Staged today 28th on New Brighton beach. Absolutely gorgeous day, 25 degrees,sunny (but with some light cloud) and just the right kind of easterly for the kites.

I don’t normally shoot much at all in summer, the nuclear lighting tends to kill subjects and colours. I decided to go armed with my very ignored 10-20 and a polariser.

It seemed at least half the people on the beach sported an slr or something, so these may not be quite unique but I did try!

A file lost amongst many others from the Kepler walk I did back in April 2010.

With half of the Port Hills still out of bounds sometimes its hard to find a good location to shoot a sunset from. You can still get up Mt Pleasant road and even up to the radio towers right at the top , the highest point on the this side of the hills. The City was blanketed in low could and I was hoping for some nice colour at sunset to light all this up, unfortunately didnt happen but there was some spectacular shots to be had!

Washpen falls is about an hour out of Christchurch, on private land and there is a $10 fee for walking the track. Its formed in an old volcano crater and the area is nicknamed windwhistle due to the noise a norwester makes through the canyon.

The walk is about 2 hours and some fitness is required but the track isnt hard out and is mostly well formed with a few slightly scrambly spots. Giles and I walked it in 100% pure nuclear Canterbury harsh sunlight so made the photography side of things a little tricky, nd grads, polarisers and exposure bracketing only go so far. This is a spectacular location and will make a fantastic sunrise spot in winter, we will be gong back and hopefully camping…

Trying out a slightly different workflow from my normal one with some help from this blog post by Jerome B.

Its not so far from my normal processing for a seascape but there are a few nice hints and tips in there to get a little more out of an image like this,

Quite a colourful sunset from home snapped with the s95.

I’ve been after a small P&S to take on hikes, bikes and general have a camera in your pocket moments for ages.

Theres a huge choice out there right now and getting better every month. Canons new G1x, Fuji’s range of X cameras look superb. Even Canon have a newer version out, the s100.

Why the s95? Its relatively cheap, the X10 is twice the price, the s100 is better but not by so much you’d really notice.

After a month or so of using it I’m starting to get a hang on its limits and abilities. Its not an SLR of course , operationally it has all the manual modes you want, but things like switching between them is slower, the shutter speed is global (between say Tv and M), manual focus in manual mode is tricky at best, but you can assign focus lock or exposure lock to another button. The raw files look good in decent light, up to ISO 400 is OK, ISO 800 seems usable. It does seem to focus at a reasonable speed and in lowish difficult conditions also.

Its overall a bit of a pocket rocket, controls are excellent and IQ , whilst not up to 7D standards is decent (it likely would give my 350d a run for its money, almost..)

One weird thing is Canon provide a time laps movie mode, excellent I hear you say! But it only comes with a fake tilt shift effect? Also no remote release/triggering and no hot shoe, though the flash controls are adequate with a slow synch mode and plenty of options.

Sometime ago I entered a handful of images into New Zealand Geographic magazines photographer of the year competition. Days before the finalists were announced, Andris Apse (usually a judge) posted a selected image on his facebook page. Jokingly I said I must have missed my email.

I had, it was in my spam folder. The judges had selected one of my images to be amongst the 6 Landscape category finalists.

So last week (27th October) we flew up to Auckland to attend the award night at the Auckland museum, what a fantastic building, will certainly have to head back and have a look around. All the images were on display from the 4 categories. All were as expected very high quality, with John Doogan & Laurie Williams images impressing me most out of the landscape shots.

Well , on to the announcements. Which is all a bit of a blur! James Frankham (Editor of New Zealand Geographic) typically announced the results in reverse order. With the first 2 images (Andris Apse and Vaughan Brookfield) getting Highly Commended I think I started to shake, as does Pam! 2 more Highly Commends for Katrin Koervers & John Doogan and there are 2 images left.

Then Laurie Williams image is displayed as runner up. At this point I’m engulfed in hugs and handshakes (thanks Flickr crowd!), and my image is show as the winner of the 2011 New Zealand Geographic Photographer of the year Landscape category! Somehow I managed not to fall over as I accepted the ‘lump of acrylic’, print and managed to stumble through some kind of speech (non prepared and the Panasonic add skit didnt seem appropriate at the time!).

The overall winner ended up being Brett Phibbs, a superb photographer who currently works for the New Zealand Herald.

All the finalists can be seen on the NZ Geographic website here. Photos of the event are available through Getty here.

And my winning image is available though Getty for licence here (the full frame not just the crop entered, slightly different processing too).

My other Getty images are here.

Overall it was a fantastic evening and such a surprise I won considering the quality of the other entrants, and most of them are working pro’s too. All the winners/finalists are published in the November/December issue of the magazine so get out and find a copy!

Big congrats to my friend Jocelen Janon for Highly commended in the Society and Culture category.

Christchurch Dusk, a photo by robjdickinson on Flickr.

North west arches always give a moody dark brooding atmosphere to my home city.

A city rapidly changing, many buildings are vanishing, and the future of others like Lancaster Park/AMI stadium looks very limited.

But its also Spring and we have a great feeling of renewal and growth here, are we past the worst? We hope so, time to build a new city from a community we have built stronger than we could have imagined.

The Glory of Arrowtown ~Explored~, a photo by robjdickinson on Flickr.

Hi, long time no update!

I’ve been busy taking photos and working on prints for a few people ( large canvas and framed prints).

We’ve also had another large earthquake since my last post! Another 6.3 in June. I was driving home and had just gotten past the cliffs when the quake hit and it all collapsed. Another few days of shovelling stuff up into a bin.

I’ve also processed a fair few shots from Autumn which are now up on my flickr account, including this one of Arrowtown which made explore.

Hopefully if this works ( sharing via flickr ) I’ll do some moe updates this way!

Thanks,
Rob.