Becoming a Hasselblad Masters Finalist

Lake Eyre, Aerial Photography and the Art of Seeing

There are moments in photography that feel as though they belong quietly to you.

They often happen in the field, without announcement. A shift of light across water. A pattern emerging from salt and earth. A colour appearing for only a few seconds before the landscape folds back into itself. These moments are private at first. They exist between the photographer and the place, held in instinct before they become an image.

Then there are moments that feel larger than anything you expected to step into.

Being named a Hasselblad Masters finalist for my Lake Eyre aerial photography is one of those moments.

It is difficult to articulate the weight of that recognition without sounding either too casual or too overwhelmed. Hasselblad has carried a particular reverence in photography for decades. It is a name associated not only with technical excellence, but with a certain seriousness of vision. The Masters competition has always felt, to me, less like an award built around visibility and more like one built around discernment. It recognises work that holds its ground. Work with clarity, restraint and a sense of authorship. Work that does not need to shout to be seen.

To be recognised within that framework feels quietly surreal.

For a long time, the Hasselblad Masters existed in my mind as something distant, almost untouchable. I admired the photographers who had been recognised through it, not simply because their work was accomplished, but because it carried conviction. It understood itself. I remember first discovering Alexia Sinclair’s work and feeling something shift. There was precision and theatricality in it, but also a complete sense of intention. It was not only the execution that stayed with me. It was the feeling that every part of the work belonged to the world she had created.

That kind of clarity leaves an impression.

To now be named a finalist within the same award space feels strange in the most beautiful way. Not because I compare my work to anyone else’s, but because these moments remind you that photography is never made in isolation. We are shaped by the artists we admire, the places we return to, the risks we take, the images that refuse to leave us, and the quiet years spent building a visual language before anyone else can fully see it.

The work that led to this recognition began, as it often does, without expectation.

Flying over Lake Eyre, there is no certainty. The landscape does not perform on command. It shifts according to water, salt, light, season and time. It can appear restrained at first, almost withheld, as though it is asking you to wait before it reveals anything at all. From the air, everything is in motion, even when it looks still. Channels move. Minerals gather. Colour emerges and disappears. Patterns form, dissolve and begin again.

On this particular flight, the landscape felt quiet at first. Subtle. Almost reluctant.

Then, without warning, it opened.

A saturated green channel cut through the earth with an intensity that felt almost impossible. It branched outward, feeding into smaller tributaries that spread like veins across the surface. Around it, the terrain shifted in response. Rust tones deepened. White salt formations crystallised into intricate structures. The land seemed less like a fixed surface and more like something alive: biological, responsive, constantly rewriting itself.

In those moments, photography becomes instinctive. There is no time to overthink composition or intent. From a plane, the image either reveals itself or it is gone. You recognise the shape, the rhythm, the tension, the moment of balance — and you respond. Everything happens quickly, but the recognition feels slow, as though some quieter part of you has already understood what the image is asking to become.

What continues to draw me back to Lake Eyre is not only its scale, but its complexity. From above, the landscape resists immediate understanding. Remove the horizon, remove familiar perspective, remove any clear sense of distance, and the land begins to behave differently. It becomes pattern, movement, memory, system. The longer you look, the less certain it becomes. What first appears abstract slowly begins to organise itself into something deeply connected.

It stops behaving like a landscape in the traditional sense. It begins to feel like a living system.

That is where the meaning of this body of work sits for me. It is not traditional landscape photography. There are no sweeping vistas, no stable horizon lines, no familiar points of entry. The work exists somewhere between aerial photography, abstraction and emotional interpretation. It asks the viewer to let go of immediate recognition and sit instead with form, movement and uncertainty.

Being recognised in the Hasselblad Masters with this kind of work carries a particular weight because it suggests there is space for that way of seeing. Space for landscape photography that does not explain itself instantly. Space for images that are quieter, more ambiguous, more concerned with atmosphere and interpretation than spectacle.

Australia has always held an important place in photographic storytelling, but its landscapes are often expected to appear in particular ways: vast, iconic, recognisable, dramatic. Lake Eyre asks for something different. It does not need to be made monumental. It already is. The challenge is not to make it appear grand, but to find the intimacy within its vastness. To notice the small gestures inside an enormous place.

That has become central to the way I approach the landscape. I am less interested in capturing a scene in the traditional sense and more interested in understanding how a place feels when it is in transition. Lake Eyre is never fixed. Water moves through it and recedes. Salt expands and fractures. Colours intensify, fade and return. What appears one day may be gone the next. The landscape is always becoming something else.

There is a humility in photographing a place like that. You cannot control it. You cannot predict it. You cannot ask it to repeat itself. You can only return, observe and remain open enough to recognise the moment when it offers something.

Perhaps that is why this recognition feels so meaningful. Awards, at their core, are markers. They acknowledge a moment in time: a body of work, a way of seeing, a particular point in a creative life. But they do not define the work, and they do not complete the journey. If anything, they remind you how much of the work still lies ahead.

Being named a Hasselblad Masters finalist does not change how I approach the landscape. It does not alter the instinct to return, to wait, to look harder, to let a place reveal itself slowly. But it does sharpen something. It reminds me that the quieter path still has value. That work made from patience, restraint and emotional attention can still find its place on a global stage.

There is a temptation, when recognition arrives, to treat it as a conclusion. A moment of arrival. But photography has never felt that way to me. The more I photograph, the more I understand how unfinished the process is. Each image opens another question. Each body of work leads somewhere slightly unknown. Each return to the landscape reveals how much there is still to learn.

Lake Eyre will continue to transform. Channels will shift. Colours will recede and return. Patterns will dissolve and reform in ways that cannot be predicted. The land will keep moving through its own cycles, indifferent to awards, cameras or the need to be understood.

And I will continue to return.

Not to capture it completely, because I do not think that is possible. Not to claim it, explain it, or reduce it to one image. But to understand it in fragments. To keep looking. To keep listening. To keep allowing the landscape to change the way I see.

Because that has always been the purpose.

Not recognition.

The act of seeing.