Methven beat Southern, 2010 Watters Cup rugby

Whenever there is something interesting going on in Methven, if I go I usually can’t help but take a camera and do some visual push-ups.  I just enjoy photographing nearly everything (except weddings). These photos don’t usually have any apparent use – so I’m thinking about making a home for them on my website, sort of a visual diary of local life.  The page is not officially part of my website yet but can be found here for now.  The initial photos are from yesterdays Watters Cup rugby final where Methven had a good win over Southern.

Raewyn Hillier on Latitude cover Winter 2010

Another cover on Latitude mag: over the last couple of months I’ve had fun photographing Raewyn Hillier.  She is a very interesting woman, recently seen with husband John on a  ‘Country Calendar’  episode featuring their high country hunting / guiding business.  I also photographed her working with Erewhon’s clydesdale horse team, riding her Harley and working at her day job as a flooring consultant in Christchurch.  It’s worth buying the mag just to read this article and see my photos of her!

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

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.

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!

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.