Religion is

The first winds of winter

Then let my name be called

Traveller

-Basho

From time to time I think about those people who, having found the photographic path that works for them, and fascinated by it, compelled to follow it, do so happily for the rest of their careers.

Lucky them.

The remaining few of us, restless souls that we are, and never quite content with any one direction, move from one thing to another, exploring, learning, then, having found what we wanted to find that period of time, moving on.

(more…)

Kia ora tatou:

Sometimes the stories around here are massive and mind-boggling, tributes to big money and breathtaking ineptitude, sometimes they  are small stories about stubborn determination.

Welcome to Africa.

I was driving south from Port Alfred, heading to Port Elizabeth and thence to Tsitsikammer for the night, when I hit the motorway, about 20 minutes north of PE. It is one of those amazing motorways with 6 lanes each side and a broad grass strip between them. You can cover long distances at the maximum speed limit of 120 km/h here and feel as if you are going nowhere.

(more…)

A ghost town, a town of ghosts

“Heaven wheels above you, displaying to you her eternal glories, and still your eyes are on the ground”

-Dante Alighieri

I said ‘mama I come to the valley of the rich
Myself to sell’
She said ’son this is the road to hell’

-Chris Rea

Somewhere back in the 1860’s they found gold in Central Otago, in a little place called Gabriel’s Gully. Of course the word got out and in no time, towns had sprung up all through the area, staffed by the hopeful, the industrious, the greedy, and the foolish. A steady stream of prospectors poured across the hills from Dunedin, all come to make their fortune.

Such are the ways of men. (more…)

Weave me a rope that will pull me through these impossible times.
Tim Finn

None of us knows what will happen each morning when we step out the door. The wind may be bringing us good fortune. Or it may not. So there is an excitement in every day, anticipation, a hope. It is the beginning of a new journey and the continuation of an old one. While we may think we know where it will end, there is no certainty, there are no guarantees. Maybe that is why we like travelling so much. Maybe that is why train journeys are so popular. (more…)

Seagulls pivot and pinion on the edge of the wind

Draw quivering wingtips through the air

Soft fingers through Tawhiri’s hair

stitch sky to land

and brand the morning light

with blue and golden promise.

Messengers all,

envoys,

bearing Rangi and Papa’s pledges

To each other.

“Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.”

Edgar Allen Poe

Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

-John Donne

It was a morning like any other. (more…)

For the first time in a fortnight (or maybe it is the second), the sun comes out. As I glance down at the skunk cabbage at my feet, uncharacteristic black markings lie across the leaves. I look at it for a moment, somewhat stunned by the strangeness of what I am seeing. Then I realise what it is; shadows have grown on the leaf. The sun has made a rare appearance, teh second time in a fortnight. It augurs well for the day ahead.

Sitka lies in the back corner of a fjord on Baranof Island in southeast Alaska. There is a gap of around 12 miles from the town out to the edge, to the place where the land lies behind and only the ocean is before. The next stop from here is Vladivostok. From Sitka to the outer edge is a trip of around two to 2 1/2 hours in one of the local fishing boats or about a half hour in something faster. (more…)

 Kia ora tatou

I have been in training.

After a lifetime of being owned by cats, I am free now. I do not have to come at their beck and call. For all their larger-than-life personalities and unique character traits (Beastly was just that, a cunning tormenter of the local dogs, especially smaller ones ,and Lucky The Bionic Cat-he carried a lot of steel in his hind-quarters after going mano a mano with a car and losing- still kept his no-retreat, no-surrender attitude), cats have their own thoughts and clutch their secret lives close to their chests.

Dogs are different. (more…)

I have seen

Summer’s fire slump slowly sideways,

slide into the cooling embers of the year.

I have witnessed

The last fragile fingernail of autumn’s grasp,

A red-rimmed leaf,

Release its grip,

Slip slowly to earth and lie smiling,

Face-up under the yellowing sun

Coming later each day around the corner of the house.

I have heard the birds that daily

Wake the sleeping trees

Struggle to arouse and enthuse them

As they calmly wrap winter’s damp mantle around themselves

And retreat into their memories.

And all the time the wind

Is coming from further and further

to the south.

