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...
Read MoreSomething a little different this week for my Lost & Found blog - I don't talk about it so often here, but when I'm not being a photographer, sometimes I'm spending my time researching a silent-era film producer / director / actor from New Zealand, by the name of Rupert Julian.
I stumbled across the story of Rupert some ten years ago (or more, come to think of it), when I was watching the 1943 Phantom of the Opera DVD with the alternate audio commentary track on - y'know, as you do. A historian by the name of Scott MacQueen was talking about the production, and just threw in as a minor aside that 'of course, the 1925 silent version of the Phantom was directed by the son of a New Zealand sheep farmer - but that's a whole 'nother story!’
Read MoreWaitangi. 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...
Read MoreIt'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...
Read MoreJust 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.
Read MoreThis 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.
Read MoreThis 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!
Read MoreContinuing 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!
Read MoreNot 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...]
Read More'Whatever you do, don't go off the trail!'
That was the last thing the helpful lady at the information centre told me, before embarking on a walk for a couple of hours near Lake Placid, in upstate New York a few years ago. Don't go off the trail. Noted.
Oh, that - and it may get a bit marshy at one point...
Read MoreAs 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...
Read MoreToday'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!).
Read MoreThis week's Lost & Found is jumping back to a weekend in Taupo in 2007 - I was there to cover the launch of a (yet-to-be-completed) film about the life of Bruce McLaren, the great Kiwi grand prix driver, and founder of the McLaren Formula One team.
But, it turned out that my accreditation was for the whole weekend of A1 Grand Prix action, so I stayed - and this weekend, the winner of that race won the 24h of Le Mans, along with a Kiwi driver (and another Kiwi came second), so I thought it was worth taking a look at those images again to see what I found...
Read MoreToday'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.
Read MoreThis week's Lost & Found post is from my last Wellington Jazz Festival - who are kicking off again today, over in New Zealand!
Our major draw card in 2011 was a one-off concert with Sonny Rollins and his band at the Michael Fowler Centre. He may have been 81 (REALLY!?) at the time, but he put on a heck of a show - and as you'd expect from someone of his calibre, the band were top notch as well...
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