The Wild Lupins of Lindis Pass - Part 1

Day Five of our South Island trip dawned a bit brighter, albeit a bit cold.  The evening before, it had cleared up a bit and we had headed to Lake Hawea to take some photos of the sunset, which never appeared! My good foot rolled on a stone and I promptly collapsed in a heap on the ground. I landed in a funny way and hurt my bad foot again. It wasn't until we got back to the lake house that I realised I had hurt it pretty badly.  It was very very painful and if anyone touched it you just about had to peel me off the ceiling.

So on the morning of Day 5, I thought perhaps I should stay at the lake house and rest up rather than be on it. Liz and Emily wouldn't hear of it and they set me up in the back of a van with an elevated foot rest. I swore I would only get out of the van if there was something super interesting to photograph.

Our first stop of the day was the Old Red Bridge on Kane Road.  I have been told this is a very historic bridge, but I can find absolutely NOTHING about it, anywhere!  So.  All I can tell you is - it's red.  It spans a river.  It's old, and it's historic.  You don't want to know anything else do you?

I played around with the tobacco filter to get a couple of surreal apocalyspe shots...

Liz and Emily were able to walk down the hill to get the underneath shots, but I had to stay up on top as there was no way my foot would let me negotiate the gravel road. Emily kindly drove me down in the van a few minutes later.

After a few shots of the bridge, I started taking a look at the surroundings.  A beautiful glade of poplar trees all in their spring growth...

And over the river, the poplars lined that bank as well.  They're my favourite trees.  Would love to come back in Autumn to get the beautiful golden yellow colours.

I then found a puddle from the rain the day before. And caught the reflection in the bridge.

I love reflections in puddles - could photograph them all day!

We then headed towards the Lindis Pass, our destination was Bridge 2360 where we had seen the most amazing 'river of lupins' on the way down.  I will do that in a new blogpost though, because otherwise this one will be too long and I would hate to bore you all.

Footnote: When I got home to Blenheim, I had my foot x-rayed and it was found to be broken. The foot has been so painful in the last 3 years, that I really didn't notice too much of an increase of pain, so I walked around on it for 10 days without knowing.  Great footnote isn't it?

Blipfoto - Blipping Mad!

I've been really busy lately - summer is here so I'm outdoors more, my foot is finally without pain - the first time in three years, so I'm making up for lost time and not sitting in front of the computer as much as I have in the past. I've also been catching up with friends, and doing some daily photography, so this blog has been neglected. Sorry about that - I'll try and make it up to you in the next few days. 

One of the things I have been doing is Blipfoto. While  was in Wanaka, we met up with a fellow photographer who couldn't speak highly enough about the site. He was that excited about it that I took a look at it when I got home and I could see the benefits in it immediately.

So, tentatively I joined, and within a week I hooked. And I'm now blipping mad!

Blipfoto is a 365 project. You upload one photo a day, like a diary. Once uploaded, you give your photo a title, a bit of a blurb (a journal), and some tags, then publish it.You can even give it a location so people can see where you have taken the photo - but this is optional.

You have to take the image on the day you upload it - the site looks at the EXIF data and takes the date from there. You can backblip, but I have decided just to blip from the day I started.

I've now blipped for 40 days. I started on the 13th December. When my mother came to visit, I told her I had to do a photo a day, and she was very patient while I found something to photograph and get it onto my computer, and upload it. Even though as a non-photographer she must be wondering why.

Non photographers always find me amusing. While away on the boat after Christmas, I took a photo of a fly. The non-photographer said 'Why are you taking a photo of a fly?' I thought about it. Do I explain the hidden world of macro, the amazing eyes, the hair on his body, the intricate wings, the fact they they can be rather beautiful? No, all that would be wasted. My answer was simply - 'Because I can!!"

But I digress. In the 40 days I've been blipping, my photography has been extended. I can honestly say, I'm a better photographer than I was 40 days ago. I've learnt new techniques, patience, and different things in photoshop. I believe it can only improve.

The reason is that I'm taking more time when it comes to the photo. I am thinking and planning in advance, where I'm going, what I'm going to shoot and the way I will shoot it. Prior to blipping it would be random and just in the moment, which is good too, but often you don't take things on board as well, than if it is planned in advance.

