Here’s the top ten images from 2022 in keeping with the yearly reviews of my images each year as suggested by Martin Bailey. Each year I go through my images and work out what I think are my top ten images, not an easy task to cut down from 43428 images to ten. As I take the images each week and review them, I give them a star rating so that gives me a good start, I started with all the images marked three stars, four stars of five stars, so that cut down a lot of the images down to 348. From there I opened up survey mode in lightroom and started remove the images from the listing. It’s always hardest to get rid of the last 40 or so images down to the final ten is always the hardest. This is the time I learn the most each year, working out which are the better images, trying to remove any emotional attachment to the images and reviewing them for what they are, looking for all the technical faults in each image, which ones have to much noise, slightly off focus, composition not quite as good as some of the others, lighting not as strong as others etc. Once I apply all that I soon narrow it down to about 20, that last ten is the hardest and really any of the 20 I’d be happy to have in the top ten. Forcing yourself to get to the final ten is a lot of going back and forth between the images slowly removing one at a time. 

Mushroom shots always make the top ten, this year four of them made the final cut of images, this one in the lawn. 

Bird shots also had four make the final cut for the year, this one a Little Pied Cormorant Posing against a clean background. 

This one caught my eye as I was driving up the hill in the Australian Botanic Gardens Growing in the grass bank beside the road, A dark moody sky a bit of lighting and one of the more moody shots for the year. 

Next up a shoot of a pair of Eastern Rosellas. This shot shows sthat you can get that creamy background with the Canon 800 f11, the blur is a result of the 800mm focal length and the ratio of camera to subject and Subject to Background, the further away the background the creamier the background. Over the years a lot of people have bagged the Canon 800F11 saying you can't get creamy backgrounds or can't shoot in anything but bright full sun. most come from people that haven't used it. I have an 800F11 and the 100-500 F9 and I find I use the 800 80% more compared to the 100-500 at 20% when checking my data from lightroom.  

A small group of Australasian Shoveler duck also showed up in the Gardens for a few days this year and I managed to get a series of shots of these before they departed, the catch with these is so get down as low as you can to get these shots, It certainly helps when they are both on the same focal plain to keep both nice and sharp in the image. 

People always ask why I shoot fungi and don't I get bored of shooting the same thing. This shot made this years top ten partly becasue of the unusualness of the the shot, its actually a Puff ball or earth star but a the end of its lift. So not what you nornally see or expect to see when you see one of these. Like all the fungi shots shot in normal daylight, under exposed and light with three external speedlites, focus stacked and processed to get the effects I like. 

Another Bird shot for this year's top ten a Tawny Frogmought, this one heavely processed to give the painting effect to the shot, some time this woprks better than others, in this case I'm happy with the result and how it turned out. The background colours and tones work well for this one. Happy enough to get it into they years top ten. 

The final Fungi shot for this year’s top ten. This one a little more surreal than the other ones for the year. Always fun playing with images and seeing what you can make of them that best suits the subject. The blue background is created by using a brown gel on the subject, Then in post-processing white balance correction which turns the shadows the opposite colour on the colour wheel. Sometimes it works better than others this one, I'm happy with this one. 

 

The final two shots for the top ten of the year are both Flora shots, the only ones to make the final cut. Both of these have had an effect I've used now for a few years to create a painting-like effect from the original image. Sometimes I only apply it to the backgrounds but in these cases, the whole image has had it applied to varying degrees. The image starts to look like something you'd see in the old masters' collections in the art Galleries. 

 

Finishing off the Years top ten with a fitting image Christmas Bells. These come out each year around Christmas time in the Australian Bushland, giving a splash of red and yellow about the bushland. All the Flora shots are lit with two off camera speedlights in small soft boxes.

It's always interesting to see the results of the top ten each year, then compare them to previous years to see just where I've come from and if I'm improving over the last few years and see the direction my Photograhy is talking. Each year the review is hard to get down to the final two, but that final process of getting down to only ten is where you learn the most about your own.

Have fun there and enjoy your photography.

Glenn.