WORKING THE ANGLES MARK ONORATI
“I’m not there to take lots of photos, I’m there to take one,”the enigmatic Mark Onorati tells me from his car while driving in outer Sydney, and he’s right. Some of his pitch-perfect images have been gestating for years, others executed with surgeons’ precision. A lot of his inspiration and ideas come from the back of a truck, literally.
“Sitting in traffic is my inspiration. There’s no view except this boxy back-end view of a truck, so my mind starts to tick over about a particular angle or a particular different type of photo.”
Some locations he was chasing for many years.
“The gods have to be favourable to me. Particularly the light, tide and sand, and then a wave that’s visually stimulating and a rider that can perform what needs to be performed in that situation. These are the variables that it takes to bring the photo together without it being pure luck.”
There was a perfect day at Palm Beach and he had the perfect rider too, but he wouldn’t go out there for Mark. The Palm Beach photo would – or could – have happened four years earlier. “I knew what I wanted, and it’s a lovely dreamy background, tight and close.”
Mark says he is always looked for angles and he is always wondering why other people don’t see things that way. “Isn’t it just about being self-aware? That’s what I’m seeing and that’s what I will capture… they’re little challenges that I set myself to see what’s achievable.”
Talking of seeing, Mark calls himself “a blind photographer” and the diopter setting on his viewfinder is maxed out on one side. He’s good with long distance, but anything close is actually blurry. How did the seemingly highly-trained artistic
