Using vintage lenses on a modern camera

It has been a while since I updated this blog, this was partly because just as lockdown started, I decided to switch camera systems and I have been getting used to my new camera. CameraS. I did end up getting quite a few of them, and I didn’t quite get rid of my old ones. My Canon 5DSr is still in my possession, lumbering old dear, because it takes astoundingly good photos when the circumstances are right, but I traded in a lot of kit to switch to Fujifilm mirrorless cameras, and I now have an X-T4, and X-T3, an X-A5, two only partly working Fuji bridge cameras, and a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye, which I have had since I was about 10.

In case this looks like a good example of photographer ‘flex’ (I hate that word but I’ve got to modernise and apparently it means ‘bragging’, but, like, new, for yoof), I should point out that the two bridge cameras are pretty much ornaments, the Kodak Brownie hasn’t been used since I was 12 and the very small one at the front is a USB. Which doesn’t work.

I know you’re thinking - which camera did he take this photo with? The one on the far right. I used a 10 second timer, I framed the shot, set the timer, pressed the shutter button, and then carefully placed the camera in the picture, and hey presto!

The interesting thing about Fujifilm cameras, is they’re designed to appeal to old fogeys like me who remember classic SLR cameras, and like all those buttons, but they have an astonishing amount of technology under the bonnet. And at the end of the day take very nice pictures.

The other interesting thing is that they’re a very easy introduction to using old, vintage lenses, because of all those dials. I have a friend who is cautiously interested in using vintage lenses, so I said I’d do a blog post for him, and get back into updating my long-quiet website.

I barely knew what I was doing when I started to get interested in classic lenses, but fortunately there are some special interest forums on Facebook, and I got a lot of advice about how to get started.

You have to use adapters to fit the lens to the camera, and I ended up buying 3 lenses that all were an M42 fit, so that I could use the same M42 to Fuji X adapter. This is what the first lens looks like, complete with adapter.

Carl Zeiss Jena Flektogon 35mm f2.8 lens

This lens was made in 1989, the year that the Berlin Wall came down. Each of the lenses I bought has a bit of history. This one was made in the DDR, and originally sold to someone in Eastern Europe. I know that because it’s called a Carl Zeiss Jena lens and Carl Zeiss also had a West German factory, and retained rights over the name, so lenses produced for the West were just called aus Jena. This lens is known for its sharpness, and although it’s a classic lens and they’re usually cheap, the price has gone up accordingly with it’s reputation.

Carl Zeiss Sonnar Jena 135mm f3.5 lens

This lens was made in 1976, the year Concorde first flew. It is generally rated as ‘quite a good lens’, usually in slightly disparaging tones, I think that may be ‘in comparison to other Carl Zeiss lenses’. I really like it, it is very small compared to modern 135mm lenses, coming in at just 5” tall, with the adapter attached. I also compared this to a couple of modern lenses, a 50-140mm Fuji zoom and a Samyang 135mm f2 lens, both of which are legendary for image quality, and stopped down to f8, they’re pretty good. Rather too good, actually, as I’d just spend a fair amount of money getting the only Fuji-fit Samyang 135mm lens I could find, from Florida… (they’re very good for astrophotography)

And a quick comparison with those other two sharp lenses, the first image is from the Fujifilm XF 50-140mm f2.8 WR OIS Lens, the second from the Samyang 135mm f2 ED UMC Lens, and the third from the Carl Zeiss 135mm lens. All shot at their optimum aperture, f8.

And finally…

Helios 44-2 58mm f2 lens

This lens was made in 1983, the year that car seatbelts became compulsory in the UK. There were many variations of Helios 44-2. The lens was based on a Carl Zeiss Biotar optical design, and my particular model was the 5th model, made at the KMZ Belomo factory in Belarus. There are differences in the model ranges that span the producution lifecycle from 1958 to the 1990s, and there are also significant differences in build quality. You can tell this particular model number because of the green, red and yellow lettering around the barrel, the name ‘Helios’ is in cyrillic, Гелиос, and because of the logo for the KMZ factory which reflected how the lens elements sat together. This model represented 15% of all production and was one of the most highly recommended models. I found all this out by way of a very helpful video produced by a Ukrainian blogger and camera expert, Roman, on his site RetroFoto House.

So I set to, looking for one, and eventually found one, being sold on eBay by another Ukrainian, trading under the name of Artemstore. It was the first time I’d bought anything on eBay, and I was apprehensive about buying one abroad, but there was nothing of any quality in the UK that I could find. The Ukraine’s tracked post system has to be experienced to be believed, they brought new meaning to the term ‘snail-mail’ but it eventually arrived 7 weeks later.

It has a very odd aperture ring, right at the front of the lens, it works quite differently to a modern lens. To set an aperture of f4, you turn the front dial around until it clicks on f4, but this still lets you open up the aperture blades to anything lower than f4, that means you can open up the lens to let light into the camera to focus, lenses and cameras being fully manual when this production run started.

The Helios 44-2 was most famous for the background bokeh, which had a tendency to swirl around the centre of the frame, and many classic lenses based on the formula also follow this -some classic enthusiasts flip the front element over because this accentuates this feature.

The effect is surprisingly hard to replicate, and works better on a full-frame camera like the Canon 5DSr. To get it to work, you have to divide your photo into thirds; the subject has to be one third of the total focal distance from the camera, and the highlights you’re trying to swirl have to be two thirds from the total focal distance.

However other elements of the lens that have made it so popular among classic enthusiasts are its colour rendition, and lack of chromatic abberation, quite unusual in a time when f2 was a pretty wild minimum aperture.

The first two images in this gallery are taken with the lens fitted onto a Canon 5DSr, the rest of them are taken with a combination of a Fuji X-T3, X-H1 and X-T4

Travels - Hong Kong and Home

IMG_1510.jpg

And finally, after a few days in Wellington, we head back to the UK, stopping off at Hong Kong again. You know how sometimes if you’ve been travelling around a bit, you decide you’re going to just splurge out (I think that’s the term) and book just one really expensive hotel for the last bit, I wonder if there is some rule that states that it will always be less than the perfect experience.

Allow me to introduce you to the Hotel Grand Harbour Kowloon. I have changed the name to preserve some anonymity. But only slightly.

Now there are two potential ways to run a hotel with a 5 star rating and obscene prices. The first is you go all out to make sure the guests have an absolutely flawless experience, are treated like royalty and you are made to feel as though you are just born into this lifestyle. The second is to maintain an air of haughty grandeur and somehow convey to the guests that they’re LUCKY to be allowed to stay in the hotel.

Following the first concept, there are free things, like free wi-fi, chocolates on the bed, a trouser press, a bowl of fruit, fresh flowers, rose petals strewn in the bedroom even. The second concept, a noticeable absence of free things. And there are spiteful little notes telling you that the room fridge is for chilling HOTEL MINIBAR DRINKS ONLY and requesting that hotel guests do not put their own drinks in there. There is no iron or ironing board, you have to avail yourself of the laundry service at a price that makes throwing your clothes away and just buying new ones a real option. The hair dryer accepts banknotes. When you roll back the bedsheets there’s a discreet note on the pillow asking patrons if they have any intention of dying in the night, could they please sleep on the floor. OK, maybe that’s not quite true.

