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Redwoods Treewalk at night

One of the best things I’ve done in Rotorua is the Redwoods Nightlights treewalk. Due to it being a dusk I choose not to take my big camera and tripod. I couldn’t have used a tripod anyway as they want you to keep moving along. I do wish I had carried my camera with me as the experience was really photogenic. It’s a 40 minute walk floating around 10 to 20 metres above the forest floor. It spans across 28 suspensions brights and 27 platforms. You can see a couple of people stood on a platform to the right of this photograph. This photograph is a little blurred. Taken on my iPhone 12, I nearly didn’t publish it here. Certainly I need to do this experience again with my Sony camera.

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Trails of light through Napier

This is a style of photography I haven’t tried for a few years. It took half an hour of standing around and waiting for traffic to come from north to south along Marine Parade. This roundabout is in the heart of Napier. You can see The Dome behind. The road to the right is Browning Street. Most of the cars were coming up Browning Street or coming towards the camera along Marine Parade. Light trail photography can be quite unpredictable. Especially when the lights are coming from moving vehicles that you don’t know where they’re heading. With headlights being so much brighter than the red of trail lights, too many cars coming towards the camera don’t make for a pleasing photograph. In the end this was a motorhome heading around the roundabout and south along the parade. It was a 5 second long single exposure.

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Ātea a Rangi

I had originally called this archway at night. It was taken a night, pitch dark in fact. But this is an educational star compass. It’s called Ātea a Rangi. It was so dark I had to use a flashlight to get the camera to focus. Sadly the sky was overcast. I’ll have to try again on a clear night. It would be incredibly spectacular to capture a rising Milky Way behind Ātea a Rangi. Designed and constructed in collaboration with Māori celestial navigation experts and landscape architects. The compass is a classroom that teaches students how to navigate by the stars. It’s set in coastal plantings around tidal waterways that reclaim this precious environment, restoring habitat and biodiversity. Signage helped me learn more about the history and significance of the site.

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Milky Way above the Church of the Good Shepherd

This is one of my best photographs of the Milky Way and the church in the foreground makes it all the more special. Yet, I still have unfinished photographic business on the shores of Lake Tekapo. Especially when it comes to better astrophotography, landscapes at night and the Church of the Good Shepherd. My vision for this location is a higher up view with a wide lens. Combining my previous Lake Tekapo with Church of the Good Shepherd photograph. Where you can see the lake behind the church with this photograph of the stars above. This would probably be taken from the MacLaren Footbridge. I tried that on this night but the wind made it impossible to get a sharp enough photograph of the church or a long enough exposure to capture the Milky Way. I could use Photoshop to combine the two images but I would rather capture the one photograph in the camera. That will have to wait for another visit to the beautiful Mackenzie country.