Wrights Water Garden - Lotus Festival

If you are ever bored in February, then you should head out to Wrights Water Gardens at Patumahoe in South Auckland. Every year in the first week of February, all their Lotus Flowers are out, and the display is breathtaking. I've been twice now, and the only way I can describe it, is that you feel like you've just stepped into a Monet Painting, with all the pinks, blues and greens around you.

I think Lotus flowers are stunning. They are by far, my favourite flower...



I had to keep changing lenses, from my 18-55mm lens if I wanted to get the whole flower in, to my 100mm macro lens to enable me to capture the detail...

Then I had to decide which part I wanted to detail, as every part of the flower seems interesting...

And when the flower petals drop, then the lotus seed pod becomes the most interesting thing to photograph as well. I took lots of images of the pods, and they all turned out well. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with them all!

The flower in all the stages of life, is beautiful, from a bud, just opening...

To the complete open flower. Even underneath, from the side, no matter where I put the camera, all I found was beauty...

See....

Even the details in the petals are gorgeous...

I took heaps of images, and I have only just got around to processing them last week. From February!

Oh - and I have yet to finish the images I took in February 2009 as well. Again - I took hundreds of images! Maybe next time I go I should just drink in the view and leave my camera at home?

Incoming Storm

Back in May when it was still Autumn, I went over to Mary's in the late afternoon. She popped me onto the back of the 4 wheel motorbike (now they are fun!) and she took me up to feed the chooks at the top of the hill. I came prepared with my camera and was so pleased I did.

A storm was coming in from the southwest, but to the north and east it was still blue and sunny. This gave me some quite spectacular lighting and it looked liked we were riding into something dangerous...

We turned right up here and headed up the hill. The scenery was spectacular! There is something about lines that attract me...

This was a bit higher up the hill. I loved the way the vines made a patchwork of colour, in their various shades of autumns...

I tried to be clever and take the photograph at the same time as moving my lens. I was trying for the impressionist/action look.. How did I do?..

This is Mary, the modern day farmer complete with cellphone! And this is the chookhouse. Rather large! They weren't getting much luck with the eggs as the falcon was swooping into the barn and stealing them. The chooks have now been moved down onto the flat!

Looking one way - bright yellow under a blue sky...

Then turn around and you see the storm is definitely incoming...

Let's go a bit closer..

I think that's far enough. It looks like it might get 'wet'! Soon! I prefer looking at the fair weather!

This is at the top looking over the valley toward Blenheim and Picton..

And again, with the chookhouse in view... Do you get the feeling I like the view? Are you bored yet?

Thought I could do another one with the blue sky that is so normal in Marlborough. It never rains down here. Much. Except for this year. They tell me it's really unusual. Then they tell me I brought it all down from Auckland when I moved. Yeah Right!

So time to head back down before it really does rain..

And rain it did!

Blenheim in Autumn is just stunning. Make sure you come and visit me at that time of the year!

A Trip to Nelson

Just wanted to show you a few images I took on the way into Nelson back in May. I was with my friend Nikki and we headed over to Nelson for the day. We didn't stay in the city too long, headed over to Mapua and had lunch on the wharf.

We left fairly early though, and as we came down the hill and round the corner, this is what greeted us...

I simply had to stop the car, walk across the road and start shooting. Who could resist such beautiful reflections when one has a camera in the car?

The mountains/hills were covered in cloud, but below that cloud is Nelson's boulder bank. A natural occuring bank of boulders that make Nelson a very sheltered harbour. You can walk along this bank, and at low tide, it looks like you could actually walk across the sand to the boulder bank as well. The water is quite shallow, but the tide comes in and out very quickly.

I played around a bit with these images, This one I made it to look like a bit earlier in the morning, than at the time we were actually there. Pink in the clouds! But this was photoshopped. For the life of me, I now can't remember how I did it! Here's what it did look like, although it is not exactly the same image...

Here's a shot of Nelson city reflected in the harbour. Nelson reminds me much of Wellington, with the old villa type housing, perched on the hillside. It has better weather than Wellington though!

I experimented with the Orton effect on this image. Here's the result. I'm not sure if I like it or not...

The Orton Effect is when you take one image. Copy it. Blur one image. Oversharpen the other, then you merge them together. It's meant to give the image a dreamscape quality. Which it does, and on some images, it's lovely to have. The jury is out on waterscapes though for me.

Finally, my favourite of the series is the reflection of the yellow boat. The yellow boat gives the whole image proportion, plus it gives something for the eye to rest on, which makes the image better than the others in my opinion.

I hope I see a lot more scenes like this one in my explorations around this area.

The Fire

I first noticed it when I was packing up my car to head to the recycle centre earlier this year. I raced in and got my camera. This first shot was taken from my driveway...

Apparently it was a burnoff, and every year they do this. This one I think got a bit out of control. I'm not totally sure of this, but there were helicopters overhead, and the fire raced up that hillside pretty quickly.

I carried on, went to an appointment, recycled my rubbish, headed into town to the library, and on the way home I noticed it was still going strong, so decided to go closer and investigate it further with my camera. At this stage, I didn't know Blenheim that well, so I just headed off into the direction of the fire. Found some new country roads I didn't know about...

This was taken from some road somewhere. I was pretty lost by now!! The smoke was casting quite a yellow glow, so the lighting was really weird. The sun was having trouble shining through it, it was so thick. I kept going and eventually found a road that seemed to take me straight there...

As you can see the light on the hills and river had a yellow tone, although I think this made image much more appealing. Looking up the other way, (east), you can see the smoke wasn't making much of an impact. This is the Wairau River..

Very pretty river, and love the riverstones. That's the one thing I love about the South Island is all the stones by the rivers.

Here is the area again, back to where my car was parked, again the yellow hue from the sun trying to get through the smoke.

Naturally, I take photos from all angles, to ensure I get at least one brilliant shot!

This was on top of the stop-bank of the river, looking southwest to the wither hills and down the Wairau Valley. The clouds aren't clouds, but smoke. Again, there was a slight yellow hue, although not as pronounced as the previous images.

I packed up then and headed home via Rapaura Road. It was quite late in the afternoon so stopped to take a photo of the old mud hut. Not only was it late afternoon, but the smoke was affecting the hue as well, which made it a good time to take the photo...

I must find out more about this hut - there's bound to be some interesting history attached to the old mud hut.