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...