There was a sort of stark, unfriendly efficiency to the place, which however did not extend to ensuring rooms were available for guests, even though they may have been booked some six weeks earlier. This caused them some problems and, in a stay lasting three days we moved twice, which hardly left any time for seeing Hong Kong. I did raise this with the General Manager at the time and apparently they are unique in that rooms advertised for sale on Booking.com weren’t necessarily ‘there’ when you arrived. I do sympathise with their situation. The hotel has 555 of them. It is entirely possible that they lose a few from time to time.

The next morning we went down to the Cafe in the hotel and had two cappuccinos and a couple of panini and it came to something around £50. That evening we went a few yards outside the hotel and had a full meal in a restaurant for £17.

The air of haughty grandeur persisted for the duration of our stay, however I did take some pleasure in pointing out to the General Manager that their fire safety signage was inadequate - you couldn’t tell which way the fire exit was when you stepped out of your room, even without any smoke, and the televisions also had bare wires hanging out the back and fizzed slightly. So lets see, 555 rooms, probably something like 55 floors, and it’s on record that a customer has raised an issue with inadequate fire safety…

They had seven people to show you to the front door when you checked out. SEVEN. They were stood approximately two feet from each other. They all made the same sweeping gesture with their right hand - it was like watching doormen do synchronised swimming.

This has absolutely nothing to do with cameras, has it - but it has a lot to do with annoying men - mainly me in this instance. In fact, if you type ‘annoying photography blog’ into Google, you’ll see I’m third on the list, out of fifty four million, nine hundred thousand hits. I am MORE ANNOYING than 54,900,000 other things on the internet. I told my partner and he was horrified. “Are you upset?” he asked. He’d forgotten the name of this website. Far from it - I’ve taken a fundamental principle from my day job which is that if you’re not annoying somebody, you’re probably not doing your job right.

That said, on to some photos, our last foreign city before our final flight home.

The hotel was situated in Kowloon, but a fairly inaccessible bit of it, overlooking what used to be Hong Kong International Airport (Kai Tak), known worldwide for its terrifying landing approaches between tower blocks and a 30% degree turn just before you land.

The old airport runway has been replaced with sports facilities, a go cart track, and a golf course, all of which are considerably less exciting then landing there was in the old days. You can see it in this picture, it’s the long flat building to the right.

You think I’m exaggerating? This picture, of Checkerboard Hill, where the pilots had to make that right turn, should speak a million words.

checkerboard hill.jpg

This is not my photo but it has been reproduced so many times I can’t identify the copyright on it.

So, this part of Kowloon was heavily residential, with the typical tiny Hong Kong apartments rising into the path of oncoming jets. They use bamboo for external scaffolding. Apparently this is very practical in a city with very little room - its light, and it can be cut to size and transported very easily. And apparently if you fall off it, well, it doesn’t feel like such a big deal.

They don’t just use it for tweaking their aircon units and fitting a new window box. They use it for skyscrapers too. If you doubt this, check out the Panasonic building (Honk Kong Island) in the following photograph. If you click on the image and expand it, you’ll see the ends of the bamboo poles. I read up on this and the thing that scared the bejesus out of me is that the walkways are just placed onto the structure, not tied onto it.

This part of Kowloon had a fake ocean liner in the middle of the street. A sort of themed shopping centre which was a bit odd. It was pretty convincing but the reason I knew it was fake is that they don’t build many cruise liners out of concrete.

We also checked out a market. Each floor was dedicated to a particular area. My partner’s pescaterian (that means a vegetarian who doesn’t quite have the commitment to take the final plunge and still eats fish) so we managed the vegetable section, and the fish section, thankfully not walking past anything that was being cut up alive. They seem to have a completely different approach to animal sentience in Hong Kong.

We wandered into the Pets section but didn’t stay long...

OK so that’s a joke. We didn’t go into the meat section just in case we encountered animals we would keep as pets (I once had a pet tarantula so the odds were pretty high). And no, they don’t eat dogs, it’s illegal in Hong Kong (since 1950), but you can get horse meat sashimi, snake soup and blood tofu, and yes, to answer your question, it is. Rather defeats the purpose of tofu in my view and I imagine it has probably freaked out the occasional unwary vegetarian.

After scooting pretty quickly out of the market, vanilla tourists that we are, we then went to the 118 storey International Congress Centre. First of all we stood at ground level, looking at the height of the residential buildings in the complex and wondering how anybody could be comfortable living in anything so high, especially if your flat is in the ‘bridge’ area between the two columns.

Then we went up the International Commerce Centre, the tallest building in Hong Kong, to the Sky 100 Observatory, and looked down on the same buildings we’d just looked up at. We were so high I think I could almost see my house from there…

These are the last pictures from Hong Kong.

So, the end of a very long day, a great deal of it spent sitting down - I had finally learnt the secret of travelling with an 11kg camera bag - we headed back to Hong Kong International Airport, and caught the flight home.

The international venues are all in the past now. From here on in, it’s duck photos desperately trying to be interesting.

These two were quite pleased to see us though…

Until the next time…

Travels - The Glittering Sands of New Plymouth

Yes, I know, they’re not particularly glittering. The thing is, they ARE.

Back Beach.

See only in New Zealand would they have such a surfeit of beautiful beaches that when they get one like this they just call it ‘Back Beach’. I think this is something pretty deep rooted in the Kiwi Psyche, because if you look at the Maori names for places, they’re often pretty down to earth. Maunganui - Big Mountain. Ruapehu - two explosions. Taranaki - Shining Mountain. I’m not meaning to be disrespectful by the way, apparently you can’t rely 100% on breaking down place names into their component parts to get their original meaning, but as Ruapehu is an active volcano, you can see where that may have come from.

Back to the subject, or back to Back Beach. The sand is black, but it’s not just plain black, it glitters. And as I found out, it is extremely difficult to capture in a photograph, as the camera just can’t quite believe what it’s seeing and just thinks sand = sort of browny gold.

The following picture has been heavily worked on in Photoshop to try to get a sense of what this feels like ‘real’.

Moody, innit?

Although it looks isolated there were loads of people using this beach, walking dogs and stuff, very friendly people too.

I walked on this beach twice, once with my partner and his sister, and then a second time, when they went off for a coffee and I decided to nip back and take pictures (not only do I find it difficult to take pictures OF people, I find it difficult to take pictures when People are Around. It’s a wonder I take any at all).

On the second visit, I got from about 2 miles behind this photo, to the bottom of the pointy rock in the background, Paritutu Rock, and just at the point where I was furthest from the car I got a phone call to say they were done.

I drove back, thinking I could find my way back without Sat Nav and do you know, New Plymouth is a lot more complicated than it first looks. I ended up on this short, wide, and incredibly straight road with lots of airplanes on it and people waving and screaming at me. Don’t know what the hell was going on there.

Anyway I eventually found my way back.

Oh we laughed. Well they did. Until I drove them back of course. Well, there’s a lot to think about - indicator stalk on the wrong side of the steering wheel, automatic transmission, a parking button rather than a plain old brake. And of course they drive on the other side of the road to the UK.

What? They DON’T?

Well my travel tale is almost done. Back down to Wellington for a few days, and then back to the UK via Hong Kong, so a bit more to blog about that. Then after that I think it will be back to blogging about insect photos and stuff.

