Bill Dowling's Artist Profile

I am a landscape photographer and have photographed the Australian landscape since my first bushwalk in 1948. That walk took place in The Blue Mountains of New South Wales on a holiday weekend in June. We walked from Leura to Blue Gum Forest via Lockly Pylon, then to Blackheath via Evan’s Lookout and home to Sydney by steam train.

I have always carried a camera on walks, cross country ski tours and motor tours in the outback. My gallery will show many of the pictures from those trips. When I started almost all amateur photographers used monochrome film and through necessity I very soon learnt to process and print my pictures.

Colour film was expensive in 1948, almost out of reach for most amateurs, by about 1951 I was able to afford the occasional roll of 35mm Kodachrome. Some of those first shots have survived, (more by good luck than care) with the help of digital processing, some of those first colour shots will appear in my gallery.

I like the work of many painters particularly from the 20th century and their influence will be seen in the way I have treated many of my pictures. Sometimes the title to a book or a piece of music will suggest a pictorial composition.

I have attempted to make some of my pictures look more like paintings than photographs I use the brushes and other devices in Photoshop. I use filters both on the camera lens and in the computer. When I want to extract qualities inherent in the pixels to stress particular lighting effects I will increase contrast, saturation and where, I think necessary, deliberately introduce spectral shift of the colours in the picture.

I need to be motivated to take photographs. To be in Central Australia for the first time, for me, was an overpowering experience, the intensity of the colour and the spectacular landscape produced in me a compulsion to blaze away at everything with my camera. It’s easy to be motivated in such an environment.

I prefer to shoot positive film in 35mm and medium format but I also use a digital camera when it is the most convenient. My digital camera extends the range of my lenses for bird and other wild life photographs. All my pictures will be printed by computer controlled printers. Those prints larger than 48cm x 33cm will be printed by commercial organisations.