Category Archives: travel

The 10 minute waterfall shoot

I spotted the potential problem when I was typing up my itinerary before even leaving for New Zealand. On the day that we would be driven down the coast from Dunedin to Invercargill, there would be a 10 minute stop to photograph Purakaunui Falls. That’s right — just 10 minutes.

I’ll take a moment here to explain my itinerary process. On a trip like this that incorporates a convention, board meetings, tours, etc., you are generally provided with a whole slew of itineraries. You get one for the board meeting, one for the convention, one for each specific selection you’ve made for activities during the convention, and on and on. The entire stack of itineraries — not to mention flight and ferry schedules — can end up nearly as thick as a phone book. The end result is a lot of weight and bulk to carry around and endless pages to thumb through whenever you’re trying to figure out what your next stop is. My solution is to take all of those itineraries before departure and to re-enter their core information into one, two-sided document that I can print a few copies of and stick them in coat pockets, camera bags, suitcases, etc. It’s my “at a glance” itinerary that gives me only the information that pertains to me and leaves out all of the schedules for things I’m not participating in. I also color-code items that need to stand out: meetings I’m running, professional development sessions I’m conducting, etc. These itineraries have become an essential part of my pre-trip planning, especially for trips like this where I’m not in control of my own schedule.

That’s a screenshot of one side of my “at a glance” itinerary for New Zealand. These things take a little time to assemble, but they are a huge help once on the ground.

A happy byproduct of this process is that I get to pre-visualize the entire trip as I put the schedule together. It’s an opportunity for things like this 10-minute waterfall stop to reveal themselves and allow me to think through how to make the most of the situation. I knew I was going to be mostly in cities and towns during my New Zealand trip so any opportunity to shoot a natural landscape was very important to me. A waterfall would make a nice addition to my overall coverage of this part of the South Island and I wanted to make the most of this stop — short as it might be.

I managed to get the front seat, next to the driver, the morning of the waterfall shoot. This can often take some elbowing on a press tour but, in this case, there was no front passenger door so you had to enter the van through the sliding side door and then scramble over the engine hump in order to access this particular seat. Not something most people found appealing, but worth it to me in order to be able to shoot through the windshield, be able to talk to the local driver, and have more room to have my tripod, etc. with me. I made a point of having the tripod easily available on this day — especially because of the waterfall stop.

Our driver was great and said that he’d made note of the 10-minute waterfall stop when he first saw the schedule as well. He knew the area and knew that that amount of time wouldn’t work at this particular location. He’d made some adjustments to the schedule in order to give us 30 minutes at the waterfall because he knew the hike to the falls would take a good 10 minutes itself. With his adjustment, we’d still have 10 minutes at the falls with an additional 20 minutes for the 10 minute walk down and the 10 minute walk back.

When the waterfall was to be the next stop, I made sure to prepare my gear. I set out my tripod and put the mount on my Nikon D700 — I was going to use it along with my Nikkor 17-35mm wide-angle zoom. I believe I also tossed a couple of longer primes in the pockets of my Scottevest, just in case the overlook to the falls was not as close as I anticipated it would be. I made sure to also pocket my ND and polarizing filters so that I could cut the light enough to get a long exposure that would let the falls get all misty and soft. The one thing I neglected to grab was my cable release. I got around this by shooting on timer, but I lost some precious seconds each time I had to wait for the timer to run out.

When the van stopped, I piled out as quickly as possible and headed down the trail at a fast walk — checking my watch so that I knew exactly when I’d have to start back. I never want to be the last one to return (that’s bad press trip karma) and I want even less to be left behind because I’m late. On the walk, I multi-task by extending my tripod legs and getting everything ready for the shoot. It takes almost 10 minutes exactly to get to the overlook and I take my “safe shot”, that’s at the top of this post, from that platform (By “safe shot” I mean that it’s a shot that ensures that I have something in the can, even if I don’t get anything else). I actually take a couple for safety and then start looking for more interesting angles. There’s a rocky area to the left that looks like it will afford a better angle and more interesting foreground potential so I start making my way around, over slippery rocks and logs. I stop every so often to take advantage of a new angle and fire off a couple more shots. Here is an animation made from two shots at one of these stops that gives a little sense of the motion of the water and the movement of the trees. Had more time been available, this would have been a nice spot to do some timelapse movies but — as it was — this would have to do:

The following shot is the last one I managed to get before having to head back up the trail to catch the van. Looking at the metadata, the first shot was taken at 11 minutes and 50 seconds past the hour and the last — and 14th — shot was taken at 22 minute and 8 seconds past. My math comes up with that being 10 minutes and 18 seconds on location, and I think I managed to make those extra 18 seconds up on the hike back. At least I wasn’t the last to return to the van.

