1. Your photography is, for one, notable for its prolificacy. How long have you been shooting?
Apart from an almost complete 'photographer's block' of about two years from 2002 to 2004, I have been shooting regularly for over 15 years.

I tend to find I shoot far more than I can keep up with editing, so I have a lot of images that I have yet to work through, in both digital and film format.

2. A large body of your work is self-portraiture. Is there an artistic decision behind this? Or has joining the 365day project at Flickr just fueled this?
My first attempts at self-portraiture were vague and more snapshot or 'record' images in high school, however at college I came to appreciate the fact that I was always available, ever reliable, and completely open to my creative ideas, so I fast became my favourite model. I was also introduced to Cindy Sherman's work around that time and really enjoyed her untitled film stills series as I was very keen on the cinema. It is almost inevitable that at some point every female self-portraitist working in the genre since will draw comparisons to her work, though I do consider it a compliment.

Over the years self-portraiture has been something that I can use on many levels - to express my emotions, record my existence in a particular place and time, express visual ideas and take on various personas and characters. Once I bought a digital SLR in late 2005, self-portraiture naturally became a regular subject for me again. Possibly through lack of any other muse in my life, I have become my own muse.

Photographs of me between the ages of seven and fifteen show an awkward girl in haphazard fashions with glasses that I abhorred having to wear, and I had come to the belief that I was not photogenic at all. So when I turned the camera on myself I was surprised to discover otherwise. To this day I have yet to find more than a handful of photographs of me taken by others in which I don't look awkward or that I don't feel show me in an unattractive light; yet even when shooting film prior to learning how to use Photoshop or applying that tool to my photography, I somehow seemed able to capture myself in ways that I could enjoy seeing.

365days projects had been spoken about in one of my lectures at college but were predominantly done more as a record - essentially taking the same basic shot every day for a year; only your clothes, hair colour and length, and possibly the background vary.

A year after joining Flickr I finally started using it regularly and as I got to know others on the site and looked at their 'photostreams' I came across the 365days group started by Chris Maverick. After toying with the concept for a while I decided it would be the ideal project and a good way for me to record the year in which I turned 30 and the potential that it held, including my debut solo exhibition. I liked the idea that most 365ers have of challenging their creativity each day with new visual ideas and themes, and exploring the full gamut of what is deemed self-portraiture.

3. How do you choose your subjects?
Essentially I will shoot anything that I find aesthetically pleasing and interesting, even if that may be subject matter that others find 'weird' or 'morbid'. Fascination with something or someone usually leads me to want to photograph it or them. Whether it be envisaging someone in a staged situation where I think they will fit the visual idea I have (eg. Karen in a red dress seated on a sideboard with a taxidermy deer head hanging above her in my Frankly, My Deer... series); self-portraits inspired by favourite films, directors, artists or styles, or simply inspired by an item of clothing or a location; mushrooms, sea debris, roadkill or dead fish discovered in their natural environment - as a vegetarian I don't kill creatures in order to photograph them, but I do feel moved to document the natural beauty of creatures that I may find already dead. Especially in the case of the wombat and fish I have discovered in my travels, these are creatures that are beautiful and unusual but that you would not usually be able to get close enough to marvel over if they were alive.

4. Besides self-portraits, what else do you like to photograph?
I also enjoy portraiture of people who are not me, though I do this far less than I used to at high school and college. My portraiture also extends to dolls which some of my friends find a little disturbing and unsettling.

I have a particular obsession with graveyards and cemeteries, to the point that signposts indicating there is one in the nearby vicinity will almost have me salivating with glee. As I don't drive, I'm sure my companions on day trips or in my various travels have the same reaction as my brothers and I had growing up in regard to my parents' attention to signs for wineries and vineyards: the futile hope that they had gone unnoticed.

Far from finding graveyards to be morbid or depressing places, I find wandering through looking at and photographing the gravestones and statues worn and broken by the elements is as relaxing to me as most people would find strolling through gardens or a park. The variety of ways in which families honour their loved ones, the cultural styles, the history of the people in that area, and the beautiful and / or kitsch decorations adorning the graves all hold interest for my photographer's eye. There is also a humbling aspect to graveyards: they are yet another reminder to me that, as much as we would like to believe otherwise, we are just passing through. Nature will eventually reclaim the 'permanent' monuments and markers we erect. We are not immortal.

Aside from that I primarily find myself drawn to urban landscapes, the minutiae of everyday life, beauty in death. I love natural landscapes but I don't seem to have a good eye for sweeping vistas unless they include traces of humans, especially proof of the transitory nature of human imprints and monuments upon the earth.