And a confession for those of you who don’t realise it, I am writing this some time after I got back. There’s obviously a downside to this. Some of you may be idly wondering what will happen next - will I suffer a ghastly accident, perhaps a Cathay Pacific plane dismantling itself at 30,000 ft because it couldn’t cope with the undeclared weight of all those passenger cabin bags that were over 7 kgs, ahem… think of all those little bits of drama I’ve been trying to build in to make this slightly more readable…. I’m afraid you now have the disappointment of knowing that I MADE IT.

But look on the bright side - you’ve also missed the part when I got back and had to go back to Real Life, a Job, the UK, Brexit, Donald Trump, Laundry. And Jesus, I was moaney for that month. Nobody needed to hear that.

And I confess I have genned up on Employment Law in New Zealand and I did ask a few Kiwis while I was over there what the general population would think of an Englishman telling them all how to manage people, would they think Uppity Pom Go Back To Your Own Country? This is currently very similar to the prevailing view in the UK. People over here seem to want everybody to go back to their own country. This is quite a tricky proposition as we are a nation of immigrants and if we took it literally, the Anglo-Saxons would be back off to the ancient homeland in Germany and we’d be left with a handful of pureborn Celts with an awful lot of lawn mowing to do.

However, all the kiwis I spoke to about the possibility of a stuck up Englishman telling them all how to do stuff were surprisingly nice about it, the couple in Rarotonga I met gave me the name of a recruitment website, and even said “We wouldn’t mind YOU”, and when I contacted the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment in NZ to ask where I could read up on the differences between UK and NZ law, gave me a few helpful pointers and said ‘let us know when you get here…’

I contrast that starkly with the welcome people receive in my own country, even in the airport. As you pull into Auckland International Airport the first thing you see is a huge banner saying “Thinking of Emigrating here?”.

Pull into Heathrow as an international traveller and the first thing you’ll see is a small depressing a4 sized purple poster saying “Assaults On Our Staff Will Not Be Tolerated”.

Enough for now - the dogs have rushed out to the back yard so that either means my partner will be back from his string quartet gig, or Amber, the next door neighbour’s dog, has had the temerity to use her own back yard again…

Travels - Up The Mountain

OK, not very far UP the mountain, but still up the mountain.

One blustery morning, at 6.30am I set off. I would like to say this was because as a photographer I was dedicated to capturing the Golden Hour however to be honest I really wanted to get away from the snoring.

It’s the opposite of the bagpipes. Bagpipes are just lovely when they stop. Snoring is faintly irritating when it’s carrying on but the real pearler moments come when it stops. Sometimes for 45 seconds at a time. I timed it.

Anyway, I gave up trying to work out if I could make an improvised defibrillator from the table lamp and braved the mountain instead.

This image shows Mount Taranaki, far right arrow is the location of Stratford Mountain Lodge, and far left arrow is the location I managed to get to before turning back.

Not very impressive, is it? However on this image, the brown bit is pretty much the snow line in winter, so I’m higher than you think.

So, a couple of new experiences for me. Firstly I think I redefined the concept of Point and Shoot photography. A camera with a completely manual wide angle lens, howling winds, and sideways gusts of rain. Set the focus point to somewhere short of infinity, guess the exposure level, whip the lens cap off, take a shot blindly into nothingness, wipe the rain off before slamming the lens cap back on again.

This shot below shows the true magic of using Lightroom to rescue what you get when you take that type of shot. Before and After…

Seriously - who would think? This is the view towards Stratford from the high car park on Taranaki.

Secondly, changing lenses in high winds was also quite a challenge. I tried to use the car as a ‘safe zone’, I thought I was doing quite well, standing in the passenger doorway and changing the lens on the passenger seat when the wind caught the door and bounced me straight onto the driver’s seat.

This mountain has its own weather, and it changes by the inch and by the minute. So I got up there in brilliant sunshine, and by the time I’d reached the high car park I was parking the car into the headwind to make sure it didn’t roll over. Squalls of rain passed over the mountain but I was determined to get some shots, and I did get quite a few. Mainly shots with rain all over the lens, so I had to practice trying to shelter by the cliff side, whilst also being very aware of the recent heavy rainfall, the frequent rock falls, and getting blown off the mountain.

I didn’t get a completely clear shot of the mountain but I think in many ways it is more atmospheric if you don’t. The night shot that started the last blog was very clear, but it somehow makes the mountain look small. I guess that’s something to do with framing it with the Milky Way.

Another Before and After shot. Amazing what you can recover, isn’t it?

So I left the car and headed further up the mountain towards the flying fox. The following sign was not terribly encouraging.

DSR_5772.jpg

Not terribly encouraging…

I spent what I thought was about half an hour up the mountain, but returned, as it turned out, two and a half hours later. This is a timeless mountain, it would be such heaven to live in the shadow of it.

And finally, saying goodbye. This is the second day, just about to head out - the first photo is Mount Ruapehu, 270 kilometres and four hours drive away.

Travels - Night on Mount Taranaki

This beautiful volcano was used as a stand-in for Mount Fuji in the film ‘Last of the Samurai’. I am completely in awe of this mountain. Its almost a spiritual experience for me. I say almost because I’m not sure a truly spiritual experience is accompanied by the soundtrack to “Dante’s Peak” playing in your head every time you look at it.

I’ve been here twice, staying in the atmospheric Stratford Mountain Lodge a little way below the snow line. I refer you to my earlier comments in a previous blog about high thread counts on bed linen. The only tent I have ever been in has been a wedding marquee.

On both visits I went up and did an early morning walk just below the snow line.

The first time I left a note in my room to say where I’d gone, I know F. all about climbing on mountains but I also know it is people like me who know F. all who get lost and incur expensive mountain rescue operations. I drove up a winding road to a high car park, and then walked some way up past the flying fox that goes up to the ski fields.

To be honest I felt I was being a bit of a risk-averse twat.

Granted that there had been pouring rain the day before, and flooding, and there were dire warnings about not going forward without a shovel to dig yourself out of any avalanches, but then on the other hand, I was on my own and I strongly suspected I was the only person on the mountain.

I did, however, do a bit of reading when I got back down, and discovered that it was probably good to be risk averse on this particular mountain. It looks very beautiful, almost friendly, but as a local guide said, it also gets alpine real quick and it has its own mercurial weather that can quickly catch you out. 80 people have died on Taranaki since they started keeping records, and they apparently anticipate an average of one person a year.

I’ll do another post about that early morning walk and the perils of taking pictures half way up a mountain in a howling gale, but for now, I thought I’d feature another aspect of this mountain that I was incredibly lucky to see - a clear dark sky.

Thermal Wonderlands

I finally got my head round which thermal wonderland was which. So we started with the Waimangu Volcanic Valley, two different walks, separated by one bus trips. There is something really creepy about this place, not least its air of times past. The truth is the Waimangu Volcanic Valley was the site of the legendary Pink and White Terraces, the Eighth Wonder Of the World, that were destroyed in a catastrophic eruption of Mount Tarawera in 1886.

I always wondered what happened to them. Were they one thing, or two things? and if so, why couldn’t they just dig them up or out?

The walk starts with a short trip up to a bizarre looking wooden bus shelter, painted with elegant figures in Victorian dress, admiring a volcanic landscape that looks unrecognisable from the one you’re actually looking at.