Yellow-Eyed Penguin encounter

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It all started when we visited the fossilized forest at Curio Bay on New Zealand’s southeastern coast. In the photo above, you can see one of the ancient, petrified trees that are visible in the rock at low tide. We were told that the endangered Yellow-Eyed Penguins are frequently spotted in the area but that they are usually only making their way between the ocean and their nesting areas at sunrise and sunset. As we were there near mid-day, it was doubtful we would see any. If we did, however, signs instructed visitors to keep at least two car-lengths away to make sure the penguins could go about their business undisturbed.

Wanting to get clear of the bulk of the tourists at the site, I picked up my pace and headed for the far end of the rocky beach where I found some great examples of the petrified logs and stumps and began photographing them. A few moments later, a sound caught my attention and I looked up to see two Yellow-Eyed Penguins emerging from the underbrush at the top of the beach.

One was more bashful and stayed in the shade but, as I continued to photograph them, the other made his way cautiously onto the beach. I picked a location where it looked like he would cross my path, but where he wouldn’t come so close that I would disturb him. Once again — as had happened on several occasions on this trip — I was happy to have brought along my Tamron 18-270mm zoom lens. I hadn’t been expecting to be photographing wildlife at this location and had nearly come to the beach with only a 17-35. Luckily I’d decided otherwise and now the 270mm end of the Tamron was just what I needed.

I wasn’t too aware of what was going on behind me until the penguin had gone and I turned around to leave. It was then that I noticed that a large group of people had assembled behind me and had been photographing the penguins as well. One was a fellow photographer from my group who had, unfortunately, come to the beach with only a 60mm prime lens. He’d made do and gotten some nice shots but he certainly didn’t have as many options available to him as I had.

Here are a couple of shots — first, just as the penguin re-emerged after walking behind a large rock:

That shot’s cropped a bit, but it’s sharp enough to handle it. I mainly cropped it to get rid of some distracting gull poo in the foreground. Proof that you can’t control everything in the scene. The next shot is closer to full frame but is also cropped a small amount just to get rid of some visual noise around the edge of the frame and also to show the penguin a bit better at the small size required by this blog template:

I don’t generally like to crop photos after they are shot. Coming from a background of shooting transparency, I learned to crop in-camera. It was a necessity. I’m only recently embracing the ability to crop and re-frame images in Lightroom or Photoshop. Files captured by modern DSLRs are now large enough that there is some lee-way. You can crop an image down a bit and still have a reasonably large file that will be viable as a stock image. I continue prefer to “get it right” in-camera whenever possible, but it has become a welcome byproduct of digital photography that I can now tweak an image’s crop later to make it stronger. Especially in situations like this where time was limited and I wasn’t able to reposition myself or to get closer just to eliminate some distracting element in the foreground or background.

New Zealand’s Otago Peninsula

Add the Otago Peninsula to my list of favorite spots on earth. I made this image during a quick photo-stop on Highcliff Road. Actually, I think there would have been a mutiny had the driver not stopped. The scenery had been spectacular for several miles and the crowd of writers and photographers in the van was becoming vocal. Happily, one of the narrow, winding road’s very few turnouts appeared and we were allowed to pile out and make nuisances of ourselves for ten minutes or so. There’s something comfortably familiar and at the same time a bit other-worldly about New Zealand’s landscapes. It’s easy to understand why the Lord of the Rings movies were filmed here. How pleasant is this view? And yet, is that one crazy tree or what?

One of the stops for the day was Penguin Place, home of the Yellow-Eyed Penguin Conservation Preserve. According to their website, “Yellow Eyed Penguins are the world’s most endangered penguin, and live only in south east areas of New Zealand waters.” Penguin Place provides a safe breeding area for the penguins, which have struggled to survive since man arrived and introduced predators to New Zealand. Visitors can walk through a complex, maze-like series of covered trenches in order to reach viewing blinds where the penguins can be observed and photographed.

While I did see several penguins from the blinds, the best sighting I had on this day was of the penguin in that last photo. He was just off of the path, sunning himself on a grassy hillside. Our guide told us he was around one year old, and didn’t have the typical markings of an adult Yellow-Eyed Penguin yet. Still, he was a very cooperative model. And little did I know that I would have another penguin encounter the following day…

Stay tuned for the next post.

