(1285Kb JPEG)Freshly out of the water this American Alligators' skin makes for a nice pattern. Taken at the Auckland Zoo.
(621Kb JPEG)A blue cod lurking under a rock. Just love the big lips on the fish and despite it sitting on the bottom a lot it was very alert.
(611Kb JPEG)This is the kind of shot of the South Island I have been trying to take for years. Various issues like not finding the right lighting, lenses that simply didn't have the focal length, me not understanding the right exposure to prevent the island washing into the sky too well and the like plagued me. I had seen this lighting once before - it only seems to happen around the equinox where the Sun as it sets provides enough side and back lighting to really make Mt Tapuae-o-Uenuku here pop. This is one of two shots I got on the same day and it is a 1680x1050 size.
(1298Kb JPEG)This Cactus caught my eye at the Auckland Zoo.
(77Kb JPEG)Near parliment buildings, in the centre of town (Wellington), there is a Cenotaph dedicated to the many war dead from the various wars New Zealand forces have been involved in. (Although it was originally dedicated to WWI and WWII casualties) This statue is a part of that monument, one of a pair standing guard over the steps leading up to the monument itself. It is a beautiful piece of work and I am quite pleased with how the shot came out, doing the statue itself some justice.
(1317Kb JPEG)A feature exhibit at the Auckland Zoo this is one of the two cheetahs there. Constantly on the move when up and lounging about when not actually getting a clear shot of one of them can be a bit tricky. Fortunately they had been just fed when I was passing through and thus were pacing a bit along a regular route. Which let me line him up for this shot.
(52Kb JPEG)Whilst out towards Cape Palliser this cloud hovered out to sea in the southern sky. With the surf rolling in below it made quite a dramatic image, at least to my eye anyways. Unfortunately in order to fit this to 1280x1024 I have had to crop the image slightly and I think it looses some impact because of this.
(2253Kb JPEG)This one came from playing with timelapse settings and is partly pure accident and partly intentional. I knew I would get something interesting from the exposure of a good one point three seconds but because it was a handheld shot I suspected the image might have been unworkably blurry. I'll leave it for the viewer to work out exactly what I took an image of but I reckon, with this crop, you could almost add a foreground lunar surface and a shadow to make this the surface of a very alien world...
(772Kb JPEG)Flames in the wind with a dark background. It is a high speed shot bringing out the texture and complexity of the flames. These three flame shots all come from the fire sculpture burning at the Pelorus Trust mid-Winter Fireshow.
(909Kb JPEG)This almost could be the shot of the top of a towering inferno, blazing in the night. It isn't - the scale is somewhat smaller being only a few meters tall. Again the speed of the shot brings out the texture in the flames.
(853Kb JPEG)This is rotated to provide a nice flame effect for all us out there who like to have the taskbar along the bottom of the screen. Flaming icons anyone?
(928Kb JPEG)This is the sun setting behind the northernmost fringe of the Southern Island. Just visible in the shot is a cargo ship about to enter Cook Straight and come in to Wellington harbour.
(451Kb JPEG)Shot from Kelburn near the top of the cable car run during the 2010 Guy Fawkes display. I love how much of the harbour water is lit up behind the buildings here.
(1174Kb JPEG)Kapiti Island as seen from the Paekokariki Hills near sunset. It is a spectacular vantage point and well worth the trip to see. Kapiti itself is now both a Marine reserve in the waters around it and a bird santuary which harbours a variety of native birdlife that is now absent from the mainland. See my Kapiti visit page for more details on the island and its history.
(110Kb JPEG)Finally a new backdrop, formated for a 16:10 display at 1680x1050 pixels. (Guess what my current screen is?) This is sort of a reprise shot of the South Island taken with my new digital camera. Makes for a nice but not overly intrusive backdrop. The only grumble I have is that the resizing operation has smoothed the image a little making it slightly soft. Works for a backdrop but would be annoying for a display image.
(301Kb JPEG)Taken with a 70-300 mm lens I finally got the focusing right for this.
