Front cover image of sheep: I stalked this on a visit to CSIRO, in Armadale, NSW
AVJ issue December 2005, and I was on my significant learning curve for my budding animal portrait photography career!
I remember feeling quite pleased with myself when I produced this pic for our cover. Ben, our designer, wasn’t impressed. He didn’t like the goopy bits around the sheep’s eye, so he gave me a lesson in airbrushing!
When this issue appeared, the ex-Scientific Editor phoned me to complain about it. I instantly panicked, trying to work out what major error I had kept in the text. Fortunately, he was joking. He said that I had put back animal welfare by 25 years – it was the first photograph he had ever seen of a sheep looking intelligent. I thought that was a great coup!
As an aside, unless I really had to, I never ever re-read an issue after it came out – it is far too stressful because you can ALWAYS find an error. “Done is better than perfect, because nothing is ever perfect,” as my friend and Veterinary Career & Business Coach Dr Emma Davis tells me!
Another entertaining part of the process was that Ben would pick out a colour for the banner (the journal title at the top of the page) that would give the best accent for the image. We would spend ages working out which particular shade of pink (or whatever) would bring out the contrasts the most in the photo. OK, that sounds a bit obsessive, but sitting with Sam Safi and the Southern Design team was a great learning experience for when I had to deal with colour management issues later on.
Camera details: Canon EOS 350D, with a Canon 80-200 mm lens at 128 mm, 1/640 sec at f11. ISO 200. At that time, I was still shooting jpgs.