Operation Albatross

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The next posts will explore the Otago Peninsula on New Zealand’s South Island. Dunedin is located where the peninsula joins the mainland and at the far tip of the peninsula is the Royal Albatross Centre, where I was to play wildlife photographer for the afternoon and try and get at least one decent shot of a Royal Albatross. I say “play” at being a wildlife photographer because I have the utmost respect for photographers who specialize in this field and I know that my infrequent dabbles of an hour or two don’t even come close to the kind of commitment, stamina and determination that it actually takes to get a really beautiful wildlife shot.

The Royal Albatross is listed as an endangered species and Taiaroa Head, where the Royal Albatross Centre is located, is the only mainland breeding colony near human occupation. These are large birds with wingspans reaching 10 feet. They live mainly at sea, coming to land pretty much just to lay eggs and raise their young. If I remember correctly, I believe our guide said that they don’t visit land at all for the first five years of life.

The image above is not of an albatross colony, but of a group of Red Billed Gulls. These birds covered the hillside as we approached the Royal Albatross Centre and gave hope that our search for an albatross might be an easy one. Not that easy, we would come to learn. The Centre is a fantastic place for learning about the albatross and other regional wildlife, but as is usually the case with wildlife, some days are always better than others for viewing wild birds in their natural habitat. A good hike up a steep slope to a viewing area that had been made from a WWII bunker led to this view of our first albatross through some very scratched plexiglass:

Yeah.

That white shape on the left is a nesting albatross. The birds were just returning for the beginning of their nesting season but they were still few and far between. This was the only one we could spot and it was pretty clear that this was not going to be the way I was going to get my albatross shot today. Luckily there was a part two to this excursion and we next made our way to the Monarch and out into the Pacific.

I’ve been on a few boats like this for various whale-watching trips, etc., and I’ve learned a couple of things about shooting from them. One, take the longest glass you have because you’ll never be as close as you want (although the optimist in me tells me to keep a second body around my neck with a wide angle just in case we have a freak encounter and a whale pops up right next to the boat). Birds only enhance the requirement for long glass as I learned one long winter’s night in a blind on the Platte River in central Nebraska — but that’s another story. Lesson two, be prepared for a bumpy ride.

And today’s ride was a bit bumpy. Or maybe “rocky” and “roll-y” is a more apt description. Once out on the big water, our little boat was riding 9 foot swells like a Coney Island roller coaster. I tried to capture these swells in a photo, with limited success:

You can kind of see the sharp foreground swell with another, more distant, swell out-of-focus in the distance but you really can’t decipher it without some sense of scale. Oh well, trying to photograph that occupied my time until the albatross was spotted.

There had been a couple of sightings earlier that were more distant and it seemed that the birds were always moving away from us but, this time, I heard the captain say that there was an albatross on my side of the boat and he was coming toward us.

I had positioned myself in a narrow walkway on the side of the boat where I could push my lower back against a wall and have a foot out forward against the rail to give me some stability with my hands free. “Some” stability. Remember that we’re diving over swell after swell and anything put on a flat surface wouldn’t stay put for a second. I had also tried to reduce my top-heaviness by not bringing the full backpack. I’m primarily relying on my Nikon D7000 and the Tamron 18-270mm zoom. At the 270 end, it’s the largest glass I carry — the next closest being my Nikkor 80-200. With the smaller sensor of the D7000, the Tamron is the approximate equivalent of a 400mm lens. A true bird photographer would probably consider this to be just barely enough but it was all I had and I was making the most of it. I also appreciated the Tamron’s compactness and low weight. Hand-holding a fast, 400mm prime lens with all the weight that a fast lens brings would have been a challenge. The Tamron isn’t as fast as my 2.8 Nikkor, but I made up for this by increasing my ISO to 800 to get some of the shutter speed back that I was losing to a slower lens. At ISO 800, I was able to get a shutter speed of 1/2500th of a second at f/6.3. And that did the trick. It gave me a fast enough shutter to overcome the rocking of the boat and — maybe I forgot to mention this — the potential 75mph speed that the bird can achieve.

The Albatross appeared over a swell and, as predicted, headed toward us and slowly arced his path across the back of the boat. As it approached, I fired off several shots — trying to regain auto-focus a couple of times throughout the burst, just to make sure I’d get something sharp. This was another lesson I’d learned on a whale-watching excursion when a fluke appeared, beautifully backlit, and my autofocus slipped off and grabbed the background as the boat rocked and I ended up with a bunch of useless images of a fuzzy whale tail with a tack-sharp cliff in the background. Lesson learned.