The 1886 eruption was the biggest eruption in New Zealand in the last 700 years and the bus shelter stands on the site of a tourist hotel which was obliterated by steam from the blast. It is why the view looks so different now. It is the youngest geothermal area in New Zealand and the eruption covered the area with mud and ash approximately 20 metres thick.

So that is what happened to the terraces, two separate sites - one of which can only be guessed at now, and the second of which is buried deep below Lake Rotomahana.

The walk takes you past Southern Crater Lake, a steep sided cold lake with pink scum (red aquatic fern apparently) floating on the surface, then on to Frying Pan Lake, which we could barely see because of the steam coming off it and the surrounding hills, and the last small lake, Inferno Lake, a startling cerulean blue, that rises and falls because of the action of a geyser underneath the waters.

Finally you get to the end of the trail which is the beginning of the vast Lake Rotomahana, filling a crater over 100 metres deep. In 2011, there was an announcement that The Pink Terraces had been found but it looks unlikely now that this was the case, and what had been discovered might have been prehistoric terraces that had always lain under the lake and had been previously unseen. Quite moody and atmospheric when you see this off season, with only the odd birder who would rather you just Went Away for company.

By way of a complete change, a few days later we ended up at Lake Taupo and the site of the floatplane, which I had looked at longingly and taken several photos off, it being the only kind of plane I had never been in. My partner took pity on me and paid for me to go up.

On my own, was his suggestion initially.

Was this because we had been discussing my extensive Death In Service benefit shortly before? Who knows? Anyway, I think the pilot took my partner’s laconic comments about safety and Not Getting Me Up In One Of Those Things rather personally, not helped by my rather dark humoured comments to the effect that when I’d put a codicil in my will, leaving our dogs to the lady who was looking after them while we were away, in case we went down in a plane, and that I’d rather anticipated that it might be a bigger one than this.

“Yeah, we do sometimes make it back?” he said rather drily.

However, when he took our details and ‘next of kin’, my partner said “I just put my dad’s name here?” the pilot shifted rather awkwardly and said “er…. a telephone number might be useful…” so maybe they don’t always make it back…

In this next set of pictures you can see Lake Taupo, which apparently is wider than the English Channel in parts, the Hydrothermal Plant and the Hucka Falls from the air. Hucka Falls is next to the prestigious Hucka Lodge, where you can spend over £1,000 a night having a meal cooked by a guy with a minimalist haircut (one tiny plat, about a centimetre long, right in the middle of his forehead. I’m sure there’s some massively cooky reason for it. Probably helps with preparing those foam, smoke, and delicate jus type dishes).

We thought it might be a jolly good wheeze to drive up to the electric gates and ask through the house intercom system whether they did take-away but they didn’t concur.

Next up was Wai-O-Tapu, probably the most popular site, not quite as much walking as Waimangu, but with probably the most variety of steamy lakes in a variety of toxic looking colours. And some ‘man made’ terraces, I discovered afterwards, where the water has been diverted over a flat area and new green and white terraces are forming.

At the far end of the trail is Lake Ngakoro, calm, but unnaturally green, and the even more alarming electric green Devil’s Bath, coloured by sulphur in the water.

And finally, a few pictures from the shores of Lake Taupo of distant Mount Ngauruhoe, the cone shaped volcano (that still gasses the odd unwary hiker) and Mount Ruapehu just behind it.

And just a few photos of the third volcanic area we visited, the Wairakei Thermal Valley, located down a winding dirt road and as opposite to the fairly commercialised Wai-O-Tapu as you could get.

The caretaker was an old English guy who had lived half his life in the UK making British cars, and ended up emigrating here almost by accident. He had a wry sense of humour and got me to drop the F bomb by catching me out with something he does with all the visitors. Those with strong hearts that is. I won’t tell you want it was, but be very careful around any Tarantula Eggs he might give you. That’s all I’m saying…

And next, the Stratford Mountain Lodge and awesome Mount Taranaki.

Rotorua and Surrounding Gases

Waimangu Volcanic Valley

So at this point I got a little lost and confused. We stuck around Rotorua for a few days and made the odd trip out to the Thermal Wonderlands, of which there are many. Wai-O-Tapu, Waimangu Volcanic Valley, Wairakei Thermal Valley being three big ones. It was quite easy to get them all mixed up, and they deserve a post all on their own so I will do a separate post about them very soon.

This part of NZ shows some signs of heavy marketing and Rotorua itself, boy oh boy, if there’s a hill, it has a zipwire on it, if there’s a forest, it has a canopy walk, if you’re into sheep, there’s the Agrodome, (pretty good actually, not sure who are better trained, the sheep or the sheepdogs).

I do however draw the line at the the National Road Board hopping on the bandwagon with the grandly named “Thermal Explorer Highway”, this evokes images of bursting geysers, lava flows, rugged 4by4 travel over steam swathed landscapes, but it is, at the end of the day, just a road. There’s nothing thermal about it, unless you turn the car heating up.

That said, they do have a lot to work with. Even Rotorua town itself, a view across the town will show rising steam from between the buildings.

Steam coming off of from the town.

I know this isn’t a great photo by the way but I’ve realised there is a difference between just posting photos that tell a story themselves, and photos that support a blog. I’m not 100% sure about the ‘photos that tell a story’ schtick anyway. Those arty photos about the lonely Afghan goat herd contemplating the changes to his life and the impact of increasing urbanisation, actually, No. He’s Not. He’s probably thinking about lunch. Or thinking ‘If This Guy Doesn’t Bugger Off Pretty Quick I’ll Set The Dog On Him’.

A casual stroll down to the placid lakeside will take you to Sulphur Point, where there are dire warnings about going off the path and where all the lake birds congregate in the bubbling water.

I am not a natural videographer (you needed telling, right?) but in case you haven’t clocked, part of the purpose of this website is for me to learn how to ‘do’ websites.

This particular video is quite a simple edit of two video files, but involved loading them into Corel Videostudio, applying an ‘anti shake’ feature, fades in between and at the end, and separating out the soundtrack and replacing it.

Replacing the soundtrack involved going onto the website to look for ‘sound files of wind howling’, finding a clip that had been posted on youtube (with permissions to use), saving it via EasyYoutube mp3 as an audio file. Which incidentally sounded eerily like the original windy noises that were on the tape. And patching that audio file into Corel Videostudio, and saving the lot in a file.

Then to get it onto your website, you have to upload the vid to Youtube, and put a link to the Youtube video - and then insert a tricky bit of code (?rel=0 …are you impressed?) to prevent Youtube then going onto make suggestions about what people can watch next at the end of your video. In my case that would be loads of camera gear reviews and videos of boats being sunk to make artificial reefs.

I really should get out more, shouldn’t I?

So - Rotorua. One place where you can be assured of getting a motel, as my partner blithely informed me, because they’re everywhere, so I let him choose. I had forgotten his criteria were a little different to mine.

I tend to go for places with crisp cotton sheets with a high thread count, a view of the Peninsula/Volcano/Desert. He tends to go for the thing that starts with "£$BARGAIN”, and ends there. Places, perhaps, where the customer is not so much ‘King’ as ‘King for an Hour’.

I know it’s just personal preference but my preference is somewhere where the glory hasn’t faded yet, where the lights don’t fizz when you switch them on, and where there aren’t discreet messages about what to do with your needles in the kitchen area. But that said, in this particular case, when we asked about a clothes airer and the last one was in use - the guy at the desk went out and bought us one. That doesn’t happen at the Hilton.

