Bill
Smit was born in 1927 at Rocklea, Brisbane and grew up there. He is a photographer and photography judge
with an international reputation. He was
a founding member of Queensland Camera Group. This is his story:
“During
the War years I did my Scholarship and Junior before I became an apprentice
Fitter and Turner. I worked for Evans
Deakin at the South Brisbane dry dock, repairing naval boats and after the War
finished, I then went back to their Rocklea workshop and worked on Queensland
Railways steam locomotives.
“My
parents both lived in Amsterdam. My
father worked in a big department store.
My mother didn't work. But they
lived in a house in Amsterdam on the top storey of a two-storey house which was
all right except that when when you had to put the cat out, you lowered it down
the window in a basket and it'd go for a walk and then when you pulled the
basket up, you only hoped it wasn't the ginger tom from next door and you got
your cat back. So then they decided to
come out to Australia and he came out in 1912.
My mother came out in 1914 and they got married here and I had, then my
brother was born in 1918 and I was born in 1927.
“My
mother, she was an amazing person really.
She did go out and do some work, working in somebody's home, cleaning
and that sort of stuff and my father, of course had the language problem
because there was no services for immigrants in those days and so he worked on
roads, with pick and shovel and then he eventually became the gardener for the
Darra Cement Works and that was a good job and he stayed there until he retired.
“We
lived near Archerfield Aerodrome, which was a revelation because the start of
aviation was just coming and we saw all sorts of different planes. And of course, then the War came and the
Americans took it over so we saw every type of plane that was there. But in the early days you used to have, what
they called "Air Pageants" where three motored Stinson, like the one
that crashed at O'Reilly's. They used to
race against little single engine planes on the handicap basis. They used to race over our house and they
also used to have a truck driving across the aerodrome and a light planes'd fly
over and trying to drop bags of flour on to it.
Or they'd put hydrogen balloons up, small balloons and they'd try and
break them with their propellers so I became very interested in aviation
through that.
“The
interesting thing about it was that in 1934, MacRobertson Miller, a chocolate
manufacturer in Melbourne sponsored an air race from England to Australia and
it was won by an English pilot. Two
pilots, Scott and Campbell Black and the second plane was the KLM DC2 Airliner. It was one of their first airliners. It landed at Archerfield and my father and I
went over there to have a look at it and of course speak to the pilots in Dutch. He ended up going with the pilots to 4QG
radio, which in those days stood for Queensland Government and sort of acted as
an interpreter and it was only many many years later that a relation came out
and I found out that the uniforms they were wearing were made by my grandfather. He worked for a company that would supply
clothes for the Royal Family in those days.
But he made those uniforms and we didn't know that at the time.
“My
brother worked for Evans Deakin which was a protected industry. And he was called up. He was in the Reserve Army before the War and
he was a member of the Light Horse, but no horses. But they had those uniforms and any rate he was
a called up and a week before he was due to sign up for the army, the company
stepped in and said - you can't go because you're in a protected industry. So he didn't go. I went to high school at the end of George
Street which was called the Industrial High School near the Parliament House. In the Botanical Gardens, they dug trenches
for us to hop into if there was an air raid.
So, the War didn't affect us that much, except that the street we lived
in, all the American aircraft that were brought over by ship, without their
wings and they would be towed past our place and it was a gravel road and, so
wasn't very pleasant that part of it, but still as far as the World War was
concerned, you know we didn't have it that hard.
“After
the War I decided I'd develop a film out of a Box Brownie camera and I did that.
Then Kodachrome film came out, the slides and the slide, of course, being
colour was very popular and the only problem was that you couldn't always get
it. I used to go to Kodak in Queen
Street every Saturday morning looking for film.
Have you got any Kodachrome? If
you're lucky there'd be one because they were supplying the World and it was in
short supply. So I bought a Kodak Retina
camera which is a nice little camera and that started me off. Then I advanced to a slightly better camera
and I met a fellow at the Yeronga Corso and we were photographing motor boat
racing and he said - I'm a member of the Brisbane Camera Group. Why don't you come along? So that was the start of that. And we used to meet in the room above the St
James Theatre which is now the Myer Centre and being a theatre, it had a very
high ceiling which meant a very long staircase up to the room, which wasn't
that bad but come Christmas time, I had to help carry a keg of beer up that
stairs for the party. That's where I met
all the people and off we went.
