Great Photography Gets Results

We are very pleased to see the media campaign for the next Australian Wooden Boat Festival get underway with the latest issue of one of Australia’s most popular boating magazines.  Our friends at Australasian Wooden Boat Builder will publish a beautifully laid-out six-page feature on the upcoming festival.  Media Manager Daryl Peebles researched the photos and filled in the details.  The article gives a run-down on all the key themes of the 2017 event with stunning pictures from the archives of the Hobart Photographic Society and the AWBF.  Photography Manager Rob Oates coordinates a well-honed program of photo assignments with a team of over 40 professional and semi-pro photographers at every festival.  This provides us with a extraordinary resource – more than 20,000 (actually, a lot more!) captioned and tagged images that are invaluable when the media come calling.

Photography has played a big part in the Australian Wooden Boat Festival since the earliest days.  The boats are beautiful, of course, but so is Hobart’s lovely waterfront setting and the infectious smiles on the faces of everyone attending Australia’s largest wooden boat festival.  Great images are no accident.  Rob conducts master classes in photojournalism (he is a successful professional with dozens of countries and locations under his belt) for emerging photographers and gives advice on both technical and artistic aspects of great pictures.  The AWBF comes to the party with difficult-to-get access to boats, special events and personalities.  It’s a good example of how a volunteer-run organisation can benefit everybody involved and still produce gold standard results.

SV Mallana (rear) and Yukon, battle for position on beam reach, Ketch Review, AWBF 2015.  Photo: Rob Oates, Ballantyne Photography

Terry Sims captured this lovely shot of the veteran Storm Bay, one of the the most beloved feature boats of the Australian Wooden Boat Festival