In Australia it is becoming increasingly difficult to shoot photos in public spaces and national parks without getting harassed or asked to buy a permit. In Bondi for example you now have to buy a $255 permit to shoot commercially around the beach. It is becoming obvious that councils are using the permits to make money and using scare tactics (pedophiles/terrorists) as an excuse…

Arts Freedom Australia is a group of photographers that has formed to fight back against this bureaucratic invasion.

AFA has recently completed a comparative study of legislation and policies imposed on photographers and film-makers within Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States of America. The result of this study clearly demonstrates that the rights of Australian photographers and film-makers are being seriously affected by a myriad of rules and regulations imposing prohibitive restrictions, high fees, and bureaucratic application protocols. By comparison, America’s national parks allow photography in all places where the public can access. What a refreshingly common sense approach – but it seems the Aussie bureaucrats are too greedy to allow for common sense.

To raise publicity of the issues, the AFA had a rally in the centre of Sydney and over a thousand photographers turned up, including some very well known Australian photographers and plenty of other wacky characters…

Went for a snorkel for the first time in a little while…it was damn cold and the u/w vis wasnt that good but loved being back in there…just need the water temp to pick up a bit cos after an hour my hands and feet were pretty numb…

There’s plenty of sealife around including a whale and calf a couple of kms off the Bower…lots of currents running so wasnt too keen on swimming that far offshore, so stayed near the point and found some wobbegongs (small carpet sharks with desert camo markings) to follow instead…

New Zealand – Fiji – Cali – Australia…

Its been a pretty amazing year, so many highs and lows, shot a ton of images both for work and play, met a hugely diverse bunch of people and seen some truly beautiful places…

On the theme of 1 year of this blog I’ve put together some of my favourite images from the last 12 months…

Click continue reading to view more…

(continue reading…)

So its been a year since I started this blog and I’ve never thought of it as a place where more than a few friends and family visit and leave comments on…

However, there is a function that lets me see the analytics for the site by month/day etc and I always find it a pretty weird read…the country list in particular never fails to surprise me.

The first two countries are pretty likely but who do I know in Spain? Is it all just bots and spammers, or are there really over hundred visits from the Chinese? Anyone actually from France out there? “European country?” Russia? Egypt??

Feel free to say hello!?

I guess the internet is a pretty random place…

August 2010 Stats

The sunrise was very odd this morning. I took the bike for an early job and the whole way there I kept seeing the weirdest shapes above me… My rushed shots didnt really do it justice so left it to the master Uge at Aquabumps to get the bangers…

More from Aquabumps here or follow him on facebook here…the guy is down at Bondi pretty much every morning to document the sunrise and see what the swell is doing…bookmark him for some daily deliciousness…

Renowned photographer and body boarder Mickey Smith explores his world as a true waterman – both as an athlete and artist – and calls his latest piece The Dark Side of The Lens.

Epic epic footage…really inspiring…

More Surfing Videos >>

It was 27 degrees on my cars outside temperature gauge today.

I doubt winter is done quite yet but it certainly feels like its warming up here…

I have wanted to go snowboarding in Australia for a long time, mainly cos its just always seemed like a pretty unlikely place to find snow…

So a mate and I left Sydney VERY early for the 500km 6 hour drive down to the cunningly named Snowy Mountains…

We got there as the end of a storm was rolling through and apparently there had been 45cms over the last week.

The first day at Perisher was pretty blizzardy but cleared up in the afternoon…the second day at Thredbo was bluebird with plenty of little pockets of pow…

The snow doesnt hang around cos it gets warm pretty quick but I have to say that, with loads of lifts and loads of trees, the set up at both Perisher and Thredbo was easily as good if not better than any of the commercial resorts I’ve ridden in NZ…

I’ve started captioning some images at the bottom of each shot.

Its funny to think about the things people accumulate in life to make them smile…

I’ve had epic moments riding on all three of these boards in different places round the world, but planning on using them all in one country this week…!