It’s mid-2022 and I’m still busy!

A brief update on things from myself.

My AOWA business hosting telescopes in the central wheatbelt is going well and I’m looking to get more locals hosting their telescopes in the shared facility, or in a separate RoR observatory, of which I am building a few to rent out. I’m hoping to make the site a useful resource for local amateur astrophotographers over time.

Astro Photography Australia keeps me busy with workshops every month, teaching people how to do astrophotography. These workshops range from wide-field nightscapes to telescope astrophotography. I am upgrading my portable telescope rig to better support the telescope astrophotography enthusiusts, and to use for remote events. You can find upcomin workshops on my page.

Astrofest 2022 is revving up and I’m curating the Astrofest Astrophotography Exhibition again. Entries are open 1st July – 31st July 2022. There’s awesome prizes up for grabs including a brand new Sony A7 IV! Curating this competition and exhibition will take much of my time between now and October 29th.

This RogerGroom.com site is still a bit neglected. I have made some updates to pages recently but I admit the range of images still is low. My focus these days is not on landscape/nature photography or specific astronomy projects like it was in the past.

Meanwhile, I’ve been making some effort to take a few of my own pics among things:

I am still alive!!

You might be looking at this website thinking Roger Groom is no longer with us. After all, it’s been something like a year since I updated this site. Well, I am still here! Just busy with other things. Life gets busy sometimes.

So why haven’t I been posting here? Well, I have been busy:

  • I still have a day job (amazing, I know!)
  • I am busy running astrophotography workshops (both online via Facetime, Skype, Teams and Zoom) and in person with Perth Observatory, Stargazers Club WA and my own one-on-one workshops at various locations.
  • Astro Observatories Western Australia is a new business I am running in the Central Wheatbelt to remote host telescopes. The site has fantastic world-class dark skies, flat horizons, but, requires an awful lot of work to maintain and improve! So I am spending many days and nights there with my family working on the site.

Here are a few nice landscape photographs from a recent trip to my dark sky property in the Central Wheatbelt region of Western Australia, just to prove I still do take landscape photographs, if not published so regularly!

A new video!

You might be wondering why I have been so quiet? Well, I am still alive, and I am still shooting photography, although mostly astrophotography now. You will find more of my recent work at https://www.astrophotography.com.au

Here is an astrophotography timelapse video shot in February 2019 from my wheatbelt property. This video features the Milky Way rising, along with the Moon and planets Venus and Saturn. Turn up your audio and enjoy the movie!

Gloucester Tree Kari Forest

Afternoon sunlight shining through the Kari Forest surrounding Gloucester Tree.

As the sun lowered in the sky on this late afternoon walk the last rays of warm sunshine are a contrast to the cooling forest. The damp starts to settle in and the warmth of a nearby cottage starts to call. This is the karri forest surrounding the Gloucester Tree in Pemberton and I’m sure this particular view is very familiar to many who walk the short tracks around the tree. I remember the exact scene from years ago. The scene may stay somewhat the same, but the lighting and person taking the photo changes constantly.

Karri Forest Leaf Litter

Karri Forest Leaf Litter (Pemberton, Western Australia)

I absolutely love the forest floor of the WA Kari Forests, and what better than to have the colour and detail of the leaf litter raised up to a more convenient height for photographing by a very obliging xamia palm leaf? It’s the glistening wet, the dynamic colour, the high saturation of the colours, it’s all there in the leaf litter.

Edge of the Karri Forest

Karri Forest in Pemberton, Western Australia.

There were many good photographs captured in a recent (May 2017) family holiday to our frequent stomping ground of the Karri Forests of Pemberton, Western Australia. This one photograph I keep coming back to, least expected though I have to admit. I snapped the photograph when quickly walking back from a short walk around the Pemberton mountain bike tracks. The tracks weave up and down the hill side of Kari forest opposite the town. Generally I’d say it’s not the most picturesque of Karri forest spots but of course it still has photo opportunities.

This photograph is straight out of the camera with no editing at all. It was taken using my Fuji X-E2 in film simulation Velvia mode. Velvia is a throw back to film days, where I started with my photography. Many of the photographs on this website still are scanned images from my film photography days, using Velvia and Provia slide films which were my favorite. The latitude, colours and definition straight out of the Fuji X-E2 are often “wow” and just perfect. The lens is a 12mm Samyang.

I particularly like how this photograph give some perspective to the enormous height of the Karri trees, even relatively young ones like these. I would normally avoid the perspective given by this 12mm lens in this situation, but it has worked out well in this case. The patchy cloud and blue sky in the distance also works well for the image, giving some depth where you might ordinarily have just a uniform blue or cloudy sky. That same partly cloudy effect lets some nice warm sunlight shine through the trees from the neighbouring paddocks.

Back at Kalbarri

Back at Kalbarri in Westen Australia’s mid-west region for a family holiday, I’ve been snapping some new pics of the area. Fitting photography in around a 1 year old’s eat and sleep routine is not impossible but it does preclude photography at one of the ideal times of day: evening/sunset. So, we make do with what we can!

Kalbarri Jetty (Murchison River)

Sunset rock pool at Kalbarri
Sunset rocks and water at Kalbarri