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.