“Being
in engineering I decided I'd build an enlarger and because I had at that
particular time a camera, Speed Graphic they call it. That was a large sheet film camera and so you
needed a big enlarger. I certainly couldn't
afford to buy one so I decided to make it with the help of Evans Deakin. But they didn't know about that.
“The
Brisbane Camera Group was meeting at the Royal Geographical Society rooms in
Ann Street and we had this competition, a prints competition and for some
reason there were two judges. One was
Garth Grant Thompson and the other was Ralph Gregory. They were both associates of the Royal
Photographic Society and, but they couldn't agree on this particular night. So after that, some of the print workers got
together apparently and demanded that we have a Special General Meeting to
discuss this business and so we had that General Meeting and their motion was
defeated so they went. Then later on we
learnt that they started talking about creating a new club. Now the print workers created the Brisbane
Salon Circle which only had about half a dozen members but you could only join
by invitation. The focus of all this
area was the camera shop in the Brisbane Arcade which was run by Tom Scruse and
they would meet there at lunchtime and talk and talk and then somebody decided that
we'd form a colour slide club and that was the start of the Queensland Camera
Group, sorry the Colour Group which later became the Camera Group. And so they were sort of independent of the
BCG. I mean we were all friendly to each
other and so that was the start of the Colour Group. However, when you’ve got club members leaving
and forming another club, well you could imagine there was a bit of ill feeling
there but we all sort of smiled at each other through clenched teeth.
“In
the late 1950s the main feature really was the colour slides. People would go out on their holidays and
take pictures and then wanted to show them to somebody. So, companies like QANTAS they had a camera
club. The Railway Institute I remember
going there judging once. And the Postal
Institute. All of them they were sort of
social things and it was looking at each other’s slides that brought it on and
then they would advance a little further and have competitions and all that
sort of thing. And then of course, came
TV and the novelty sort of wore off.
Bill Smit receiving Commonwealth Medal in Adelaide, 1986 |
“There
were 480 photography clubs in Australia.
That's a list that was in a book and there was about 40 I think in Queensland. So they wanted judges other than their club
members, you see. That's where the Photographic
Society of Queensland came in. They used
to do tape judging and we used to receive slides with a cassette tape and the
judge would judge it, put down all the comments and send it back. So this gave the country people somebody
else's opinion. So that was quite a
thing at the time.
“There
was one person from that time who was a good photographer. He was from Toowoomba, Graham Burstow. He was a friend from way way back and he was
very much in to photographing people doing their own thing so to speak and he
became well known for that. I used to
judge the Toowoomba annual and he always won.
Sometimes he would not enter to give the others a chance. But he was a great fellow.
“The
Queensland Colour Group had a badge that was sort of looked like three cubes in
a sort of an irregular arrangement and there were three different colours and
that badge changed later on but it was a badge they printed for members. The Queensland Colour Group had these
"at home" club meetings and they would invite people from other clubs
to come. Somebody'd put on a slide show
and another time somebody would put on a movie and we had one chap who worked
at the Conservatorium of Music so he put on a piano recital for us. So it was a get together. It was a good thing because it got people
mixing from different clubs.
Graham Burstow, Ernie Wright, Bill Smit, 1960s |
“There
was one memorable night when I gave a lecture on differential focusing, that is
to have a photo so there's things in focus and others not in focus. Frank O’Shea was a member of the club whose
job was to look after the projection and in the middle of my lecture on
differential focusing up come a slide of a picture of a differential on a car. So behind the scenes, they'd been working on
it, trying to put me off my beat. Well
good laugh so we all enjoyed it.
“The
early days of AVs were pretty primitive by today's standard. We had two projectors and you would project
one slide and then the next projector was ready so you'd switch projectors. So you sort of had slides with a break in
between. And then somebody invented a,
or they pinched an idea from the movie theatres where you had two flaps on a
spindle so that when one flap covered one projector, the other was uncovered
and you just went and it was more of a sort of a fader. It was much better. And of course, eventually it all became
electronic. This is all before the
digital age. There were people with
little tape recorders playing the music while they're showing and you know, it
was very difficult. But I remember one
night we had 17 entries which was quite good from one club. You can't get that now.
