trying to reach my goals. I certainly enjoy reading everything that is written on your website.Keep the information coming. I enjoyed it!
Thank you.
artikelnya sangat informatif sekali..terimaksih banyak
Thank you.
Hello Murray,
First, thanks for taking the time to visit my site; pleased you did because otherwise I would probably never have come across yours.
Very interesting and a mine of information by what I have looked at so far, will enjoy working my way through all your back-posts. I think it will take me some time but looks worth the effort.
David.
Thanks very much David and I’ll have to check yours out some more too. It sounds like you may have forgotten but you have been here before though it may have been a long time ago.
Ha – that would explain why some looked familiar.
I had some problems with my computer and as a result needed to rebuild my favourites list.
I am a little more vigilant with my back-up now (How many times do we hear that!)
David.
Yes, I just restored from backup yesterday some important files I had accidentally deleted while trying to create space.
We conversed that previous time but it must have been on your blog. I think it would have been while I was posting the Patagonia/ Antarctica/ Easter Island images so you wouldn’t have seen any on the other tabs.
Thanks for a great blog, I have nominated you for the “The Versatile Blogger’s Award”
You can read more about it here: http://ynnej1976.wordpress.com/2013/03/16/the-recognition-of-other-bloggers-passing-it-on/
Thanks very much for the honour, Jenny.
I must admit though, I’m not much inclined to follow up on the conditions for acceptance of awards.
That is absolutely OK, took me rather some time to write this post
You are still very worth the nomination.
Another great article.
Thanks very much.