Roving-Eye Gallery update and newsletter #28 for October-December 2023

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

 

Welcome to 2024!

 

With the latest update just uploaded head to https://www.roving-eye.com/whatsnew-2023-12 and you can scroll back month by month for an easy catch up for previous months too!

 

It’s been a few months since the last newsletter so my apologies for that!

 

Normally I like to get it out as near as possible after a month ends to coincide with the closing month gallery update but things conspired to push me further back each time!

 

In the middle was a trip to New Zealand which ended at the end of the month and took some weeks to get all the images finalised and then a house move just before Christmas pushed things back again.. so here we are at last!

 

Normally I like to concentrate on Australian content and the New Zealand trip was a rest trip away as opposed to a full on photo expedition like I would normally do.. but even on a “rest” trip I still managed to capture 6,000 image files which boiled down to 300 selected and completed images.

 

I lined the trip up to coincide with the full moon, hoping for some “exotic” shots with snow and mountains, and I got excellent conditions then and on other days so how could I pass up such opportunities of this spectacular landscape!

 

While 6,000 images may sound a lot this was going at half pace at best, given it was not a dedicated photo trip. Also a single panorama you see in the gallery can easily have dozens of individual images go to make up the final result.

 

This comes from the panoramic “stitching” process itself, where you would shoot a scene with a systematic “grid” pattern of multiple overlapping images and then use software to seamlessly merge them into a single high resolution result. I love this process since it matters less and less what the raw sensor resolution actually is since you can synthetically construct arbitrarily high resolution results from it.

 

When you then also shoot the same scene at different focal lengths to give you options at the edit stage you easily run into dozens of images and more to get a single final result you see in the gallery.. so you can see why 6,000 image files is an easy number to get to even at half the normal pace!

 

I also used the need for a dedicated New Zealand gallery page as an opportunity to bring all the recent photo expeditions into a single master page so it’s easy to branch off from there to any area of interest..

 

There are 8 significant trips I’ve done in the last 18 months all branching off into many different galleries which has taken some time to organise.. I hope you have the time and interest to take a look at some of it!

 

If so just head to https://www.roving-eye.com/tripindex

 

For the more normal monthly updates this newsletter covers I have very much continued with the policy of generating black and white versions of selected images since they nearly always add an entirely new way of looking at things, sometimes showing details that a colour version just doesn’t show much of at all!

 

What I didn’t expect was the black and white processing to show hidden faults in some colour images! I was suitably horrified to discover that. It looks as though I will have to now include a time consuming black and white processing step for EVERY final gallery image now, regardless of whether I keep it or not, to keep the quality levels up high where I want them to be!

 

The faults I am talking about are spots in the sky, and even after seeing it so clearly (depending on the style of black and white processing being applied) I can look back at the colour original alongside and even knowing there is a spot there being unable, or barely able to see such a spot.. this is why their existence has eluded me till just recently.. but no longer!

 

The spots are just normal outcomes from shooting in the outdoors, dust, fine spray etc are all things that settle on optic surfaces such as lens or filters, and when you change lenses the camera sensor itself!

 

The camera sensor in particular requires very careful cleaning with specialist items and should be done from time to time and the lenses and filters very regularly.

 

Given the depositing of fine particles is a completely dynamic part of the shooting environment and hard or impossible to avoid at least the photo editing process and sophisticated tools can eliminate them in a seamless, astonishing and clever way.. albeit a bit time consuming but essential step!

 

As well as the black and white now being a regular inclusion I am also continuing with the policy of as much wildlife as I can opportunistically muster as you never know when you might need a good collection of images of the same animal!

 

A recent client request for a montage of Tawny Frogmouths is a case in point.

 

Assembling montages is fiddly and typically requires a good selection of images so you can find a shape that best fits the next hole to fill in the assembly process.. so having a large collection of images is important to be able to deliver a quality result.

 

So dozens more kangaroo and other shots are going to be a thing then.. I won’t ever say “no” to capture even more images no matter how many I may already have.. you just never know when you may need that one “key” shot at some point in the future!

 

I hope you got something from the discussions today and we are now kicking off into 2024 and while I have no major expeditions planned thus far I hope that changes so I can keep the mission going and cover holes in my map of Australia!

 

Don’t forget to drop into my very active YouTube channel.. the 8 expedition galleries mentioned earlier each have a dedicated music video version there.. very soothing to put on the big screen and relax to!

 

Just head to https://www.youtube.com/@AlexMcNaught/videos

 

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