Sony A900. 24mm. ISO 100, f8 @ 1/320

The future was rushing towards me, drawing ever closer, arriving on the horned wings of an approaching storm. I looked up in horror, in ghastly realisation, and knew that there was nothing, nothing at all I could do to escape, to turn it away….

I am more convinced than ever that whatever we photograph, we need to be passionate about it, we need to embrace it.

Being a restless soul and a Libran to boot, and thus deeply aware of the duality which dwells in all of us, I cannot help myself. I need at least one other way of photographing. I love photographing the landscape, being out there with Creation and drawing it, drawing from it what it is saying to me at the time.

I am also fascinated by the human condition, by the often surreal nature of human existence and   of the interaction between people. I am intrigued by the fact that for all the vast numbers of us on the planet, no two of us are the same nor do we have the same life experience. Exploring the spaces between continues to draw me.

Then there is still life and the ability to use photographs to create narratives and…..

OK. I am a generalist at heart.

But I still love photographing the landscape.

But what I have observed is that to be really good at any branch of photography, you have to be in love with it, to be driven to do it, to know all there is to know about it and in particular to deeply understand your subject.

So I am going to talk about three tools I consider indispensable for being a landscape photographer and which can give me powerful information and understanding when I am out there.

1. My GPS unit. Friends laughingly (I hope) refer to the dashboard of my truck as the Bridge of the Starship Enterprise. There is a cradle for my mobile (now a legal requirement, he said defensively); there is a Navman GPS unit which helps me find my way around Auckland without making a fool of myself, which functions as an electronic logbook and Bluetooths with my phone as a handsfree kit; and there is a Garmin GPS unit, one of those yellow jobs you can carry around in the bush and look professional. The last, while somewhat antique, allows me to log where I am, and connects to my PC to record times and locations for images I have made on a map of New Zealand, thus building up a database for future reference. To be honest, I don’t refer to it much. I tend to store that information in my head. What  it does do is give me an accurate measure of altitude and therefore where I am in relationship to ground level. This can be a big help, as I will explain.
2. A passion for weather. Somebody once asked me what I would do if I had my life over again. I replied that I would love to be a meteorologist. Weather fascinates me.  It may have something to do with feeling a strong pull towards Tawhirimatea, the Maori God of the Winds and what that symbolises. Or it may just be that I am fascinated by the effect of weather on the land. I know I am intrigued by the interlocking nature of global weather patterns and how events in one part of the globe are inextricably linked to what happens everywhere else. I guess it meshes nicely with my interest in the nature of Creation and my sense of Nature as a visible manifestation of The Divine Principle. Whatever. My geography teachers at school never taught us anything of meteorology, preferring instead to attempt to interest  us in the annual crop production of Nebraska and Kansas. To date I have found little use for knowing the GDP of Malawi…But I have continued to be fascinated by weather, and by its symbolic representation in the form of isobaric maps. I love looking at a weather map then comparing it with what I see around me, learning to interpret the symbolic in an empirical/experiential way. And that has led to me  tool
3. My Casio model Sea Pathfinder watch. Ok I confess. Watches are to me what shoes were to Imelda Marcos. I love watches. I have 3. I would love more… But the Casio is my favourite. It is huge. It is neither delicate nor discreet. This is not a watch for wearing to a posh dinner party with royalty. It is built so ruggedly it would probably take a direct hit from an RPG and shrug it off. In the 5 years I have had it I have replaced 12 batteries (it takes 3 at a time ($80…ouch!) the strap once, and the outer casing, bezel and glass once. Grandpa’s axe, I suppose. What it does have is a compass, which allows me to calculate where I am, in which direction I am facing, and therefore the likely positions for sun/moon rise. It also contains a barometer, which has a nifty bar graph that shows me what is happening with the air pressure and therefore high and low pressure systems over the country. Over time I have come to understand what that means and the nature of a potential low/cold front. If the bar graph is dropping steeply, then a spectacular front is imminent (depending on the time of year). I have also learned that the best (read: most photogenic) weather arrives after the graph begins climbing again, signifying that the front edge of the cold front has passed and that the good stuff is close behind.

