Another clear blue sky marked the end of the working week today. I took a stroll up one of the local hills to take in the ‘golden hour’ as the sun dropped low on the horizon. Whilst I liked each of the three images alone, I decided to combine them to show the progressive journey to the final shot, peeking through the harakeke (flax) towards Rangitoto on the other side of the harbor.
Now we are in autumn here in NZ we are getting some amazingly clear and fresh days as we head into winter. The temperature has dropped, but its still awesome weather in the sun with no wind. I was on my way back to the office and pulled over to take a shot of the clear blue sky. With an abundance of evergreens and lack of deciduous plants I wanted to create that autumn feeling still. I give my image a bit of the old washed out film look. To me it creates the visual feeling of a cool, crisp and clear day.
One of the things I love about New Zealand is how close we are to all aspects of nature, even if we live in the central city. The beach, mountains and forests are all relatively easy and quick to get to. I had some time to kill after work, on the way to a mates house and stopped off for a quick bush walk. One minute in and you are away from the cars, traffic and people. The lush green freshness radiates the senses and offers a calming element to ones busy lifestyle. We are approaching winter at the moment, so it gets dark fairly early. Looking up at the moon through the rapidly darkening bush, I caught this shot with my GRD IV. With some minor editing I placed it into a square format and bumped the contrast a little to make the clean black silhouette of the forest.
Welcome to MikeHawkey.com! Once I get up and rolling I’ll be posting various images and conversational observations. For today, here’s ‘Elephant in the City’. Playing around in Gimp (http://www.gimp.org), I got thinking about animals roaming free around our inner city regions (a little 12 Monkeys like). Grabbed a city shot from my GR IV and one of Burma @ Auckland Zoo from my Nex 5N, and here we are, Burma taking a stroll down lower central city Auckland.
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