Sometimes I look out the window and see amazing clouds and feel a compulsion to photograph them. This was one of these days. The clouds had a sense of drama and an ominous dark quality to them. I grabbed my camera and took a walk around the block down past a local park and grabbed a few interesting pictures along the way. This is the result. The images are all shot on the canon wide angle 17-40mm f4 L lens on a 5D. I have used Photoshop to do selective highlighting and darkening and in some cases have blended 2 bracketed images to retain the details.

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On a recent flight transiting through Auckland I had a fantastic view out the window of the plane as we were coming in to land. The following images were grabbed in about 30 seconds as we approached the airport.

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At the south end of Christchurch are the Port Hills – apart from these, everything else about Christchurch is flat. The Port Hills are a great place for recreational pursuits such as walking, mountain biking, rock climbing and sight seeing. The hills are apparently the eroded remnants of the northern rim of the Lyttelton volcano (who knew?). This area is also the beginning of Banks Peninsula, which is a mostly barren but very beautiful and mountainous area.

To get to the Port hills is a short drive, taking me less than 20 minutes. At the top of Dyers Pass road is the Sign of the Kiwi and from here you can either head down into Lyttleton or traverse the Summit road. I took a right turn and headed west along the Summit Road until I got to the Sign of the Bellbird – from here I had a beautiful view of the whole bay.

The weather was not very good, which made for some hazy visibility – but did create some dramatic skies.

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I live in a beautiful country. But not just any beautiful country; I live in the South Island of New Zealand – one of the most coveted, scenic and beautiful places in the world. I tend to forget this and admit that I don’t venture out nearly often enough.

A few years I saw a list of the top 50 places to go before you die, which had been created from a survey of 20,000 people. It listed the South Island of New Zealand as one of the top 5 places in the world that people wanted to visit. I try to remember this when I’m sitting at home on my couch and not outside enjoying the world.

Recently my partner and I were invited to a wedding which was ‘inconveniently’ all the way over on the West Coast. We live on the east coast, but what the hell, we decided to make a weekend of it – pack the camera!

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