Headshots: Raoul Craemer

Raoul Craemer is an actor currently based in Canberra. Raoul has recently signed with a new agent and asked me the other day to take some fresh head shots of him. An added bonus is that the role he's currently engaged with requires a beard and so we're doing two sessions ... one with beard - Voila! ... and one next week when his role finishes and he shaves the beard off.

Personally, I quite like the beard on him.

Oh and Raoul's current show is called A Scandalous Boy by David Atfield and is showing at The Street Theatre until well, yesterday ;-)


Thoughts on a show

I'm sitting in the café adjoining the Front Gallery, where my show is currently on. My opening was last night and I'm feeling a little bleary. My sunglasses hide the bags beneath my eyes that must surely be a giveaway to the seediness I'm currently experiencing.  I'm here ostensibly  to imbibe coffee and eggs and bacon to assuage my mind into a connection with the absolutely stunning spring day that is in full swing outside. I'm also here to spy ... to see who's looking at my photographs and which ones they linger over and discuss. From time to time I wander in to tweak the lighting or straighten a picture. I tend to do this when there are people in the gallery and I can have a talk about the images and how they were created ... people have been very nice and said many congratulatory things. I've even sold two of the pictures, one which has been hanging in my bedroom for the past year and a bit, I will miss when it goes to its new home. I will miss them all if they go. They're little pieces of me ... each one a photographic journey now rendered manifest and framed and hung upon a wall.

I imagine their new homes and spaces, there's a part of me that would like to visit them there ... to see how they inform and play in their new surroundings. Other folks will see them every day and I wonder about this ... quite inordinately.

I realise I've spent three hours here now ... becoming slightly more human with each coffee (maybe one more?) and finding myself gazing blankly at the other patrons in this Inner North Wi-Fi hangout, bent over laptops or skipping the world, reading their Kindles ... I notice very few are actually talking ... even the couples with mismatched devices are intently studying their own ... noone is reading a book ... not a paper one anyways. There's one couple; I'm not convinced they're an item though he wants to be I think and he's constantly trying to show her amusing things on his phone and she's looking awfully bored ... increasingly so the more insistently he appears to not read the body language and blind to the look of disdain each time he offers his screen ... but then he's not looking at her ... he's looking at his phone and therein lies the problem.

A bit rambling today but there you go...


Shoot: The Second Movement show band

Last week I had the opportunity of taking a few pictures for the The Second Movement show band when they got together for their mid-week rehearsal. 

A little history... The Second Movement played in and around Canberra in the late 60’s and early 70’s and were resident band at the Civic Hotel Lounge. The group became resident band at the Deakin Inn when it opened in 1969. The band played at the Deakin Inn up to six nights a week for four years until they retired in 1974.

In 1967 the band signed a recording contract with EMI and recorded two singles, which were released nationally. The singles were produced by Robert Iredale (who was Johnny O’Keefe’s’ record producer at the time). The singles had moderate success and made it into a few top 40 charts.

After a thirty years’ absence the original band (there were some personnel changes in the early seventies) decided to get together for a 30th anniversary party bash at the Southern Cross Club Canberra. Some of the band members hadn’t played in a band since the band retired in 1973. Others no longer lived in Canberra so the logistics of a reunion offered many challenges. However the project went ahead and the night was a huge success. The band enjoyed themselves so much it was decided to continue the band which would make itself available for the occasional booking.

Ostensibly to create a few simple pictures to refresh their website, the session was fun and enjoyable and a lovely bunch of guys the majority of whom have been playing together for more than 40 years! The band member whose house was used as the rehearsal space restores old Jaguar cars ... he had an absolutely gorgeous red E-Type Mk2 that you can see the band posing with in a couple of the photos. 

The band did insist in standing outside in the bright noonday sun which caused a little squinty action but the sunshine and blue sky certainly set off their matching blue stage suits! I did manage to convince them to pose together in the back shed where the featured image was shot ... that one's my favourite from this little shoot.

 

Links

 


Midnight Smoke

Some late night mucking about with the camera... otherwise wordless... :-)

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Fred Smith’s Dust of Uruzgan CD Launch - in review

I think the gig marked a real step-up in the stage-craft and production of a Fred Smith performance. As always, his songs were passionate and rendered well and his band (Liz Frencham (double bass), Lachlan Coventry (pedal steel and electric guitar) and John Jones (drums)) supplied excellent and solid support. The addition of projected images of Afghanistan worked well too. The audience was made up of an eclectic mix with many folk attending their first show after hearing a couple of tracks on the radio. ABC Canberra’s Virginia Haussegger introduced both sets with great gush. I never realised she was such a fan. I had the privilege of attending the soundcheck to get some stills of Fred and his band prior to the show and am attaching a couple of them for you to have a look at. There is a larger set to be found at Fred’s page on Lushpup Images.