water – Page 5 – MikeHawkey.com

As I transition back into the usual flow of work, its time to share some images I captured over the last week.

As stated the other day, I went to the West Coast of Auckland and took some images at Piha Beach. Nice and early in the morning, the water flowing to the beach was still (the surf beach that Piha is still had waves crashing) and the haze and spray of the sea drifting in. Although the sun was yet to come up properly, it was overcast.

I set my tripod up and took a few shots, both with the Sony Nex and the Pentax MG, looking out past Lion Rock and into the island in the distance. I also attached a graduated tone filter to both, trying to give the sky some colour in the Nex, and bring out a little cloud on the MG.

Today’s image, from the Nex, is straight from camera, unedited aside from scaling and adding my sig. If I was to edit it, I think I might crop the aspect a little, but I quite like it as-is.

I will write some more about Piha in the coming days as I have a few images I wish to share. Today’s image brings about childhood memories for me. The stream in the foreground was great for sailing boats (model ones) and building dams on. I also recall as a youngster falling in fully clothed and being less than impressed. Piha is a black sand beach – it always seemed to stick much better than white sand, and ALWAYS got into my sandwiches as a child!

Prior to visiting Motat with work on Friday, I had some lunch at Western Springs – the large freshwater springs next to the venue. Once upon a time Western Springs was the primary water source for much of Auckland (Like the Pumphouse on the North Shore I have written about). Now days it makes a popular place for a walk, run or to have a picnic and feed the ducks.

Surrounding part of the springs is a little river where the water flows. Armed with my Sony Nex 5N and 210mm lens I got as central to and low as I could and shot into the distance.

In post processing using Gimp I slightly cropped and straightened, added a cross-processed filter, pushed the contrast a notch and desaturated by several points.

Walking down some lesser known streets (to me) on the North Shore, I came to a dead end at Charles Street. It had a great view looking over at the Harbour Bridge (almost directly to where I took my night shots of the Bridge several weeks back). Armed with the Sony Nex and Jupiter-11 at f4 I got down to the height of the small mangroves and followed the water track to the view of the bridge. Aside from being straightened and cropped slightly, no other post processing.

I recently purchased a film scanner with the intention of using it to copy new films as I develop them. As a side bonus, I found a box of old negatives from my 100% film days. Todays image is one of those, taken on my trip to Hong Kong about ~8 years ago. From memory I was using a Minolta Dynax 700si – a really nice piece of 35mm kit I regret selling. Im not sure if it is still the case, but when I visited, Hong Kong still had a small percentage of the boat people community just to one side of the harbor. I remember going on a small boat tour around their community and watching people working on engines, preparing food etc – all the things you might see on a side street on land.

Aside from scanning and resizing for the net this negative scan is untouched. I love the look of old film.

Tag: water

Flowing out to Sea

Up the River

Beyond the Mangroves

35mm Hong Kong