It has been an eventful year for us here, and we wish you a very merry christmas followed by a happy new year — see you in January!

These gents are part of a group of Salvation Army members that collect donations at train stations and pubs around Sydney. I wanted to do something more than just a pretty picture, and I thought it would be a good opportunity to see and learn something off my normal trail. You’ll see these guys on Fridays in the Sydney CBD wearing down their shoes for a good cause, so if you do drop a few coins in — they’ll appreciate it.

(A big thanks to Major Peter Sutcliffe of the Salvation Army for helping me make this happen.)

The Festival Opening will be on May 5th at the Australian Centre for Photography in Paddington, and will run until June 11. My image will be seen with the other shortlisted images on a rotating slideshow with the exhibition. You can see more of my work at another Head On event, at the Ultimo TAFE Captured exhibition.

Graduates from TAFE NSW – Sydney Institute will showcase their creativity through photography at their first ever exhibition held as part of the 120th year celebrations of TAFE NSW – Sydney Institute and in conjunction with Head On Photo Festival.

Captured will showcase the works of graduates who are working all over the world in advertising, marketing, the arts, fashion and media. With each image you will enter their world and witness it through their eyes. So come and see their point of view, Captured forever in print.

Here are my two entries that will be exhibited:

Locals racing past a streetcar. The streetcar runs city-wide and is the backbone of public transport in Hiroshima.

My grandfather has dementia, and over the last fwe years have slowly forgotten almost everyone he ever knew. How much of my father, his son, does he still remember?

This is turning out to be a bit of a Head On year for me, being short-listed in the Head On Portrait Prize of 2011, as well as participating in Captured. So come along and check out both shows, and see what the local talent can offer!

These are promo shots for Joel’s upcoming album. The first single, Bohemian, you can listen to right here.

“I feel like the greatest gift I’ve had, is the fact that in 26 years, I’ve never not been busy. Honestly, I think the key to that has been, treat every assignment as if it’s your first one, you know? I think there is a misconception, especially that students have and I really make a point when I speak at schools to talk about the fact that you never really arrive. You are always working towards something but you never stop. I think there is this crazy idea that you get somewhere and then everything is cool.”

Go read the rest here.

People rush to cross Aioi Dori in Kamiyacho, Hiroshima

Just got home today from a brilliant 17 days in Hiroshima and Hong Kong, introducing our son to his grandparents and great-grandparents. Despite the recent tragedy in north-eastern Japan, the people in Hiroshima seemed perfectly normal; but for the days following there would be groups of people calling for donations at busy street corners in an insistently loud but completely polite way. And I was told since courier services restarted to the Tohoku area and Tokyo, people have been sending boxes of bottled water to friends and family, making it hard to buy bottled water in the city.

Japanese TV was, unsurprisingly, devoting a lot of time covering the tragedy, as well as the drama unfolding at the Fukushima nuclear plant. But unlike the idiotic fear-mongering that some of the international “news” organisations seem to prefer, Japanese TV was filled with heart-wrenching tales of loss, and I can’t ever remember feeling so relieved to watch the fund-raising Japanese Celebrity “Who Wants to be a Millionaire”.

The Fukushima nuclear accident also gave rise to a small personal project I managed to shoot while I was in town. I wondered what Hiroshima people thought of nuclear power, before and after the accident. My wife’s parents are atomic bomb survivors, and I had the privilege to photograph and interview them, as well as some other Hiroshima locals, on their thoughts on Fukushima. More of that coming up, after the translations and the transcriptions are all complete.

Left: All this construction is on reclaimed land, only a few years ago the harbour ended at the row of buildings on the far right. Right: The view from Victoria Peak, Hong Kong.

Hong Kong provided another personal opportunity: to introduce my son to his great grandparents, and to gather four generations in one room. My family is spread out all over the world, and it’s not often we can all meet. Even this time my sister couldn’t come, so it wasn’t a full family gathering, but it was nice to see so many people that I had not seen, and to, believe it or not, meet cousins that I had only known when I was a child and they were merely babies. I wish I had more time to photograph all my family, I will have to make time to pursue that project. I also wish I had time to photograph all the incredible food we ate!

I did manage to see and photograph a few places in Hong Kong, it’s amazing how much has changed. Hong Kong has been embarking on a huge scale of land reclamation projects in order to build vital housing and infrastructure. There are beaches in Hong Kong that my parent’s generation used to go to that simply no longer exists — it has been built over, and more often than not the coastline itself has been artificially moved hundreds or meters away. One thing that I had forgotten is that there is a remarkable amount of greenery in Hong Kong still, which just serves to make the skyscrapers look even taller.

The defining characteristic of Hong Kong, the 24hr lifestyle and the crushing crowds, none of that has changed. We were staying in a hotel in Kowloon Town in the dirtier end of town, and restaurants and shops were open right up to midnight — and beyond. Kids were playing on swings at 11 at night, the MTR stations look the same at peak hour as it does at midnight — on a Tuesday. I found the vibrance intoxicating, my wife found it overwhelming, but we both wondered if we could find a future that involved more of Hong Kong, and Japan.