Author: Robert Young

Another One of My Heroes Has Left

Carroll Shelby 1923-2012

As a teenager growing up in rural Victoria, Australia, getting hold of a copy of the American car magazine Road and Track was a major event.

Each issue had photos and articles about the glossy dream machines produced by the US auto industry, and pictures and articles about the muscle cars, NASCAR racers and other motor racing exotica.

That’s how I learned about a man called Carroll Shelby, a Texan who seemed very close to being a nutcase. Put a 427 cubic inch V8 motor into a dainty little English sports car body? Of course and you end up with the fearsome Shelby Cobra 427 s/c. He followed this up with the totally insane ‘Super Snake’ of 1967. Not content with a 7 litres in a small English sports car, he built two with twin superchargers, one for himself and one for his friend comedian Bill Cosby. The myth has it that Cosby only drove his once and it scared him so badly he sold it straight away. The Super Snake impressed, or terrified, Cosby so much he turned the experience into one of his famous stand up routines – 200 mph, the speed the Super Snake would go. The car Shelby built for himself sold for $5.5 million in 2007.

Carroll Shelby was responsible for, or had a hand in the development of, the legendary Ford GT40 and its wins at Le Mans, the Shelby Cobra, the Shelby Mustangs, the Sunbeam Tiger and various other cars such as the DeTomaso Pantera and the Dodge Viper

He also fueled my interest (OK, obsession) with American muscle cars and the Mustang in particular. It is a direct line from the teenager reading about Carroll Shelby in Road and Track in the ’60s and the black machine sitting in my garage,

RIP Carrol Shelby

Russell Boyle

My good friend and poet Russell Boyle has added his words to two more of my images. I am always very impressed with just how well Russell captures the mood and the thought process behind the image.

Apocalypse

This is based on my image Early Morning in Little Lonsdale Street. The photo was taken with bright low morning sun shining directly down Little Lonsdale Street, turning the old building facades into a series of light and shade and vertical lines.

Door

This image was taken in Fitzroy. I was attracted by the band of diagonal light down the wall. The original image can be seen here.

A framed A2 print of this image is for sale at Seddon Deadly Sins in Victoria Street, Seddon, Victoria. Ask for Chris and have a coffee while you are there.

It was quiet, too quiet…

It was early morning at the Melbourne Museum and the animals weren’t stirring or making a sound. Not surprising really, they were all long dead and stuffed. But that didn’t stop actor Dave Lamb from getting excited about seeing them as he prepared for his part in this year’s Museum Comedy.

Dave Lamb getting excited

Dave loved the idea of being able to present a room full of dead animals to the Museum Comedy patrons, he was really getting quite excited as our photoshoot progressed.

Dave Lamb getting quite excited

In fact, he was getting very excited about the whole thing.

Dave Lamb getting very excited

er, OK Dave, that’s a little too excited.

That's too excited, Dave

Early Morning at the Museum

It was early morning at the Melbourne Museum. All was quiet. There was no one about, except for Ben McKenzie, Petra Elliott and Dave Lamb of Museum Comedy, me, a few security personnel, the cleaning crew, some early starters, the admin staff, the cafe staff, a few dozen researchers and… But it was quiet, very quiet.

What was that? - Ben McKenzie and a dinosaur

We had an hour to make magic, or at least enough images for the Museum Comedy publicity. So, a couple of light stands, Nikon flash units, umbrellas and camera and tripod got trekked about to several locations in the museum and an hour later we were done and packing up as the first sight-seers arrived.

Thanks to the staff of the Melbourne Museum for letting us play with the exhibits.

It’s Dungeon Crawl time again!

The first Dungeon Crawl for 2012 kicked off with a duck-handled umbrella of evil, a bat and the Valkyrie Courier Service.

Geraldine Quinn

Twinkletoes the Elf Lord had been given Brian, the duck-handled umbrella of evil by mistake and he asked three adventurers to return it from whence it came – Mount Target.

Qualdo the obese Eunuch (Sean Fabri) and Gnome Chomsky, the intellectual anarchist gnome with less than no charisma (Nadia Collins) then got into a van driven by Weibke Llarssonssonsson, the Valkyrie courier (Geraldine Quinn) and set off on the quest.

There were magic puzzles that weren’t and a bat, the problem of returning or exchanging Brian without a receipt, an ogre who wanted a degree to hang on the wall and a very obtuse guardian of the Returns counter and…

Guys, I just take the photos, I don’t have a clue what is happening most of the time. All I know is that it had a happy ending when Weibke finally received a petrol voucher so she wasn’t out of pocket on the quest.

If you want to understand it, come along. You will laugh, you will cry but mostly you will laugh and have a great time. And there is a bar at the Bella Union too.

The Knights Before Christmas

The Last Dungeon Crawl of the Year

I’ve just finished culling, collating and processing the 386 images I took at December’s Dungeon Crawl, The Knights Before Christmas.

As befitting for a December show, it had a lovely Christmas theme, with elves, Santa, good deeds, bravery, comradeship and a lot of seriously weird stuff.

It was Duddlepour eve, and the hard working dwarfs were about to be thrown out of their lodgings into the cold snow if our four brave adventurers couldn’t find and return their magic tools (which had been stolen by an apprentice laundry hand from the thieves guild) so the dwarfs could finish making the magic armour and sell it so they can pay their rent and not be evicted by their grasping landlord. And that was just the first five minutes.

Scott Edgar, Brenna Courtney Glazebrook, Casey Bennetto and Nadia Collins were the adventurers, along with the Dungeon Master and grasping landlord; Ben McKenzie. The multi-talented Richard McKenzie played everyone and everything else.

Doing Publicity for Dungeon Crawl

As regular readers will know, I have become a fan of Dungeon Crawl. Partly because it is a lot of fun, partly because I get to take some fun photographs. Recently Ben McKenzie asked me to do some new shots that could be used for publicity.

Ben and Richard discuss the rules

The brief was to take some straight headshots of Richard (who plays all the truly evil characters) and then some action shots of Richard and Ben that could be used for publicity. I say ‘action, but we were restricted in space and format, so the heads needed to be tight.

The set up was two umbrellas with flashes firing through them. For the Richard headshots I placed them in the traditional clamshell position (one above the other) with the bottom one on a lower power setting.

For the group shots (well, a small group), the umbrellas were moved out to the sides to provide an even light across the characters.

A third flash was fired at the white background.