which means here in New Zealand that we are well into summer now. But, the weather has a mind of it’s own, and today feels more like winter. It has been cold and wet, and when there is a gap in the cloud I can see snow on the surrounding mountains, which is a little unusual at this time of year!
There photos I made in early spring, when this sort of weather is a little more expected!
One of the things I love most about this area is the sky! It can be absolutely dramatic, changeable, and full of colour!
And capturing it truthfully can be a challenge – there is almost always a contrast in the amount of light in the sky compared with the foreground, so to really capture what your eye sees, it is frequently necessary to use either a Circular Polarising Filter (CPL), or a Neutral Density Graduated filter (ND Grad) to balance the exposure and bring the sky forward!
And if I don’t have all these things in my car ready for use I will likely miss out on a great image! These last two images and the ones following happened as we were driving to St Bathans with friends for dinner after the Blossom Festival, which happens on the last weekend in September. The light was beautiful, and I stopped the car a number of times to capture these images!
The CPL filter is a must have for any landscape photographer – it reduces haze in the image, balances the exposure somewhat, and deepens the blue in the sky, which brings the clouds forward. With out the filter the sky would be overexposed, with very little blue and the clouds washed into the background!
While I do very little editing of my scans, one thing I do like is the haze removal tool in Affinity Photo, which can be used occasionally to good effect without making the image look over processed or over saturated!
While purists sometimes still pooh pooh the zoom lens, and some of the early ones were not that good, my most used lens is my Contax Zeiss 3.3/28-85 lens, which is sharp at any focal length, and which allow two quite different compositions while standing in the same spot. I could alternatively crop the image, and sometimes I do, but a cropped image will always result in more apparent grain and lower definition, so I prefer to crop in camera by using the zoom lens where I can!
And finally, looking up the hill behind our house to the woolshed, with that amazing sky becoming the focal point of the image!
The last few days have been taking up with much busyness. The arborists who work for the lines company have been back to remove the giant poplar tree that dropped branches and nearly took out the power lines when it snowed a month ago. I have a lot of wood to cut up and remove from the grass in front of the fence, so I am going to have a very good supply of firewood this winter.
While I am ahead on the firewood, I have not had time to get my vegetable patch going this summer yet, anything I plant now will be for a late autumn harvest. On the plus side though, fruit trees are laden with plums and apples, even quinces, which I have not seen for a couple of years. And I have been getting our caravan (RV) ready for our holiday after Christmas. It has not moved for two years, so waking it up has been a bit of a project! We will be heading up the West Coast again on Boxing Day for a couple of weeks, and I am hoping for some great pictures along the way!
Thank you for visiting! As usual these images were made with my Contax camera and Kodak Portra 400 film.
I hope you and your families have a safe and Merry Christmas! See you (hopefully) next week!
