See my YouTube channel for photography videos...

Some years ago I bought a GoPro HERO3. The advertising was and remains so slick that whenever a new model is announced, thousands of people flock to stores to get their hands on one, only to realise they have very little reason to use one.

As I mentioned in my previous essay post, Embracing Landscape Photography, it's easy to become inspired by other people's lives of adventure and travel. Until now, I never had a great reason to produce a video about something. Most of my efforts outside the series of music videos I've produced have been quite random in topic and style.

Why Now?

Me on Mount Maroon overlooking Mount Barney National Park in South East Queensland.

While I don't deny that some recent photographer's own YouTube channels have been a huge inspiration for my own efforts, it also comes at a point where I feel I have established the wide variety of skills and confidence needed to produce this type of content at an acceptable and repeatable level of quality.

Producing any kind of video requires a wide range of skills, from camera work and cinematography to video editing and storytelling techniques to colour grading, graphics and effects, audio mixing, and in the case of personal "vlogging", media training to speak in front of a camera confidently.

You also need to know what you are talking about with the topic you are producing videos for. I don't profess to be an "expert photographer" by a long shot, but I have a solid understanding of why I am shooting a photograph or what I'm looking for in a scene, and I'm always learning new techniques and tricks. If a viewer learns something by seeing me do the work, then that's all I can hope for!

My Short Term Goals

I've always enjoyed teaching people about photography, not as a university teacher but just in general. There are no secrets in photography, only the ones deep in your subconscious that drive you to the results you achieve.

I honestly don't know if my channel will take off, but all I can do is build a body of work and push it out there. In the short term, my goal is to cover landscape photography shoots, talk about photography topics near and dear to me and also provide my own take on techniques used to create the photographs. There's no shortage of information already, but everyone does things differently and I hope that my approaches to my work will help other people.

I have a growing list of adventures to embark on and photography topics to discuss, so there will be plenty to come in the future.

Here are a few videos I have created recently that I hope you'll enjoy!

When you experience a sunrise like this, it makes waking up at 4am all worth it. Follow me down the valley within Mount Cook National Park to enjoy photographing the sun as it rose, and the mountains as they woke up alongside Lake Pukaki in beautiful New Zealand.

I wanted to show the process of taking a raw file and editing it for printing on my Epson SureColor P600 fine art printer using Lightroom CC. This isn't a step-by-step on how to use Lightroom itself nor how to install printing profiles, but a demonstration of the techniques I use when editing a landscape photograph and preparing it for print.