Heading off to the annual Lantin festival in Aucklands CBD this evening, I captured this image of the mid-town car park. I like how at night you can see right into it, whilst all around is black. Its almost like a giant dolls house where one removes the side wall to see what is happening.
Shot on the Nex 5N with 16-50mm lens. Very light editing in Gimp.
New Zealand, being fairly isolated on a country scale, has a vast history of migrating. The indigenous group of New Zealand, The Maori have legends of the great Waka that brought them to New Zealand from Hawaiki. Some time later the European discoverers came to the South Seas of the Pacific – Abel Tasman,and most notably Captain Cook. Soon enough people from England (and other areas of Europe) came to the brave new land and settled. Skip forward a few hundred years (we are a fairly young country) and we still see people coming to New Zealand for its beautiful lifestyle.
As a side, this got me thinking about passports and the process involved in moving from place to place. If anyone has any interesting articles/books on when exactly the world was divided up to the level one needed ID and permission to move from one land to another please add a comment. We take it as the norm now, but it cannot have always been such.
Todays image, ‘Beach Migration’, influenced by my thoughts, is of a group of paddle boarders of Aucklands Takapuna Beach. Cutting out the beach in the foreground, I wanted to create some form of impression that they are heading to Rangitoto Island.
Shot on the Ricoh GRD IV and edited in the OSX version of Gimp 2.8
As posted yesterday, Wednesday night I attended the Garbage concert at the Auckland Civic. Being concerts can be iffy about cameras, especially ones with Lenses that look big, I took along a Ricoh CX6. A great little camera with 10.7x zoom, as with all small point and shoots, it struggled a little with focus at times, and certainly had some noise at the higher ISO’s. Turns out other people (non officials) had walked in with their DSLR’s, so I could have taken something more substantial, but never mind – a great little camera with a big zoom that fits in the pocket, and has many of the custom aspects my usual GRD IV has.
Capturing Shirley, Duke, Steve and Butch, I cropped in a little on todays image. To deal with noise, I decided B&W was the way to go, and also pushed the contrast and slightly adjusted sharpness. All done in CS5.
Today marks a bit of a changeover in post image shooting for me. We purchased a new Mac, and my Linux machine, although still in use, is slowly getting things transferred over from. I like to use all OS’s, so will continue to do so, but mostly for now on OSX. Likely I will continue on with Gimp, but I also have more opportunity to keep in practice with Photoshop and the like also – something I have mentioned before, I am well out of practice with. As we are still battling with ISP issues, I have not yet managed to get Gimp on the Mac, but will attempt again over the next few days.
A quick post before the end of the day.
Shot on the Samsung s2, I hope to share some more tomorrow’ish.
Garbage rocked the Civic at Aucklands CBD. A great concert, many many years since they came to NZ.
Ranginui and Papatuanuku (Rangi & Papa) are the two primordial parents relating to the creation of the universe in Maori legend. To summarise loosely (check the full story here), Rangi and Papa lived embraced together. Their children were always stuck in the dark, cramped and unhappy. Eventually they decided to separate the two, and one of the son’s, Tane-mahuta successfully pushed them apart by resting his back on the ground and pushing up with his legs, Rangi and Papa screamed and cried, but they were forever separated – heaven and earth.
For today’s image I shot a simple grassy ridge and sky. Pushed the contrast and leves in the sky and slightly on the grass. Converted to B&W and added a vignette. Shot on the GRD IV and edited in Gimp.
All going well, this posts tonight. Ongoing ISP issues still…hopefully resolved tomorrow! Also off to a music concert tomorrow night. Hope to get some shots.
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