5. What format(s) do you shoot?
Since October 2005 I've been shooting predominantly digital, however I have recently had my two 35mm cameras repaired and have a Holga, all of which I hope to dust off and make more use of during 2008.

6. Do you use mostly natural light, or do you work in a studio?
I mostly use natural or ambient light, as I haven't had access to a studio or professional studio lighting since I finished college. Often I manage to work with my household lighting in a way that produces more of a studio appearance; you learn to make the best of what you have.

7. What kind of darkroom (traditional or digital) techniques do you employ?
Although I haven't worked with film for the past 2 years, I tended to shoot mostly in black and white, and often my colour work was transparency cross-processed as negative. I also enjoyed using high-speed infra-red black and white for specific projects.

I fell out of the habit of processing my own black and white film a couple of years after college and so, without access to a darkroom, my printing and processing were no longer things I retained control over.

I have always had a preference for high contrast, though I have managed to pull that back a bit over the past few years.

I don't take the purist attitude to Photoshop and photography in general. I don't consider my work to be photo manipulations, but I rarely publish any of my images as shot. Whether working in film or digital, I consider things like colour correction and contrast adjustment as basics that I will apply to all of my images when editing electronically or printing from a negative.

Some of my images have only these adjustments made to them, others I edit in a more stylized manner depending on the final image I am trying to achieve. Many of my images are framed exactly as taken; other times I will crop an image to square format if I feel it works more strongly that way, and I do enjoy the feel associated with medium format film cameras. I don't tend to use much layering or filtering or brushes; primarily using levels, curves, variations, brightness/contrast; diffuse glow and sharpen filters; and clone and heal tools.

Although I learnt basic Photoshop techniques at college, I didn't really extend my knowledge and widen my usage of it until I started shooting digital. I still find I do very little editing of my film negatives compared to my digital images. Not having the skill and techniques to do more advanced edits on my images is a good way of restraining excessive manipulation of my images, however I am happy to learn more as a way of broadening the possibilities for my work. In my view it is no different to learning how to work in other types of paint, or in other styles of painting. All are valid mediums and styles; it is a case of applying the one that best fits the final work you wish to create.

8. You've posed nude in a few of your shots, did you find it a difficult decision?
The actual posing and photographing is not the difficult part, especially now with digital photography where you don't have to worry about staff in a photo lab seeing the images before you do; the hardest decision initially was deciding whether to publish images on my website or hang them in galleries and so forth.

Unfortunately because of the general moral climate where violence is more acceptable than nudity in films, for example; and where all nudity, especially in photography, is still often wrongly lumped together as pornography, publishing nude images still carries a certain amount of controversy, debate and trepidation.

Although the nudity in the image 'Fountainhead' in my first Crawlspace series is understated and mostly obscured by the layering of textures and images, I still found it drew a lot of attention in the group show I created the series for, as people could "see my nipple' - it was the subject of a fair bit of light-hearted tee-heeing.

If I were photographing other models and I had their permission to publish images of them nude my primary consideration would be in the merit of the overall image. However, when the images are self-portraits, and especially if you are publishing them on the internet, there are added considerations of who may be viewing them; how family and friends may perceive the images and what the repercussions may be (if any); and your own body image issues and personal feelings that need to be contended with.

Although more suggestive than explicit nudes, my Intimacy series was the first that I was quite proud of as a series and wanted to include on my website, however I did consult with a number of my photographer friends on whether to publish them or not initially. The model is not clearly identifiable as me, but the possibility of the images being misinterpreted or potentially having an impact on how I was perceived by others was something I was still wary of.

The reality is that people are not just faces and hands and backs and shoulders and feet. My complete body is an important part of who I am and contributes to how I see myself, clothed or unclothed. My sexuality is also an inseparable part of who I am, however it is not all that I am, therefore the assumption that an image showing nudity is always about sexuality is a superficial view.

Becoming familiar with the self-portrait work of Katie West contributed to my confidence in gently erasing the line drawn in the sand. Discovering the work of Olive and Rose reminded me that nudity in art can be much like being naked in life: natural, incidental, beautiful, innocent, erotic and sensual all at the same time.

9. Furthermore, has this hurt or helped your photography? Do people judge you cause you decided to pose nude?
Thus far I have not found that it has hurt my photography.

