You know, sometimes I look at the endless pursuit of the perfect exposure, the meticulously calibrated settings, and I think about the very nature of the craft. We spend so much time chasing that crisp, final, ‘perfect’ image—the one that looks exactly as planned on the screen. But I’ve come to realize that maybe the most potent images, the ones that truly resonate, are not technically perfect.

Let’s face it, gear matters less than vision. It’s all about the intent, the process, the sheer, messy act of seeing the world unfold. It’s like trying to capture a moving river. If you try to freeze every single ripple with the sharpest settings, you miss the current entirely. You end up with a sterile record, not a feeling. The real magic happens in the space between the frames, in the tension of what hasn’t been fully resolved.

I’ve been wrestling with this idea lately, drawing from some deeper thoughts on process and the universe—ideas that feel incredibly resonant when you step back from the technical fuss. I was reading about the concept of the “Creatively Unfinished,” and it struck me as a mirror to every single photoshoot I’ve ever done.

Behind the Lens: Embracing the Mess

When I’m out in the field, especially chasing the light here in Aotearoa, the weather is rarely cooperating. It’s often a frustrating dance of soft mist, sudden sharp wind, and moments of blinding, fleeting gold. You set up, check your histogram, you breathe in that intense anticipation, waiting for that moment where everything aligns. And guess what? It rarely does.

There are the times when the light is just shy, when the shadows are too long, and you have to make a call—a compromise, a slight shift in angle—knowing that you’re not achieving some polished, finished masterpiece. That moment, when you look at the raw, slightly flawed exposure on the screen and realize it’s a genuine record of the struggle, that’s where the truth lies. It’s the ghost of the light that you couldn’t quite bottle.

We get caught in this trap of perfectionism, don’t we? We want the final, flawless outcome. But clinging to that static ideal—the idea of an absolute ‘End’ or ‘Perfection’ can feel suffocating. It turns the creative act into a performance rather than an unfolding.

The Freedom of Becoming

This unfinished state reminds me of how the universe itself operates. We look at the vastness and wonder where it’s been, where it’s going, a continuous, dynamic journey. This perspective frees us from the tyranny of finality. It means that the beauty isn’t just in the perfectly rendered edge, but in the space surrounding it: the light that fell just slightly wrong, the texture of the atmosphere, the history etched into the image. It’s in those imperfect elements that we find our connection to the ongoing becoming.

This concept ties into ideas about visual uniqueness. Instead of fighting for a standardized, flawless result, we can embrace the unique signature of our experience. It’s about accepting that our vision, filtered through our reality, the local light, the unpredictable elements, is inherently unique. It’s a celebration of the beautiful, continuous process, not just the polished result.

When we let go of the need for an absolute ‘finished’ product, we open up immense creative space. We stop focusing solely on the destination and start cherishing the journey. This shift transforms the technical struggle from a battle against error into an exploration of possibility. It allows us to see the light not as something to be perfectly captured, but as something to be experienced in all its shifting, transient forms.

So, the next time you’re in front of your lens, I encourage you to breathe. Stop demanding completion. Allow the process to guide you. Find the thrill in the becoming.

What unfinished moment are you holding onto today? I’d love to hear about your own experiences—let’s celebrate the beautiful, imperfect light together. Good light to you all.

It’s techtober and with it comes the releases of new updates and gear to fuel our hobby / obsession. Adobe is no exception, and today marks the release of the new version of Adobe Lightroom. As always there is a plethora of new features and updates that promise to change the game! Let’s face it they employ huge resources to “communicate” with us, so that we continue to pay them. But is there anything to get excited about? Well I think there is, and it’s the Variance slider.

One of the challenges I have always found about shooting infrared images, is extracting as much detail as possible from the image. This includes bringing out the micro tonal and colour detail that lie inside the RAW files we capture. To do this we build and us custom profiles, we spend hours learning and using tools and practices we are provided to craft the final image. There are so many tools that can do this and as much tribalism as usual about which one is better. But in the end we want beautiful nuanced images.