Kia ora tatou:
It had to happen…spammmers find blogs. I have had a number of offers which relate to health and virility issues ( which I do not believe I have!). For that reason I intend to enable moderation for all comments. This will mean a delay between you submitting and your comments appearing on the site. I apologise for that, but I am sure you receive your fair share of such offers….

A number of you have asked me about upcoming workshops, both here and abroad. So here is a summary to date:

-I will be offering a range of courses for people in and around Canterbury through the University of Canterbury. These include landscape photography, digital skills and digital workflow for working photographers. You can find out more and sign up on the university website

-There are still places on the Sitka workshop. Fees for the week are a very reasonable $US395 -(plus travel and accommodation of course). You can read about it and download a brochure here

-I will be running a workshop in the Maniototo in the first week of August, in beautiful Wedderburn in Central Otago. If you fancy 6 days down there, studying photography, along with being in fabulous scenery, experiencing a barbecue in the snow ( true!), a little curling and being pushed (photographically, not over), email me to book a place.I will post details and a brochure over the next few days. Numbers are strictly limited to 12 participants.

Ka kite ano

“God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world”

-CS Lewis

“We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature – trees, flowers, grass- grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence… We need silence to be able to touch souls.”

-Mother Theresa

An artist must possess Nature. He must identify himself with her
rhythm, by efforts that will prepare the mastery which will later
enable him to express himself in his own language.
-Henri Matisse

It was scum, ordinary scum on the surface of a lake. (more…)

And soon I heard a roaring wind:

It did not come anear;

But with its sound it shook the sails,

That were so thin and sere.

The upper air burst into life!

And a hundred fire-flags sheen,

To and fro they were hurried about!

And to and fro, and in and out,

The wan stars danced between.

The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner -Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“Remember what Bilbo used to say: It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to…”;

- Frodo to Sam

Sometimes you just have to go with the flow, to follow the wind. Sometimes a chain of events flows from a single decision, from a single choice, and sometimes that choice isn’t really one at all. (more…)

A very receptive state of mind… not unlike a sheet of film itself – seemingly inert, yet so sensitive that a fraction of a second’s exposure conceives a life in it.
-Minor White

It was one of those serene mornings that yawn and stretch into life on the West Coast. After a day of rain, the weather had come to a standstill while the high rolled gently onto the land. A sense of expectation and an eerie calm had settled over everything. It felt like the weather was holding its breath.

I had meant to be up before dawn to follow the transition from night to day but I overslept and wasn’t ready until after 7am. I went out anyway.

As often happens for me, I wasn’t sure quite where to start, so I stood there and looked around, waiting for the image to come to me. The great American photographer, Minor White, once said “Be still with yourself until the object of your attention affirms your presence.” Over time I have learned the truth of what he said. Sometimes an image has to come in its own time and we have to be willing to wait for it. Rushing around will only keep it at bay. So I waited.

I went and stood down by the water’s edge. Ruth, the elderly whitebaiter in the deerstalker hat and bushshirt who has been coming down there for many years and continues to do so after the death of her husband, looked sternly at me.
” You should have been here earlier,” she said. “The light was really nice then. You missed a good show.”
I got the point. But the photograph was still eluding me, even though I sensed its presence nearby. I didn’t even know which lens I would use. No clues at all.

Then, as if accepting my contrition, the image began to show itself. I looked up at the sky and the early-morning clouds dawned on me. A jetstream far above was drybrushing the clouds into koru-shaped wisps that tumbled and frolicked like carefree children across the sky. At my feet the sky checked itself in the mirror-calm estuary. I felt as if I was standing on the edge of eternity. Land and sky had become one. Now I began to understand why Tane and his siblings might have wanted to push apart their parents, Rangi and Papatuanuku. All that eternity could get to you. The view was huge and wide and all-encompassing, and I felt at once elated, at once diminished by it.

I wondered where to begin. Then the scene told me what to do. It was both intense and panoramic, wider than it was tall. It seemed to go on forever and draw me into some sort of limitless zenlike being, where sea and sky had become one, and the only link with reality was a thin line of darker-toned land forming the horizon.