Has to be said, I did not feel particularly safe in Rotorua, lots of little things, a screaming row between another hotel resident and the kind guy with clothes airer, the extensive Rogues Gallery in the New World Supermarket of people who were banned from shopping there, and the number of times my partners said “Don’t look, keep going” all contributed to that.

I think the thing that really brought it home to me was when we’d just exited the Gondola Station at the bottom of Ngongotaha Mountain, all chrome, new glass, whizzy tourist attractions like a luge and some horrendously scary bike trails, and walking across the car park fiddling with my camera and hearing my partner say “That’s so sweet…”. I thought I’d done something whimsical but he was referring to the fact that I was so involved in whether my camera was in Programme Mode or Aperture Priority, I completely failed to see the two cars full of yoofs spinning around the same car park, screaming at each other and waving guns.

Guns. In New Zealand?

So Rotorua. Tons of things for families to do. But, Gangs, and Guns. I’ll move onto the Thermal Wonderland with the next post and we’ll be back to steam, rocks, landscapes with green ponds before you know it. You’ll see.

Travels - traversing the Hamptons

So after an uneventful flight, marred only slightly by discovering that some oik had stuck the pages of the safety briefing together with chewing gum, and then discovering that the in-flight entertainment didn’t work. I suspect Thing B led to Frustration which led to Thing A, but it was only a 4 hour flight so I whiled it away staring hard at everybody else’s screens and making them uncomfortable.

Customs and security was interesting, my partner thought he’d whizz through security faster than I on an NZ Passport, which he would have done, had I not offered to fill out his Landing Card for him and inadvertently ticked the “No” box to the question “Do you know what’s in your bag?” He didn’t let me do that again.

However, we got through it, and how we laughed! Well I did. And I was quite glad that we hadn’t succumbed to buying any coral or wood souvenirs at the airport duty free in Avarua, as Customs made you throw them away when you arrived in NZ. We got out to our hire car, in the dark, having narrowly escaped being upgraded to a 7 seater when really we only needed a slightly large boot, not a truck.

I think the agent got his own back on us though as we had a) keyless start b) automatic c) non-intuitive lights, d) indicators on the wrong side and e) parking buttons, not handbrakes, to contend with.

Most of these were OK, as we took it slowly at first, however there was one heart stopping moment when my partner decided to slam the brakes on (trying for the imaginary clutch) and we had a loud beep from behind us from a kiwi gentleman who, after that point, drove at a safe distance.

This was the only time we experienced this phenomenon. I don’t mean accidentally slamming on the brakes, we did that loads. I mean having a kiwi drive at a safe distance behind you.

We pulled into a motel in Hamilton, ragged in the way that international travelling leaves you, but I’ve decided that’s probably the best way to experience Hamilton. The motel was nice and I learned how to use NZ heat pumps at 3.00 in the morning, when it went on at full blast because some of the random button pressing I’d been engaged in earlier in the evening trying to switch it ON somehow activated a timer.

Then on, the next day, towards Rotorua. We passed through a small town, Tirau, which had some rather odd buildings made by someone who had a lot of corrugated iron and too much time on their hands.

Why? Just Why?

We saw signs to ‘The Blue Spring’ which seemed to be a tourist spot, and made a detour towards it.

It was quite a way off the beaten track but it proved to be well worth it. For a start my partner saw several Pukekos that remind him of home, not surprisingly, as we were, actually, ‘home’ but that always cheers him up.

It would appear that while you can have too many photos of ducks, you can’t have too many photos of Pukekos, and if he’d had his way, the 4,000 photos I took when I was overseas would have all been Pukekos.

IMG_3513.jpg

Pukeko

Good eating on one of these…

And this is a Takahe. A Takahe is a larger, bluer bird. Quite rare. Which is a good job as partner already goes nuts over Pukekos. They run away from him, startled. Imagine what he’d be like if there were Takahes in the wild too…

Takahe.jpg

Takahe

Larger, bluer, less good at evading predators

I should perhaps clarify at this point for the Department of Conservation, that there is NOT Good Eating On A Pukeko. At least I wouldn’t know.

So on we went to the Blue Spring. As we approached it we came upon a Cormorant drying its wings. I was so excited to encounter this at relatively close range, I took loads of photos with a 400mm telephoto lens, and a 1/50 of a second shutter speed, so the end result was quite impressionistic and could have been a cormorant drying its wings, or a whale breaching, so I’ve not included them here. However, I did catch some later of the same bird resting on top of a cabbage tree.

So herewith, photos of the Blue Spring - the stunning colour of the water is due to it’s optical clarity, having filtered through underground aquifers for between 50 - 100 years.

And that is enough for today, the next posts will be about the Thermal Wonderlands, Rotorua, and how I could never be a photo journalist, a decision I came to after realising I had wandered into the paths of two cars driving full pelt, and bristling with gang yoof waving guns and screaming foul oaths at each other, and I was too busy adjusting the settings on my camera to notice.

That for another day!

Travels - last night in Rarotonga

I had taken a few last shots as the sun set and I thought that was pretty much it for the evening, just one more of some of Rarotonga’s stray dogs fishing in the lagoon.

Or maybe two. These two were best buddies, and the dark one was really friendly. If you patted her she would even ‘guard’ your stuff when you went in the ocean for a dip!

Night fell and I was busy packing the complex chinese puzzle that my luggage had become. My partner, who tolerates rather than enjoys my photography habits, came in and said to me “You’ve got to see this…”

In the UK, you can hardly ever seen the Milky Way. Sometimes you can just about tell it’s probably there, unless you are in a true Dark Sky site like the far West of Scotland.

Rarotonga is an island, but it isn’t really a Dark Sky spot, however it does have very little pollution and that makes a huge difference to how much you can see.

I think the bright star you can see in some of these shots is Venus, it was so bright you might have mistaken it for the moon. As with all the other photos, double-clicking on them will bring them up full size.

Travels - Rarotonga - the Curse of Metua

Could this happen anywhere else? I don’t know.

Picture this. Vaimaanga Tapere, a stretch of land that runs from The Needle, an inland spike of rock, down to the beach on the southern side of Rarotonga, looking out onto the lagoon.

Rarotonga’s Great Road, Ara Tapu, encircling the island, runs through it. Beside this road, blink and you miss it, there’s a quiet space, a blank moment, with a strange sense of past times, of quiet and decay. This is the Sheraton Hotel Resort.

No, this is not the bitchiest hotel review ever. This isn’t because I had simply the worst quiche in my life there, or the most overpriced daquiri, at this hotel there is no customer service, no daquiris. No anything except brooding, quiet ruin.

In spite of being prime Rarotongan real estate, the resort was abandoned when it was partially completed, something like 25 years ago. No guests have ever stayed there and to date, nobody has stepped in to try to develop it.

This is one of about 15 buildings, set in a great semicircle that make up the complex.

Image courtesy of Google Maps, I ain’t got no drone

Image courtesy of Google Maps, I ain’t got no drone

Admittedly there are some downsides to the location: You have to cross the main road to get to the beach (this makes a huge difference to the prices holiday lets can charge); The beach itself is relatively small and it opens onto a fairly rocky part of the lagoon; And finally, this part of the lagoon can kill you.

If you look slightly to the left of the hotel complex in this picture, you also see a blue ribbon going from the lagoon out past the reef, and another, more obvious blue tendril to the far left of the picture.

