Evocative of a gaslight style

There are some very moving moments in the first exhibition of photographs at Magnet Gallery as we come back from the summer break.

David Wayman is the gallery’s best-selling photographer and he’s joined this time by his son Tom.

Tom has a similar aesthetic but a more dramatic feel for the night sky.

He has a lot of fun with a full night exposure, so the stars form a pinkish spiral over a modest little country cottage.

“When you have an exposure that long you get a lot of ambient light,” curator Michael Silver said.

Tom’s prints are on matt archival paper, accentuating the subtleties of his colour palette in the print.

David’s compositions can also be moody abstractions, but he is at his best with the subjects he loves.

His dog features in two, one trudging across the water after an illness and the other, seemingly drinking out of a cloudy sky.

He’s brilliant at capturing silhouettes against the sky but in this the water acts as a mediating presence.

“This is his third exhibition here,” Silver said. “He’s always out hunting, always looking. He drives somewhere and goes to the bush. He goes all over the place.”

Photographers don’t need to put impressions into words. It’s more about the timing and the persistence.

There are fishermen and cyclists captured in picturesque locations that could be called romantic.

A black and white print of a fisherman seen heading out onto the pier from the vantage point of a Victorian gazebo is evocative of a gaslight style.

Caught in Light, David and Tom Wayman, Magnet Gallery, until February 25. •