Category: New Zealand
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Blowholes in pancake rocks
The breakers dash against the rocky coast. The water breaks into a natural cave, forces its way into a narrowing tunnel, then finds, under enormous pressure, a way out to the surface through a vertical blowhole … That the sudden blasts of water up in the air appear amidst a landscape of eroded pancake rocks…
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Glacial milk
It can be white, but also grey or turquoise, depending on the mineral composition of the rock that is ground by the glacier on its slow way down. The rock flour collected in the melt water of the glacier is so fine that it remains suspended, giving the water its cloudy (milky) look. Here in…
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Coincidence
Two swimmers in Wellington Harbour. One in the water, the other on the wall of a gallery at the harbour front. One doing breaststroke, the other backstroke. Both rather clumsily. I remember when seeing the second swimmer I thought of the first whose picture I just had taken outside. It made me decide to photograph…
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Wanaka skyscape
Except for its colours, the skyscape that I once saw above Lake Wanaka resembles the landscape I sometimes see from my window in the Himalayas: rolling mountain ranges rising in the mist above a layer of low-hanging clouds. The skyscape in the picture is nothing else than ‘a visible mass of condensed watery vapour floating…
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Still waters …
run deep. That’s indeed the impression we get when looking at them from the right perspective, as we did in last week’s post when looking down at Diamond Lake. But here, standing at the overgrown shore of the lake, all we see in its still waters is but reflection. We even cannot make out the…
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Diamond Lake
Truly an appropriate name for this gem, mounted in its green border. Seen from above it does indeed reflect the unfathomable firmament, yet it also hints at its own dark depths. Photo of the week: Diamond Lake, above Lake Wanaka, New Zealand 2013
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Composition
Every photo is, of course, a composition, marked by the choice of what to include within the four sides of the picture and what to leave out. Light and colour also come into play. The photographer may or may not be fully aware of these factors, but they do play their part. Here it was the…
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Through the fjord with a bang
While the Maori section of the museum in Okains Bay offered an interesting picture of Maori traditional craft and culture, the colonial section looked a bit like a junk shop, a ‘brocante’, with a nostalgic making mishmash of early 20th century objects brought along by the white settlers. The painted drum in the picture, with…
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Coffee time!
The background of the impressive Maori figure on the painting we recognize as Okains Bay, the pristine bay that I showed you on this blog two weeks ago. Behind the Maori’s back we see two waka (traditional Maori canoes) pulled up on the beach. The first Maoris that came to New Zealand over a thousand…
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Okains Bay
Okains Bay is not just a magnificent bay on New Zealand’s South Island (see last week’s post). It is also the place of an old Maori settlement with still a considerable percentage of Maori population to this date. The photo shows the inside of the Whaakata, a traditional meeting house, now part of the Maori…
καιρός remembered 