(304Kb JPEG)I got my hands on a second hand 500mm catiodaptic lens, this is the result of playing around with it. Being a little mirror lens wobble is almost impossible to avoid and focusing is tricky to say the least. Thankfully liveview helps but it will be tricky to use this for anything else astronomical as it is a fixed apeture F8 lens. Still for a thirty year old piece of kit it does pretty well.
(146Kb JPEG)This is just a simple nightsky shot with the moon in it formatted for 1680x1050. Pushing the exposure out to fifteen seconds gives the clouds a chance to shine in the moonlight filling the sky out nicely. Naturally this blows the moon out so you lose all detail with it but I think it works well as an image.
(191Kb JPEG)Just below work is this industrial zone with oil tanks prominently featured in it. The shadows and colour of the scene caught my eye, thus the shot. Odd how something normally so ugly actually came out looking quite pretty...
(185Kb JPEG)Taken out Eastbourne way, this is a shot of some pebbles in the surf. I like the shadow and texture of it.
(232Kb JPEG)Yet more pebbles, also out Eastbourne way. This has more motion in it.
(53Kb JPEG)Taken from Oriental parade this shot makes quite a nice contrast of the plane against the vast clouds. Again, in order to preserve the aspect ratio, I have had to trim the image a bit and it suffers a little for this. For your interest, the plane is in Air New Zealand livery and you can just partialy make out the Koru on the tail.
(847Kb JPEG)Found on the grounds at work during a particularly copesetic Autumnal day. For once the auto-focus on the camera worked how I wanted - I really need to buy a digital SLR back once I have some spare money again. So here we have a Toadstool formated to 1680x1050 pixels for a backdrop. Just remember it is brightly coloured because it is poisonous...
(173Kb JPEG)Late in 2006, around mid December, the state of Victoria in Australia suffered a series of quite devestating forest fires. The smoke from that was sufficient in volume to reach New Zealand and gave us this quite spectacular sunset. Haven't seen one quite as red in a long time. Shame that such a beautiful sunset has to come at the price of such largescale destruction. This is formated to 1680x1050 pixels.
(128Kb JPEG)Eastbourne again, rocks this time. The colours foiled me a little so I may redo this shot with a polarising filter to bring the colour up a bit.
(1365Kb JPEG)Rocks in the surf down on the Wellington southern shores. These sort of shots are pretty easy to do, simply expose for around half a second and get the timing right. It doesn't hurt to have a tripod and a cable release to keep the camera shake down but you can, with a bit more effort, use the camera self timer as well.
(187Kb JPEG)Everyone needs a little sand in their life. For the interested this is Island Bay sand.
(982Kb JPEG)Full body shot of a sea perch.
(785Kb JPEG)Closeup shot of a sea perch. You can see the lovely colour spot pattern.
(701Kb JPEG)Full body shot of a snapper. These fish were around twelve years old and pretty active at the time.
(643Kb JPEG)Another full body shot of a snapper. Being silver scaled these fish changed colour a lot depending on the lighting conditions.
(37Kb JPEG)The South Island of New Zealand, as seen last thing at night a little down the road from home. It is a difficult scene to capture on film and the automatic camera didn't cope all that well. I hope to redo this shot with my new, more manual, camera in the near future.
(611Kb JPEG)Companion to the butterscotch south island image, yeah I know - dull names, this tries to frame the South Island a little more with some foreground imagery to give a little more depth to the composition. Formatted for a 1680x1050 monitor.
(781Kb JPEG)Taken at the Wellington Zoo I got a nice colour tone and composition for this set of tree leaves. This was right next to a moat like pond that kept the spider monkeys contained and provided a nice swimming spot for the Pelicans to putter around in. Formatted for a 1680x1050 screen.
(161Kb JPEG)Here is what I consider the premier shot from the '24 hours in Wellington' photoshoot I participated in. It makes an excellent backdrop. Of course I could be biased in my assesment.
