Black and White

I'll be honest with you, a Sydney sunrise will sell almost any photograph. The sky does something ridiculous, and people respond to it before they've properly looked at anything else in the frame, which is lovely, and it's also a bit of a crutch. So there are only eight black and white works here, because a picture has to genuinely earn the conversion, and most of mine don't.

What's left once you take the colour out is structure, and structure is what this coastline is actually made of. You get the bedding lines in the sandstone, showing you how the rock was laid down, the straight edge of a pool wall running up against a shelf that hasn't a straight edge on it anywhere, foam breaking apart as it slides back off the rock. On a grey overcast day, with a heavy sea running, colour gives you almost nothing, and tone gives you the lot.

I should say I don't convert a frame because it failed in colour. I decide out in the field, usually when the weather's miserable and there's no light worth the name, and those are reliably the mornings that give me something I can still stand to look at years later. A big burst of orange is a firework, and everybody enjoys a firework (I'm not above it). But a grey morning at Bronte, with the swell coming over the wall, is a slower and stranger thing, and people seem to live with it more easily.

If you do hang one, try to put it somewhere with light coming in from the side, rather than straight opposite a window. The tones are doing all the work in these, and they'll be wasted on a wall that flares. Not a rule, and I'm no interior decorator, but it's worth knowing before you pick the spot.