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

Mt Hutt, late spring snow

Another find in my folder of ‘files to work on’ was an image I captured a few months ago.  It is from one of my nearby locations that I regularly visit to photograph.  It is always interesting to see how different the same composition can look under different light.  This day there was a combination of a late spring dump of snow, a setting moon, wonderful early light on soft clouds and content sheep grazing.  As I type this I have a 1 metre wide print on canvas emerging from my printer, it looks great.

Late light, Glenfalloch

I am still working through a backlog of photographs taken a while ago on a trip into the backcountry of the Rakaia river – this one caught some very special light one evening.  I have printed it along with some other new material to freshen up my collection at the Icehouse Gallery.

Sunrise, Glenfalloch

In this month’s NZ Geographic there is a large fold out map of Canterbury.  One of my Glenfalloch images was used for the information panels on the reverse.

I have not spent as much time out photographing as I would like lately due to some big changes underway. If you are not plugged in to the Methven grapevine you may not have heard that we have sold our house.  We love living here but decided we want to be able to pack up and travel more easily.  A house with 2 acres of garden is not very conducive to that idea!  Having sold the house, we spent a lot of time deciding where to live but ended up realising Methven has everything we want: a great community, all the shops & essential services yet still retaining the small town ambiance, and a location central to all points of the South Island.

Having decided to stay here we looked for a smaller house to live and work from but couldn’t find the right combo so once again will go through the building process.  I’m excited to be able to incorporate purpose-built printing room and studio space.  We have found a great architect to work with and are at the early planning stage, expecting to take most of the year to complete the new property. We will live in a nice little rental cottage on a farm just out of town for the year.

With a disrupted year on the books we thought why not really mix things up.  So we have ordered a large (25′) caravan that we hope to spend a lot of time in this year, doing a slow crawl around the island(s).  NZ is not that big but there are endless little communities and interesting pockets of country dotted all over.  We want to take the time to get to know as many of them as possible.  And of course be photographing life and land along the way.  I’m not sure what the end point for this photographic journey will be, but it will develop along the way.

I am hoping to connect with a lot of people on the road.  This blog will be a lot more active than it has been, with updates of where we are and where we are going.  So if you are somewhere near us and feel like sharing your part of  paradise do get in touch, we will  head your way.  And if you have any suggestions for places not to miss, we’d love to hear those too.  Here’s to an interactive tour.

We will be heading off in early March once we have fully moved out of our house and settled in to the cottage.  I’m busy trying to figure out the best mobile internet solution because much of area we plan to go is not near cellphone coverage.  If you have suggestions, please let me know.

All this means my other ‘regular’ work will be a bit disrupted during the year, but we will have short periods back in Methven now and then, so if you do have a project you need help with let me know.  I might just need a bit more notice than usual.

Snow on Mt Taylor and Pudding Hill, mid summer

And for the visual of the day I have a photo I took just out of town this morning looking towards Mt Taylor and Pudding Hill. Yes it is supposed to be mid summer with harvest getting under way but fresh snow makes a joke of that. I am reminded once again why I class my 20 years farming as ‘character building’.

Frosty sunrise, Glenfalloch

In the Dec issue of Avenues magazine there is a feature on the best place I know of for a corporate retreat.  Glenfalloch Station is set in beautiful isolation and offers great hospitality, accommodation and conference facilities. It is also one of my favourite places to photograph.  The Avenues article only used a few (including this one as a double spread on the entry page) but if you look through my portfolio you will see Glenfalloch images popping up regularly.

The latest Latitude magazine is out now. Each issue I have a double page spread of one of my images, with a few words about what was going on in my head at the time.  Often it is not easy to articulate why I like something, it just seems right, so I find it an interesting exercise having to put pen to paper (actually finger to keyboard).  Here is this issues image, click it and you will go to a full 1600×1200 pixel version which you are welcome to ‘borrow’ if you need a new spring themed desktop.  Oh, and here was my ‘insight’ about the image:

“As a full time photographer much of my time is spent aiming for not only a creative composition but also technical perfection, coaxing the maximum detail from every pixel.  Now and then I enjoy stripping the composition right back to the basics, sometimes less detail works better to convey the mood I’m trying to capture. Too much detail can distract. There are still some people around who feel that photography should always be a literal representation of reality, but everyone’s own reality is very different.  The camera is just a tool to help show my particular view of the world.”

For the second year I have put together a calendar to help fundraising for the Methven Community Sports Trust.  It is out nice and early for those people who are organised and like to post overseas. This year we have streamlined the production and managed to reduce the price to $10 while maintaining the quality of last year.  Every cent goes to proposed new sporting facilities in our town so it is a good way to support the local community, promote our beautiful part of the country, and take care of a few Christmas prents all at once.  It is available at many retailers around town (a full list will soon be on my main website).  If you are out of town let me know, we can mail.

2010 Mt Hutt - Methven Calendar

This is a little backwards but I started a page on Facebook here with the aim of letting surfers there know about my website and photography. It is interesting how interactive it is though, I plan to have regular updates there.  So if you are already on facebook I’d love you to add me over there.

I have been all over the place lately (Sydney, Melbourne, Hokitika and Wellington in two weeks) and finally had a chance to sift through some of the images I have been collecting. Looking outside at snow now on Mt Hutt it seems hard to believe I shot this just a couple of weeks ago in Hokitika.

Surfers at sunset, Hokitika