Getting these splendid pics of Bearbrass’s veteran rower Robyn B was no light matter. We asked Bearbrass member Kerrie M to photograph the event. She’s culled the best few from more than 400 she took in a torrid early-morning shoot on the Yarra’s narrow stretch near Hawthorn.
To get the right angles and lighting, Kerrie managed to get a ride in the coaching tinnie with outboard, and shoot from mid-river.
“Lucky those tiknnies are stable and I didn’t fall out,” she says. “I had to leave behind my 12kg bag of telephoto lenses, because they’d get wet in the bottom of the boat. Lucky I had my ‘Sherpa’ husband Pierre there to haul me up and out afterwards.”
She originally planned to shoot down on Robyn from a bridge but the angles were too extreme so she worked from the bank and mid-river. “With a portrait you can control where to place your subject, ‘Just stand here by the garden bed,’ you say. With rowers they’re moving all over the place, and there’s safety issues for everyone on the water.
“The Yarra stretch was so busy with other boats that I heaps of people and athletes interrupting my sight-lines. I was shooting in bright sunlight but the river banks were in deep shadow and heavily tree’d. I needed to use a shutter speed of 1/1600th and 1/2000th of a second exposures because of the movement of the rowers and the movement of the tinnie. That made it difficult to balance the light and risked getting graininess in the shots.”
Then there was the problem of making the four women in Robyn’s boat all presentable. “They’re exuding energy on the oars, not posing with nice smiles. I’d get a good shot but one of them might be grimacing and it is important to show your subjects at their best. I shot them in bursts of 10-15 pics to get just one that’s OK.”
Kerrie’s been improving her skills ever since she got the photography bug doing folk culture pics in Korea when Pierre was stationed there a decade ago. She’s done lion and elephant studies on safari in her native South Africa – “But this experience with Robyn was one of my biggest challenges,” she says.