The other good thing about Blipfoto, is that there is a huge community of other 'Blippers', and a whole new volcabulary to learn. When you publish your first photo, people welcome you to blip. Such a friendly group. Then they subscribe to your blip journal and make comments every day. Then you find out that they don't live too far away and there's talk of Blipmeets. Then there's the blip birthdays.  After 10 blips you have a blipbirthday and you're no longer a novice. Then there's 50, 70, 100, 200, 365, 500, 1000 and so on. Then you get conblipulation comments

So you meet people, you laugh, and you're having fun, AND your photography improves daily.

What can be better than that?

The other great thing about Blipfoto, is that you don't need to have a fancy pants camera. Androids and iPhones have blipfoto apps, and you can take the images and upload direct from your phone.You blip your day, what you're doing. It may be boring, or it may be interesting but that's just life in general

If you do read this and decide to join and start blipping. You can find me here. Made you you let me know you've joined and that  you read about it in my blog, and I'll add  you to my subsciptions and follow your journey.

I hope you get as much enjoyment out of it as I do.  Any questions? Just ask!

My fellow nerd very good friend Bron loved the Travel WordArt I did for my daughter, so I suggested she give me a list of places she has been to and I'd make some up for her too. She asked me if I could do favourite composers instead, so I told her to list out her favourite composers then rank them out of 7, where 7 she loves the to bits, and 1, she still loves them but not as much as the sevens, and anything in between. 

Giving the words a rank, allows them to be bigger words, the higher they're ranked, the bigger the words, and it is what makes the WordArt work.

So the following images are Bron's favourite composers.  When she picks out a favourite, I'll be uploading it to redbubble as a Tshirt, Hoodie and/or Poster for her.  

I know Bron likes Black and white so the first one reflects that...

But I threw in a couple of coloured ones just in case she wants to move away from White on Black.

But then I felt guilty for doing so so did another one...

I used one of my photographs of a sunset and overlaid it on the image to get the variations of colour on this one.  I can change the hue to any colour one would like..

If you have a list of words that mean something to you, favourite music, favourite equipment, bands, cameras, travel, books, Authors, people - anything at all, list them down, rank them as above, and email it to me, and I'll do some WordArt for you.

Travel Word Art

My daughter and I spent most of this morning planning my upcoming trip to Europe and looking at places we might want to see in the weekends.  Its going to be an interesting trip as I get to see three or four friends that I've met over the years and get to stay with them in their own country.  Anyway, this blog post is not about my trip, but rather the travelling my daughter has done since she left New Zealand in 2008. Travelling in Europe is easy and cheap if you're based there, it just seems expensive and hard to get to when you live in a place like New Zealand!

Towards the end of our planning, Anne pasted a list of countries she has visited in the last few years, so I found a Word Art page and created a number of Word Art creations.  When she's picked one or two that she likes, I'll make up a tshirt for her, or a poster, or both.

If anyone else would like one made up of your trips/travel, and if you send me the list, I can easily create some for you as well.

The particular wordart programme i use allows for a mixture of fonts and colours and a mixture of horizontal and vertical placement.

 I used a tool called Randomise to find these. Just hit the Random button until I found one I liked.

The only problem is that once you move on to the next random one, unless you save it right there and then, it's lost forever.

The other problem is that it changes so much, you can't ever seem to find the one you like again, not even if you try to do it manually.

You can play forever with this programme, it's so much fun, so if Anne doesn't like any of these ones, I can see I'll be playing a lot more :)

I'm planning to do one for me as well, but it will probably be just the travel I've done over my lifetime.  It still wouldn't be as many words as Anne's though!

Which means that people won't have to get in so close to read it!!

Love the concept of this and I think it looks great!

Puzzling World at Lake Wanaka

Day 4 of our trip down south and we awoke to crappy weather. So after quick trip to the lake to photograph the Tree in the Lake briefly in the rain, and a great catch-up with Roger Urlwin, who is a great landscape photographer in Wanaka we headed to Puzzling World. The perfect thing to do in Wanaka when it rains. Puzzling World has two parts - an outdoor maze and an 'illusion' part. We weren't interested in the outdoor maze at all, so just paid to do the Illusion section. 