These are riptides, deceptively calm looking parts of the lagoon with a strong current that will whisk you out to sea before you know it.

But the real reason this complex lies abandoned is because it is cursed.

In pre-colonial days, it was the scene of bloody tribal battles and spirits are said to walk the land. And in the early 1900s, the land was claimed by a prominent chief at the time, Pa Ariki. The claim was disputed by another tribe led by chief More Uriatua and this simmering powder keg of emotions (you get it all in this blog, don’t you?) came to a head in 1911, when a European Settler by the name of William Wigmore, shot and killed More Uriatua.

More Uriatua’s daughter, Metua, appeared in vengeance and placed a curse on the land. She said that none would profit from the land until it was returned to the tribe. Although Wigmore managed to escape prison, his businesses failed.

Fast forward to 1980, and some Italian businessmen struck a deal with the Cook Islands Government, to open a 5 star hotel on the site, involving joint investment from both parties.

In 1990, at the ceremony to start the building works, Metua’s grandson, More Rua, suddenly appeared dressed as a high priest and dramatically renewed Metua’s curse. He struck his spear on the rock bearing the inaugural plaque, and it shattered.

This naturally was a little upsetting for the developers, but they pressed on. Three years later, with the site almost finished, the Italian money suddenly stopped, and the building contractor went bust. There were rumours of mafia involvement and the Cook Islands government who had underwritten the project ended up facing a bill of $120m. This had an absolutely devastating effect on the island and marked the emigration of waves of Cook Islanders to New Zealand to try to find work.

In spite of repeated attempts to re-start the project, all subsequent efforts have failed amid allegations of tax fraud, and the head of the tribe, Amoa Amoa, has refused to lift the curse unless the land is given back to the More tribe.

This story might seem incredible to our eyes, but the place really has a creepy atmosphere.

I had the eeriest feeling I was being watched. In spite of the fact that it was very obviously abandoned, I felt really uncomfortable about going in any further. You can just walk off the road onto the site, but you do feel like you are walking on sacred ground.

Pause for thought.

Later on the same day, I took the road from the north of the island, Happy Valley Road, up to the start of the track to The Needle. Calling it a road was aspirational, in the same way as calling my moped an Off Road Vehicle was. Mopeds have a very odd centre of balance thing that makes you feel a bit like an elephant riding on a marble. You sort of get the impression that this thing was designed by someone who just didn’t care if it remained upright.

The road gradually deteriorated under me, there were deep channels cut into it from flash floods. And it got increasingly rural. Rarotonga is well known for its roosters and chickens everywhere, but here there were also pigs tied at the side of the road, the odd farmer working in a field.

The atmosphere got steadily more intimidating, and eventually I got to the end of the track, and parked up.

It was really quiet, you really noticed that you couldn’t hear the waves, something you got used to virtually everywhere else on the island.

I headed back down. I came to a fork in the road, and on one side was a farmer loading some crops onto a flatbed truck. Next to him was his son, probably about 12, staring at me.

I thought, what must I look like to them? bleached white and occasionally sunburnt, on a hired moped, obviously a tourist, with a backpack. I started drawing parallels with the film ‘Deliverance’ in my mind.

Then the boy waved at me and gave me a thumbs up sign.

These Rarotongans are really Awfully Nice People, aren’t they?

That is it for this evening, the next post, one more from Raro I think, to say goodbye and then off to New Zealand, Rotorua, and Lake Taupo!

Travels - Rarotonga Constitution Day - Te Maeva Nui

Purely by chance, we ended up in Rarotonga when they were celebrating their Constitution Day, 4th August 1965.  This is a big deal for the Cook Islands, and Islanders from all over the Cook Islands come across to Avarua in Rarotonga to celebrate the diversity of the islands and showcase their culture. 

The Cook Islands include 15 islands scattered across the South Pacific over a vast area and when you see just how vast, it cover 1,800,000 square kilometres of ocean, and shows what a tribute this was to the early Cook Islanders who set off across the ocean to see what they could find.  

Some of the islands benefit from tourism, such as Aitutaki, Rarotonga, and others like Manihiki benefit from black pearl farming. Some are nature reserves with only 2 caretakers, others are very difficult to get to for tourists, and even Rarotonga gives the impression of being relatively unspoilt so there is a huge amount of variety in each of the islands.   

I had assumed that colonialism probably brought with it a lot of negative things that we tend to associate with Empire, one of which would have been concepts of land ownership, and you would suspect given what has happened elsewhere with Empires, the principle of land ownership being followed very closely with the principle of swindling original settlers out of it with beads and blankets, apparently one of the things that came out of this colonialism was a concept of indigenous land ownership from mountain to sea - so when they were allocating land to various tribes, sections were divided up this way.  This would mean that the islanders could own the very desirable beachfront properties all around the lagoons.  

I am not 100% certain this is absolutely accurate, I learnt all this from a very friendly Kiwi couple who initially mistook me for the Official Photographer of the Parade, and ended up telling me I'd be very welcome as an HR Manager in New Zealand and even suggesting the jobs website I should check out.

So the Parade was a little casual, shall we say, and I have subsequently found out that we were some way down from all of the action.  I think the first sign was the arrival of the first float, this one.

which as you can see, is Float No 4.  This was followed after some time by Float No 11, then 21, and the order of appearance gave some clue to how the Parade was going to go.  It took quite a long time and to be charitable something like this is fairly difficult to co-ordinate (and it should be noted that this is just one of the activities that mark the Declaration of Independence..  

Anybody who has read my blog previously will realise I am usually fairly reluctant to photograph people, something that many amateur photographers have in common, and looking through the following pictures you may get the impression I've been able to overcome this - however, in practice I shot these with a very long lens and initially thought they were pretty disappointing and cluttered, then I started realising that I could crop other people out of them and some of them ended up being quite interesting portraits.  

That said, these are really easygoing people.  If you can't take a photograph of someone who's that friendly, who can you photograph?

Later on, I'll look at some of the other aspects of Rarotonga, the night sky, some of the beaches and the lagoon, even the slightly spooky interior and the definitely creepy abandoned Sheraton Hotel Complex that's a story in itself...

But for now - Constitution Day!

Travels - to Rarotonga

Our stopover in Auckland was brief as we were moving on to Rarotonga.  I'd planned this partly in case any of the long flights were delayed, but also because I just could not get my head around the fiddly business of crossing the international date line, which lies between New Zealand and Rarotonga, and arriving the day before we set off.  

Now I've had days at work like that where you think it's Thursday and you realise with sickening clarity when you get there that it's really just Wednesday again, and I've had the opposite, when I was on the famous Whiskey Diet, and lost four days in one week (sorry, old joke there) BUT it's a different matter entirely when you're also trying to book hotels around it.

I found myself wondering… What would happen when I arrived on Wednesday and I was back in Tuesday.  Would I be able to call myself in Auckland from Rarotonga, and speak to myself the day before I travelled?  In the short term, that could be very handy, for instance, if you forgot to pack your sunscreen, or if you were aware that an entire wedding party would be on your plane and would clean out Duty Free on arrival.

But in the longer term, the possibilities are endless.  If I just crossed the International Date Line loads of times, could I eventually get back to my 30s?  Maybe make some long term investments. Do It All Differently the second time.