This time I tried to concentrate on following the bird’s path and fire-fire-fire, re-check focus, fire-fire-fire, re-check focus, fire-fire-fire… and then… that was it. We had a couple more albatross sightings but none quite that close. Thanks to the Tamron 18-270, this albatross had been close enough that I got a few shots like these — the first only lightly cropped to straighten the horizon and the second cropped a bit more:

I’m not typically selling to a wildlife market. For my purposes, I just really want to have images in the file that help tell the story of a place. These albatross shots show the bird and a bit of the environment. That works. If someone needs a shot of a nest, eggs hatching, etc., I’m glad to leave that sale to the wildlife guys that have the patience to get those shots. It takes a lot of work on their part and I know I’m not going to compete with their images with what I get on a 2-hour boat trip. Still, I’m happy to have gotten the shots that I did and it was a great day to be out on the water enjoying this beautiful place. The Otago Peninsula is absolutely magnificent and I could have easily spent weeks there. Unfortunately, I only had a couple of days this time. I’ll show you more of those two days in the coming posts — as well as another spot where the Tamron saved me on a wildlife surprise.

Dunedin, New Zealand

Once my convention was over in Wellington, it was a short flight down to Dunedin on New Zealand’s South Island where my post-tour would begin. Still set at a whirlwind pace, at least the focus for me would now be photography — my convention responsibilities were now behind me. And at first glance, Dunedin was just the place to get started. The train station (above) was our first stop. Well, a farmers’ market that was being held at the station, actually. I always love shooting markets but I did find myself very distracted this time by the striking railroad station itself. I worked my way through the market stalls and spent a good amount of time exploring the architecture. Later in the afternoon, after a walking tour of downtown, the sky had cleared and I made a return trip for a few more shots like this one:

There are things I like about each — and actually think there might be some good black & whites in the cloudier set — but always like having different weather options in the files. You don’t always get that luxury when traveling through a region at high-speed like this but New Zealand seems to be much like Kansas in that, if you don’t like the weather, just wait a minute. It will change.

A few more from that downtown walk:


Much like Wellington, there were still plenty of hills and steep grades in Dunedin as seen by these rowhouses. Dunedin was settled by the Scottish as was evident by the statue of Robert Burns in the octagon, the city’s central “square”, and some of the grander architecture. According to Wikipedia, the name “Dunedin” came from the Scottish Gaelic name for Scotland’s capital, Edinburgh — “Dùn Èideann”. The gothic church above is the First Church of Otago which also seems to channel that Scottish influence.

Wellington, briefly

I was on a press trip in China a few years ago and heard our host describe our fast-paced schedule as “to appreciate the flower from a gallop”. Sometimes I feel that most of my life is lived that way. Always at a gallop. Certainly my few days in Wellington, New Zealand, fit that description. It was the core of the Society of American Travel Writers Annual Convention and I had several roles to play: I was finishing my term up as Chair of the Society’s Freelance Council, I was on the professional development committee helping to coordinate a few of the sessions on photography, I was helping with the judging and presentation of the winners for a “photo shootout” that took place just prior to the convention, and I was trying to glean some benefit for myself in the form of getting some stock images and making contacts with various writers and PR professionals. Sounds like a lot to do in four days, doesn’t it? I’m not complaining, however. I’ve gotten a lot out of the organization and I’m happy to contribute when I can as well. That said, I might have overdone it a bit this time. Live and learn.

The shot on the left sums up much of my time in Wellington — I saw glimpses of the city through windows as I passed from meeting room to meeting room. These coffee cups were set up for the attendees of my Freelance Council meeting one morning and I was somewhat relieved to see the rain outside as I felt that I maybe wasn’t missing quite so much that day afterall. On the right is a quick shot of Andrew McCarthy, actor-turned-travelwriter, who was our keynote speaker at the first day’s lunch. The shot at the top of this post was made at a reception the night before. I had taken a camera — just in case — and was relieved to see that one side of our venue opened to the waterfront when a beautiful sunset appeared. I missed out on some hors d’oeuvres that evening, but got a few nice shots.

