02/04/2023
AN EXTENDED INTERVIEW WITH PETER HAYNES
of Peter Haynes Perspectives
The quiet photographer from South Windsor, who - just quietly - won the biggest three-day event in the southern hemisphere.
When local photographer Peter Haynes started adding a discreet link in the captions of his photos suggesting that supporters might like to “buy a coffee” - that is, donate the value of a coffee to a crowdfund to support his work – I thought to myself that I would rather enjoy buying him an actual coffee and a bit of breakfast. However, I had a secret agenda. I wanted to hear – and share - his story.
The moment you ask someone to share their story and have their portrait taken is always an exciting one. You never really can pick who the camera-shy ones are. Sometimes loud people are camera-shy, which is always weird. The other day in Richmond Park, an older woman chatted my ear off for an hour, and I felt sure she’d enjoy letting me take her portrait, but she just about disappeared into her cute little red hat when I asked her if I might take her photograph. Nevermind. You can’t win them all.
Conversely, Peter’s quiet, intelligent nature didn’t necessarily make it obvious to me whether he would consent to be interviewed and photographed. What happens when you ask a photographer to pose for a portrait? I suppose I was about to find out.
I should have known that he would be an easygoing, curious and kind person. Perhaps he was as curious about me as I was about him. Perhaps he just loves the idea of someone home-delivering some coffee. Perhaps he’s just humouring me because he's a really nice person.
For whatever reason, I’m welcomed warmly into his South Windsor home, and immediately upon entering the living room, a striking photograph catches my eye. However, it’s not one of Peter’s. It’s a photograph of Peter, astride a highly-educated horse in full Prix St George+ get-up, competing.
“Ah, and there you are,” I exclaim involuntarily, examining the photo at close range. This is a world I know well, too. I can just about hear the squeak of the leather and feel the gentle contact of the horse’s mouth on my fingers. Arguably, the best days of my life were spent at my riding instructor’s safe and loving home, on her horses. Those days ended far too abruptly. This means I’m excited to hear the story of this man’s eventing success. I am in for a real treat of vicarious enjoyment if I can get Peter Haynes talking. As it turns out, conversation begins to flow effortlessly, and we get on just fine. It even turns out that he is personally acquainted with the instructor who unknowingly saved my life in teenhood - Judy Fasher.
We're away. Warm baked goods, coffee and pleasantries are distributed between us, and the interview begins. Now that I’m seated on his couch and facing his office walls, two more walls graced with photos of Peter’s favourite eventing moments come into my view.
Long before we were suddenly referred to as “equestrians” by the great unhorsed, the sport of eventing was done by eventers. And what an eventer Peter Haynes has been in his lifetime.
Originally calling his page “In the Limelight”, Peter describes the first posts on the page as being his initial foray into sharing media of any sort. What you mightn’t know is that this pastime of Peter’s actually goes back over twenty years, and his more focused pursuit of photography and videography began because of a traumatic fall from a horse.
“It was in the early 2000s,” he explains. “In 2001, I broke my back and I couldn’t compete for six months or more. We had just bought a video camera not long before that. It came with crappy editing software, and I had nothing else better to do, so I read books about it. I’m not the sort of person who sits around and does nothing. I’ve always had an interest in technology since I was a little kid. In the seventies, for example, there wasn’t much by way of technology but I was one of the first kids with a digital watch. I saved up for it!
“I started playing around with video, and I’d never done anything like it before. I’d only ever videoed horses. I told Heath Ryan that I was doing it, and he said, ‘Oh, why don’t you do my stallion videos?’ So it went on from there. When he was at the National Championships in 2002, I was videoing him. He encouraged me to do some interviews too, and put them all together. The organiser of the CDI (Concours de Dressage International) saw them on YouTube and said, ‘Okay, if you’re going to do this, we need to get you on board!’”
For the next ten years, Peter was the resident videographer for the Sydney CDI event, posting daily highlights and interviews of the world’s finest competitors.
Peter retired from eventing in 2008, when he became a parent.
“I couldn’t be a good competitor and a parent, in my mind. I just couldn’t do both. It was the obvious choice, and I’d also been competing for decades at that point. I’d had enough. Most people don’t like hearing that, but you can love horses and still not ride them. I still coach quite heavily though.”
As with so many people whose work revolved around an in-person economy, his videography work was heavily impacted by COVID-19, forcing some evaluation and adjustment.
“It wasn’t til covid hit that I lost about half or two-thirds of my coaching clients,” Peter says.