A few years ago adobe brought in the point colour tool in Lightroom to help with this, and this was a huge step forward. This tool allowed us to either use this as a global or a local adjustment. Through it we could target individual colours, adjust them and finesse the final colours. But there were limits which we discovered quickly, with developing and extracting, the teasing apart of similar colours to capture the subtleties of the scene we are capturing.

With the new variation slider shown above, we now have a control that can separate those similar colours. In the image below you can see the difference has made. Some of the pinks remain but others from the original image have been migrated between pinks and apricots, making the image far more interesting. This is going to be a really interesting tool to explore further. If you look at the image you can see how the colour reflected changes in the shadows, an interesting detail missed in the earlier processing.

Let me know how you get on and share the images you create with it, I am interested to see what people achieve with this. I am interested to see how this will also effect the black and white processing built from images processed like this. As we all know in the digital workflow the best black and white conversions are made using the best colour developed images, this is because the more colours we have, the more tones we can extract in the black and white conversion.

As the southern hemisphere gradually warms up, there are increasingly more opportunities to capture stunning landscapes in infrared light. A chance to explore possibilities and experiment with creative ideas and techniques. There's something almost magical about shooting infrared in warmer weather and how it transforms the world around you.

What really gets interesting is when you start combining filters. A lot of photographers shoot infrared with just a 720nm filter, which gives you that classic look—the white trees, the dark skies, the surreal tonal inversions. But add a polarizing filter into the mix, and you're working with a whole different set of possibilities. The polarizer does what it always does—it cuts glare and reflections, saturates the sky, manages those shiny surfaces—but in infrared, these effects can be even more pronounced. That already-dark sky can go almost black, creating this incredible contrast against glowing white clouds. Water becomes less reflective, more transparent, revealing detail beneath the surface that you'd never see in visible light.

The trick is understanding how these two filters interact. Infrared light behaves differently than visible light when it hits reflective surfaces, and the polarizer affects infrared wavelengths in ways that aren't always predictable. You might find that rotating your polarizer has more subtle effects than you're used to, or that it works best at different angles than it would for normal photography. Water, in particular, becomes fascinating—the polarizer can cut through surface reflections to reveal the infrared signature of what's beneath, while still maintaining those ethereal, milky qualities that long exposures in infrared create. It's a bit of trial and error, honestly, but that's part of the fun.

This is the perfect time to experiment because you've got the heat working in your favor and the landscape is coming alive. Think about coastal scenes where you can play with both the sky and the water, using the polarizer to control each independently. Consider forests and parks where that bright foliage will really pop against a polarized sky. Even urban landscapes take on a different character—concrete and glass behave strangely in infrared, and the polarizer can help you manage all those reflective surfaces while still keeping that surreal quality. The key is to get out there and shoot, to see what happens when you stack these tools together and let the season's warmth amplify everything. Each location will respond differently, and that's where the creative discoveries happen.

For photographers, the Cape Palliser region offers extraordinary geological diversity within a relatively small area. The pure white limestone formations provide stunning contrast against dark beach sands, deep blue seas, and often dramatic skies. The interplay between the ancient marine limestone and the active coastal environment creates ever-changing light conditions and compositional opportunities.

This geological context transforms your photographic expedition from simply capturing beautiful coastal scenery to documenting a remarkable chapter in Earth's history, written in stone and shaped by millions of years of tectonic forces and coastal processes.

The Cape Palliser region sits in one of New Zealand's most tectonically active zones, near the boundary between the Australian and Pacific plates. The limestone formations we see today have been tilted, faulted, and uplifted through millions of years of tectonic activity. This ongoing process continues to shape the coastline, with the area experiencing regular seismic activity and gradual coastal uplift.

Recently I went down to Wellington with a friend to introduce them to the kind of architectural photography I enjoy. After we had spent a while wandering the streets, the topic of where to next came up. It’s a real issue in photography. We have all been there, thinking what do I do next. What should I photograph? What genre?

