Autumn Retroactive Digital Cover | Vol.0

The Beginnings of Little Sphere

Take a look at our Autumn Retroactive Digital Cover, and get inspired...We are opening submissions for our Winter Retroactive Digitial Cover!

When I saw this photo on Lloyd Meadow's Instagram in a lovely little Autumn film series, I knew right away I wanted to ask if we could use it for the vision for our Autumn Digital Cover.

Now, he joked that this was a class example of nepotism, and I had to laugh. Little Sphere is the lovechild of me (Manue René, Editor) and Bronte Foster (Creative Director, as well as Lloyd's partner) so calling himself a nepo baby does make you wonder how exactly he fits in the equation... but alas, I understood what he meant.

Cries against nepotism or favouritism of any kind are valid, but I think in this case I was happy to lean into it as a minor injustice—which, actually, I think I can justify. My friends are part of what has always made me feel so at home in Castlemaine, and it makes sense our first cover was shot by a dear friend. I couldn't have got this baby going without the support and inspiration from my friends.

And this photo spoke perfectly to the feeling Little Sphere as a concept gives me, and what I hope translates. It's warm, it's familiar, it's easy to recognise even though there is something new about it as well.

The autumn leaves are the reminder that we are in flux, going through changes as we hope to keep evolving this space and what it means—going beyond our initial ideas and forward to something that feels like a group creation.

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Little Sphere Vol. 0

Image Credit: Lloyd Meadows

Title: Wheeler Street - Autumn - Lomocolor 800

Developed: Stab In The Dark Lab

I just texted Lloyd for an artist's comment, and he said: It was such a beautiful time of year, and it was a common reoccurrence to go out for evening strolls, when the light was absolutely sublime. I had taken pretty much the same shot sans car a moment before I saw it travelling down the road. I was, however, having a shutter issue with my camera where sometimes it just wasn’t going off, so I lined up the shot again and just prayed that it would actually fire when the car came into frame.

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So what is Little Sphere?

This is what everyone has been asking us, which makes sense, coz we just sort of popped up and started sharing local events, gigs, pictures, putting posters up around town, teasing something coming soon...

Well. This is what happened.

I was driving to Tortoise Espresso one day—as I am want to do—and realised there was nowhere locally I felt like I could send my work. I had finished a shoot with Bronte where we were showing Crum's (a local knitter's) new range, and I was submitting the work to Melbourne-based magazines. And I thought, wouldn't it be great if we had a magazine, out here?

Because I would love to see what everyone else is doing, sit down at the cafe and flip through a magazine of our local makers, read interviews with local legends, look at photos by local photographers, get a good recipe for the weekend from someone that shops at the same markets as me, hear what other people think are the best local spots in nature.

So that day I said to Bronte (who was working at the Turtle Cafe when I arrived) that we should start a magazine. The picture you may have have already seen on our socials is Bronte's original mock-up that they did after we came up with the name that night at our Ariel Class (shout out Castlemaine Circus)...

I just love the tagline You Are Here. It's exactly what we want to do, be a little marker of what is happening here, what you have been doing, the ways in which we exist in this little sphere. I imagine that it will be a magazine for us, but also something you can proudly show any of your out-of-town visitors. Something that would be great at a cafe, that might one day replace a morning scroll and be a nicer way to flip through inspiration and stories.

Maybe even one day, it will sit in magnation in the city, and people will pick it up and get a glimpse into our world...

We Are Digital for Now with Hardcopy Aspirations and Dreams...

So whilst the Little Sphere origin story may be imbued with tales of nepotism, I hope that it ripples out and you feel like this is something you own as well. I have loved discussing this idea with my friends, hearing what they think and what would add to the magazine. But it's important now to hand it over to you.

So, to start, submissions are open for the Winter Retroactive Digital Cover. It could be a portrait, a drawing, painting, a picture of a sculpture, something weird, something cool, something wintery... let your imagination run wild.

Send your submissions to submit@littlesphere.online and just say somewhere in the subject that it's for the Winter Cover.

And in the Meantime...

We will have a Newsletter format as we work towards a delicious print edition. That was also the thinking behind the website: littlesphere.online implies the possibility of a littlesphere....print! Or what's the opposite of online? Offline? IRL? You tell us. Let's keep the convo going... oh and yes, the whole point of this little paragraph was to invite you to subscribe to the newsletter. The sign up is in the footer. See it? Right down there? Go on, you know you wanna.

All the love from our Little Sphere,

Manue xx