Can you take a bad photo in New Zealand? It turns out that you can. I took dozens of them. But once in a while, I came away with a gem like this which (granted has been post-processed, but otherwise) gets the composition just right, albeit somewhat cliché. The Trans-Alpine Highway connects the east and west coasts of New Zealand, running between Greymouth and Christchurch.
At the beginning of my trip, I had taken a day to ride the train between the two cities in a full-day round trip. During my final leg of my visit to New Zealand, I drove back to Christchurch from the West Coast. As the sun began to go down, I looked in my rear view mirror as I crossed a crest on the highway, and realised that the best view was the one behind me. I stopped, I stepped out, I shot, I took a few moments to take the scene in, and then I returned to my vehicle to continue my trip back to Christchurch.
Photographed over the Crown Ranges in New Zealand’s South Island. The green glow at the bottom is the Aurora Australis.
Smack bang on the highway, yet usually driven right past by, Irishman’s Creek sheep station is about 14km southwest of Lake Tekapo and is blessed with the same dark skies that this region is famed for. THat night, I stopped here in the setting moonlight, braving temperatures of -2°C to capture this image of one of my favourite little landscape locations from this part of the world. While the full arm of the Milky Way had risen, its position relative to this mailbox wasn’t quite as perfect as I would have hoped for… so I had to make do with what I had.
Built for off-road travel, not quite so for off-planet travel, this was very much shot on earth, at the top of the Crown Range Road just outside Queenstown NZ. In the distance, lie the Milky Way, and a faint green glow of Aurora Australis.
This image is particularly close to my heart. It was shot at Lake Tekapo in New Zealand at a time when I was very seriously reflecting on life. I had been driving along the highways on South Island of New Zealand making my way from Christchurch to Queenstown. In the middle of the day (it was 2pm), I came across this lake which was as still as a millpond. The air was still as I have ever felt, and as I parked close to the lake and made my way to the shore, I saw this scene before me that was completely surreal.
I took this shot, and then picked up a flat rock, attempting to skim it across the surface. I had never made a rock skim more than 6 bounces. On this occasion, I lost count at 15, and the rock was still going.
This was shot with a Canon 1000D, a Sigma 10-20mm lens, and an ND8 filter on a tripod. It has been colour corrected in Lightroom and Photoshop, and cleaned up in Noiseware, and to this day, remains one of my favourite shots, from one of my favourite locations.