Last week I got a newsletter from Helen McLeod titled “The Importance of Finding Your Photography Style” which follows along the same lines. In the newsletter she posed this question “But have you ever sat down and really tried to define what that uniqueness is? How it motivates your creativity? And how it shows up in the photographs you take? Even coming up with three words that define who we are as photographers can be daunting...Who was I within the space of my photography, and who did I want to become?” Before I go further if you want to sign up to Helen’s newsletter head on over to her website at https://www.2-galleries.com/, it’s a great read and something I look forward to.

Photography in the beginning is as much a technical challenge as an artistic one. Where we focus on the 5%, the settings, learning the camera, and how to process the images afterwards. We may start shooting in one genre because it gives us pleasure, or because other friends enjoy it. When I asked this question to another friend years ago they told me this “Good photos come from being in the right place at the right time, better photos come from within”, something I have never forgotten.

What is the difference between snapshots and art? When the images you create are an expression of you, of the uniqueness that Helen is talking about. Forget the Instagram or Facebook likes, what do you care about, what amazes you, what stirs an emotion. As Helen says “Even coming up with three words that define who we are as photographers can be daunting”! But daunting doesn’t make it impossible. Give it a try? It might take you a night, a week or even longer but it’s a great exercise.

What would be my three(ish) words….. here goes Balance…. no simplicity… filtering out the distractions….something like that, calm / peaceful, visual confusion… something that gets the brain asking questions.

So why did I call this post “Vision and Projects”? Because I think the two are so interwoven that they may be fundamentally linked. The last couple of years I have been thinking about how the various genres and projects I shoot may come from the same route source. What do they all share? Each project seemed to go off in different directions, how could they be linked? I guess I was considering where I am in them. Surrealism, Landscape, Aviation, Black and White, Long Exposure and Infrared, that covers quite a breadth of topics. But through giving myself license to explore these in projects, I can see my vision change.

I can see now that those few words I would use to describe how I see and express myself in one project, may apply to how I see in other projects. Like looking at the same object from different vantage points, I can see more clearly what is unique in the way I see, and what fascinates me. There is a phrase in research, to copy from one person is plagiarism, to copy from many is research. I think I get what they mean. Give it a try, try a short term project or be bold and try a couple, you never know where it might lead.

The image above is part of my Wellington building exploration / fascination / project, if you want to see more of these you will find the gallery here https://www.makephotography.net/wellingtonarchitecture

For the last few years Photoshop has had a feature called Super resolution, this is a way to increase the megapixels of an image after capturing the image. But this has always been restricted to only work on the original RAW files. This is huge, if you know why, then you know why. Let me explain.

So if this has been available in Photoshop for a while what is so important about this update. The answer is because it now works on Tiff files, Tiff files that may have already been processed through Camera RAW. For the last few years, in Camera RAW you had the option of using the new denoise function (which is quite good) OR the super resolution function (which still had issues) but you could not use both. By being able to use super resolution on a Tiff file means you can use denoise on the first time through Camera RAW, then do the editing. Save a file with all of the edits made as a Tif. Then open that again in Camera RAW and upscale it through super resolution. The file below went from 12 megapixels in the cropped version to 48 megapixels.

Please be aware that this feature is not available in Lightroom but I will believe it will be released soon.

How to do this from Lightroom

Until Lightroom get this feature you will need to do a slight workaround (because I use Windows this will be in Windows speak but for Mac users just translate):

1. Select the Tiff file you want to upscale in Adobe Lightroom

2. Right click on the image and choose EDIT IN, then from the flyout menu choose OPEN AS SMART OBJECT IN PHOTOSHOP

3. This will then open the image in photoshop

4. Now double click on the layer thumbnail of the smart object in the layers panel in Photoshop

5. This will open the tiff file in the Camera RAW application

6. Now open the Detail panel and hey presto the super resolution check box is enabled

This will have a few plugin makers a little frightened I am sure. Let me know if you found this useful and whether you want me to post more items like this.

By now you will have seen many pictures of the eclipse and how it looked from both the earth and (for the first time ever) from the moon. In this post I want to take a slightly different approach and document how I planned the shoot, what I aimed for and how I could approach a similar event next time.

