By Sheree Hoddinett
For John Cupper, photography wasn’t a path he followed from an early age. Instead it was an interest he dived into after a cruise holiday about 10 years ago. He purchased a camera to take on his trip and the rest is history. He joined the Bribie Island Photography Club and started entering the club competitions of which after the first full year, he came in second by just one-point to Marj Webber.
It was enough to spur on his competitive nature and has now resulted in the 79-year-old being named winner of the 2022 Brisbane Ekka senior photography competition category. John’s winning entry is a photo of two kookaburras feeding out the back of his home right here on Bribie Island. The same photo also scored John an Australian Photographic Society prize earlier this year and is also entered in other photography competitions with John waiting to hear if he’s been successful or not.
“To be named the winner, I was a bit lost for words,” John said of winning the Ekka competition. “I was the grand champion and to have my photo picked as the best, it’s very humbling.”
John’s back patio is often filled with the sounds of different bird species, who come in for a feed and to say hello.
“My favourite subject to photograph is birds because I can sit here at home and do it,” he said. “I do go out sometimes to Buckley’s Hole or around a few other spots, but a lot of my good photographs are taken right here on the back deck. I step out and the birds are right there. At the moment we have Drongo birds and there’s about a dozen of them that sit on the fence and in the trees. I break up meat for them and they hover near me, and they even take it from your hands and fly off. We also get crows, curlews, we’ve got one Willy Wagtail that flies in all the time. There are kookaburras, miner birds, rainbow lorikeets, so many different types.”
So how long did it take to capture that winning shot? A mixture of patience, timing and possibly a little bit of luck worked in John’s favour.
“Because we feed the kookaburras regularly, we have four that come here all the time and in the picture I took we have the mum and one of the babies,” he said. “The baby was sitting on the short perch on the back fence and the mother was on the longer one. Mum had a bug in her mouth and the baby was screaming to be fed. Mum was watching and I could see this happening and unfolding before me and had my camera ready to go. So I focused on the baby. When I photograph I keep both eyes open and I could see mum getting ready to fly and I held the button down. I’m a spray and pray type and I find it’s a really good system and then I got them beak-to-beak. I was lucky to have enough depth of field to have all wings and features in focus. In amongst all the frames was the winning shot.”
Camera equipment doesn’t come cheap and John’s spending has well and truly gone into the thousands, but he admits it’s all worth it to be able to take the photos that he does. He has multiple cameras (including a microscope camera) and lenses that he takes great pride in.
“I bought my first camera from Harvey Norman, it was a kit and I’ve still got it,” he said. “It gets me out of bed in the morning. I’m still learning all the time because it’s a constantly changing atmosphere. I’m self-taught and with all the information online, I read everything I can. I shoot in raw so it needs to be processed and I know just enough to get by. The processing is really important and with Photoshop and Topaz I can do quite well.”
John talks about photography with a passion, his face lighting up as he discusses the different photo types he has taken over the years. His computer features a multitude of photo folders filled with images of birds feeding, flying and dipping into the bird bath. But there’s also photos of flowers, insects, planes, ships and even a goanna named ‘Anna’.
Exactly how long is he hoping to keep pushing on the camera button?
“Probably until I drop or just can’t do it anymore,” he said. “But my hands are still good, so I’ll keep going while I can.”
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