In this issue

1. My Artwork of the Week

2. Frontispiece

3. Photographer's corner-seeing light

4. Waiata mou te Ata-Rainsong, Windsong

5. Fevered Mind Links (to make your Sunday morning coffee go cold)

6. Endpapers

My Artwork of the Week

In 2006, when I first moved to the Maniototo in Central Otago, I fell in love (again) with the same place that had inspired Grahame Sydney to pack himself up and has little Morris van and move up to be with the landscape he loved.

It took me a while to realise what I loved most. It was the light. Of course, it was the light. After all, light is the bread upon which photographers feed. It is the staple of our art. And coming to know and understand light is a lifelong journey we never complete.

I met Grahame early on, one night in the pub in St. Bathans. Over wine and food, we had a lovely long deep conversation. I had just discovered his iconic book Timeless Land, written with his friends Brian Turner and Owen Marshall. Grahame talked about how the book launched his career, making his work known to many.

Naturally, I fell in love with the way he painted the landscape. It didn't take too long, however, before I realised how his photorealistic paintings were constructs, composites of memory which suggested that he had stood somewhere and produced a literal document of it. It took me time to realise that he was conveying the feeling of the place rather than a photographic representation.

On my trips backwards and forwards to Christchurch, I would often pass the old goods shed by the railway line between the two branches of the Rangitata River. On the southern end of the shed was a giant luridly-coloured mural with the legend "Ohau I Love to Ski", an advertisement for the ski field at Lake Ohau. Grahame had made a painting of it, and I wanted to see whether I could make a photograph just like it. On one trip south, I had Timeless Land sitting on the seat beside me. So I pulled over, found the painting and the book and sat there, comparing the difference between reality and the artwork. I quickly realised two things.

Firstly, I would need a ladder, perhaps 30 feet tall, to get the same perspective.

Secondly, I would need to spend at least a week with a chainsaw, cutting down all the willows beside the railway line that seemed to have mysteriously disappeared from the painting.

There was something else that didn't feel right. At first, I couldn't put my finger on it, so I drove south without getting out my camera.

It nagged at me for a fortnight or so. Then one afternoon, the penny dropped.

It was the sky. It wasn't right for a Canterbury landscape. After spending most of my life in Canterbury, I knew all the variations of the sky in different weathers, particularly when a Norwest wind was blowing. And I'd never seen the sky like the one in the painting.

However, I knew the sky and the painting very well. It was that peculiar gradation, that transition from yellow to blue that you only see in Central Otago. He had painted a Central Otago sky onto a Canterbury scene.

And here is the thing.

Wherever you live in Aotearoa, the skies are unique to that locality. The quality of an Auckland sky (and Auckland clouds) is vastly different to what you will find in Ahuriri (Hawke's Bay) or Taranaki. Coromandel light is nothing like Southland light. It has its own mauri (essence).

Part of our journey as photographers of the land is to become intimately acquainted with the difference between them.

Frontispiece

Atamaarie e te whaanau:

good morning everybody.

Finally.

After three years of watching Fiordland from the eastern rim, I had the glorious opportunity to fly over it and be with it again. Finally, I was back in my happy place, in my flying office (see picture above).

It is hard to imagine the vastness of this UNESCO World Heritage site. Over a million acres of wilderness, most of it untouched by human feet and unlikely to ever be walked upon. Ever.

It's not that people haven't been coming here for a very long time. However, until the invention of the helicopter, vast tracts of it have been inaccessible. You can get there by walking or arrive by sea through one or more of the fourteen fjords.

Last week, I spent four days with two passionate photographers who wanted me to show them Fiordland as I know it. So we travelled, and we talked (a lot), and I guided them to some of my \ secret places. We spoke of the ancient sacred trails which criss-cross the land and of my tupuna (ancestors), who have been coming here for thousands of years. It was an absolute honour to share some of this ancient knowledge, to give them a perspective, a framework and a conversation opening for their responses to this unique whenua (land).

One of the places where we land is the very top of a mountain. The landing pad is perhaps 10 m square, so it's pretty exciting to slide up a cliff and then plop down.

As they were photographing, I looked out to the mouth of the sound and could imagine the first sailing ships coming into the entrance. I could imagine the waka haurua (double-hulled canoe) captained by Poutini edging into the calm of the fjord.

And for a moment, I heard the lines from John Keats sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer":

PS:

If the idea of a heliflight on our secret route has you salivating, please get in touch.

Photographer's corner-seeing light

Mastering photography is never a destination.

It is only ever a journey.

We never master photography. We only ever practice it.

Have you ever noticed that doctors practise medicine, lawyers practise law, and artists practise art? It used to worry me that doctors are only ever practising. You have to wonder if they will ever give up practising and do it for real—just a thought.

Light has to be at the top of the queue of everything we will never master in photography. However, we can go a long way in improving our understanding.

We must learn to see light, its direction and its quality, to name a few.

Here are a few tips.

When you get to a place that you want to photograph, take the time to stop and look. Ask yourself what the light source is and where it is coming from. Is it the sun? If so, is it shining directly from a clear blue sky and creating hard-edged shadows, or is it diffuse, smeared across the sky by high clouds? In that case, the shadows will have much softer edges.

See where it is placed relative to the subject you want to photograph. Is it coming from behind you and falling onto the subject? This is front light. It is the safest light because you are not likely to make mistakes with exposure. You can trust your camera. The downside of the safe front light is that it is boring. It fills in all the shadows and creates no sense of depth. Everything looks two-dimensional.

Is the light source facing you? This is called backlight. Getting your exposure right is tricky because the light meter in your camera will be trying to give you an exposure to cope with the extreme dynamic range of your subject. However, this isn't necessarily bad, as we will examine in a moment.

