Roving-Eye Gallery update and newsletter #14 for January-February 2022

 

Hello to everyone and thank you to the new subscribers.. welcome aboard!

 

With the latest update(s) just uploaded head to What's New! | Roving-Eye.com and you can scroll back month by month for an easy catch up for previous months too!

 

It’s certainly been a very wet start to 2022 for much of East Coast Australia and I hope wherever you are you have not been affected by it!

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Certainly this time last year Port Macquarie had major flooding which we have been spared a repeat so far this year but other areas north of here have not fared well unfortunately.

 

Most of January here in Port Macquarie was grey and wet and I only managed 8 photos for the whole month so it certainly wasn’t worth a newsletter so I’ve grouped January and February in together.

 

February however was a much better count with a very healthy 41 images added to the portfolio with a big boost coming from many animal photos which are sometimes much easier to come by than iconic land or seascapes!

 

We had a wild and free Koala hang around for many days in a nearby tree and I got many clear shots in so many different sleeping positions, 2 leaping dolphins in the river and a rare visit by an Australian Fur Seal which sure added to the wildlife variety for the month!

 

All the animal photos came out super sharp and the new lens discussed last newsletter is the reason for that and the upgrade came just in time to reap a harvest.

 

Also coming out super clear was a pair of rising full moon shots, which I have done before in the same style but distinctly softer with the older lens and not really the quality I want to sell so thank goodness that has been banished to the past now.

 

A single “fine art” image was managed which is now in the queue to be framed and that portfolio is slowly building now and so I am getting active in finding a new and appropriate channel to sell these higher priced items.

 

I aim to use the medium format Fuji camera heavily this year in pursuing the highest possible image quality and for when it’s a carefully considered scene with special lighting to create a “fine art” image.. a much slower process with less images produced than the typically fast multiple shots that wildlife subjects need and the camera hardware for these 2 extremes couldn’t be more different too!

 

Speaking of camera hardware there have been a lot of small cameras added to the stable of the typical video “action” and “vlogging” types. I don’t expect these to be adding to the serious print portfolio for direct sales as such but I expect them to very much fill a role in “story telling” which is what still photography is implicitly about, even if you may not particularly think of when you think “landscape” or “seascape”.

 

When you view an image you are viewing the “story” that the photographer has already chosen for you.. the composition, the subject focus, the technical execution.. have all been decided by the photographer to tell a story in a single still image.

 

The other, and more typical story telling is of course the video format.

 

This isn’t something I’ve done much of in the past except via the drone videos but I am taking deliberate steps, by way of these small camera purchases, to embed video story telling as part of the whole photographic process but also to give a wider picture of the environment and sometimes the funny pitfalls and travails of a working photographer in the wild too!

 

Please bear with me as I learn how to pull this off in a remotely interesting way but I hope by the end of the year there has been enough time and expedition locations to put that all together in a watchable way so you can have some interesting, and maybe funny, videos to watch as well as browse the image galleries!

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Take care and thank you for reading this far and sharing the journey!