Scott Bridle is a world class aerial photographer and chopper musterer and at one stage he lived about forty minutes from me at Mungindi. I truly love his photography, but I also shudder at the idea of him taking his wonderful pics and flying his chopper at the same time! It gives a whole new meaning to the word, simultaneous. Australian-born Scott Bridle’s early years were spent at Erambie, his family’s grazing property in the Glenmorgan District of south-west Queensland, where he first became absorbed with and developed a passion for the land.

I asked Scott what he loved most about his ‘day job’.

I think it is ( apart from the beautiful land we have to see ) that I can have a big influence on the way we handle our cattle ! I like to make it a stress free process for cattle !  I get a lot of pleasure seeing a mob of cattle walking happily along to the yards and seeing the people working them, happy too !! Not to mention the huge savings there are in having quiet cattle …

Here’s to that! Scott is always in the air and with the distances he covers and the lack of technology in some parts of the bush trying to get him to guest blog almost verges on the impossible so I was grateful he had the time to answer a question (via iphone).

 Scott was surrounded by art from an early age. His mother, an accomplished landscape painter, hosted many workshops with visiting artists from the Flying Arts School, and introduced art-making to her children as a natural part of life. Scott developed a love of nature and an affinity with the land early in his life. His first photographs were taken at the age of 10 using a Kodak Instamatic. Photography was then, and still is, his way of expressing his feelings about the bush and property life.

Scott has worked as a stockman since 1990 on vast landholdings in the Queensland and Northern Territory outback: in the Channel Country of far south-western Queensland and in the Gulf and on the Barkly Tableland in the Northern Territory. He became a helicopter pilot in 2002 and, since then, has mustered cattle over some of the most isolated country and roughest terrain in Australia.

Scott’s photos are fantastic. I actually used some of them in my book trailer for The Bark Cutters and next week another of his snaps (the cattle swimming above) shows up in the trailer for A Changing Land.

Scott exhibits regularly and he has a stand at Farmfest, Toowoomba, QLD from this monday on. For further details do check out his site  www.scottbridle.com . And a reminder that all of Scott’s photographs, including the ones shown here today are copyright protected and can not be reproduced without his express permission.