In early March, like many others, I became aware of the lunar eclipse that would grace our skies. Originally I had heard that all we would see in New Zealand, would be the end of the eclipse. But I soon found out that this was incorrect and instead we would get to see the peak of the eclipse. But and this is a very big but, the peak of the eclipse would be soon after sunset. This raised an interesting question, how visible would the moon be in the shadow of the earth? Would this afford us an opportunity to capture the blood moon in a lit landscape?

So time for some research! Question one, how was the timing for the eclipse when compared to the twilight times for my region and where would I find out that information? The answer to this was easier than I thought, after reading a comment on a post I saw that https://www.timeanddate.com/eclipse/ would give me a table of the timings for the eclipse in local time, simply click on the eclipse in the list provided:

The next question is how does the table above relate to the sunset that will be happening at the same time? Once again this was easy and provided by the same website at https://www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/new-zealand/palmerston-north

Now the question of where? After checking the Windy application (https://www.windy.com/-40.356/175.611?-39.697,175.248,8,p:cities) I could see that the ranges offered the best hope of a clear sky. In particular the saddle road holds some good clear views east, where the moon would be rising, and the location below offered a good space to work from. This is where local knowledge pays off and failed attempts can be the foundations for success. This was a location I used to get this photo https://www.makephotography.net/landscape?itemId=w2sndiowwutxfusha6mbdd2tbq69du

Enter Planit Pro, an app which now has an Android offering. Using the VR viewfinder on the eclipse tab (where you can select the actual eclipse in question), I was able to look at the location as if I was already there and see both how it might look and the lens I would need for the composition I had in mind. Mind blowing to be frank.

So how close was the eventual image, to the one I saw when planning this, you be the judge! I hope this helps you and future me when planning the next outing. Thanks for reading and as always, I wish you good light.

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There are many reviews on lenses, covering the normal uses of lenses. But what about if you are interested in photographing in a different style. Today, my new TTArtisan 10mm F2 lens arrived, and as with all new lens arrivals, it is time for testing. Why do you need to test a lens, because I find it the quickest way to get to know a lens, its strengths and weaknesses, its character and limits and things which would be better to avoid.

Today’s test is how does this lens perform when used in combination with a Canon R7 and an 850nm filter. In full disclosure I paid for this lens myself and all opinions are my own and nothing has been cleared with TT artisan before posting this article. The camera was mounted on a tripod, captured in CRAW format, from a shady position on a hot summers day. They were captured with a monochrome preset on the camera and then had basic contrast adjustments in lightroom. In the f2.8 and f4 images I have made an additional copy and added radial filter to counteract the diffuse hot spot. The files adjusted with a radial filter have been noted as modded in the file name. Those with no mod, are those with just contrast adjustments.

In this version there is a very weak hotspot, but at f2 depth of field could be better

As you can see the hotspot is a little more visible but still quite diffuse, the degrading of focus in the hotspot is not too bad.

The hotspot now has more defined edges and is starting to degrade the image

The edges of the hotspot are now well defined and focus is degraded

Let’s be honest here, predicting the future can be hard but in this case the hotspot is getting worse as we continue. So rather than continuing what is the best we can do reliably? I feel that f2.8 could be easily corrected and f4 maybe could be fixed as well. Let’s try the f4 version first.

To get rid of the brightness of the hotspot the radial filter needs to be too aggressive and makes the contrast to heavy, so let’s try this on the f2.8 version

I think this is the best combination of depth of field and hotspot avoidance. That was a very informative test, I hope it helped you because it certainly helped me.

Today as the final flights of the RNZAF C-130 H make their way down this beautiful country, we celebrate their 150,000 flying hours and 60 years of service to this country. Whether it be troops, supplies, humanitarian relief or search and rescue, these amazing aircraft did it. To the ice, desert or tiny atoll, they have been there, sometimes in the same week. When it came to a replacement we just brought the newest model of these veterans.