The best light to use is sidelight. The light comes from your left or right side, shining onto your subject and creating pockets of light and shadow. This will create texture and modelling on your subject.

Backlight can work for you. It creates silhouettes and favours shape rather than form.

I made the picture of passengers in the railway station in Rome, keeping this in mind. While waiting for our train, the busy morning commuters were scurrying past our seats. The sun shone directly in our faces, reducing the passers-by to shapes and silhouettes. In this instance, it was ideal because I didn't want to know who they were.

Instead, I wanted to suggest what they were.

Then I could focus on the moment when all the shapes in the scene found a point of synchronicity. The perfect moment for me is in the position of the commuter's foot (in the middle of the picture). The raised foot suggests transition, shifting his weight from one foot to the other as he walks across the platform. While the moment is frozen, it suggests a passage from and towards.

Waiata mou te Ata-Rainsong, Windsong

RainSong, Windsong

The wondering rain has come from the west,

gathered aloft from the restless, shuffling tide along the coast,

vaulting over

the crenellated crinoline crimpedged mountain ramparts

and bypassing old aeondreaming gods,

a driven, dreamfilled waft and weaving of ritual renewal,

borne on the featherbreath arms of the wind

and gently, lovingly tumbledownpoured

over the warm weighted belly

of the faceupturned waiting earth.

It slithers and slips and silverslim slides

through threadbared slots in the face of the dark,

prising slendersliver gaps

from the moonbrowed frown

of the windtousled night,

to finally beat a binary code of hope

on my tindrum rumpapumpum roof.

Fevered Mind Links (to make your Sunday morning coffee go cold)

An Entire Group of Whales Has Somehow Escaped Human Attention — www.theatlantic.com

The marine biologist Jay Barlow likes to say that he went looking for the last of the Ice Age mastodons and instead bumped into a unicorn.

Lemony Chicken — eggs.org.nz

A quick, easy dinner recipe that yields four servings for only $14. Great value and great tasting too! That's Dinner Cracked!

Researchers Discover World’s Oldest Water in a Mine Nearly 2 Miles Underground — mymodernmet.com

Have you ever thought about how old water is? If not, you are probably in the majority. Water regularly cycles through our atmosphere by evaporating and condensing. The global amount typically remains roughly the same as molecules form and reform.

How the Physics of Nothing Underlies Everything — nautil.us

Millennia ago, Aristotle asserted that nature abhors a vacuum, reasoning that objects would fly through truly empty space at impossible speeds. In 1277, the French bishop Etienne Tempier shot back, declaring that God could do anything, even create a vacuum. Then a mere scientist pulled it off.

Scientists believe second asteroid may have contributed to dinosaur extinction

A crater on the floor of the North Atlantic is thought to have been created around 66 million years ago, putting it at roughly the same timeframe as another asteroid that collided with Earth. Sponsored Content UPI Aug.

A Navajo Artists Family’s Take on Love, Compassion, and Resistance — hyperallergic.com

SANTA FE, NM — A wall text panel introducing Abeyta | To’Hajiilee K’é emphasizes the Navajo concept of hózhó, which means “beauty, balance, and a sense of being at one with the natural world.

After Menopause, Killer Whale Moms Become Pod Leaders — getpocket.com

When their reproductive years are done, females take on new roles as wise survival guides.

How Are the Bees? — nautil.us

Chelsea Cook grew to love the low hum of the honeybees she studied as a graduate student in Boulder, Colorado. Their characteristic buzz, she learned, was audible cooperation, the result of worker bees fanning their wings at the colony’s entrance to circulate the air and cool the hive.

Turkish Eggs with Chilli Butter — eggs.org.nz

Take your taste buds to Turkey with this super tasty take on breakfast eggs. It's a breakfast to enjoy time and time again!

How to Use Photoshop's Blend If Feature for More Powerful Edits — fstoppers.com

Photoshop is a tremendously intricate and complex application, and as such, there are many ways to accomplish any specific task. The Blend If function is one of the program's more useful tools, but it is a bit hidden and does not always get the attention it deserves.

End Papers

I hadn't realised that some of you take the recipes I supply in Fevered Mind Links quite seriously. One of you contacted me to ask if I test drive them before sharing them. Had I made the curry recipe?

Well, no.

For one thing, I don't have the range of spices (try buying those here in Te Anau!), but it didn't look that hard. They even suggested I open a cooking school. Dear God! However, knowing that there are eagle-eyed readers checking my recipes, I am now going to supply two each week.

See above.

Tucked away as I am in the bottom left-hand corner of Aotearoa, it is easy to be unaware of what is happening in the rest of the world. Here in the basin, we are surrounded by high mountains, which somehow seem to keep all the trouble and tribulations of the world at bay. The world seems to have more rabbit holes than a Central Otago paddock, competing to keep us in a permanent state of fear. Perhaps there is a challenge. Maybe each of us has to find a way to progress with purpose and composure.

When my people and I drove up the Milford Road earlier this week, the weather was unusual. It was grey and drizzly (not necessarily that out of the ordinary because we get a lot of rain here); however, the direction had me bamboozled. Bad weather here tends to come from the south and west, sometimes the North, but rarely from the east. Unfortunately, on this day, the clouds were piling up from the east, not to the east.

And then I figured out why. The "atmospheric river" from the tropics has been inundating Taranaki and the West Coast/Nelson area. We were catching the outer edge of it. I've never heard the phrase "atmospheric river" until this year. Now it seems almost a catchphrase. Whichever way we look at it, the weather patterns are changing, not in a good way.

Perhaps it is time to see ourselves as part of an intricate and complex system rather than individuals picking and choosing our way through life. Maybe it is time to get to know our neighbours in every sense.

As always, I wish you strength, health, wisdom and understanding.

Ngaa mihi nunui arohaa ki a koutou

much love to you all.