ping’s posterous

Sorry I haven't posted anything in awhile, but I finally got through Day 5. We spent most of day 5 on the road, the cross country/island drive from Lake Wanaka to the east back to Christchurch. We only made a few stops along the way, but we drove through some amazing landscapes in New Zealand from the barren wasteland (as seen in the final battle for Gondor in Return of the King) to the grassy plains perfect for sheep farming. But overall, Milford sound was definitely the climax of the entire trip and everything since then is just going down hill. I still felt I got a few good shots in, but mostly thanks to HDR and post processing... less thanks to the natural beauty of New Zealand like previous days.

The morning started off early for me as I got up extra early to catch sun rise but it was still pretty cloudy. After breakfast we got some time to walk around the shores of Lake Wanaka and I finally got to explore the vineyards next to where I took the star photos during the previous night. When I got to the vineyard, I was really intrigued by the numbers identifying the rows so I snapped this photo.



It was originally an HDR but I didn't like the fake look of it so I decided to desaturate the image and add a lot more warmth (yellow) to create the almost monotone image. Some minor touch up on the pole to accentuate the 43. I think I just like the perspective of it, the repeating pattern of the poles getting smaller as well as each row leading away from you leading into the background.

The next image was taken at Lake Pukaki. The weather was pretty terrible with gray bland overcast sky not giving me anything to work with. But the lake had really beautiful rocky shores along with this amazing blue water (thanks to the glaciers). In order to bring out the details in the rocks and not blow out the sky, I had to use HDR... I played a bit with the effect this time creating a more storybook fantasy feel (actually it really reminds me of those motivational posters...). I hope you don't mind me taking some liberty with the effects.



The next image is probably one of my favorites from the trip, a photo of The Church of Good Shepherd at Lake Tekapo (one of the most photographed landmarks in all of New Zealand). Again, I had to use HDR to really bring out the details as the sky was just a boring gray.



This was the exact image I wanted when I first saw the church... for some reason I just had this image in my mind, a low super wide angle shot of the church, exaggerating it a bit against the background a plain small church look even more amazing set against the cloudy/dark sky. I actually waited for close to 10 mins for all the visitors to clear the area (it is a heavily visited site, so tour bus after tour bus would drop people off). I was really fortunate that there was this small pause in people visiting the church for me to snap a few quick photos of the church, un-disturbed (needless to say people in my tour were less than happy with me as they all sat waiting in the tour bus way off in the distance there). I used this photo as the October photo in my calendar, titled "Shelter of Hope". The name was partly inspired by the local artist (Esther Hope) whose sketches were the basis for the actual church, but it is also about how this image made me feel. In many ways churches, more specifically religion/faith, provides a shelter for us against the storms and turmoil we face in life. They not only give us shelter, but strength and hope to face each day, knowing that the storm will pass and a the skies will be clear one day. This is how the image made me feel.

As usual, the full album can be found on my picasa web gallery or here: http://picasaweb.google.com/pingc315/NZTripDay5LakeWanakaToChristchurch?feat=directlink

A couple more interesting photos below:
From Lindis Pass, near where the battle for Gondor was filmed.




Of course you can't have NZ album without sheep and alpacas. SO cute!





Finally image of Christchurch Cathedral in Christchurch

So after a short break from processing photos, I finally uploaded the photos from day 4 of my New Zealand trip a couple days ago. We got up pretty early that day (at about 5 AM) and headed out to Milford Sound for a 2 hour boat tour. This was probably the highlight of the whole New Zealand trip and offered some of the most spectacular views of the whole trip... needless to say, this makes keeping this blog post short very difficult as there are a lot of photos I really liked from that day. The full set of photos is available at: http://picasaweb.google.com/pingc315/NZTripDay4MilfordSoundAndLakeWanaka?feat=directlink.

As mentioned in earlier posts, a storm swept through the area days before we arrived, so the weather was always questionable. In addition, the only road leading up to Milford Sound had a mudslide just the day before... our tour lead had hoped it would clear up by the time we got there... Luckily for us, the weather stayed clear for most of that day and the road was cleared 30 mins prior to our arrival... I really think someone upstairs was watching over us this entire trip. Other than the poor weather on the first few days, this entire trip have been really blessed.

