Coldplay - Auckland 10/11/12

Not the highest quality photos, but there's only so much you can do with a cellphone in a mosh!

Morning has broken!

Sunrise on the lower Waimakariri, at the confluence with the Kaiapoi river.

Camping! Yay!!

First camping since winter!  Roll on 8 months of consistent camping.

Kisses for the cuties

Turning back the years again with this one.  This is Elijah's first day home.

Kisses for the boys...

A gray day at Karaki beach

I love the beach just down the road from our house. although when the sea fog rolls in, everything becomes somewhat mono-chromatic.

Something still stands in Cathedral Square!

The Cathedral may be gone (or going).  Maybe they should re-name it Chalice Square?

Its a plane Jim, but not as we know it.

Something a bit different today.

We live about 30km from Christchurch airport, under the flight path.

This is a time exposure of a plane going over our house at night.  The lines you see are its running lights, and the dots the flashing one's.

Its interesting to note they have the traditional green on the starboard, red on the port.  I never noticed that about planes before.

Jakob's first tramp

I'm delving back in time a bit here.

This is Jakob's first tramp, a classic for kids into Lake Daniells in the Lewis Pass.

Jakob was still only three when we did this, and looking back at the photos now, tiny.  He was a real trooper, but naturally enough took his time (6 or so hours to get in).  Here he with his first view of the hut at the end of the first day.

There were heaps of older kids at the hut, and going out the next day Jakob did his dardenest to keep up with them all, hence we were out in three hours! (and Jakob was fast asleep about 10 minutes after that!)

Well, I may have cheated a little on this one....

Either I was really fast to get back for the timed shutter, or I got someone else to take this one of me in front of Mt Cook, close to dusk.  

Keas re-visited

Kea's framed against the massive, glaciated eastern face of Mt Sefton, as the light fades and the clouds roll in.

View from Mt Olliver into Mt Cook National Park

Having hinted about Mt Olliver yesterday, I'd better show you what it looks like up there.

This is taken from very near the summit of Mt Olliver.  

Top left of the photo is where the summit of Mt Cook would be, if it didn't have a weather front coming over it.  In the valley on the left can be seen the Hooker Glacier, and glacier lake, with the shoulder of Mt Sefton dropping down towards it.  

Directly across is Mt Wakefield, with Mt Elie De Beaumont peaking up behind it.

In the middle of the shot is Mt Cook Village Hermitage; the head of Lake Pukaki is on the hard right of the photo.

This panorama is taken from a series of ten shots taken in portrait rather than landscape, to get a higher resolution final image.  I often use my Smartphone (which has a nifty 8MP sensor) to do panoramas now (I'm lazy), but using my main camera with some stitching in Photoshop (or Autopano pro) still gives the best results.  In this case I had my phone drowned the next day by the storm you can see here coming over the Alps, so I had just the shots I'd taken with my main camera.

Kea fly-by

Ever since I was a kid I've been trying to capture the elusive underside of a Kea's wing.

Late last summer I went up above the Mt Cook Hermitage, past the Sealy tarns to the Mueller Hut for the night - fantastic trip, if you like the outdoors, are reasonably fit, and don't have dodgy knees I can heartily recommend it.

In any case it turns out about 20 kea have made their home around, on, and even under the Mueller hut, ergo I had a whole afternoon to photograph them!  I still found getting the under-wing elusive, but when it came together some of the results were spectacular - my favourite is this kea fly-past, scooting just over the roof of the Muellar Hut.  The summit of Mt Olliver (the first peak Ed Hillary ever climbed) is on the right hand side.

Kaikoura weekend away

Karen and I got away from the kids for a weekend.  Gotta love golden hour during a walk out around the peninsula.

The Molesworth station

Neither karen nor I had been through the molesworth, so last waitangi weekend we got around to doing it.
Verdict?
Brilliant, much more than I expected.  It was very gorgy ~ more akin to central otago than anything in the northern part of the south island.  Lots of big deep (fairly) warm swimming holes (which we took advantage of).  Once you get to the northern end of the molesworth turn around and go back. The 100 km through to blenheim its pretty dreary.

This panorama (of about 180°) is taken close to the hanmer end.  A real photographer would shudder, but my samsung galaxy s2 is fantastic at doing clever things like panoramas and hdr shots ~ stuff that used to take me ages in photoshop is now automatic.

Brooding hen

We started at my aunty Colleen's for the weekend.
We buy our hens ready to go on the lay, but colleen, having a rooster can breed her own.
This hen is currently brooding 9 chicks...

Lunar eclipse

A couple of years ago I was observing a lunar eclipse, and decided to take some photos throughout the event as well.

Unfortunately I'm not setup to be able to photograph through my telescope, so this series was taken on a long zoom, long exposure, mounted on a tripod.

There's something about Robin

I don't know what it is about our nephew Robin, but we've got some fantastic shots of him over the years...

At Deb's & Duncan's beach wedding - the groom (Robin's dad) has just arrived!

Waihi Gorge bush

Over New Years, we went adventuring through the wonderful bush (dad would say rainforest) at Waihi Gorge, up in the hills behind Geraldine.

Sunset on the Waimakariri

I was out for a run along the lower Waimakariri River last night, and it just happened to be golden hour, on a beautiful, almost perfectly still evening.  Sunset across the water - it doesn't get much better than that.  When you have scenery like this it certainly adds to the run, whiles t somewhat interrupting it as you stop and gape (and photograph).  Not a bad interruption though, especially in my current state of fitness!

As per normal with the golden hour, the shots get better the closer you get to sunset, so some of the best are down the bottom.

I think this one is probably my favourite of the lot

Lots of fishermen were out enjoying the conditions.  As I was shooting a salmon was hauled in on the other side of the Kaiapoi river.

The wide panoramas are all standard exposures, whereas most of the others are HDR shots.