Geoff Woods

Geoff Woods

Australian born Geoff Woods has managed to combine carpentry with surfing and from the age of 30, photography. Inspired by the work of Peter Dombrovskis, the two subsequently became good friends. After working extensively with large format cameras, Geoff now uses a Nikon D800E with Zeiss lenses. His images have been published by Australian Geographic, The Wilderness Society, and the Australian Conservation Foundation among others

flickr.com

It’s always interesting to look at what images others favourite, and it was through this route that I came to Geoff Woods’ images on Flickr. Unusually for these times, I could find out very little about him online, though I remembered him coming into the conversation about a recent End Frame, and having been mentioned by a couple of our previous interviewees. There was clearly only one solution – to ask Geoff to be our Featured Photographer.

Can you tell readers a little about yourself – your education, early interests and career?

I grew up on a wheat and sheep farm for the first 12 years of my life, which my parents then sold and we moved to Sydney where I finished my education. Leaving school I became a Carpenter (and have been doing this for nearly 50 years now). At the same time I took up surfing and was an A Grade surfer by the time I was 25; I kept surfing until I was in my mid 40s.

How and when did you first become interested in photography? What kind of images did you initially set out to make and has this changed over time?

I became interested in photography at the age of 30 years; I thought I needed something of interest besides surfing. So I bought my first camera, which was a Canon T50, and quickly found out that it was a fully automatic camera which restricted what I could do with it so I upgraded to a Canon AE1 Program. In those days I took pictures of anything I laid my eyes on, I had no real direction.