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 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 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 MoreThe work I've been doing recently with Apocalypse Theatre and Pinchgut Opera got me thinking about what I try to achieve in production stills photography; so I thought I'd have a look at a show that epitomises my favourite kind of images from this sort of work - New Theatre of Riga's production, The Sound Of Silence, which I photographed for the New Zealand International Arts Festival in 2010...
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 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...
Read MoreThe Wellington Jazz Festival of 2009 was quite a different beast from the previous festivals I've mentioned in the last couple of Lost & Found posts - this time, the management of the New Zealand International Arts Festival took on the programming and running of it, so the scale of production and calibre of performers was substantially different...
Read MoreAs 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...
Read MoreFollowing on from last week's post, today's Lost & Found is from the 2003 Wellington International Jazz Festival - which is only weeks away from its next event, in early June.
Read MoreI was very sorry to hear yesterday of Jack Body's passing, in Wellington; he was a New Zealand composer of great talent (though he'd never admit to it himself), but also boundless energy and irresistible enthusiasm. Whenever I saw him, he always had a project on the go currently, and invariable one or two more waiting in the wings for when he had a free moment. (I honestly have no idea how he found time to write music, as well!)
Read MoreWith the Wellington Jazz Festival set to return in just a few weeks, I thought I'd have a look back at a few of the earlier editions for the next few Lost & Found posts. I was their photographer for a few of the events - 2002-04, and on its rebirth in 2009 when the NZ International Arts Festival produced it for the first time...
Read MoreIn 2004, I was asked by the Arts Foundation of New Zealand to make a series of portraits of their Laureate award winners for the year - a disparate group of people from around the country, who had been nominated quite without their knowledge to receive this new award. They got a phone call out of the blue one day to say they'd won, there was no application process or requirement to produce work and report back - they'd simply been chosen because of their contribution to the country's culture.
Read MoreThis 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)!
Read MoreAs 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...
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