Well a very Happy New Year to you all. For me the start of any new year is a great time not only for a well deserved break, but a great time to reflect on the previous 12 months and have a bit of a mental review of how I saw my photography progress. The main aim of this is to work out my direction for 2019 and I’ve set myself a nice challenge as a result. I’m very happy with how my Astro photography has progressed. My weather photography is in a lull due to simply there being no storms so I’m concentrating on my landscape photography.

I’ve set myself a challenge to only shoot panoramic landscapes in the 3:1 format for 2019. Oh I’ll still get the odd normal 4:3 framed photo, but purely for Instagram. Any dedicated landscape photograph I capture in 2019 is going to be a panorama. Why? Well several reasons. I love to follow other photographers works and over the years I’ve come to admire two photographers in particular. Ken Duncan and Mark Grey, both incredibly successful Australian landscape photographers. Ken has been at it for Decades, Mark is relatively new to the scene, both having extraordinary success. It’s more than that however, it’s the resulting photographs they get. There is something about an amazingly well captured panorama that draws you in. The photograph when seen large envelopes your entire field of view, you are put into the scene with the photographer at the moment of capture.

This is what I want to explore and it actually means relearning a whole lot about photography. Composition is different by necessity as the frame is now very different and balance, viewpoint, elements all come into play in different ways.

So my journey into this field has begun and I find it very exciting. To kick off the new year with a bang I met up with my great friend Craig and we headed west to areas near Toowoomba in search of Sunflowers as word is out, they are blooming.

PLEASE NOTE : I won’t disclose the exact location of this farm at the farmers request. However, if you are looking for Sunflowers the area of Clifton on the Darling Downs between Warwick and Toowoomba has them in flower right now.

Thankfully Craig has scouted this location only the day before, also gaining us permission from the farmer to access the land fully, simply awesome work mate. 3:30am saw us standing in the back of the ute, Tripods at the ready, watching the light slowly appear. This first panorama was captured around 15 minutes before sunrise, the high cloud getting hit with the awesome colours of the approaching sunrise, that light also reflecting down onto the sunflowers. My composition here was to be very simple. Lines leading you through the fields.

Next it was time to really head into the fields. Another section of this farm has a great windmill surrounded by Sunflowers, well how could we resist photographing that? This field was full of bees making their merry way from flower to flower, and we did take the time out here to really just soak up the atmosphere, work our compositions and try different things.

Capturing panoramas is a bit of a challenge. The hardest part I find is framing. As you are stitching together multiple photographs to take one large one, you can’t see the final result in the field. Specialist panorama cameras exist but are far beyond my budget so this is my option in order to get the best quality and result. So far I’ve worked out that by setting the height of my view and ensuring I capture 5-6 photographs across I can usually get pretty close to the result I’m after with minimal loss of pixels in post production on the computer.

This final panorama was the only time the sun actually fell directly on the flowers. We had stopped to have a chat with the property owner when the sun broke through, but only on the ground, the sky was not being directly affected, awesome light! Excusing myself for a minute, I quickly setup and captured this image of the farmers old parents house, now not lived in but still maintained, which is surrounded by the wonderful sunflowers, not a bad view in my books. I think this is my favourite from the morning and I know my wife agrees with me.

I’ve found I’m quickly falling in love with the panorama format for both the challenge and the results. The quality end result I’m getting allows me to print a 60inch wide x 20inch high photograph at full 300dpi resolution (no loss of quality at all). I love to see my photographs purchased and hanging on peoples walls. Panoramas seem to lend themselves perfectly to being displayed, they work well in many different styles of rooms in peoples homes and in businesses. That’s my end game as a photographer, while I love taking photographs, and sharing them with the world, to create images that people love enough to hang in their own home to me is the ultimate.

So I’ll keep working at it, continuing to find new subjects in amazing conditions and share them with all of you. If I can get a nice portfolio of maybe 20 photographs by the end of 2019 I’ll be in heaven, and maybe a few of you will have such a connection with my work that you’ll want to own a copy for yourselves.

Finally, a quick single photo I took “doing it for the gram”. This will be up on my Instagram Feed.

Thank you everyone for following along with my photography for 2018, I really look forward to what 2019 is going to bring. I think the photographs will be released a bit slower, but the quality should be another level higher as I continue to learn and challenge myself.

Murray