It was already dusk when we arrived, and the sun was setting as we found the beach for the first time. Through a gap in the hills it appeared, a small river snaking its way to the sea; and it was there that the wind hit us.

I hadn't seen many beaches like this in New Zealand before; the hard surface felt more like icy snow to walk on, sometimes strong enough to support your weight, other times fragmenting underfoot...

Waitangi. The word is weighted with meaning, in New Zealand at least, as the treaty between the Crown and the chiefs of the many Maori tribes was signed there in 1840, or at least a number of signatures were made there; and it's also home to annual celebrations on Waitangi Day (6 Feb) each year, which are sometimes controversial, or marred by protests against the government of the time.

But it's also now a scenic reserve, open to the public most of the year; and, in 2006 on a road trip with my parents (who were visiting en route back to Canada from a trip to Australia), I drove up north from Auckland to the Bay Of Islands area to see it...

It's a funny feeling being able to take a picture of a train, FROM the train itself; but sometimes, it happens.

Last summer I was aboard the Rocky Mountaineer, travelling from Vancouver to Calgary on some of the original tracks laid by the founders of the Canadian National Railway, and took this image out the side of our car of the front of the train heading off into the distance, and dragging us along with it...

Just a quick entry in the Lost & Found files today - this one was captured on film (yes, film!) a few years ago when I owned a wonderful camera, the Hasselblad X-Pan, which I've written a bit about before.

The great thing about those was that they were compact rangefinders, like a Leica - but also that they took double-frame panoramic images right in the camera. None of this digital sweep-panorama iPhone stuff, you actually saw the frame the way it was going to be!

But gradually, I was absorbed into the digital world, and when I found a digital rangefinder - at that time, the Epson R-D1s - I sold the X-Pan; and I haven't had a film camera since.

This week's Lost & Found is a perfect example of why I started posting these - images I was very happy with, but that only I have seen. And even saying that, I saved them to my hard drive that week, and never looked at them again until now!

The 18th Sydney Biennale was held in July 2012, before I moved here from New Zealand; but while here on a visit I took a ferry to Cockatoo Island to see both the site and the installed works. It was a thoroughly impressive collection - and a beautiful sunny day, right in the middle of winter, which Sydney does very well I must say.

This week's Lost & Found is from a trip I won (on Twitter!) to Cairns quite by accident, when I was living in Wellington in 2010. If I recall correctly, Air New Zealand was adding direct flights to Cairns for the first time, and asked people to tweet something about how they'd get there. I sent a slightly snide reply (along the lines of 'in a plane, duh!') without actually intending to enter, and somehow or other wound up winning!

Continuing from last week's Lost & Found, here's a quick glimpse of another part of Canada's east coast, Nova Scotia. I didn't have a very solid mental picture of the Maritimes before going there in 2010, so of course there were surprises - I certainly didn't expect such lush forests!

Not long after visiting the Adirondacks in 2010 (as seen in last week's Lost & Found post), I went to Newfoundland for a few days, just to see what it was like.

[Actually, I wanted to go to Iceland that year, but something something volcano something something, so Newfoundland and Nova Scotia were the backup plan...]

As it's Canada Day (if you factor in the date line, of course), I thought I'd post something from one of my visits back to 'the old country' where I grew up for today's Lost & Found.

This is from an area about 3h north of Toronto on the Great Lakes - Georgian Bay, to be specific, which is part of Lake Huron but practically a lake unto itself by any normal standards of measurement...

Today's Lost & Found is going back to single images for a change - though in fact this is a stitched panorama of several frames, so in a way it's more than one!  I was on a driving holiday in the Northland region in 2006, when we passed through Opononi (former home of Opo, the Friendly Dolphin!).  

Today's Lost & Found is a quick exercise in contrasting weather - the same scene in New Zealand's South Island just outside Queenstown, taken with the same camera & lens combination, just three days apart over the Christmas holidays last year.

As I mentioned in last week's Lost & Found, the Wellington Jazz Festival is about to happen again in a couple of weeks - so I thought I'd have a look back at some of the earlier editions when I photographed the event for them...

This is the third instalment of my Lost & Found series dedicated to Dead Letters, a beautiful short film I worked on nearly ten years ago now - but the more I dug into the files from this one six-day shoot, the more I liked what I saw (if I may say so myself)!

As I mentioned in last week's Lost & Found, I didn't need a lot of convincing to work on Dead Letters, the short film we made in 2005.  The film follows Ngaire (Yvette Reid), whose job it is to take letters from families during World War II and transfer them to microfilm before sending them overseas, to the New Zealand forces in Europe at the time...

In mid-2005, my friend Gemma Gracewood got in touch to say she was working on a short film called Dead Letters, with fellow producer Fraser Brown and director Paolo Rotondo, which was going to be shot in Wellington - and would I be interested in doing some stills for them...?

Today's Lost & Found images come from an event I was just attending, rather than working on - the Cuba Street Carnival night parade in Wellington, New Zealand...

As I mentioned in last week's post, this Lost & Found image is from a trip to Methven in the South Island of New Zealand I did back in 2003 for a magazine in NYC; because the story was about skiing, it seemed important to try to capture some of the mountains around the town, even though the season wasn't right...

In early 2003, I got an email from a magazine in New York, wondering if I was available to pop down to the South Island for a couple of days, to find some images to accompany a story about skiing in New Zealand. Well, who am I to say no to such a thing?