If you would like to see more we have a whole catalogue of images right here

Thinking back to my previous post about living in boxes, I have been thinking about how the two cities compare. Palmerston North City (395 square kilometers) is about 13% smaller than Wellington's (442 square kilometers). Wellington's population however is just over double the size (214,200). If you take into account the area within the city devoted to everything other than residential accommodation, this results in a density estimated at 746 people per square kilometer (Palmerston north is 234). So it is easy to see, that with three times the density, housing in Wellington requires different solutions than those in Palmerston North. This challenge has resulted in quite different architecture and patterns of living.

Living in boxes was not a dig at apartment buildings or the accommodation in Wellington, but more a question. In some ways we all live in boxes of one kind or another. The box we live in, may be divided into many smaller odd shaped boxes, but ultimately it’s still a box. We assign such prestige and value to these boxes, to the style of them, the decorations, even the area where the box is. Should they be mass produced to make them cheaper? How vulnerable they are to natural disasters, how ecologically friendly they are, the questions are many and varied and say a lot about who we are.

In the realm where visible light surrenders to the infrared whispers of nature, Aerochrome film dances on the edge of perception, transforming our familiar world into a surreal dreamscape where trees blush in electric crimson and skies deepen to violet mysteries. Originally conceived as a military tool for detecting camouflage, this discontinued Kodak infrared-sensitive film transcended its utilitarian origins to become a medium of otherworldly artistic expression, rendering chlorophyll-rich vegetation in stunning magentas and pinks while turning everyday landscapes into ethereal tableaux that seem to reveal the hidden energy pulsing beneath the surface of reality. Like a window into a parallel dimension where the boundaries between the physical and the metaphysical blur, Aerochrome captures not just the reflection of light but perhaps something of the soul of the natural world itself, challenging our understanding of what it means to truly see.

The image above of course was not captured using aerochrome film, it’s a digital image captured through a 720nm filter. This is my take on how areochrome might look, a celebration of its legacy and a nod to the way it transformed photography.

“There are at least two kinds of silence that define us.

One is the eloquent silence of the world as we were given it
the silence of light and beauty, the silence that holds a promise…

there is also sometimes a dark silence within us,
one that results from willful blindness and deafness.
We struggle against it.”

Robert Adams

I have always been intrigued by infrared photography but struggled with how to do it. Then in 2020, after spending time with Cath Kelly, it all came together. Like anything it took commitment, and time, but through it I have found a way to capture the world in a style I like. Dark skies, long exposures and with a touch of the surreal.

To do infrared well, I feel you need to bring out as much colour as you can in the infrared image. The colour image to the right shows how far you can take it on an unconverted camera. You can see how this gives me options in the final image that I would not have available in a normal visible spectrum image.

Through using an unconverted camera I get access to longer exposure times, with the filter acting like a 15 to 17 stop neutral density filter. This gives me the chance to remove people from these busy streets. Throw in the chance of glowing foliage and you have a way of seeing the world from a very different perspective.

This is all is part of my Wellington architecture project, you can see the rest of the images here.

Being from a city where most buildings are one or two stories tall, and the centre of town has a smattering of buildings over ten stories. Going to Wellington is a little bit of a culture shock. To see apartment buildings like this one fascinates me. The difference in lifestyle, the benefits and downsides. Location, location, location, that’s the phrase isn’t it. Makes me think.

This is all is part of my Wellington architecture project, you can see the rest of the images here.

The first image from our latest trip to Wellington. Been trying to find an interesting composition for this building, and finally I think I may have it. I love the way that it adds mystery to the image…. what is it, how big…. That’s one of the most powerful tools in photography, to show only what we want to show and let the viewer figure out the rest.

To see more images from this project,

Every year I take time in the December - January holiday break to look at how things are going and what I could try to do differently. In 2023, I decided that I wanted to explore surrealism and how that might look. This year I decided I wanted to try getting more of my work out there. Entering competitions, was part of that plan, but it also includes looking for other opportunities like the NZ Camera book. NZ Camera is put together by the Photographic Society of New Zealand (PSNZ), and is compiled from images submitted by its members.

