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Veteran newspaper photographer Bruce Postle spent 27 years recording with his camera the daily tragedies, celebrations, and oddities of life. Now he’s produced a compendium of his images. Here he explains the techniques he used to capture his own ‘decisive moments’.

The legendary news photographer Bruce Postle has had a career which has spanned decades, and which has also crossed several technological thresholds. When he began chasing images for the regional newspaper Queensland Country Life in the late 1950s he was issued a Speed Graphic medium-format bellows camera, a heavily engineered piece of kit that was at the same time bulky, difficult to manhandle, and built to last. He still has one, though he hasn’t taken a picture with it for many years. When he finished his newspaper career in 1996 the digital camera revolution was about to seriously come into its own, and in his most recent working life as a freelancer he has acquired a top-of-the-range Canon EOS digital SLR with a wide assortment of lenses. But while he has enough kit in storage to consider opening a museum, he’s not too fussed about the technical details of the equipment. Once he learned how a camera or type of film worked, his interest in it was much like that of a builder’s interest in his nail gun. It was simply a better tool with which to achieve his objective – which was to convert his creative thinking into an original and thought-provoking photo, while relentlessly working against a deadline. Postle would use all the resources available to him to score a great picture.

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