About Rod
I am not the photographer who will make you look like everyone else.
Over forty years with a camera in my hand I have formed some strong opinions about what photography is for and what a portrait should actually do. This page is my attempt to explain them.
How I got here
I was thirteen when I walked into a newsagent and came across a photography magazine. On the cover was an Ansel Adams, a classic black and white landscape, a river winding through Yosemite, tones I had never seen a photograph produce before. I stood there looking at it thinking: what did it take to make that?
That was it. That was the beginning.
Somewhere along the way a Pentax S1a appeared in my hands, a small, beautiful machine made in the mid sixties, already older than I was. I genuinely cannot remember how I came to own it. I still have it. Back then I shot everything: cars at the racetrack, family trips, anyone who would stand still long enough. Rolls and rolls of film. People came later, once I understood that the most interesting subject in any frame is always the person in it.
Over nearly two decades as a working professional I photographed mayors and CEOs, tradespeople and small business owners, council events and community gatherings across Western Sydney. Boardrooms and building sites. All of it.
That commercial pressure built an eye that works quickly and hands that know what they're doing before the mind catches up. More usefully, it taught me how to put people at ease quickly, which, when someone is sitting in front of a camera, turns out to be the most important skill of all. When you have spent years delivering the shot under pressure, for any subject, in any condition, you stop being precious about the process and start being very good at the work.
At some point though, working in service of someone else's brief stops being enough. You want to make something that actually means something. So here we are.
What happens in the room
Before we start there will be tea, coffee, or champagne, because a session like this is worth celebrating before we have even begun. Once we are settled, something interesting tends to happen.
When someone feels genuinely comfortable, not posed, not performing, just present, the conversation goes places you do not expect. I have talked about business, family, regret, ambition, and the deep mysteries of the universe in a single session. Rabbit holes are common. I am always ready for them. Forty years of people will do that.
None of it is a distraction from the work. It is the work. Because when someone is fully engaged in a conversation they find fascinating, they forget the camera completely. And that is when the real portrait happens.
By the end I am usually creatively drained in the best possible way. That is how I know something real was made.
That moment
When a client sees their finished portrait for the first time there is always a moment, after the initial reaction to the quality, where something quieter happens.
They stop looking at the image and start feeling it. The question shifts from recognising their face to something harder to name. Do they see not just what they look like but who they actually are? Most people have never been asked that question by a photograph before.
That moment is why I do this work. It resists explanation and I have stopped trying to fully explain it. I have come to think that is exactly as it should be.
What I believe
Photography is not a lesser art because it uses a machine. The eye, the patience, the understanding of light and the particular way a person holds themselves when they finally stop performing, that is the craft. And craft applied with genuine intention produces art.
A portrait made with care, printed to archival standard, and designed to live on a wall and be handed down — that is a legacy object. That is what separates a photograph from a portrait and a file from something worth keeping. Making those, here in Penrith and across Western Sydney, is what I do now.
I have been called contrary. I prefer considered.
Why this work matters to me personally
I never made a portrait of my own mother.
My father died when I was young and was never properly photographed. My mother and I talked about sitting down and doing it properly for years. The occasion never quite presented itself, and then it was too late. She was gone and I regret that deeply.
It informs every session I photograph and every time I look a client in the eye and tell them not to wait for a better occasion. There is no better occasion. There is only now.
Who I am
I am based in Glenmore Park, Penrith, and I have spent most of my working life among the people of Western Sydney. The ones who built something from nothing, raised families, put down roots, and became someone worth photographing. People, in other words, a lot like me.
I do not own a turtleneck. I show up in dark denim, a leather jacket, and brown suede boots, and I take the work seriously without taking myself too seriously. The sessions are considered and unhurried. The conversation goes wherever it goes. The portraits are made to last.
I will make you something worthy of a gallery wall. I am genuinely good company while doing it.