I went back to my vehicle and got my camera, the 24mm shift lens and my tripod. I slopped through the mud to the water’s edge and set up my equipment. As so often happens, no matter how hard we work to narrow the gap between what our eye sees and what the camera exposes, the viewfinder will often reveal a different truth. (I learned a long time ago to always look through the lens when there was a story to be told; the hard part is knowing which lens will best tell it). I wanted to make a stitch panorama with enough information in the file to make a really big work, at least A0, so I made two overlapping images, shifting left for the first one, then right for the second, and using identical exposures for both.

After working for several minutes, I stepped back, and Ruth, who had been obviously watching me, commented on how much effort I seemed to be putting in, and how she could have done it in much less time. Helpful soul.

Taking a break, we talked about the whitebait season (bloody terrible) and the spring weather (also bloody terrible) and the sandflies( becoming bloody terrible).

Then I saw her net.

It floated there, a drawn-out piece of material reality lying contentedly between sea and sky. Its gossamer tail rested, ethereal, sublime and serene, in the translucent waters, while its glowing, skeletal head basked in the morning sunlight. I went back to The Zone. Lost in another Place and Time, I roamed, making more images, using the same laboriously technical but absorbing shift-lens-stitch method.

When I returned to the Now, I looked around, hoping to talk to Ruth, but she had lost interest. Her back was pointedly turned away from me, the tails of her bushirt, flapping disdainfully, and she was bent over, fiddling with her spare whitebaiting equipment.

One day I am going to find Ruth. I want her to see this image.

The Norwest wind has been buffeting the district all day, throwing its weight around, thumping the buildings like an out-of-sorts and grumpy bully, who, because he can’t get his way, stomps scowling away down the street, knocking over all the rubbish tins as he goes. He has managed to do some damage. A friend, who lives just around the corner, shows me the sagging remains of a brand new tin garden shed, punched out by the strength of the wind. The cloud cows are back, ruminating their way across the sky, casting vast pools of shadow as they meander east.

As the day draws on I find myself getting increasingly itchy, moving outside to stare at the sky, to watch all the action and wonder how I can participate. In the end the day gets the better of me and I have to go. I pack my equipment and head out of town, moving up towards the light. The truck is lurching and shuddering in the wind, and when I stop by the Shoe Fence and get out for a look, it seems as if the whole landscape is on the move. To the south, the clouds are moving much more slowly across the Lammermoor Range, dragging their wispy, diaphanous rain skirts. The ones above the Old Man Range are much more impressive, big bloated pompous things with puffed out chests, while those off to the north linger, thin and anorexic. Around me the grasses are hissing angrily, furious at being treated in such a fashion. But it is still early and the sun hasn’t sunk low enough for the shadows to bring texture to the land. So I drive on.

Then I am back at Wedderburn and this time I turn left onto Maniototo Station Road. It stretches emaciated and barren away to the South, a line of pale yellow splitting the landscape. I follow it down, my vehicle hardly raising any dust from its bony surface. The road lingers along for a bit then abruptly arises onto a small plateau, trickles a little further then abruptly splits in two. Ahead of me, shrinking into the distance is Maniototo Station Road, veering off to the right Highfield Road. Either way looks just as good, either way is full of possibilities.

At first I ponder which of these two roads I should take, especially since the light is now getting to the point of being critical. I know that whichever one I choose will dictate the pictures I am able to make: take the wrong road and the results could be disappointing. The secret then is to choose the correct one. I ponder this for a time as I look around myself at the landscape, the light, the weather and the day. It occurs to me that life is like that; a series of intersections or choices. Each decision we make will have ramifications for the rest of our lives. So I need to choose wisely. In the end I do neither and begin photographing the intersection itself. Somehow there is something iconic about this place, a kind of visual metaphor for Choice and Consequence.

Later, as I edit the image, I realise that colour does not suit it, that the binary nature of Choice dictates it should be black and white.

Art imitates life imitates art.

I have been travelling across the tail end of the night, crossing from west to east, under a sky littered with stars and the untidy splash of the Milky Way. To left and right, the mountains loom up, ghostly and sepulchral, immobile stone trolls, noting my passage but making no comment.

I left the West Coast shortly before midnight, driven by a requirement to be back in time for a meeting in Ranfurly. Travelling in the dark can be a very personal and surreal experience. They say angels talk to a man when he walks, and I have come to realise that they do the same thing when he drives. It is a time to reflect and review. Perhaps it is something to do with being alone in a space that only extends to the limits of the headlights.

