Author: Roger Groom

My wife and I have spent years crawling around the understory of Karri Forests in the south-west of Western Australia. Back in 2000 – 2010 we regularly visited the area every year, amassing quite a collection of orchid and fungus photography. It’s amazing what you find, and you always find something new. People drive, cycle or walk through forests for hours and not see a single interesting thing, but if they just stopped and sat down for 10 minutes in the one spot they would be amazed by how much is within 1 square metre of themselves.

Since 2010 we haven’t done much in the way of macro photography in the Karri Forests, so a recent trip, in the brand new age of modern digital cameras, resulted in some macro fun on level of photographic quality which was significantly hard with film photography in the early 2000’s, but which is now quite achievable. The above two photographs are some nice glowing examples. The fungus appears to glow in it’s surroundings, semi-translucent and brightly coloured almost like a neon sign. And yet you can be assured most people still walk past these.

Today I enjoyed a photography excursion to the wheatbelt, driving through Northam, Goomalling and Todyay. Trips like this have been relatively rare in the last year or two, with my spare time spent more on astrophotography or travelling for other reasons. It’s fun to focus on terrestrial photography a little again. I started off the morning in monochrome mode, and these above photographs are from that time, when the fog was still only just starting to lift at 10:30am! The day turned out to be beautiful and sunny, but of course the best photographs were from the morning with fog.

 

You could be forgiven for thinking, looking at a website like this, that whenever an astronomer sticks their camera outside they see stars and galaxies. Well, not the case! Most inconveniently, it is often cloud! At the ASWA Astro Camp on the weekend just gone, the weather didn’t play particularly nice, coming over quite cloudy on the first night, and only allowing a two hour (albeit perfect two hour) gap on Saturday night.

The above photograph shows a little tiny bit of the constellation of Orion poking up above a layer of cloud, and Jupiter shining through the cloud. The orange look to the cloud is derived from light pollution reflecting on the clouds.

Continuing with the theme of survey images from my photography of NGC objects, the above photograph shows a selection of twelve galaxies. I have been spoilt for choice lately, with a wide selection of spectacular galaxies imaged. All are 5 x 180s exposures (sum combine) using Meade 12″ SCT @ 2160mm focal length on a Paramount ME, using SBIG ST8-XME @ Bin 1×1.