On our way to Milford Sound, we made a quick 10 min stop Mirror Lake (well... they say 10 mins but I stretched it to like 15 ^^;... kept everyone waiting). The weather was so beautiful that the lake was really like a mirror, perfectly reflecting the beauty in front of us. Unfortunately it was rather difficult to capture the full experience on camera due to the extreme dynamic range (the reflection and lake was in the shadows where as the actual snow capped mountains were in bright sunlight). I doubled stacked filters (2 stop graduated ND to darken the top half of the photo and a polarizer to bring out the reflection and colors) and then in post I added another graduated filter at the bottom to bump up the brightness of the shadows to create this final image.


When we got to Milford Sound, the weather was still mostly clear but there was enough clouds in the sky to make it even more interesting. It was on this boat tour that I took most of my HDRs (high dynamic range, where 3 photos of the same scene are then combined in post processing to form a single image), in fact I think I ended up with 30+ HDR shots so in total I took close to 100 images just for HDR. I tried to keep the HDR fantasy like feel down and stick to what felt natural.

Here are two shots of Milford Sound with Mitre Peak (doesn't this feel like something out of LOTR? You know the part with Frodo on the boat passing the giant statues?).




The first shot was shot in RAW and then post processed in Lightroom. I really had to brighten up the green on the mountain but it gets a tad bit noisy. The second image is an HDR with -2, 0 and +2 stops. It's not too different from the RAW shot but I get so much more detail in the clouds and the green just pops better making for a more dramatic image (in my opinion at least :)).

There are so many photos that I really liked from Milford, but this is perhaps one of my favorite from the entire trip. I used it as the August photo in my calendar, titled "Heaven's Blessings" mainly because it looks like the water is pouring down from the heavens. Additionally, this is actually not a permanent waterfall (it's called Fairy Falls), it will dry up in a few days without rainfall so in many ways, we were blessed to have the storm pass through revealing this hidden beauty within Milford Sound.


Here is another photo from Milford Sound. I really like how the cloud just wraps around the mountains... It also shows the entrance to the sound being mostly hidden, this is why the early explorers did not discover Milford Sound as no one expected it to lead to anywhere.


One final shot of Milford Sound as the boat was returning to dock.


After the boat tour, we drove straight to Lake Wananaka where we stayed for the night. Just before dinner I saw these two Paradise Ducks near by. These ducks usually live in pairs and mate for life.


Since we spent the night right along the lake shores, there was very little light pollution allowing me to get a few nice shots of the Milky Way and stars. I had to use my 50mm 1.4 wide open and a 1600 ISO to get the shutter speed fast enough to capture all this without star trails.




Only 3 days left of New Zealand photos, hopefully I'll be able to get through them quicker now :)

Sorry the long delay in between posts, a lot of stuff has been happening both at work (you know, like the launch) and outside of work. Personally I've been trying to take a short break from photography (and processing photos) so I can attend to other areas of interest and hopefully come back to photos with a lot more passion and creativity. I actually had day 3 photos almost fully processed 2 weeks ago but I got side tracked by a personal photo calendar project I was doing... Thanks to everyone who helped with that and provided valuable input.

Day two proved to be an even more interesting (and at the same time, disappointing) day than day one. Day one was spent all in Auckland (well, and the plane... and Hong Kong airport...) but to be honest, there was nothing special about Auckland... think of it like say... Irvine or San Francisco, except with lots of grass... So arguably day two was the real start of our New Zealand trip.