Fortunately, drone technology has progressed quickly, making it accessible for all sorts of new ventures. Peter was quick to recognise this, and his fondness for learning and utilising new technology came to the fore.
“I had a drone, but you can’t fly a big drone in this area, and DJI had just come out with this thing called a ‘Mini 3 Pro’. It’s sub-250 grams, so you can fly it here at certain times,” says Peter.
“It’s heavily restricted because of the RAAF base. I thought to myself, ‘Maybe I can get some horse videos,’ still thinking I’d try to make money out of the horse industry. As much as I put myself out there, I still wasn’t getting enough work.”
This lack of sustainable income from videography involving horses might have been an unpleasant reality at the time, but it was the final push that saw Peter producing his signature images of well-loved Hawkesbury heritage buildings and landscapes… the sort of image that has pleased thousands of locals online for free each week. Today, he has over 3,700 followers on Facebook, and a growing list of private and corporate clients.
But Peter’s generous and humble with the story of his learning journey, saying that his ability took work and dedication to develop, and sometimes from unlikely (and very accessible) learning sources.
He says, “I checked out this guy called ‘QuickAss Tutorials’ on YouTube. He’s really funny. I like him because he’s really pragmatic. He said to go and shoot sunrises and sunsets, and include local historical buildings if you want to make money. And that’s the thing; I originally started this because I needed to make money. It’s not the normal story of a photographer, where people think you have a great love of art. I didn’t have a great love of photography. But I started to develop an appreciation for what makes a good photograph.”
I mention to Peter the happy Facebook comments from locals, for whom Peter’s photographs of Hawkesbury landmarks and landscapes strike an emotional chord.
“We only see the world through our own perspective,” responded Peter. “A reason why I used the word ‘perspectives’ instead of ‘photography’ in ‘Peter Haynes Perspectives’ was because I’m always trying to see the world through other peoples’ points of view (which is not the best way to live life a lot of the time). But I try to reply to every comment, and the only comments I don’t reply to are the ones where I don’t really know how to reply to them; if they’re negative. Even then, if you take the one that someone posted about a building ruining the history and heritage of the area, I mean, you’re probably not wrong! I actually thought the same thing; it’s a shame that the [Macquarie Street apartment] building is there, but it’s a good thing to juxtapose the historical and the modern. But I don’t know how to reply to negative comments like that. It’s not a criticism of me. I mean, what am I going to say? ‘Yeah that building sucks!’…?” Peter chuckles.
He's got a point. So often, the reaction of the online viewer is so immediate and so visceral, they will often shoot the messenger, when really, photography is just a reflection of us all. I prompt Peter to expand on the psychology of the community’s responses.
Peter lives in the real world about antisocial online behaviour. He says, “If I’m not more centred and aware, I might react badly. But at the end of the day, you can’t take it personally. That’s not a criticism of my photograph. Even if someone does criticise my photograph, that’s really just a subjective opinion. If I put a photograph up and someone says it’s a s**t photograph, that still just says a lot about them and doesn’t say a whole lot about the photograph. I’ve had to learn that.”
I ask Peter if he plans to keep toddling along, doing what he’s been doing.
“Well, that’s kind of what I’ve always done! People say I have to enter competitions, and things like that. I honestly don't know."
I send myself on a bum steer when I suggest to Peter that he comes across as someone who trusts his own instinct, and that this seems to generally work for him. I love his answer. I love it when I get someone wrong, because it’s often in these moments when they unapologetically and succinctly define themselves.
He says, “I’m very pragmatic and analytical. I’ve learned to trust me. It depends how you define ‘instinct’. I don’t have enough ‘instinct’ in photography yet, because I haven’t done enough of it to trust it; does that make sense? When you’ve been in a situation many times, you get these intuitive feelings. I can look at a horse in the paddock and know when it’s sick. I can look a horse going cross-country and say, ‘That horse is going to take off soon’… and it’s not always the case but you get a feeling. That’s intuition. I haven’t done this enough to get ‘intuitive’ or ‘instinctive’ about this. Maybe to be instinctive means you’re more born with it. The word being thrown around as well is ‘artist’, and, well, I don’t understand that, because I don’t see myself as an artist. I have artistic merits, obviously, but really, I just edit a picture til it looks nice.”
I ask Peter if I am more accurate to describe him as a self-directed learner.
“Oh, absolutely,” he says, “Everything I’ve done, I’ve learned myself.”
He also describes the line between not taking public opinion personally but also taking responsibility for what he shares online.
