Pentaxian Profile: Camus Wyatt

An accomplished young photographer from New Zealand

By PF Staff in Pentaxian Profiles on Jun 15, 2011

Welcome to our fifth Pentaxian profile.  This time we are hearing from Camus Wyatt, an accomplished young photographer from New Zealand!

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The past year has been a big year for me in photography. After picking up a camera three years earlier, I’ve recently had my first solo exhibition, on the back of some of the top youth awards and grants for photographers available down here in little New Zealand.

Around four years ago, studying history and politics and not long out of high school, I found myself increasingly interested in the photojournalism images accompanying the studies of events ranging from the Vietnam War, to the 1930’s Depression, the Spanish Civil War, to 1950’s France. This lead to what has, in hindsight, been a non-stop interest and learning experience in photography.

Coming from something of a journalism and photography family, my interest in photojournalism has firmly stayed, with the addition of street photography, a documentary-type genre closely linked to photojournalism in many ways. I began, like many shooters, to take images of things which interested me around where I lived. After research, I picked up a Pentax K10D kit as my first camera gear, which began my use of Pentax.

A shot with the first kit lens picked me up a national under-25 award, and a portfolio with the same little lens gained me a substantial grant for emerging New Zealand photographers. Recently I’ve spoken several times on street photography, and am currently organising further exhibitions. As well as experience gained in motorsport and journalism shooting, as well as some commercial and wedding work, I have continued to shoot anything of interest, which usually means being out of the street for hours on end, camera in hand, looking for some kind of ‘decisive moment’.


I shoot with a Pentax K-7, which I appreciate for the compact build, quiet shutter and robustness, as well as the excellent Pentax leather hand strap. At the moment I’m using the Sigma 30mm f/1.4, and looking for a good Pentax 21mm limited ‘pancake’, which I also used at one time. I think Pentax produces easily the best DSLR set up for street-style shooting, with physically small optics choices of quality complimenting the camera bodies.

I now own far too many of the books of photos that got me into photography, especially loving the work of Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, James Nachtwey, Ernst Haas, Robert Doisneau, Sebastiao Salgado and Andreas Feininger.

You can see a lot more of my work here: http://www.camuswyatt.com/
And a Facebook page I update with interesting bits and pieces as well as my own work. See also my forum profile.

I might go take some photos now.