Thingomy.co.uk

I stayed in Queenstown just long enough to look around — nice place, but way too tourist oriented. They have a gondola up the side of the valley, with a bungi jump site at the top, I spent a good deal of time getting photos of the bungi setup, and yet more time taking photos of the view.

Tech bit: I did a panoramic HDR shot, it’s going to take some considerable effort to put together, and some ingenuity to get the HDR thing to work. The allignment is the simple bit, but once I export it as a multi layer photoshop file, I’m not really too sure what to do with it. It must have been a good 30 shots at 3 diferent exposures to get diferent stuff in DR. I took a load of bungi jumps from the same viewpoint as well, so I should be able to stich one of them into it as well.

Up the gondola:

I took a look around some of the more interesting parts of Queenstown, and sat on the beach (pictured above) to take sunset photos, the results wern’t spectacular, but worth posting:

The road north, including a really large center pivot irrigator:

Aouraki Mt Cook, I’m informed that it is very rare to see it exposed like this, even the bus driver was out taking photos:

I met up with some folks that I knew on the way north and stayed with them for a few days, they had some friends that were nutters, especially the one in the driver’s seat with the hat on:

I’m perticularly proud of the first one of the kids (6109), it’s technically a very good shot, I didn’t even crop it.

Millford sound deserves it’s own post, it was the bit of NZ that I was really interested in from the start — I would have liked a week to peruse the area, but that’s tricky — there is always walking tracks, but doing that in a fjord is one way to quickly give your self really sore feet.

This is a really stunning fjord, similar to some of the best found in norway, it was excavated by a mother of a glacier in the ice age, and is now filled with sea water half way up.

We joined a bus that had just come down from queenstown, so even got a long lie. The bus took the rather long trip into fjordland, and through the Homer tunnel, which is a really impressive and remarkably old feat of engineering. Kiwi Ex had managed to negotiate a 2 hour cruse to the mouth of the fjord and back, with a free bufet meal included — the meal was more of a pain than anything, you were eating when you should be looking at scenery, although the route in and out was the same.

I decided that I had to do somthing to mitigate the lack of my only wide lens for somthing as mamoth as millford, so my solution was panoramic images, I have good software for stiching them, but not with me. This means that I took a stackload of images, none of which are really usefull untill I get home.

In the middle of the boat trip we stopped by an underwater observatory — think floating inverted lighthouse.

So The pics that are usable:

I rapidly left Queenstown knowning I would be back a few days later.

I was booked onto another excursion around the Invercargill, Duneden area. Varius things went wrong including the weather; some people I was with; and my primary camera lens breaking so I spent most of the trip pissed off damp, cold and uninterested.

We were told that one of the places we visited (I believe invercargill, but I may be mistaken) was described by one famous musician that visited the area as “the arsehole of the world” and I can see why, I’m sure it’s wonderfull in good weather when one is happy, but I have to agree with him.

The following are the highlights:

Sea Lyons, trying to work out who’s boss:

A fairly basic farm tour involving sheep sheering which as far as I’m concerned is a chore, so I stuck to photography.

some random scenery and other stuff seen along the way.

Note that the Cadburies tour sucked goats — it lasted 45 minutes, and could have been done in about 5, they didn’t even bother showing us the factory.

So anyway, this took me up to Te Anou — nice place, lots of souvenir shops. Notably however it had no shops capable of replairing camera bits.

For those interested in the tech bits: my 17-70 zoom (35mm equivelent: 25-105) developed an issue of it’s zoom ring jaming randomly and making rattling noises when shaken. To avoid any further damage and incase picture sharpness was being affected by loose optics it has been retired to the bottom of my bag untill I do a warantee return from home. My second widest lens is a 30/1.4 (35mm eqiv: 45mm) this is not very wide … bummer.

For those less technically inclined, I can still take photos, but not of really big things… like mountains or fjords or cliffs; all of which I know I would encounter the next day in abundence.