I see other female self-portraitists on Flickr who have a larger audience regularly having to (or feeling they have to) defend nudity in their work, so perhaps it is that the majority of people who approach me about my work, either through communities or my website or in person, have a more open and accepting view of nudity in art. Unfortunately in some people's narrow view nudity is only valid as art in the work of the Old Masters and painting, and in most contemporary art it is just a way of getting more (in Flickr language) 'views'. Unfortunately the advertising adage of 'sex sells' is how some people cynically view and discredit nudity in art.

My main concern initially was related to the segments of my audience that I know personally, rather than those I do not know. Although at first no doubt it was a bit disarming for my family to be confronted by images of me in various states of undress, however artistic the images may be, they appreciate the aesthetics of the images and my decision to make the images I do. My parents' only real concern seems to be with the potential viewers of my work and the decision to publish the images online where the subject is so obviously me. This is more from a protective point of view than anything.

Friends and acquaintances are also generally pretty accepting and I have had no negative responses to the work. Again, I think it comes back to their acceptance of me as a person, and of my art, therefore it has not impacted noticeably on their behavior toward me or on their perceptions of my work or me in general.

Judgment from people I don't know ranks fairly low on my priorities, so if my work were to offend someone or it were not to their taste I would simply suggest they do not bother to continue to view my work.

Beyond that I don't find that the inclusion of nudity has suddenly generated more interest in my work, or driven people away from my work. My self-portraiture, especially whilst completing my 365days project, jumps around thematically and stylistically, so any nudity is more incidental to the particular images I'm creating than having become a standard. I am just as likely to receive responses to my photographs of other people or of urban scenes as I am of a nude self-portrait.

10. What formal education have you had in photography?
I completed a three year Diploma of Illustrative Photography at Photography Studies College in Melbourne, Australia in 1997.

11. What was your first experience in the field?
The first time I remember taking photographs to any extent was on a 'round the world' trip in 1991/92 with my family, however I had learnt some basic processing and printing and shot with an SLR in early high school for a class year book project.

When I moved to a small town in country Victoria I started taking Media classes and processing my own film, and my dad gave me his old SLR to use. From that point on I regularly photographed my friends and my surroundings, and ended up dropping music classes (music being my first love until then) in exchange for art classes and became further enamored with learning more about photography.

My friends were always willing to pose for me, even if it meant getting muddy in a semi-dried lake; running through a graveyard in a debutante dress playing at ghosts; climbing about rocks and in tunnels; or draping themselves in seaweed.

12. You've held a few photography showings, how do you go about preparing and deciding what will be in a show?
My debut solo exhibition Alternate Worlds was a fairly organic process initially. I was showing a visiting friend from the UK around the Bass Coast and Wilson's Promontory area of Victoria and we made a stop to wander along the rocks and beach near Kilcunda. As usual I was armed with my camera and started photographing the rock pools and shells and rock formations. Returning to the Bass Coast on a camping trip with a few friends about a month later I again found myself crouching amongst the rocks and sand and effectively continuing the series. As I worked through the images and edited them I decided that I wanted to exhibit a series of the images as my debut solo show and went about finding a gallery and narrowing down the selection.

Where there are a lot of images to choose from I tend to make an initial shortlist of images then step away from it for a while, then return and try to edit down as ruthlessly as possible. Sometimes this means an image that I love does not make the cut because it is too similar to another image or is not as strong as another image.

I also usually seek the opinion of a couple of close friends who I feel know my work well. I take into account their responses and suggestions and discuss the work with them, but in the end I make the final decision because I have to be happy with what I am showing.

I made the decision not to have my debut show include or be comprised of self-portraits, as I didn't feel that would be as accessible as my Alternate Worlds series. So I found it a little bizarre when people who know my work seemed surprised and almost disappointed that the exhibition wasn't self-portraiture, even though I'd been quite clear on the work to be included.

You learn pretty quickly that deciding what to show has very little to do with what you think will sell. I know what I love and would buy if I were part of the audience, but I also know that my tastes and preferences are not always those of my audience and that you can't read the mind of potential collectors. So in the end I think it comes down to showing the work that you feel is strongest and conveys best the themes and ideas that you are trying to express.

13. Has living in Australia helped influence your work for the better (or even worse?)
I would be lying if I said living in Australia has had no influence on my work, though I would find it difficult to narrow down the specific influence on the images I produce. My experience of growing up in Australia is inseparable with travel, moving houses, the cities, the countryside, the people and my family; and my work has also been influenced by people, places and things outside of Australia, both experienced firsthand and through the media and internet. I don't know that I see what anyone would consider a specifically Australian aesthetic in my work.

