Hello and welcome to my new series of articles ‘A Retrospective with Matt’. I have been a photographer for around 5 years now and as you can probably imagine I have taken a hell of a lot of photos. I could possibly be in the tens of thousands of images. I recently started re-organising my storage systems and noticed myself reflecting on some of the older photos remembering a lot of details from when I took them and criticing them based on the photography knowledge I have a few years on. I figured it could be a good idea to do this on a public platform to both give these older pieces a new life and potentially provide other photographers with some inspiration on what to do and in some cases what not to do.

A photo of Urangan Pier in Hervey Bay at sunset taken by Matthew Maguire.

To kick this series off I want to show you one of my personal favourite photos and also the first photo I captured that provided me with a signature style at the beginning of my Landscape photography pursuits. I decided to quit my job and start a Tafe Course for photography at the end of 2019, this meant that my first term studying was during the Covid Lockdowns of 2020! This sucked for my work as I have always mainly been interested in Landscape Photography. When the Lockdowns in Queensland lifted around the school holidays, I packed my camera gear and headed up the Queensland Coast. My first stop was Hervey Bay, a beautiful little oceanside town about 3 and a half hours from Brisbane and famous nationwide as a retirement location. I was only there for one night and made sure I took advantage of Urangan Pier, which stretches one kilometre out from the beach.

This photo, cleverly named ‘Urangan Pier’ was taken at sunrise. I drove down to the pier as the sun was just starting to make an appearance, parked nice and close and began my walk. I had an idea of where I wanted to shoot as I had been there the night before but I was a bit unsure of how to compose the image. I tried a few different positions deciding to stick to the middle of the pier and line it up nicely in the middle of the frame. This photo was taken before I had any sort of ND filter so it’s actually quite surprising I was able to get the water as smooth as I did, it was a still day which helped and it was fairly dark still allowing me to have my shutter open for a while. I Remember sitting here for a while waiting for people to pass me and for the colours to show up in the clouds. I wasn’t too confident of this happening but I had left sunrises too early in the past and missed some wild photo opportunities. This was one of the first photos that I was confident about entering into competitions and was so excited to print and show my photography teacher when I got back to school.

My Opinions

This photo was taken on the same pier but at sunset the night before.

Looking at this with a fresh set of eyes, there are some things I’d like to change (and might). It’s a beautiful photo but in the technical realm, it’s lacking in quality a little bit. It prints beautifully and looks great on any wall but I would now capture this image by increasing my ISO a touch. I used to be terrified of grain and would never push my iso above 100, this was a habit that was really hard to get out of until one day I just forced myself to shoot an entire day of photography at 400iso. I was cured after that!

This photo wasn’t lined up perfectly in the camera on the sides. It’s hard to notice unless you’re holding any sort of straight line against it, but to me when I need to crop or edit it in any way it drives me a little crazy. My favourite part of this photo is the distinct/solid line dividing the ocean into deep blue on the left and then the pinky/orange on the right. It is rare to get perfect alignment like this in landscape photography as you’re mostly relying on the sky and the layout of what is around you.

Looking at this photo makes me really want to go back to Hervey Bay, but I live in Melbourne now which is very far away. I actually have this photo printed and ready to frame in my own house just to add a little bit of that ocean element I love so much.

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