January Image of the Month

So begins another year of photography! As it happens (it didn't just happen, there was deep planning and careful forethought put into it!) we are not home. This place is pretty darn photogenic even with unflattering light. Sunrise or sunset, and some of the interesting stuff and it becomes amazingly photogenic.

It's easy to take lots of photos here. 6319 this month, in case you were wondering. 515 have been edited, (and I'm way behind, still), with 30 ending up with 4 stars. That's pretty well one a day. Only one 5 star image though, so that makes it easy. No runner up or anything, just another look at the stars.

Which turns out to be a weird thing. I'd edited the photo, went wow, and posted it on various social media. When I came back to look at it earlier today, there was a huge mottled band across the middle, and I'm wondering how I could possibly have not noticed that. At first I thought I'd done something, or Lightroom was playing games with me, or it was a laptop screen thing. But no.

So I went back to the original and did the edit over again, and it came out slightly different, and I think better. Then I remembered that for complicated reasons I'd turned the graphic processor off. So I turned it back on and restarted. Nope. Must have been my miss-calibrated eyeballs or something. So I'm going with this version.

For the three of you that missed it first time round, this is on the beach behind our rented house in Queenstown. Kelvin Grove, if you know it. I woke up in the middle of the night and saw stars when I looked out. It had been cloudy when I went to bed.

I gathered my stuff and walked down to the beach. It was windy and warm, with a half moon off image to the left. There was some deep shadows and I set up there. Trying to get the horizon level was the hard part. The peaks off to the left are The Remarkables, and this photo does not do them justice at all.

The sky is pretty dark considering Queenstown is just on the other side of the peninsula not far away. For Calgary locals, you would have to drive out to about Bragg Creek to be that dark. I'd like to make the Milky way a bit brighter, but that brings up some of the back ground noise.