Our final dinner and the presentation of the photo shootout winners was held at the Te Papa museum, above. An amazing place. Wellington is one of those great cities that deserves much more time than I was able to give it on this trip. I hope to return one day soon to explore further and to reconnect with my new Wellingtonian friends. But, for the next few posts we’ll be off to the South Island of New Zealand…

Shooting details with the Tamron 18-270

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I’ve neglected to mention that all of the photos from my last three blog posts — Glimpses of Auckland, Auckland Graffiti and Back from New Zealand — were taken with my new Tamron 18-270mm lens. As I had suspected, the wide range of focal lengths offered by that one small lens made it the perfect companion on those quick walks that I would take in the morning before breakfast or between sessions of my SATW Board meeting. I also took it to meals just in case something particularly photogenic was served, like these oysters on Waiheke Island:

When I travel for reasons other than purely photography, it’s always a trade off of when to take the gear and when to just focus on the meeting or whatever else might be the actual purpose of the trip. The thing is — you never know when an opening ceremony at a convention might include dancers in traditional dress or be held at a venue that has an amazing view of sunset over the bay. It’s not always practical to take a backpack full of gear and keep it shoved under the table while having dinner at a nice restaurant. For a while I made do with a pocket point-and-shoot for times like this but I was never entirely satisfied with my results. For this trip, I went with the Nikon D7000 and the Tamron 18-270mm lens. I even had video capabilities when needed.

The flowers at the top of this post and the detail shots below came from a couple of hours that I had to walk around the small village of Greytown, New Zealand. The weather was overcast and wide shots weren’t exactly tourism brochure worthy with those white skies, so I focused on details that kept the sky cropped out and took advantage of the nice, flat light. The Tamron came through for me again with its ability to focus close enough that there really wasn’t ever a shot I couldn’t get (I think Tamron specs out the minimum focus distance at just over 19 inches). The bokeh is nice as smooth as well.

Sure, there were other times on the trip when I had more time and freedom to photograph and I’d make use of nearly every lens and filter that I’d packed, but for those days that I had to tend to other business and still feel prepared for the occasional shot that presented itself, the D7000 and 18-270 combo never let me down.

Glimpses of Auckland, NZ

As I mentioned before, my real reason for being in Auckland, New Zealand, was to attend a Board meeting for the Society of American Travel Writers. Due to this, most of my time was unfortunately spent inside of hotel conference rooms but I took every opportunity to get out and explore when out of session. Each morning before breakfast I would grab a camera and take a walk — often through Albert Park which was just a few (steep!) blocks from the hotel. That’s where the photo above was taken, in part to prove that it was indeed Spring down under. That and I liked how the flower forms echoed the shape of Sky Tower.

For being such a long flight away — around 12 hours from LAX — New Zealand felt less foreign than many places I’ve been. The fact that they speak english helps of course, but the country was also settled at roughly the same time as the area where I have lived all my life. An 1860s building is old in New Zealand as it is here in Kansas. There aren’t a lot of ancient reminders around to let you know that you’re far from home.

That said, every now and then you’d run into something like this tree, the scale of which was altogether foreign in my terms (note the woman walking just behind the park bench for a size reference):

We’re looking for a shade tree for our side yard and what I wouldn’t give to have that baby! I don’t think I could wait the hundreds if not thousands of years it would take to reach that size, though.

I’ll end with a few more architectural shots from my morning walks and the last from the window of my room at the Sky City Grand Hotel that was located right at the base of the Sky Tower. With a landmark like that, it was no problem finding my way home from those walks.


Auckland graffiti

One of my first impressions of Auckland, NZ was how clean it was and how little graffiti I saw. Every now and then I’d spot an odd tag or two but, for the most part, graffiti seemed to take the form of larger, more organized murals. A little research since I’ve been home reveals that the city had undertaken a large-scale cleanup prior to the Rugby World Cup. Most graffiti was painted over but murals that had the permission of the property owners were spared, for the most part.

To some degree, the authorities seem to even sponsor graffiti as seen in this campaign for recruiting police officers (more here):

My favorite piece of art was one that I found in St Kevins’ Arcade — a building on the city’s funky K Road that has a walkway through to Myers Park. Here’s one small section of it:

According to Long White Cloud, this piece is the work of Cut Collective and is a recent addition to the street art scene in Auckland.

Back from New Zealand

Two weeks in New Zealand just flew by. I was there to attend the Annual Convention of the Society of American Travel Writers (SATW) held this year in Wellington. Prior to the Convention, I was in Auckland for the Society’s Board meeting. I’ve served as the Chair of the Freelance Council for the last two years — my term ended on the final night of the Wellington Convention. I’ve enjoyed my time on the Board immensely but also look forward to taking some time off to return more focus to my own freelance business. I have lots of thoughts floating around for tweaking my business model and will now have the time to start implementing some of those ideas. 2012 promises to be an exciting year. More on that as it happens.

Since I didn’t have time to post while in New Zealand, I’ll share images now as I go through post-processing. First up is a shot I took on Day One in Auckland. I had just landed that morning and took advantage of some rare free time to walk the city and get my bearings. This is a kinetic sculpture on the waterfront with Auckland’s iconic Sky Tower in the background.