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.