“Then
came the four-track recorder, which means you could record on four individual
tracks. So you would put on two tracks
the music in stereo and the third track, you could have a signal for when the
slides to change and that's what you'd hear on the earphones and you'd know to
do the change exactly at the right time.
So that was a big advancement that way.
That was used for years.
Graham Burstow, Dr Ron Knight, Dr Garth May, Bill Smit, 1960s |
Eric Dury & Bill Smit, 1980 |
“Kodak
in those days used to have a lecture service.
See Kodak was very oriented to amateurs in those days and they had lectures
on tapes and you could borrow them to show at the club and we approached them
about making duplicates of some of the winning entries so they said - if, we'll
copy 75 of them provided that we're allowed to keep a copy for ourselves for
our lecture service. So that was
good. So we'd send down the 75 and
they'd duplicate them. See the thing
about duplicating slides was that they had a duplicating film which was a much
lower contrast film because if you copied on ordinary film, it'd be a much
higher contrast. So by using duplicating
film, which is made for that purpose, you got a better image.
Brian Rope presenting Bill Smit with APR medal, 1966 |
“I
started a darkroom service. I was
looking after my father so it gave me something to do. So I built a decent dark room under the house. When I bought the house, it had to have room
for a decent darkroom. So I built that
darkroom and then I started a black and white printing service for
professionals because colour prints had come in and a lot of the labs switched
to colour and they wouldn't do black and white.
In fact, Kodak, if you wanted them to print, which they used to do in
those days, they would send it down to Adelaide. So I had this service and the Brisbane City
Council have photographers who follow the Mayor around and they take the
pictures, develop them and then store them.
They don't print them but they're there for the record and then somebody
started picking up pictures they wanted to print and I got that job. And when I looked at the negatives they were
so thin, lacking in detail, that to print them, it was hard to make a decent
print. You had to print on the hardest
grade of paper, Grade 5. You had
different grades of paper for different contrast and, I rang up the boss of the
City Council photographic department who was originally a member of the Brisbane
Salon Circle and told him how shocking they were and he had no answer but we
found out later that when they developed the film they develop them in deep
tanks where they suspend the film into the developer which is agitated by
nitrogen bubbles and then when it's developed, they fix it and then hang it up
to dry. And as you use the developer you
had to put in a replenisher to bring the developer up to proper strength and
unfortunately, one photographer thought the other photographer was putting in
the replenisher and the other way round and consequently no replenisher was put
in at all. And as a result, we had these
thin negatives.
Bill Smit & John North with Bill Smit Shield, 1997 |
“And
you know you're dealing sometimes from little, we're talking in inches in those
days, 4 x 5 inches up to 20 x 16 inches.
And you know, it's a fair size piece of paper but I had, I made a big
tray in the darkroom out of marine ply and made a tray about six inches deep
and I had the trays on top of that but then once I fixed them I could just slip
them under into the water which was running water, for half an hour to wash
them. Then of course, when you're
dealing with enlarging a little bit of dust on the negative on the carrier
becomes much larger on the thing. So it
didn't matter how careful you were, after you've printed every print, then
you've got to retouch it, get rid of those so there was a special little water
colours that were available in little blocks and a very fine brush and you'd, I
used to use a Loupe on my head to magnify it and so the idea was when you
retouch it you couldn't see where it was.
So it's all time-consuming.
“I
used to make, what you call a "proof sheet" where you laid out, it
was a special gadget. You laid the films
in there, you put a sheet of paper in, expose it to light, develop it and then
you'd have a, a black and white representation of each negative so you could
pick it and see what was good and you had to do that particularly with wedding
photography so that people could pick out what picture they liked to have
enlarged.
“I
never did wedding photography but I processed it because I saw too many
"accidents". You know, whole
wedding taken out of focus, through no fault of the photographer, but unbeknownst
to him, the vibration in the car had unwound an inner lens so that it wasn't in
focus. So we had to tell them when they
came back from their honeymoon that, sorry we've got no pictures. So we had to dress them up and stand them
outside the church again and all this. And
of course, there’s no wedding cake left.
So that put me right off.
“Queensland
Colour Group was solely colour slides and then somebody got the idea, they'd
like to do colour prints, or black and white prints. Black and white was very popular in those
days and so they thought, well if we're going to do black and white prints,
that name doesn't quite suit. So they
wanted to retain the initials so they switched them to "camera group"
from colour. That's their advancing with
the times.
