Ben Apfelbaum

RED BULL CLIFF DIVING @ FARM COVE : SOME SPECTACULAR PHOTOGRAPHY

 

Gary Hunt (France) Male Champion
Rhiannan Iffland (Australia) Female Champion

The idea for a cliff diving competition may have come from Acapulco, Mexico where for countless decades divers leap from a very high cliff after first praying to the Virgin Mary.Perhaps as a result, no diver has been killed at Acapulco.

Rather than a cliff top, the contemporary divers leap from purpose built towers approximately twenty six to twenty eight metres above the water line. 

A crowd of approximately eighteen thousand people watched the final leg of the Red Bull Cliff diving championships at Farm Cove.  The final events took place on Saturday 22nd October.

The spectacular backdrop of the city skyline, Sydney Opera House and Sydney Harbour Bridge.

The women’s championship had been decided in the previous leg of the tour in Italy. 

The winner was by Australian Rhiannan Iffland. Hailing from Newcastle, she nonetheless felt pressure to perform well in front of a home crowd. She has won over the years the championship six times. 

The men’s title was decided at Farm Cove with Gary Hunt from France having to complete a dive worth ten out of ten points in order to secure the title. The 38 year old has won the championship ten times.

Nonetheless there were up and coming young divers who were snapping at the veterans’ heels. 

Article and photographs by Ben Apfelbaum

 

Published by Ben Apfelbaum

My photography began when my father handed me the proverbial brownie box camera as a child. As cameras developed I went through Fujica and Olympus range finders graduating to my first single lens reflex camera, the Minolta SRT101, the latter being the greatest facilitator to my growth as a photographer. Digital photography has only added to this. I was a regular contributor to Camera Craft magazine (Australian Camera ) for over three years. During Australia’s Bicentennial year (1988) I made it a personal project to document the celebrations. This culminated in the creation of a book of my photos which was published in 1989. The book was called CELEBRATING AUSTRALIA and came with an accompanying calendar. My works have appeared in a number of publications including the coffee book entitled MY AUSTRALIA (1989), publisher Robertsbridge Severn. This book had a preface by the then Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke. I was a co-photographer on a book entitled SYDNEY- DISCOVER THE CITY with text written by Robert Treborlang. Major Mitchell Press was the publisher. Also for two years I was the photographer for calendars celebrating Sydney’s multicultural communities. The two calendars were entitled MULTICULTURAL SYDNEY. My work appeared in a group exhibition held at Sydney’s Town Hall pertaining to the diversity of life in South America to raise money for orphanages there. I have over one hundred photos stored in the New South Wales State Library archive. I had a solo exhibition held in 2007 entitled Ben’s Lens at the Sydney Jewish Museum which celebrated the vibrancy of the Sydney Jewish community. Some of these photos are on the Museum’s permanent display. I have exhibited internationally firstly at the Spruill Gallery in Atlanta Georgia, United States, and in an exhibition entitled Kosher and Co at the Jewish Museum in Berlin. Currently I am a regular contributor to J-Wire and this esteemed publication. To celebrate the opening of a permanent Photography Gallery, the State Library of New South Wales selected 400 shots from its archive of over 2,000,000 images to display in the new gallery. An image of mine was plucked out of the multi million photo archive to be part of the inaugural exhibition.