The truck and I know each other well, and we are attuned to the rhythm of this particular piece of road, but somewhere above Lake Hawea I know it is time to take a break. The road is becoming a little bit difficult to control, wrestling to get away from me.. I’m worried about the potential for having an accident, although I haven’t seen a single car in two hours. So I pull up at a photo opportunity lay-by high above the lake, and sleep for a couple of hours.

I awake and push on. The road slips and slides and winds its way down to Alexandra. The needle has slid to near- empty and there are no gas stations until I get to Ranfurly, so I pull over again on the main street, and wait for the pumps to open. It’s five o’clock now, and my best guess is they’ll open around 6 a.m. There will probably be workers, contractors and farm people wanting to fill up. I drift off again, and wake just as the signs come on at the Caltex station across the road. Sure enough, as I pull on to the diesel pump, a guy in a Mitsubishi ute stops on the other side, and fills first his truck and then the petrol cans for the collection of chainsaws in the back. His pointed comments on the frost explain the sullen muttering of the helicopter I’ve been hearing in the distance since I got here. Frost on the vines. Of course.

The first glimmer of daybreak is throwing the hills to the east into relief as I head up the road towards Omakau. Off to the left, the brush of snow swept across the hills by the weekend southerly storm is beginning to light, pink and blue, as the light strengthens to the east and the sun begins to appear above the horizon. The contented murmur of the diesel plays almost a counterpoint to it. As I wind my way up a road I’m beginning to know well and which is beginning to know me well, I begin to reflect on the road my life has and is taking. There have been some hard lessons to learn, and some hard lessons I’m still learning.

They say angels talk to a man when he walks.

There has been a heavy frost (hardly unusual round here), and the semi-frozen water races and streams of water on the rocky ground squirm and shimmer in the early morning light. I pass an irrigator, one of those black circular ones like an oversized cowpat which has been left on all night. Around it a circle of white frost has built up in layers, ice upon ice upon ice like thick icing. A lone weed inside the circle has multiple coatings of hoar frost, and now points an ice-gloved bony finger towards the sky.

Then, as I climb up the past Becks onto the plateau by St. Bathans, I see the fog bank ahead of me. Oh great. It does nothing to lift my spirits, which have been hovering on the fine line between reflective and dour. It writhes and slithers and fidgets its way over the hill, picking at the landscape, pouring into the hills and gullies, shrouding the trees and buildings in a grey mystery. The just-out-of-reach sun, maybe a valley or two further east, has turned the upper edge of the fog bank a wild pink-magenta colour, which provides a line of contrast between the sullen grey beneath, and the dharmic yellow-blue gradation above. It makes me think of that Stephen King novella, the one where the people are locked in the supermarket while prehistoric creatures roam outside. As I drop down into the murk, I can almost imagine dinosaurs roaming, indistinct and shadowy in the fields to either side.

Passing the Wedderburn hotel and the railway goods shed brought back and restored after Grahame Sydney had painted it and made it famous, I see the old stone shearing shed off to my left, sitting solemn and somehow forlorn in the mist. The power pole beside it is adorned with birds, socialising along a single wire. There is a composition here, so I climb down from the artificial warmth of the truck. I zip my jacket up to my chin (wish I’d remember to bring that beanie) and break out my camera. By the time, I’ve made for or five exposures, the mist is starting to lift and the hills in the background are moving into the frame like uninvited guests. So I pack up, and drive further up the hill.

Then, as I am almost at the top of the hill, the light explodes in my face. Ahead of me, on the ridge line, a stand of old man pine. The mist is beginning to thin, breaking up into shreds, beginning to drift apart like friendships beyond their use-by date. The rising sun, much more confident now, is sitting just behind the trees and pouring light through them. Great shafts of light and shadow are spilling out of the trees, and from where I am parked, it’s as if they have exposed their heart for all to see. It is so dramatic that it blows away the goblins of melancholy and self-doubt that have been picking at me all night.

This time I manage somewhere between 20 and 30 exposures before the moment has gone.

Following the long curve of the road down into Ranfurly, I can feel the fire lit inside me again, the itching expectation of what will appear on my computer screen. I give thanks to my travelling companions.

What I have seen is, in a way I have yet to understand, an affirmation.