Sadly this was not to be.  I can’t help thinking though that we should have been able to come up with a date and time system for the planet which didn’t include an enormous temporal zip stretching from the North to the South Pole.

But that’s for another day.

The flight was uneventful, but arriving in Rarotonga was exciting.  I know a bit about flying, having actually passed my Private Pilot’s Licence years ago.  On Flight Simulator.  I remember proudly telling a friend that I’d done everything I would need to do to pass my Private Pilot’s Licence, and he commented “Except fly a plane”

So I often watch the flight progress monitor on the in-flight entertainment.  Was that wise? I hear you ask.

Well, on Cathay Pacific, I noticed they switch it off just as you’re landing – I think this is because there was an American flight where the passengers actually got to watch themselves crash and that was considered to be demotivating.  But on Air NZ, no such thing happens.

And unfortunately, unfortunately, they don’t calibrate in-flight entertainment systems to be entirely accurate because you’re not expected to actually fly a plane using the information you can get from the back of the seat.  So I didn’t know that, on my screen, the plane was showing about an inch lower i.e. to the South, on the map than it really was.

Rarotonga is a very pointy island.  It has a lot of volcanic peaks in the centre.  

I was expecting us to come in from the West, but we overflew the island and turned to approach the airport from the East.  Because of my minor screen glitch, I noticed that we weren't lined up with the runway as we came in and we appeared to be flying into the mountains South of the airport...

At exactly the same point that I noticed that, the captain decided to do a Go Around.   This is where they abandon the landing and have another go.  So the engines powered up suddenly and I braced for the sight of palm trees in the window and the inevitable impact, carnage, screaming (think Sale at TK Max and you’ve pretty much got it).  

Thankfully I didn’t go the whole hog and do that thing where you put your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye but I did grab my partner, and far from being grateful at being alerted to our possible demise, he slapped me.   And of course it's good to know for the future that should I have some other urgent instruction like "JUMP!  It's gonna BLOW!" or "RUN!! RUNAWAY ELEPHANT!!!" his go-to position is probably going to be to tell me not to be so ridiculous.

So we hurtled skywards with a lot of noise and then came the cabin crew announcement, that this was all perfectly normal, and the captain had done a ‘go around’ and it was all perfectly normal.  It was so perfectly normal that the steward felt the need to repeat this about seven times, by which time everybody in the cabin was pretty clear that it wasn’t perfectly normal, and were individually clocking up all the times they’d flown before and this perfectly normal thing hadn’t happened.

Then we spent a while circling around over the ocean on the west side of the airport, while I imagine a humongous argument went on in the cockpit about who’s fault it was that they’d wasted all that avgas. 

We had a second announcement that we were waiting for another landing slot because of other traffic, thinly concealing the fact that way out here, there wasn’t any other traffic.    I suspect this delay was due to one pilot trying to get across to the other pilot that he really had to learn to land at this airport from BOTH ends and he was going to have to do it from the East sometime.  Perhaps even pointing out that if he couldn’t we may just have to go back to New Zealand, as there was nowhere else out here they could land a plane this big.  There may have been voices dripping with sarcasm.  Who knows.

So the second time round, we came back in from the East, and this time landed uneventfully.  

Kia Orana Rarotonga!  

Unchanged from the last time we were here, still the same horrendous queues through customs, still the same incredibly friendly and welcoming people, and you still get a lei necklace of fragrant flowers when you come out of the airport.  I don't remember that happening at Leeds Bradford Airport...

More later, but for now, some pictures from that first evening in Raro.

Travels - to Auckland

So today we were to say goodbye to Hong Kong and venture forth to New Zealand.  A 9.00pm flight via Cathay Pacific seemed a fairly civilised option, and you could check your luggage in at the main railway stations in Hong Kong and they'd whizz it out to the airport for you.  Don't see that happening at Kings Cross. 

This wasn't to happen quite as we expected.  This was an 11 hour flight, running half an hour late initially, then we FINALLY got on the plane.  I mean FINALLY like, Tchoh! 35 minutes late???  Call Yourself An Airline etc etc etc.  Little did I know.

Comfortably sat in the Airbus A350 Sardine Can and about to push back, we then had an announcement that Philippine Air Traffic Control had had a power cut, and we would be grounded for at least an hour and a half.  Another flight to Auckland had left approximately 15 minutes before us and while we were pondering our misfortune to have picked this one, we quickly realised it was probably better to be on the ground, stationery, than in the air, flying blind across Philippine Airspace in an ATC powercut.  

Then at the hour and a half mark, an announcement that the pilot had 'timed out' so we had to wait for a relief pilot.  This is a pilot just like any other pilot, except that when he arrives, everyone feels such a sense of relief that we can get going.  That's why he's called a relief pilot. 

Ok, look, you don't come here for the jokes.

So, three hours later, we took off.  Funny thing is, I don't remember doing anything on that plane for those three hours that we sat on the apron.  We just sat and waited in silence. Like a very boring special interest club consisting of a lot of people just pretending to go flying in a passenger jet.  

This turned a 11 hour flight into 14 hour one, but we were landing mid-day anyway so it didn't make much difference.

Sunrise across the Coral Sea (not a bad picture for a Sony Xperia Z3 phone)

One small moment of levity however came from the terribly nice old lady who sat in front of me.  Calling her 'old' still feels a bit wrong, because in spite of being obviously around 80 years old, she was wearing shorts, a backpack, and was clearly a lot fitter than I was. 

She was not very used to planes, as she managed to change the language on her in flight entertainment system to cantonese as soon as she touched it.  My partner helpfully switched it back for her, but it reverted pretty quickly.  She got the hang of it eventually but not before watching half of a gay coming-of-age film with growing confusion.  I did love her dearly though, not for her quirkiness but because on an entire 14 hour flight, she didn't put her seat back.

Auckland, City of Sails

Arriving in a fairly unremarkable hotel in Auckland, I wonder if those occasional unsung heroes who are just trying to do the best job they can, realise how much difference they make to an utterly knackered traveller.  On check in we were greeted by a Māori guy who asked us where we were from, and we ended up telling him about the flight delay and he said "Well you've still got beautiful smiles on your faces so I guess it can't have been too bad, eh?"

Those of you who have been to New Zealand will recognise the Kiwi 'A' there. It's not an accent, or a letter, it's pretty much the end of every sentence, as in "So you're from the UK, eh?" or, quite a good example from my Kiwi sister in law when I took out my 100 - 400mm lens later in our trip "Jesus Ken! you compensating for something or what, eh?"

A little later on, a trip to the Skytower, to watch the sun go down.

Next, Kia Orana, Rarotonga! and the closest I came to an in-flight emergency...

Travels - Hong Kong

It has been so long since my last blog I almost forgot how to log in to the website.  However, I have been busy.

I finally found an answer to the Leeds - Temple Newsam - You-Can-Never-Have-Too-Many-Photographs-Of-Ducks photographer's fatigue.  I have exhausted Temple Newsam, and I have finally decided, Yes, You Can Have Too Many Photographs Of Ducks.  Even ones like this:

I have truly Maxxed Out on Ducks.  And short of photographing Temple Newsam upside down, I can't think of anything else to do with it.   

The simple answer was to go to New Zealand and photograph something different.   

Well I said it was simple, I didn't say it was cheap.

