Thingomy.co.uk

After a fairly considerable amount a galivanting around all over the place, including :

kiwi bus to Kiakoura;
seal swimming;
the train and ferry to wellington;
kiwi bus to toupo;
intercity to Gisborne;
road trip to Rotorua;
2 nights in a very comfy tent.

I’m now gettign ready to leave the country. I take the Kiwi bus to Aukland tomorrow, and fly soon after.

I am very happy, I have gotten what I have come here for, and still have stuff for next trip. I’m now ready to get on with stuff at home.

For the record, the seal swimming was fantastic, it involved 2 piece 7mm wetsuits, and snorkels. i was a couple of meters from a seal a number of times, and got a good look them loads of times.

Very few photos recently, I’m taking time to chill and see people, and there has been little of photogenicity of late.

I am very intregued to see that sony have relieced a couple of more cameras with some really interesting technology in them. I will be watching this space with baited breath. Even more interesting to me is the fact they have also mentioned that they will be reliecing a new flash gun, it’s goign to be very interesting when it comes out.

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.

Forgot to mention yesterday that the caves thing was in Waitomo, and i’m currently in Toupo.

Yesterday wasn’t hugely eventfully, I went out to get lunch and a cash machine, while waiting for the cash machine I was standing around a nice square in the middle of the town, and a random Chinese lass came up to me and started of a conversation, I should have known that it wasn’t going to be good seeing as it started with “you have very nice beard and mustashe where you from?” (and no there was no comma in the middle) before I know where I was she had tried to flog me some book about the philosophical background of martial arts, then bloody well tried to guranga me, I told the cow to sod off. So after that rather amusing incident, I went for a walk.

lake Toupo is the largest fresh water body in austrelasia, and was formed in an eruption several thousand years ago. there was another smaller explosion later, in roman times, and they reported that the sky turned red over europe, it has a surface area of 616 square kilometres, so we arn’t speaking a small explosion here…

anyway, the overflow is a river called the Waikato River, which at times has a flow that will fill an olimpic swimming pool in 2 seconds. there is a path that leads along it, and this is where I chose to take a walk.

There is a hot water spring a few K out of town, it forms a stream, and pours into to the river. where the 2 meet, there is an area that one can go swimming in hot water, I decided to investigate this, it actually turned out to be pretty lousy, as there is some hot water pools (note, they are hot, not warm) and a load of cold water. after swilling about there for an hour, getting both bored and sunburnt, I continued along the path up to huka falls.

Think of a fairly low waterfall, a few meters at most, with an olimpic swimming pool going over it every 2 seconds, well, it’s awesome. I stopped for a while and took a load of photos… tech stuff:

I took a panoramic, that turned out be about 8 shots wide by 3 high, I used my 17-70 at about 30mm. Unfortunately I screwed up and left it at 10MP, so used half a memory card. the exposure was crazy as there was direct sunlit white water with subtle green tones in it in the foreground and forest in shadow in the background, along with clouds and blue sky. I decided to exposure bracket it, by a little over 3 stops, taking some in the middle as well. that and the fact the water was moving, means it’s going to be really weird to put together, but if I pull it off it will be really cool.

Tomorrow I go on the “east as” trip, it should be really cool, I’ve been told that it’s the best bit that Kiwi do, so it should be nice (or sweet as, as a kiwi would say). It’s the outback of NZ, I don’t expect to get mobile coverage let alone internet while out there, so see you folks in 4 days. I believe that we sleep on random mouri families floors for much of it.

Having escaped form both alcatraz and the shitehold that is LA, I boarded a 747 and zipped across the pacific.

This hostel has skype, vacilities, so if anyone wats a call, say so.

LA airport is also a dump BTW, a few duty free shops selling the usual suspects, and one or 2 food places, many newspaper shops, but edinburgh’s shopping is streets ahead. The fact they are in the middle of major refurb work doesn’t help things either.

I got completelly turned around over timezones and things, added to that the air hostesses woke us up at 4:30 local time to give us a breakfast. when i say turned around, I don’t mean jetlag, I mean really confused.

I got some post cards sorted out in the US, then forgot to post the buggers, so i have 2 postcards with us stamps on them, in NZ. I’m tempted to post them in order to see a confused looking postman.

America was certainly worth doing. If I do it again, there will be a longer amtrak session, likelly a 30 day pass, and i will be organising ot meet people on it, not at thier place.

In other news I’ve just found that myblog doesn’t render properly in IE6, which is slightly amusing.

– only photgraphy giberish to follow–
I found a load a small photography shops in sanfran, and managed to score a genuine Kenko 2x TC (wibbly cammera bit) for about half the price it should have been. I was taken a back when I said “I’ll think about it” and he started haggling with me, I wasn’t really trying very hard as I really niether needed it nor perticularly wanted it. I paid just over 50 quid for it.

I found some real junk with sales pitch in other places, wide angle adaptors — “what is vignetting? … oh yes of course you get the fish eye effect. To get rid of that all you have to do is zoom in a little. he tried ot add an 82mm uv filter for free too, and you know what that does on a “10mm” lens. I didn’t even check for CA, but I imagine it would have been dire. the distortion certainly was.

I finally had a chance to get out and about and take photos.

This consited of a walk down to the local river, and some of the surounding landscape, I will let other people discuss details of the plant stuff that’s going on here, I got about as far as “oooh, pretty colours”.

Some of the more notable encounters were a squirel that I ended up about 6 feet from, a world class collection of water lillies and some really cool butterflies and other bugs.

Below are some of the shots I took, the photographers among you will notice that most of them seem to be taken at a rather long folcal length, and there are many macro shots in there, that would be owing to the purcase of my new favourate lens, the Minolta 100mm f2.8 Macro RS D — more on this later.

Can I make a special request that people feed back on how this post looks from where you are viewing it from, as I’m testing out some new ways of doing things in this post.

There are more (about 50 more) and larger copies of these here (7 images follow)

I finally managed to get ot edinburgh, and find a computer that works, this involved fixing cabages internet.

Between sleep deprivation, the boat and some unfamiliar suroundings, I havent quite recovered yet, and my balance is still a little off.

I went to a Beltane[www.beltane.org random pagan festival that I do photography as part of] party last night and had much fun, the 2 highlights were:
the processional drummers doing thier act — the feeling of your ribs bouncing off each other in time to a drum beating is somthing that you just can’t ignore;
and the chance to get a hold of the new Carl Ziese 135/1.8 lens that Twotruths has bought — very impressive piece of glass — I want one, completly useless to me, as it weighs about a kilo tho.