We paid our $14 then decided we needed to visit the bathroom first...

This is what greeted us. An amazing illusion and ery well done. The sign said:

"Roman Style Toilets. View the Diarama from the centre of the room for the best perspective, and take an fascinating photograph! Roman toilets often had running water under the seats (Flush Toilets) and the Romans often carried a brush as part of their personal toiletries. This brush was used instead of toilet paper. The toilets here are to look at, not to USE"

So I took some photographs as they suggested...

Note  I purposely wore those socks especially for effect as I knew of this diarama in advance!  I also took lots of other photographs but was under strict instructions not to post them on this blog.  I'm open to bribery and corruption of course - just hit the donate button on the right hand side of the blog!!!

After much laughter watching other people there as well, we headed to the Illusion part. But wait. There's some flowers. Emily, Liz and I then started photographing these!

The roses were particularly good specimens as they were quite sheltered. I love playing around with textures and this is one I came up with which I'm quite pleased with.

But this has to be one of my best images of a red rose. Red roses often turn out pink in my camera, and I've always deleted them in disappointment. However I've finally mastered how to get them right in Lightroom so am very happy with this outcome. After about half an hour we realised we had paid $14 to photograph roses that are accessible by anyone. We laughed and tore ourselves away to actually enter Puzzling World itself!

First up was the Hologram Hall. Quite a collection of them and some big ones too.

In this one, as you walked back and forth a gun appeared, which was unexpected!

As you walked back and forth, she smiled or didn't smile!

On the walls were illusions such as these...

Are these lines straight? Or not. Even my camera was confused!  They are totally straight!

This was fun. A room fall of famous faces in the Hall of the Following Faces. No matter which way you went, the faces followed you. Here's Emily testing it out with one eye.

And Liz in front of Mother Teresa...

Next up was the Ames Room which was used in the Lord of the Rings. It's known as a forced perspective room where, when you look at it from the viewpoint it looks normal. But the shape of the room is actually really distorted. It is used to create tall people and little people as demonstrated here. First, in this image, I look really small in comparison to the height of the ceiling.

As I go into the centre, I still look small..

But in the middle, it now looks as if I'm of normal height..

But on the other side, I look way too tall..

and I have to try pushing up the ceiling to fit!

Emily, Liz and I all had fun in this room. Having cameras tripled the fun!

Next up was the Tilted House. The room is tilted at an angle of 15 degrees. All the displays are 'normal' and your brain cannot adjust to the fact the floor is tilted. It was particularly tough on me because my balance system is totally stuffed anyway, so the room did make me feel nauseous.

In the following image, Emily is actually upgright, she's not leaning forward at all.

Although it looks like Liz has gone uphill, she had actually gone downhill - where she is, is actually the 'bottom' of the ride. This felt particularly bizarre.

Here Emily is trying to walk uphill, and it's quite hard to walk because the illusion is so strong and your brain can't cope with the fact that the floor is sloping. I wonder how long it would take for your brain to get used to it. I certainly hadn't after 20 minutes.

'
The swing permanently on a slope - again - another illusion because it's actually the walls at an angle as is the floor. The brain continually straightens up the room at the expense of the expense of the displays which seem to hang at impossible angles.

Out to the Cafe where they had a mirrored ceiling which gave great abstracts...

Finally we ventured outside where lots of tourists were in line to get interesting photos with the leaning tower... Here's Liz trying to hold it up!

I ventured back to the car and sat opened up the side door, and sat in the passenger seat while I waited for Liz and Emily to catch up. As they approached, something moved and gave me a fright. A songthrush had flown into the van (most unusual), and got frightened and flew into the front, landed on the dashboard and stared at me. I didn't think to get my camera out! I slowly got out on my side and moved away, and Emily opened her side up and it flew out. not before leaving a white deposit on top of the dashboard!

So that was our afternoon. Fully Recommend Puzzling World, especially on a rainy day when outdoor activities aren't so good.