Each member of the PSNZ can submit up to two images, but only one image from each member will make it into the book. So in some ways you can see this as a salon in a book. A time capsule of the photographers, and the subjects that captivated them for this year.

A few months back I was told via email that one of my images had been selected. To know that I made it into the book was great news, but to know that of the two images, that they chose the surrealist based image made it even more special. What will I submit for 2025?

Thanks to the PSNZ and all those that put their time and effort into making this work each year.

Well 2024 has been a year for the record books, we have had a number of aurora displays. The display on the 11th of May will not be easily forgotten. Thousands upon thousands of New Zealanders made the effort to go and see it, stood in awe, and got a chance to see a side of nature really shown at this latitude.

But not everyone got a chance to see it. In fact a number of my friends missed out and regretted it. It took a little bit of the shine off the experience for me. I promised them that I would let them know if I saw anything happening again. So last week when I saw the x class flare happen, saw the favorable predictions and the early data which said something big was coming, I sounded the bells.

Pieter, Kelly and I chose to head up to the Saddle road to see if the display lived up to the predictions, I thought about photographing it but then I thought why not try something different. What about a timelapse? As you can see in the video above, it turned out pretty well. What a year! So far the timelapse of Facebook has been seen over 11000 times and shared by the council. Where a photo captures a beautiful moment a timelapse seems a better way of capturing the movement and time it lasted. I even made the animated gif below with the images.

I went out for a quick look last night and through the aid of some astro tools on my phone managed to find the comet :)

This might show my age, but there used to be a debate between which mattered more, the greatest single or the best album. In today’s fight for attention, sixty second soundbite or highlight reel, it feels like the single has won. But has it? If you love the artist, which do you prefer?

As with music, there is still a place for albums, projects and series. These longer forms of artistic projects allow both the creator and the consumer to go on a journey. To explore at a deeper level, and descend beneath the obvious. They give us license to go beyond.

For the past couple of years, I have been trying to push myself to work in projects. To develop ideas, to give myself as Ralph Gibson recounts in his story, a point of departure. For those who don’t know the story Ralph Gibson, an American art photographer, was told by Dorothea Lange, "I see your problem here Ralph, you have no point of departure". Lange said this after Gibson showed her one of his pictures while working for her. Lange explained that having a point of departure is important because it's similar to having a fixed destination when buying toothpaste, which provides motivation. She believed that photographers who drift around without a point of departure will never get anything good.

Last year I did the Intermediate Photography Course at UCol to help me change direction and see photography from a slightly different perspective. To believe in myself more, and quieting those voices in my head that say art is for artists, to see where it could take me.

The image above is from a project I have been working on which I have loosely called the Surreal World of Guitars. A fun little series which plays with those magic words “What if?” What if a designer reimagined the classic shapes and forms of guitars and used those concepts in the designs of houses for example. This project was inspired by Storm Thorgerson and other surrealists who dared to dream outside the square and show us a dream world in which fantasy and reality collide.

So why this post, you might ask? Is it an introduction to this project? Well kind of, but actually it’s more about what projects can do for you. Because the image above I entered into a competition, specifically the 2024 National Triptych Salon. Yesterday I got the results back and it placed which is awesome. Did it win anything, no, it got an acceptance in fact. Some people might take that as you need to do better, and a year ago I would have too. But as we grow, we get to see things from other perspectives.

Of course everyone wants to win, but that is impossible. The results are based on subjective criteria not objective. But if art is about expressing your feelings so that others can express theirs vicariously through your work, then appearing in the catalogue or the exhibition is the important bit. Which one the judge liked more or less determines the "winner" but the people viewing the exhibition can have their own opinion, and experience.

I love projects now and will continue to explore them. I love what they can do and how they can better express your thoughts. I am still in awe of other peoples projects, the books and exhibitions that have paved the way for art through history. I think if you are honest, is your favorite music album one of the many greatest hits collections that have come and gone? Those projects that try to make new money from old hits. Or is it an original album that expresses an idea? A band in its prime, reaching out to the world in the hope that others will see what they love, and love it to?