We got up real early... at some ungodly hour (even tho we checked into the hotel at like 1 AM the night before) just to catch the 8 AM Tranz Scenic (TranzAlpine line) train to go from the east coast (Christchurch) to the west coast of the south island. The train takes you through the beautiful country sides all the way to the gorgeous alpines of the south island. In fact, it takes you right through one of the places where they filmed Chronicles of Narnia, though I don't think I got a photo of it.... oh well. I spent most of the time on the observation car (just a shell of a car with a few railings, and a ceiling... and... really strong winds. Wind strong enough to knock you silly). By the time I got off the train, I probably looked like I've been working in the engine room shuffling coal all day and being the photo geek that I am... the first thing that I thought was NOT "oh my face.... gotta go wash all this off :(" but instead "oh my poor lens.... how am I gonna clean it!". Yeah, it's like that. Anyways, some photos from the day two album below...

From NZ Trip Day 2 - West Coast

This photo is NOT one of the photos I got from the observation car, unfortunately none of those photos really turned out all that well. This was instead taken from inside the nice, comfortable, air conditioned passenger cars.. with champagne and pâté. I really like two things in this shot, the power pole (yes I'm crazy) and the blurred sheep. I guess I like the motion blur caused by the train. And the power pole just serves as a nice anchoring point. The beautiful green grass set against the even more beautiful blue sky doesn't hurt of course. Oh, here is a bit of trivia, you see the sheet metal wrapped around the power pole? That is to prevent small animals from climbing up the pole and damaging it (specifically, possums I believe).

And the next two photos are taken at Shantytown, a old gold rush mining town that's now just a tourist destination (this is where we had lunch)...


When I saw the old antique steam train getting ready to move, I knew I had my shot. I mean, seriously, how often do you get to see steam trains this close any more (ok, it's not that uncommon, but set against this nice green grass and that perfect blue sky with clouds? It's once in a life time!). Most things are NOT meant to be photographed at eye level so I got down on my knees next to the train track and pointed my camera up. It made the small train look more impressive and helped bring in lots of that nice sky. The post processing was pretty simple. Bumped up the saturation a bit, and shifted hue towards more green (yellow -> green, and a bit more on the green hue itself). Increased contrast and lowered the luminosity on the blue to darken the sky a bit. But overall, pretty simple stuff.



When you have an antique train, in an old mining town... it is natural to take photos that have the old faded nostalgic look right :). Post processed in LR2, bumped the saturation down (I mean way down), warmed up the temperature (+59 and +27 tint). Adjusted the brightness, exposure, contrast and the like until I got enough contrast, really bright steam coming out of the train with really dark shadows everywhere else. Added a bit of vignetting for kicks. This probably is my favorite image from the day and pretty high up there on my list of favorites from the trip.

I'll start working on the photos from Day 3 soon. This is just the beginning... I haven't even gotten to the good stuff yet...

So I've finally gotten around to processing my NZ photos... starting with the crappiest set of NZ photos - day in Auckland. As nice of a city as Auckland is, it's just not very photogenic, at least I didn't find it very interesting. We got to Auckland in the morning after a long flight from HK/TPE. Our flight to Hong Kong was delayed by about 1 hour + another 1.5 hours of circling in the air due to typhoon passing through which meant that we completely missed our connecting flight to Auckland. We basically spent the better part of the day at Hong Kong airport. Not a great start to our trip, but at least we got to see everything we were suppose to and it all worked out in the end. Anyways, some photos from Auckland (album: http://picasaweb.google.com/pingc315/NZTripDay1Auckland#)

From NZ Trip Day 1 - Auckland

This was taken at the Mt. Eden volcano crater. Mt. Eden is the highest point in Auckland (natural one at least) which offers great view of the city. The crater was huge so I decided to swap over to using my 10-22 super wide lens. While I'm not thrilled about the tourist walking, I like having the path there to kind of make it more interesting (I do have a version without the path and tourists).

From NZ Trip Day 1 - Auckland

After Mt. Eden, we stopped by Auckland war memorial museum and the botanical garden next to it. These 2 photos were really bland originally, no colors in the sky (cloudy) and just lacked anything interesting (no colors to really jump out at you, etc). I decided to desaturated it a bit, made the over all photo warmer/reddish to give it the old sepia feel (but not actually sepia). I rather like the result, much more than the original anyways (another example of how lightroom saved my photo). Hope you like it too.