Sunset, Merewether Ocean Baths, Australia

Written By Paul Foley
Merewether Beach, Newcastle, Australia (Click image to buy)

Sunset Storm Clouds #0165 — Merewether Ocean Baths

As I headed down to the beach, I had intended to capture some black and white storm cloud pictures. I had set up my Linhof 6x17cm camera and loaded it with Agfa Scala film. However, the clouds behind me parted, allowing the last rays of the setting sun to burst through, painting the clouds with spectacular colour.

Frantically, I pulled the unexposed film from the camera and re-loaded it with Fuji Velvia. I hate wasting film, but when the transparencies came back a week later, I didn’t mind this time.

Paul Foley

I am an Australian fine-art photographer based in Newcastle, New South Wales, and have been making photographs for more than fifty years, including 35 years as a professional commercial photographer.

I think of much of my personal work simply as finding pictures—looking for relationships between light and shadow, lines and shapes, landscape and humanity. My photographs range across landscape, the sea, abstraction and the human form, with recurring interests in time, place and memory.

I remain a generalist photographer. Some ideas develop into collections that I return to over many years; others appear unexpectedly and result in a single photograph.

My work has been recognised in Australian and international photography awards and exhibited in Australia and overseas. Including as a finalist in the Galah Regional Photography Prize (2025) and National Photographic Portrait Prize (2011), selected to hang in several 'Mosman 2088' exhibitions and included in group exhibitions in Glasgow, Tokyo, Newcastle and China. I have also had individual and collaborative exhibitions in Sydney and Newcastle.

I live in Newcastle, Australia.

https://www.paulfoley.com.au
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