Archive | places

These and more new photographs have just been added to the gallery auckland colour.

The above photographs highlight the interplay of reflections between the Phillips Fox Tower, the National Bank Centre, and Auckland’s Skycity Sky Tower.

I understand my newly built website will be ready to go live over the next week. There will be short periods of disruption, as parts of the development need to be applied while the site is live. So the photographic theme for this post is building.

I recently returned from an 8 day photographic trip where I had intended sailing to Great Barrier Island. Kawau Island was to have been the first destination with day two being the leg to Great Barrier. However on arrival at Kawau I discovered the stormy weather had ripped my headsail so I thought it best to limit the trip to bays in and around Kawau. It was an enjoyable 8 days with some of the time confined to cabin spent experimenting and attempting to compose music. I want to develop music to the point of providing my own soundtrack for online multimedia presentations, – a long term project! So much to learn and so many other things calling upon time.

There should be some good photos from the last trip, but I think it best to sit on them for awhile, to become more detached, more objective  : : peter

This post kicks off my new project ‘Auckland Central‘ and includes photographs taken a few days ago at the Chinese New Year Lantern Festival in central Auckland.

The event has grown year by year to a point where not many more people could fit into the space of Albert Park  and the adjoining food area on Princess Street. It has been reported that 250,000 people attended over the 3 day period, – a huge, happy, success.

As a so called national day of celebration the contrast between the Lantern Festival and the sorry farce of what I recently heard described in the media as ‘Maori Grievance Day’ could not be more pronounced. As an Aucklander, the Lantern Festival is probably becoming our annual day of celebration, and I am faced with the irony that it is largely immigrant Chinese giving us our best day of the year. Ironic because Maoridom demands and receives preferential treatment on a massive scale, and yet looks determined to escalate and perpetuate its ‘grievance industry’. While on the other hand, Asians in New Zealand, despite adversity, get on and make a success of things, – they are an inspiration and hopefully a bright star in our future. I admire them, and am grateful for that.

Photographically, my time at the Lantern Festival was challenging, as I took just one lens, a manual focus 100mm macro, so focusing in the dark was a bit hit and miss. I took this lens because it is reasonably fast, f2.0, and is renowned for exceptional bokeh, – that is, a creamy out of focus rendition. The slide-show currently displaying above, illustrates this by conveying a wateriness, a fluidity, that would have been destroyed if  the photographs were mostly in focus and shot with flash  : : peter