From Peter Curtis ACS, Tasmanian branch Vice-President (and immediate Tasmanian past president)
The ACS in Tasmania lost another of our very early members last week when Rick Reynolds passed away after a long illness. Rick first joined the Society here in 1972 and was our Branch President for a few years in the 80s.
Those of us who knew Rick as a local cinematographer in Tasmania mostly recall that he was a film cinematographer at TVT6, shooting 16mm film for News, Current Affairs and documentary programs.
However, Rick’s interest in photography began way back in 1948 when his mother gave him a Kodak Box Brownie on his tenth birthday. Within a year, he’d set up a darkroom in the family bathroom and was doing his own developing and printing.
Rick joined the Royal Australian Navy in 1959 as a photographer at the Naval Air Station in Nowra, NSW. This began a nine-year experience as a Naval Photographer, which included war service in Malaya and Borneo. He learned all aspects of photography, including 35mm Cameflex Motion picture cameras and the good old 16mm Bell and Howell. He got to use periscope cameras in submarines and aerial gunnery cameras, which he fitted in fighter aircraft. Then, when fully trained, he focused his work in the navy public relations area, learning to shoot for news coverage, as TV had been introduced to Australia in 1956.
In 2011, Rick wrote, “There were also moments of tragedy and times when you were in the wrong place at the wrong time. On the sixth of February 1964, I joined the ship’s company of HMAS Voyager at Garden Island dockyard, Sydney. I had a gunnery assignment using 35mm Cameflex motion picture cameras. A few days later, off the coast near Jervis Bay, at about 10 pm on the night of 10th February, the ship got in the way of the aircraft carrier HMAS Melbourne and was cut in two by the impact. I was very lucky to survive the collision, as 82 sailors were killed that night. I wasn’t thinking pictures at the time, merely trying to save my own neck, but as things settled down and everyone was helped that could be helped, I kept seeing these amazing scenes, but my cameras were on the half of the ship that sunk in the first few minutes.”
After leaving the Navy, Rick worked in country television and Sydney for the ABC and Channel Seven as a news cinematographer prior to coming to Tasmania in the early 70s and was working as a cinematographer at the Government Film Department. Following the closure, Rick left the state, working freelance for a number of years, before coming back to Tasmania in the late 70s to work in commercial television. After that, he moved on to other things, starting an Antiques business that survived for over twenty years in Salamanca Place.
Rick was a frequent attendee at ACS Tas events until just a few years ago, when his health started to fade. He was always a positive and friendly attendee, truly interested in new technology and advancements in our craft. Rick is possibly the last of the pioneering group of cinematographers who worked in Tasmania when the ACS was in its infancy here.
He will be missed by those of us who knew him.