Exmoor Lockdown Diary 117 - 20 Years of Working with My Great Friend Richard Austin
The photograph above was taken by the well known photographer Richard Austin - a man who, over the years, has won every single award press photography has to offer. He sent it to me just now, but for the life of me I cannot recall what the occasion was. It seems that whatever I was writing in the churchyard, it was boring enough to put the cat to sleep.
Richard never relaxes - even when we took the train from Taunton to St Ives for a day out by the seaside
For two decades, Richard and I shared many an adventure working on stories for the Western Morning News - the main daily newspaper in the West Country - and other titles in the group. In way, we represent what is now all but a forgotten era. No media worker gets to do the things we did any longer - the modern job is very different and, believe me, nowhere near as much fun.
We were out on the road a great deal - I dread to think the number of miles each of us would amass over a year back in the good old days. When you are covering a patch that stretches from somewhere just west of Bristol right down to the Isles of Scilly, you certainly clock up the miles.
Richard and I got along very well together, sharing the same dry - sometimes dark - sense of humour. Laughing a lot - getting along with the countryfolk we used to meet in all manner of places - and understanding the world world in which they lived.
While the hordes of holidaymakers enjoy themselves on the beach at St Ives Richard is still working hard
The pair of us always used to cover the really big occasions - the Royal visits and even the horrible murders. But often we’d be working on obscure features that I’d dreamed up - mainly (and I can say this in all honesty now that I no longer work for the paper) designed to give me a sense of fun and adventure rather than for any loftier reason.
And we did have fun. A lot of laughs, some scrapes and a good many adventures. And the benefit of all this belting about was that we knew everyone - and everyone knew us. That’s one hell of a good thing when it comes to being a journalist. Knowing people - and having them know and trust you - hugely, massively, helps in the level of authentic coverage you can offer.
Richard getting the angle of the dangle right on a sea cliff in Cornwall
As usual, I am a little pressed for time right now, but will relate some of these Austin-Hesp adventures in different posts over the coming weeks. But in the meantime, to give you a flavour of the sort of man Richard is and the sort of things we used to get up to, I have rescued the following story from my archives, written probably 15 or more years ago…
Richard Austin applies his lying down photography technique on a cliff top in Cornwall
As a roving feature-writer I regularly work with Richard and can report that I have never known a grown man to hurl himself towards terra-firma - muddy or otherwise - with such enthusiastic abandon.
I am forever turning around to speak with a colleague who is not there - at eye-level, at least. What I have learned to do is look downwards and there, often as not, I'll find the six-foot-four photographer lying, crawling or sitting depending on the shot.
"I like to get on the same level as my subjects," explained Richard, while crawling down Dulverton main-street recently.
I had suggested his laundry bills must be huge.
"Well, you can get a bit grubby, but it's important to get the right angle, especially with animals. Getting down to their level can make all the difference to a shot. Hey - why am I telling you my secrets?"
Later we got to talking about one of the most memorable photos in Animal Magic - the one where four badger cubs are lined up in the footsteps of Nikki Hawkins of Secret World animal centre at East Huntspill, near Bridgwater.
You can see the young badgers walking through the buttercups at eye-level: "Seconds after I took that shot a low-flying jet flew over and they scattered to the four corners of the field," recalls Richard.
I have never known a snapper like the tireless 48 year-old from Lyme Regis. (Blimey - was he only 48 when i wrote this?)
He ducks and weaves around a subject with one of his big Canon digital cameras zapping away as if it is in some way an adjunct of his body. He doesn't so much carry the device, but wear it. When they invent a camera that is fixed permanently inside the photographer's eye, Richard Austin will have one.
So, not surprisingly, I had been looking forward to seeing a copy of the now famous book and took the first opportunity I could to sit with Richard and get him to show me some of his favourite shots.
"I suppose I should include the two 'gay' swans - if only because I've never spent so long on any subject before," Richard told me. "I knew I could sell the picture far and wide the moment I saw the sign at Abbotsbury explaining how two male swans had set up nest together. As long as I could get the right shot. But it took me four hours to get that picture. I was about to give up so, as a last desperate attempt to get something, I threw a bit of grass in the water and they both grabbed at it together.
"I am not the sort of photographer who sits about in hedgerows for hours on end. 20 minutes - that's my normal limit - then I'm off. After all, I am a press photographer, so I don't get that much time."
Of course, a good many of Richard's animal subjects are news in their own right, like the rare osprey that was stealing fish from a trout farm near Dartington...
"But it was the Jack Russell dog who snatched the headline. There I was, waiting around for the osprey to go fishing, but all it did was sit in a tree. And, suddenly, there was the trout farm owner's terrier wading into the water catching a fish. It stole the show."
At other times a seemingly unremarkable shot will hit the front page of a national newspaper - like Richard's picture of a pheasant running through the snow on the Blackdown Hills. Then there are sublime shots where the photographer is in exactly the right place at exactly the right time. Not that these occasions necessarily happen by accident. Richard gave me an example by telling me how he'd noticed the way in which blackheaded gulls on the River Axe had developed a unique system for catching small fish.
"They sit on the water and then suddenly flip forwards to spear the fish - it's the only place I've seen them do it," said Richard, explaining how he'd captured a fabulous image of one of the birds making the manoeuvre above a mirror-like surface.
"Actually, I was a bit unhappy with that shot as I wanted the beak of the real bird to be touching the beak of its reflection, but the camera I was using wasn't my normal one and it was a bit slow."
Other shots are purely the result of good fortune, like the one of a seagull pecking at a young man's head.
"That was taken at the annual Christmas Day swim at Charmouth - I had a feeling the gull might do something like that. People cuss the gulls, but they are characters - they are the most adaptive birds we have." Other photos are highly planned, but nerve-racking all the same.
"Like when Jeff Prince of Secret World released the peregrine falcon he nursed back to health. I went all the way to Cheddar Gorge to get that shot - and it was a once-and-once-only thing. The bird wasn't going to come back for me to do it again."
All the equipment Richard uses is digital and all his cameras are manufactured by Canon - a D2000, an EOS 1D and an EOS D30 - for the enthusiasts among you. I asked him if there was some kind of Holy Grail in the animal world - something he has yet to photo, something shy and difficult to shoot...
"The kingfisher. I've got pictures of them before, but I reckon getting a superb shot of a kingfisher in action in an English river is far more difficult than shooting lions out in the Serengeti."
My guess is that Richard Austin will snap the illusive kingfisher, sooner rather than later. In the meantime he can flick the pages of Animal Magic with enormous pride - it is one of the best collections of animal photographs ever put together in this country let alone this region.
As I say, more Richard Austin stories will be on this site soon - in the meantime you can have a look at his website at https://www.richardaustinimages.com/