Graham Burstow & Bill Smit, 2016 |
Bill
has a number of awards and groups to which he belongs, which he explains here:
“Well
the FIAP, that's the Federation International de L’Art Photographique is an
organisation based in Europe and they were sort of setting standards for
competition and we got to hear of it and I remember I was President of PSQ in
those days and one of the members of one of the clubs wanted to investigate
this and he found that you could use the FIAP in Australia but only one body
could look after it and that was the Brisbane Camera Group. And then the Australian Photographic Society
came along and of course we handed it to them because they're the main body. And the "E" in FIAP is for
"excellence". AFIP was for
artists, artistes, and that is, there's a lot of other ones now, ES, that's
excellent service. A lot of other ones
now that I'm not too familiar with.
“In
2012 it was at the 50th anniversary of the Australian Photographic Society
Annual Dinner in Canberra and one of the members of PSQ was down there and he
called me on stage and handed me a certificate saying - you're a Fellow. So that was very surprising.
“The
Commonwealth Medal, that's given to three classes. One is the professional photographer, the
other is the scientific photographer and the other is the amateur photographer. So it only comes round for the amateurs once
every three years. I was a foundation
member of the Australian Photographic Society and I did a lot of conventions in
Queensland and later on they made me a Life Member. But that's the basis behind the Commonwealth
medal. That's been given to some
scientists and that sort of thing who have contributed to the photographic
progress.
Bill Smit judging Images of the Year 2016 (Photo by Gaye Edwards) |
“The
“Australian Photography” magazine, which has been going for years now ran a
six-monthly competition. And you entered
each month and I entered and I used to do a thing called "bar relief"
which is an experimental thing where you took a slide and you made a contact
negative of it in black and white and then you'd sandwich the two, slightly out
of register, so that you get a slight white line around things. I did quite well with those but I never won a
monthly competition but I accumulated enough points to win and the prize was a
flight with Pan Am to Hawaii, a week at the Hilton Hawaiian Village so that was
really a big thing.”
Bill
has done a lot of caravan trips around Australia and continues to enjoy driving
around the country and taking many photos.
“I've
done close to 200,000 kilometres. I've only
been looking at maps recently to realise just how many places I've been to, going
around Australia. I’ve been across the Nullarbor
five times and up and down the centre and you'd go to every place you hadn't
been to so to speak. And that was a
great thing and it's an economical way of travelling, plus you meet a lot of
people and photographically, of course, it was marvellous. In those early days of course you had slides
and with the Kodachrome slides which was the best film you could buy. Agfa made film but that used to deteriorate
badly but Kodachrome. I've still got
Kodachromes that are as good as ever. But
you had to send that film down to Melbourne.
When you bought the film you paid for the processing there and then and
it was supplied with a little packet that you could put the film in, put your
address on it and send it and then a week later you'd get it back. Except for one year when the young Queen and
Prince Philip came to Australia and they did most of the states. Queensland was the last state and the town
just lit up. The William Jolly Bridge
was blood red and every building in Queen Street, had all bright lights
everywhere. There were photographers
there with tripods everywhere. So I sent
the film away and I got it back six weeks later. There was such a demand you see. But with it, was a box of mounts. They said - sorry we can't possibly mount
them, you'll have to do it yourself. So
they sent the packet of mounts. But
other than that you usually had to wait a week, which seems a long time in this
digital age.
Bill Smit for Queensland Camera Group 60th Anniversary 2016 (Photo by Gaye Edwards) |
“As
you get older, things become heavier so consequently I didn't want to have a
camera with auxiliary lenses and all that sort of thing. So now I've bought what you call a
"bridge camera". It's a Nikon
P900 and it's not light, but it's all you need to carry because it has a focal
length of 24mm wide angle to 2000mm telephoto.
That's a long telephoto and you can also do close-up with it to within
about a centimetre and it's all built in to it.
I've made prints with it to show the people how the quality is, you
know, a scene of a farmyard with a dray in it and then you zoom out to 2000 and
you just show a bit of it with cobwebs on.
You know, that's all I want to do and I see it on the club on 10-foot
screen. I have no quibbles about the
quality, so it just suits me fine and keeps me in photography. And it only cost me $599.00 for all that. It's got some limitations and as I say, it
does what I want to do.”
Bill Smit was interviewed in February 2017.