Being an artist in Australia has advantages and disadvantages. In some respects being so far away from cultural centres like London and New York is often seen as a disadvantage, but I see that as less of a stumbling block these days as the internet bridges some of the issues with distance these days: I can as easily contact a gallery or other artists overseas as those on my doorstep; anyone in the world can view my photography on my website; I can just as easily have my work published online or in print in the UK or the US as have it published in Melbourne.

I have lived in Melbourne more than half my life, albeit in three separate periods so far, and I continue to come back because, amongst other things, there is a strong art community across various practises and levels. I don't know that I could say that I would not have had the same or similar artistic opportunities elsewhere, but I don't think I could guarantee that by living in another country I would have had more opportunities or advantages.

I feel my experiences and day-to-day life influence my work, so obviously living one place or another will always have an impact - the cost of living in Australia does not tend to be as high as places like London, for example, so I might be able to live more comfortably here on less income - but I no longer have the belief that I might have had when I was younger that I could do more, create more, if only... I think if you really want to create and you really want to get somewhere with your art, then you make your location and the opportunities you have work for you, rather than seeing them as an obstacle or not as worthy opportunities.

Having said that, I lived in the UK for two and a half years and on a personal level I would love to return there at least for a time, and I would love to live and create in other places around the world; but I think that has more to do with my love for travel and new places and meeting people than being exclusively about art.

14. Who or what else do you look towards for inspiration? Who has influenced your work?
I find inspiration in what I guess are many of the 'standards': film, music, other artists, dreams and books; but inspiration might come from something as basic as the light through a window, an item of clothing, a prop, or a word. Some mainstays in my influences are David Lynch, Cindy Sherman and Bill Henson; to list all the artists and films that inspire me would be a lengthy task, as every day I discover more artists, both known and emerging, who amaze me with their work and inspire me to do more. As part of my 365days series I've created homage's to some of my influences, for example: Blue Velvet, Peeping Tom, Hitchcock, Get Smart, Disderi's carte de visites and The Dirty Three.

15. What other hobbies do you have?
In all honesty, photography quite consumes my time and attention. I enjoy reading and watching films, but they tend to take a back seat, and even when I do try to lose myself in the enjoyment of a book or a film I find my mind constantly distracted with the photographic ideas they inspire.

I used to play piano, clarinet and saxophone, but my studies of each dropped off around the time I fell in love with photography. Unfortunately I have no natural talent for drawing or painting, though I do write a bit here and there when inspired.

16. What are three things a beginner in photography should keep in mind?
1. Learn the rules so you can break them.

2. You can learn a lot by looking at the work of photographers you admire - try to learn their lighting, the way they get the mood they do, what works about their composition. Then shoot to your heart's content and learn from every shot you take.

3. I read a quote recently attributed to Ansel Adams: "The single most important component of a camera is the twelve inches behind it.' Don't fall into the trap of thinking that you can't make art because you don't have the right equipment. You create the images, the camera is just a tool used to record them.

17. Any future plans to strive for in your creations?
I would love to exhibit a selection of my 365days images in a gallery, but that will mostly depend on finances at this stage, so that is not a definite plan.

I'm looking to branch into self-publishing and the magazine world during 2008.

I also have a couple of books that I've been wanting to create images inspired by for a number of years now. I'm hoping that in 2008 I will be able to move forward with those ideas.

I tend to have a number of definite plans, intentions or ideas at any one time, but let the rest fall into place around me and enjoy the ride. Coming into the new year, my resolution for 2008 remains the same as it was for the past two years: make this year count.

18. And lastly, the token interview question for us: How did you come across Phirebrush and what keeps you coming back?
A Canadian photographer I came across in communities on LiveJournal, Rachel Cartwright, had posted an entry about having work included in Phirebrush. I always make it a habit to find out where artists I admire are submitting their work as a way of finding more outlets for my own work, so of course I came over to check it out. I was impressed by the standard and variety of the work included in each issue and the links resource maintained on the home page.

I generally submit five photographs each month, as along with other online magazines I submit to, it's a great outlet for exposure of my work and provides a challenge to continue producing a minimum of five strong images per month. There's also the added buzz that comes from finding one of your images in the featured section.

Sites like Phirebrush have been instrumental in encouraging me to continue with my photography by providing the opportunity to show my work and to discover other artists around the world. Sometimes I have a sense of having 'wasted' the years between finishing college and 2005 in regard to my photography, and feel that if I'd maintained a blog and had outlets like Phirebrush to contribute to when I finished college I would never have stepped back from my photography the way I did. Utilizing these outlets now is a way for me to make up for lost time.