The Departed

Tomorrow I'm off on a nice summer island holiday.

Flying to Invercargill. Getting on Te Kaha. And cruising some of New Zealand's subantarctic islands.

I'm going there courtesy of the Royal Society and Massey University.

I'm looking forward to days of spewing my guts out on the high seas, then freezing my arse off on the islands.

It'll be AWESOME!!!!

And cos I can, even though it has next to no connection with the previous text aside from them being taken somewhere other than mainland New Zealand, here are some photos from Marrakech, Morocco.

The Townbelt

Very near my place is a piece of the townbelt.

I've been exploring bits of it again recently.

The Rail

Yeah so for my birthday I bought myself Lightroom.

Seeing as it's a bit of an unwieldly program to get your head around I didn't have much of a play with it until a couple of weeks ago.

That was when I caught up with a local Lightroom whiz and he gave me a quick lesson on how to use the thing.

It is a great program, but for better or worse it's designed for digital shooters (hence the name), and not really made for us film shooters. But we can make it work as an archive.

So for the past few evenings I've been busy metadataing, captioning and keywording. And they said I was mad being so anally retentive about recording stuff - especially those who ridiculed me when I was overseas carrying around my little notebook writing details of every single photo I took. I knew it would come in handy one day.

Anyway, I've done about 8% of the stuff in the catalogue, which is only about 40% (at most) of the photos I've ever taken (just those I've scanned). But it has made me aware of some little slip ups with my scanning.

For example, I discovered I hadn't scanned four films from this time last year.

Sad. So sad. Cos there's some nice shots there.

Like these ones.

The Neighbours

The Nothingness

For quite a while now I've been thinking about photographing nothing.

It's a hard thing to do as photography involves recording light, and in order for light to be reflected, and therefore enable it to be recorded, there needs to be something for the light to reflect off of.

The other day, having only a few other things I should have been doing, I went out and made some images ... of nothing.





Thoughts appreciated.

And here's what I did for New Years - spending hours at the computer trying to make 174 photos look like one shot. Thanks Photoshop.

The Unique

Is it too obvious to suggest a McCahon homage?

Yeah, thought so!!

The Mountainair