Northampton photography exhibition brings ocean and outback together

The usual botanical displays at Northampton’s Drywell Plants were set aside on Friday evening as local photographer Flynn Drage opened his debut exhibition — Oz from Above.

A surveyor by day, Drage picked up the art almost by accident.

“At work we do a lot of 3D mapping. We’ll use the drones to fly over, and we might take a hundred or so pictures. Sometimes you look at a couple of them and think ‘they look pretty decent’, and they were taken by accident,” he said.

His imagery showcases the environments he grew up around in Northampton. The ocean, and the outback.

“Every school holiday we were out at the beach... Horrocks, Lucky Bay, I just loved it.”

“With work I travel all over the Mid West - Gascoyne, so I get to cover a lot of good country. I’ll often pull over on a smoko break and just get the camera out.”

The one-night exhibition saw about 170 people through the door of the small plant shop, a number which Drage said confirmed the encouraging words of his mother, and his wife Jasmeet.

“I’m a real go-with-the-flow kind of guy, but my wife and my mother are very arty, and they were really encouraging,” he said.

While Drage has access to high-end professional gear through his job, he said the amateur level Mavic 2 Pro drone he uses is more than capable of taking the stunning aerial shots on display.

“The only way you could improve from that is to jump in a chopper and start taking pictures with a DSLR, which I have started doing.”

Since starting his business Ocean2Outback three years ago, Drage has photographed locations throughout the Mid West and beyond, from remote stations, to the azure beaches of the Cocos Islands.