I went through all those earthquake drills as a youngster and when I needed them at 4.35 am this morning just lay in bed trying to wake up, wondering why the whole house was jumping around! Luckily no real damage here, images from Christchurch looking rather surreal though with many older buildings partially crumbling. In Methven both the Brown & Blue pubs lost chimneys, shop stock was shaken up a bit but could have been a lot worse.

Two things I learnt: first, I finally understand the power and use of Twitter for immediate news. Within minutes a stream of reports and photos were appearing, being re-tweeted around the world. An iphone linked to Twitter account would be the best reportage tool to dominate immediate news. Second, NZ (I guess Auckland based) TV was so slow to pick up on anything, CNN was reporting within 20 minutes, NZ TV was at least a couple of hours later. Pretty slack really.

Firemen clean up broken chimneys from the Brown Pub after this morning's earthquake

We have settled in well to our slow tour of NZ, constantly surprised at our discoveries. The South Island really is a great place to live in and be able to photograph. I haven’t quite figured out the disconnect of what I personally find interesting, and what the average tourist here does (or is steered towards by the marketers). A couple of hours in Queenstown, mecca for all visitors, is more than enough to me. Sure it is surrounded by beautiful scenery, but so is most of the island, in a less frenzied way.

What really catches my eye are the unique little buildings and establishments with personality. While heading from Queenstown to Gore we stopped in the little settlement of Athol. An intriguing building promised ‘Bed & Breakfast, coffee, hot chocolate’ as well as artworks. Inside we met the owner, a real character, who was busy working away in his studio out the back. Definitely more interesting to me than the average tourist shop.

Red Barn Studio, Athol

I am sitting in a backpacker’s hostel overlooking Wanaka right now, cataloging and backing up a stash of images from the last few days. We just biked the 160 km Otago Rail Trail over four days. The weather wasn’t the best for comfort – norwest headwind on day 1, freezing rain on day 2, more wind on day 3 then finally a good tailwind on the last day – but is did create some magnificent light and sky landscapes. I hauled a stripped down camera kit (one body & 3 lenses) but it still seemed like more weight than I needed at times.

While on the trail we met many interesting people. A chance encounter with two traveling English photographers in the Ranfurly pub ended up with us comparing thoughts and ideas all evening. Escaping from the freezing rain to the warm reception by Ken & Helen at Glen Ida. A random encounter with a young woman who quit her job in the US a year ago and is now peddling her way around the world with only what she can carry on her bike. And of course the other rail trail bikers including our near neighbour Dave.

The plan is to carry on around the south for a while (autumn colour in Arrowtown is high on the list) then work our way north, maybe up the west Coast. I’m enjoying being able to carry out most of my essential work on the go; a couple of hard drives with copies of my entire archive and a very good laptop. Well it hardly qualifies as a laptop – an 18.4″ AW series Sony Vaio – not something you would open up seated on a plane! But it does have an amazing screen, one of the few that faithfully displays a full Adobe RGB colour gamut and has enough screen real estate to enable accurate image editing unlike most laptops. With this and a mobile wireless router I’m still in business while on the road.

Change is good – getting out of the usual routines definitely sparks the creative juice.

Cloud and road converge on the rail trail

We are just days away from moving out of our house to a small rental while we build our next new house. You may have heard that we are taking the opportunity of a disrupted year to have a good look around NZ, I’m really looking forward to having the time to see and photograph all the quiet little places I usually race through without stopping. I plan to build up a collection of photographs of NZ in 2010, a slice of real New Zealand rather than the normal glossy over the top images we usually see. These images can look a bit underwhelming at the time but several years down the track it’s interesting to see how we change. One of my all time favourite publications is Robin Morrison’s ‘South Island from the Road’, a collection of photographs from around 1980.

Regarding the above photo, when I photographed it last week I couldn’t help but compare it to one I posted a few weeks ago of a blue car outside our garage in Methven. Two photographs of cars outside garage workshops in two little country towns, not very far apart. Similar but not. Life is full of contrast!