Now that I have had a Michael Reichmann moment, talking about toys tools, on to this photograph.

We were in Akaroa a week   ago. It was a late, balmy afternoon, and I was watching the skies, assessing the light and clouds, quality, angle and direction of the light ( I can’t help myself, I do it constantly), when I happened to glance across the harbour and noticed  wisps of cloud curling down over Mt. Bossu on the other side, being driven in by a southerly. I looked at the barometer on the watch and noticed for the first time that afternoon that the bar graph had been tumbling steeply for the last couple of hours but that it was now beginning to climb as quickly. And I knew that a dramatic landscape photograph was highly likely.  A sense of something atmospherically imminent, of some weather event I need to be in front of, gripped me. I have learned to trust this sense and allow it. From where we were, the bottom of the cloud layer would have been around 400m. I immediately thought of the lighthouse and the view to be had out to the south.

We jumped in the Hilux and took off up the road. At around 400m the road slid away into the murk and closed down to a narrow winding gravel idea amongst the tearing shreds of mist and thrashing winds. in the gloom the native shrubs, which have learned to grow at an angle away from the wind and hug the land, leaned away in the gloom like disturbed trolls.

I love being out in stuff like this.

The road climbed to around 680m, with the cloud getting thicker and thicker all the time, then abruptly turned right, sidled around a hill, then suddenly began dropping. Because I had driven the road, I wasn’t worried. I knew where it went. Well, mostly….

We dropped and dropped, bleeding off altitude at a high rate, then, at around 375m, we emerged gradually from the cloud, which was now streaming just above our heads and blowing through the hair of the withered but indomitable macrocarpas which farmers here  in New Zealand have planted for shelter since the early days. We continued the drive down until we emerged on the cliffs above the Akaroa Heads. The Garmin noted 250m.

I tucked the truck in behind another clump of macrocarpas which clung to the edge of the cliff ( from the bare ground and droppings  sheep used it frequently as shelter) and stepped out to look and assess the quality of my instinct.

I stood there, stunned. Perched as I was, about 1m away from the edge of the sea cliff, I had an uninterrupted view to the south (and below me).  The wind thumped and pushed and shook me. The storm was running round, maliciously slicing the tops off the waves, while the sky boiled and strained and raged and heaved in fury.  The light had a strange quality, a sort of deep turquoise luminance, and an inner glow which I had never seen before. Takitimu, the western head at the entrance to the harbour, slid away to the south, black and inscrutable and below me a reef protruding just above the water stubbornly held its ground against the storm. It was astounding, eerie but utterly beautiful. My weather sense had kept faith with me.

I raced back to the car. As I arrived, a stunned and shell-shocked Korean family with picnic basket and fishing rods were limping back up the hill. Their lovely day’s outing to the rocks had been violently shredded. They climbed gingerly into their Prado and lurched away back up the hill.

It was Big Sony time. I put on the ZA 16-35/2.8 and decided against using a tripod. The wind gusts were so fierce that I needed to be able to respond in the spaces between.  Anyway, using a tripod could cause harmonic vibrations which would affect micro-detail.

I went back and began photographing. I hadn’t used the machine for a couple of weeks, preferring to use the R1, which is my lead documentary camera. Somehow the settings were out of whack and I made some stupid errors with exposure, shooting without checking the histogram, aperture and ISO. My first 2 frames used f2.8 at ISO 6400 on Program…how did that happen? O yes, the fair….

Tony, Tony, Tony. Settle, Petal. Take a deep breath and sort yourself out. Get a grip.

I set up the camera properly. ISO 100, f8, Aperture Priority, DR standard, autofocus and anti-shake on,  and began exploring the scene, using a variety of focal lengths, as I worked my way in. I shot multiples of each framing, since I have observed that in conditions like this I tend to get a sharp one amongst others which have microshake. A result of dancing with the wind.

As I did, I noticed that the light was coming and going, pushing down through the clouds and illuminating the sea with a strange, sepulchral glow. Tangaroa. Abundance. Green/healing.  Life. Heart. Eternity revealed.

Then it was done. It was time to go. How did you go, she asked?

I think I may have one of my seven coffin pictures, I replied. I am back with the land.

I will let you all be the judge.