“I like to put things out that – to me – are a positive way of looking at things. It’s not that I’m an overly positive person, but I just don’t want to be overly negative, either. I’m becoming aware that an image has influence. And to some people, it’s more than others. I’m surprised how much impact this has had, but I also realise it’s only scratching the surface. I’m still relatively unknown, and it’s nice that a few people are enjoying my photography. Ultimately, what I’d love to do is make a living out of it. I can’t afford to do this as a hobby… it’s a bloody expensive hobby. I put a link up for people to donate, but it’s not a sustainable income.”
When I ask Peter what sort of work he’d really like to be doing in the future, he smiles and recalls a recent event in Windsor’s George Street pedestrian mall.
“I enjoyed Saturday night,” he says, gesturing to a few photos of the Elvis impersonator he snapped dancing with a delighted local child. “I’m not an unsociable person, but I’m not an extrovert. I’m more of an introvert. I’m not the person who goes out there and parties. I’d rather sit down and have a conversation than go to a party. But I enjoy seeing people enjoy themselves, and I really liked that community event. I also recently shot at Cooks Shed, and I enjoyed that too. I’d never done anything like that before and it was good. But I enjoy pretty much everything. And this is what I’m learning about myself.. I just enjoy creating. I enjoy coaching riding, because it’s creating a better experience for people with their horses. I tend to over-analyse things sometimes, but I’m learning to use my brain for good and not evil, instead of analysing all the bad things in life. I suppose that’s why I do tend to look at things a little more constructively as opposed to negatively. But yeah, I just enjoy creating. If that makes me an artist, I suppose that’s what an artist does.”
I ask Peter if he thinks photography is more a craft than an art.
He says, “Yeah, it’s more the craft of it. But then again, I’m not a crafty person. I was a real technician with my riding. I started as a boy from the bush, who inexplicably rides very classically. The reason I rode classically is because that’s what the world’s best did. So in my photography, I see good photographs, and I try to emulate what that goodness is. If someone takes a great photograph of a building, there’s no point in me then going and taking that same photograph, but I see what they do and try to emulate that in my own creative way."
He relates this ability to self-evaluate to riding and coaching, too.
He says, "With my coaching, I’m honest. If people want their egos flattered, I’m the worst coach in the world. You don’t get to international level with someone going, ‘oh that’s wonderful!’ all the time. I’m not rude, but if you actually want to learn to ride, I’m a good coach. And I think that’s again me emulating what I have learned into my own style. I think that’s how we do things. I don’t think anyone ever wakes up and says, ‘I’m going to create something completely original that’s never been thought of before!’ If you watch every movie, it’s the same movie. It’s the same script. It’s the same plot lines. There are maybe three or four plot lines in movies. There’s not much more than that. It’s just how it’s told. I guess that’s what – to me – creativity is. There are only so many ways you can take a photograph, but it’s the way you tell the story about what you’ve taken. Again, a lot of the time, I don’t know what I’ve done, but I know it looks good. When you think about it, a horse person going into photography makes sense. Well, to me, it makes sense. It’s a normal evolution. I don’t think I could be doing what I do with photography without all the other history. But I think that’s anyone, really. I don’t think anyone does anything without some sort of evolution into it.”
And for anyone thinking of trying something new that you’ve never tried before, I ask Peter what his little nugget of wisdom might be. He doesn’t disappoint.
He pauses thoughtfully, and says, “Learn what you can. If it’s a passion, obsess over it! Learn what you can, where you can. Keep your mind open. It’s generic advice, but it’s true. That’s what I’ve done. Even if I look at a bad photograph, I don’t just accept that that’s a bad photograph. I think about WHY it’s a bad photograph, and in that way, and if you put it into the right context, a bad photograph can be a good photograph. It’s the context, and the story you tell with it. Just keep learning. If you’re not willing to obsess over it, maybe it’s not for you. I don’t know if that’s good advice.”
Yeah nah, that's pretty solid advice, Peter.
🐎🐎🐎🐎🐎🐎🐎🐎🐎🐎🐎🐎🐎
You can view Peter's amazing photos at his page called 'Peter Haynes Perspectives' and also follow him on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/peterhaynesperspectives/
PHOTO 1: Peter competing at Adelaide 3DE (three day event), photo by Roger Fitzharding.
PHOTO 2: Peter at home in South Windsor, photo by Rozzie Chia Davis
To contact Peter about photography, videography and aerial vision services, go here: www.peterhaynes.biz
To get info about his services on coaching and other horse-related stuff, go here: www.peterhaynes.com.au
