Aviatrix Miss Freda Deaton in her biplane, NSW, c. 1930.

A young girl holds an exceptionally large apple, c. 1930.

A technician works on the Southern Cross in NSW, c. 1931.

Adela Pankhurst Walsh delivering a speech in Sydney, 1931.

Sydney Morning Herald photographer George Bell’s 1910 photo of a man on a horse.

A child plays with the medals of a returned soldier at an Anzac Day service, Petersham, NSW, 1933.

Jean Thompson sits in her Type 37A Bugatti between races, 1930.

Herbert Henry Fishwick’s 1933 photo of lifesavers paying out rescue ropes during a surf carnival at Bondi Beach.

One of the greatest pleasures of being a newspaper journalist is to work alongside press photographers – quick-minded and empathetic, says arts editor HELEN MUSA.

Few press photographers in this country are as famous as Mike Bowers, host of the Talking Pictures segment on ABC TV’s Insiders, a veteran of 13 federal election campaigns and world conflicts, and the author in 2008 of Century of Pictures: 100 Years of Herald Photography.

Now Bowers is curating an exhibition of Fairfax Photo Archive images at the National Library of Australia for which he has been trawling through many thousands of images of glass-plate negatives now digitised by the library, so there’s plenty to talk about when we sit down to discuss his approach.

Based on the collection of glass plates, which resided in a Fairfax warehouse in Alexandria in Sydney when he researched his earlier book, the exhibition effectively traces the birth of Australian picture journalism.

To Bowers, the almost sensual quality of the glass-plate negatives was a source of pleasure – the imperfections are all still there and will be on display in the coming exhibition, along with the China-pencil markings on the photographs.

Certainly not a photography snob, Bowers is quick to praise the amateur snaps by Aussie servicemen in both world wars and also notes the influence of art photographers such as Harold Cazneaux, who pretty well set the gold standard in composition.

He totally rejects the idea that good news photography is a matter of luck.

“You’ve got to be there with your camera, with tight settings… to me that’s not luck, that involves training skills – you have to have the instinct and the drive to find the pictures and to make them your own,” he says.

This exhibition is based purely on the glass-negative era. His research has shown that most photographers went through about 12 glass plates in a day, meaning that with an average of three to four jobs, they’d be taking just three or four frames, unthinkable to a present day photographer snapping away on a digital device.

“You had to be very judicious,” Bowers says.

He’s been looking back at the history of photography and, given that the Fairfax collection starts in 1890 when half-tone reproductions became possible, it was the weekly Sydney Mail that ran the best pictures, sourcing their pioneer photographers from studios used to doing portraits.

George Bell, who worked first at the Mail and then at the SMH, is usually considered to be at the forefront, but also prominent in the show is Englishman Herbert Henry Fishwick, another SMH recruit.

The early snappers may have come from studios where the settings were static, but they were quick learners and by the 1920s and 1930s, Bowers tells me, their pics became more like photos today, especially to cover big news stories, as when US president Teddy Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet arrived in 1908 and when the Sydney Harbour Bridge was being built.

Unsurprisingly, Bowers has lots of yarns to tell about photographers and journalists we know and tells me that his self-description as “photographer at large” came after he saw David Marr describe himself as writer at large.

Also, we agree, if a journo really wants to insult a news photographer they’ll call him or her “my photographer”.

We pause to reflect on some of the crises that Bowers has covered in his career – in Kosovo, Cambodia, Bougainville, the Middle East and Aceh after the tsunami, where he got one of his own lucky photos when he snapped a soldier in the hills with a bird on his shoulder.

“War coverage is different from sitting in the living room,” he says. “All photographers have this experience of the logistics, how to eat, where to sleep, how to get water.”

Back at the library, he was offered 18,000 images, got them down to 200 and then, after suggestions from staff including NLA curator Guy Hansen, decided on around 150 photographs that illustrate moments in Australian history from the 1890s until the late 1940s.

“I got so used to looking at the screen, but it’s different when they’re printed out as a tactile, physical object – their power is released,” he says. “I’ve chosen a myriad of images to get cadence, a nice rhythm.”

They’re largely from Sydney and NSW and he shows me a few of his favourites, George Bell’s 1910 image of a man on a horse, industrial pictures, the Harbour Bridge paintings, the long-lost pier at Coogee Beach and an image of travelling salesmen, a profession that’s almost disappeared.

“I hope there’s something in it that shows what a good photo is meant to do,” Bowers says.

Fit to Print: Defining Moments from the Fairfax Photo Archive, National Library, February 27-July 20. Free.