As you can imagine, once released from the relative photographic prison of Leeds and Area, I went a bit nuts and at the last count, my computer is now over 4,000 photographs richer.   Relax, gentle reader, I do not intend to post ALL 4,000 on here.  Maybe 2,000.

So my plan is - a few blogs, in instalments, taking in Hong Kong, Rarotonga and New Zealand in turn, with maybe some observations on travelling with cameras on the way.

The first observation is I am now a different shape.  Not fatter, thanks to what I think is a tapeworm I picked up on Hong Kong, which has sadly now left me, but with legs like a baobab tree trunk.  This is because I was going to photograph night scenes, cities, landscapes, and possibly tiny insects and that meant taking both cameras and an assortment of lenses, which can be a little heavy.

There are dire warnings all over photographic phorums about checking your beloved camera into hold baggage as you might as well wrap it up with NICK ME tape, so basically you have to carry it all on yer person into the cabin.  And I rapidly discovered that with two cameras, a 14mm wide angle, a 150mm macro, a 100-400mm zoom, and a 24-70 mm zoom, not only was I not zooming ANYWHERE, but I was also overweight.  Most cabin baggage allowances run to 7Kg and this lot weighed something more like 10Kg.  I also had to include a small laptop, for transferring the pictures onto an external hard drive, and spare batteries, because you can't put either of those in hold baggage. 

So, tips for the phlying photographer: 

First of all, get an App called 'My Packing List' which will allow you to input the weight of each item, so that you can work out how much it all weighs without having to balance on the scales and deducting your body weight 50 times. 

Secondly, get a small carry on, like a 'reporter bag' because you are usually allowed to carry a cabin bag, and one small item, like a brolly, coat or small bag, and work out, to the gramme, which lenses you can swap over into your reporter bag before you check in, to get your rucksack down to 6.99Kg.  You can swap stuff over later so that you can have something useful to put under the seat in front of you rather than two inert lenses.  

Thirdly, vitally important, when you check in, DO NOT put your rucksack down.  Sling it casually across one shoulder, because, like, it's not heavy.  Assume an air of nonchalance.  Watch videos of drug smugglers being caught at airports, and don't do any of the things that they do if that helps.  This should mean they don't realise how heavy your stuff is.  

Fourthly, very important this, don't forget to put Your Medication in your rucksack.  Make sure there is quite a lot of it.  Doesn't matter what it is.  Aspirin, Diet Pills, Bisodol, Multivitamins, Dried Frog Pills, because you see, you can't travel without Your Medication, and if you have like 15 bottles and four spare camera batteries, they're not going to ask you to just put them all in your pockets.  Fake an asthma attack if you get stuck, but also bear in mind your inhalers will have to be in clear plastic bags.

Swap the random lenses you'd ensconced in your reporter bag back into your rucksack after you've checked your hold luggage in.

Going back to the Before You Leave bit for a moment, which I did many, many times on my subsequent travels, ask yourself, do I really need ALL of those lenses, because by the time you've finished dragging them half way around the world, trust me, you will feel the weight of every one of them.  And you too will end up a Different Shape.

It's not just airports you have to think about.  It's rental cars.  It's places where you might have opened the boot and someone might have had a chance to look inside.  It's hotels that you're checking into, that don't have the room ready, and offer to keep your bags.  One of the nicest hotels we stayed in was in Hong Kong, the Novotel Century, quite posh, freezing airconditioning, a large atrium with no discernible ceiling and an air of ruthless efficiency from the staff. 

On our arrival, we had hours to kill before our room was ready, and jetlag.  They helpfully let us leave our bags, all very efficient, and even gave us a numbered security tag so that we could reclaim them, and off we went into the sweltering Hong Kong heat.  So that first time, the only time, I left my camera rucksack with them, and when we returned to the hotel, as I walked up, noticed all of our bags, along with my rucksack, on the street, where the taxis pulled in.  

They were secure.  Well, they had a rope around them.   It was quite a thick rope.  And apparently there's very little crime in Hong Kong because they're all too busy looking at their phones.  You think we have it bad in our country...

Hong Kong was an experience, but all talk, no photographs.  I'll cover a bit more in a subsequent blog about the stop in Hong Kong on the way back.  But for now, some pictures.  As ever, click on the pick to get a bigger version to look at.

For Esther...

I look at my blog and realise that it has been nearly 4 months since my last blog, so breaking all the rules of successful blogging, namely, keep it current, informative, and mostly, GOING.

The trouble is, for a budding photographer, the winter months are only passing fair.

Photography is all about Light, and a good photographer thinks not just about the subject, but about the light.   So where you might have twilight, daylight, moonlight, as photographers, we have a few more up our sleeve.  There is the Blue Hour.  This is the hour before the sun rises, where, thanks to the modern DSLR and its amazing sensor, you can put a camera on a tripod when it's practically dark outside, and see what your eyes can't see.  Then there is the Golden Hour, this is around dawn, or dusk, when the sun is low in the sky and casts long golden shadows.

The trouble is, in Leeds, you also get an awful lot of the Grey Hour.  These are the hours, commencing quite early in the day and running right through the Blue Hour and Golden Hour, the midday hour, and the evening hour, where an overcast sky and an obscured sun lead to what they call 'soft light', or rather, 'grey light', or as we photographers call it, DULL Light.   All Day.

The trouble is, grey light is not all that photogenic.  No moody shadows, just rather dull twigs, flat landscapes, and rather miserable looking people.  I'm not selling it, am I?  And in Winter, whatever you may say about winter landscapes, there are an awful lot of grey days.

However, come February and March, we also get the odd random bit of snow, usually in huge unpredictable bursts, and usually wildly over-promoted by the news channels.   And if you get up early enough, you can get pictures of it before it melts.

Esther is my Handler on the Independent Visitor Scheme.  Technically her title is Independent Visitor Scheme Co-ordinator, but I prefer to make her sound more like a kind of spy co-ordinator, it adds a lot of glamour, which let's face it, is quite difficult to generate in Leeds.  

Independent Visitors are volunteers who are matched up with a young person in the care of the local authority, a kind of adult 'buddy' who is there just to be their constant friend, no matter what.  Esther has done a pretty amazing job supporting me and the young person I look after over the years.  

I've been seeing him on a fairly regular basis for the last six years, and by happy accident, on one occasion when we were meeting to go to the park, I put a couple of cameras in my bag, just to see if it would interest him.  I'm proud to say that he took to it like a pro, and several years later, I still have a picture of him with that first camera.  Since then he's entered competitions and even earned his first commission before he was 10 years old.   At some future date I hope I'll be including some of his pictures on this blog, if he will sell them to me.  He's pretty good with money, hence the commission at the age of 9!    

So in conversation with Esther, she asked if she could see some of my pictures, so, Esther, just for you, here are some shots of Temple Newsam, taken in the recent snows.  Really early in the morning, in the freezing still dawn air.

Which is also why I currently have a terrible cold.   What we photographers do, eh?

Click on a picture to see it In Big.

And here are a number of photographs I took another early morning in Temple Newsam, as the snow was falling...

And a few shots of Roundhay Park in the snow...

Cormorants in Roundhay Park

Seagulls on an ice sheet, Roundhay Park, remarkably uninterested in the coming of their Messiah.  Perhaps I over-did the highlights?  Anyway, that's seagulls for you...

And now, off to bed to nurse my cold and dream of blue light, golden light, summer light, spring light, anything but grey light...