Every time I visit Wellington Zoo I spend time both at the start and end of the visit trying to get good shots of the otters. It helps that their enclosure is right by the entrance hall.
The little blighters rarely hold still for more than a moment so you have to be patient and take your chances. This is one of my best close-ups, taken in September 2005.
The oldest operating wind turbine in New Zealand sits atop a hill in the Wellington suburb of Brooklyn. Commissioned in 1993, it has been feeding about 1 Gigawatt of power per year into the local grid.
Early this afternoon, I accomplished a real world task that was both challenging and satisfying.
I had been for a short drive from Rotorua, where I am currently staying, to see if I could locate a section of land my parents used to own many years ago. Having done a little sleuthing and a little deduction, I set about taking some photos. I took a number with my DSLR (Pentax K10D) and, thinking of emailing my parents later, a few with my iPhone. I’ve taken quite a few with my iPhone and mailed them off with no troubles in the past. The challenge was whether I could take the DSLR photos and, with only my iPad, email them.
The camera connection kit was duly connected to the iPad with memory card inserted. The photos appeared and I marked those required for import then hit the go button. The photos imported, I took the next step to share them via email. The draft email appeared and, one by one, the photos appeared. Or rather, some blue squares with question marks on them appeared. I knew the photos were on the memory card, and the iPad, in RAW format. It seems Mail does not have the smarts to convert them to JPEG.
“Aha!” I thought. I am pretty sure my camera can convert RAW into JPEG all by itself. I had a quick play, but couldn’t figure out how to do it. But wait! I have my camera manual (in PDF form) on my iPad. Win! A quick flick through the manual gave me the information I required to make the conversion.
With the converted photos now on the camera, I set about importing them once again. Then I deleted the RAW photos again and imported the intended JPEGs. Sigh. It would be useful if the import screen showed file type or size so I knew which was which.
Before I knew it, I had composed and sent two emails, complete with great pictures from my real camera. This entire process took place while I was sitting in the car near the local airport.
So here is an unedited (I still have to figure out if that is possible on the iPad) photo from the experience. I’ve now processed and uploaded my photos from the trip, so have updated the photo below.
I said a little while ago that I would showcase non-aviation photos on this blog. And then I didn’t. Not because I didn’t have any such photos to show, but because I forgot to post about them. I just remembered. Anyway, enough addled ramblings.
This post will perhaps appeal most to non-Wellingtonians. Locals will for the most part be familiar with what I describe below.
One weekend whilst out with the boys, we decided to pop up to the top of Mount Victoria – one of the best vantage points from which to appreciate Wellington Harbour and City. Here are a couple of shots of the city.
The first is taken from the summit lookout, showing the CBD, adjacent to the leftmost elbow of the water, across to the Westpac Stadium in the middle right of the picture. It was a very humid, cold day.
The second shot was taken from a little below the summit and focusses on the central city area. The three bright red Wellington Harbour Board tugboats point toward the brown brick Wellington Railway Station, opened in 1937 in its very central location as part of a major upgrade of the rail network at the time. To the left of there, you are almost looking directly along Whitmore Street which crosses from the waterfront to Parliament – the circular Beehive building just visible poking up from behind the rather more ugly central post office building. It also shows just how surrounded by hills the city is.
Then another weekend I was out at Wellington Airport waiting for Jetstar and there were some nice waves crashing into Lyall Bay.
The big ones were most spectacular as they crashed over the breakwater at the end of the runway.
And on yet another weekend out, I took a couple of shots portraying something of the context of Wellington in the larger sense.
First, a compact view from Southgate, above Island Bay, looking east. You see the houses of Southgate perched atop the hill, behind which is the mouth of Lyall Bay, Moa Point – easily accessible but sparsely populated, the harbour mouth (Cook Strait is to the right) and finally the sparse and difficult to access coastline toward Sinclair Head and ultimately the southern most point of the North Island, Cape Palliser.
The other shot swings the view to the southwest to take in the snow-capped Kaikoura Ranges which are near the top of the South Island, with Cook Strait in between. The distance from camera to the highest mountain peak is roughly 130km (80M). Also in the foreground note the end of the housing. Very little of Wellington’s south coast is populated.
That’s all I have for you. Nothing photographically stunning, but hopefully of interest to some out-of-towners. Most of the photos are best appreciated at larger sizes than shown here, so click on any of them to go to their Flickr page, where you can then click on “All Sizes” above the photo.
Many of you know about my ZK-ARJ site where I publish my aircraft photos. If you don’t already know about it and this…
…excites you, please go and check it out!
But in any case, I just recently realised that I’m not showcasing my other photography anywhere. So henceforth, I shall post about any new batches of photos of non-aviation subjects I upload on this blog.
All my photos are published on Flickr and if you choose, you can keep up with new additions directly at my photostream where all of my photos appear in the order I upload them. Be warned that most of my photos are of aircraft.
But not all. I have pictures of birds…
…of cute cats…
…and of zoo animals…
…to name a few. Well, that’s most of it actually, but there are other subjects including trains, both real and model, some architecture and landscape shots too.
All photos on the blog are clickable and will take you to that photo’s page on Flickr, from where you can explore further. You can also view my collections and sets which put most photos into handy groups for your viewing pleasure. (Hint: Collections are sets of sets!)
Today I concluded a deal which will see this photo become part of a new product from Wild Card. As many of you will know, I upload a lot of my good photos to Flickr and on this occasion I was approached by Wild Card for use of the photo, for which they have paid me.
All I can say is get your camera out, shoot often (assuming it’s digital, it doesn’t cost a lot), listen to the opinions of others, but always be your own critic.
I have recently got my photo management workflows sorted out a bit more and processed a bunch of new images for my Flickr account. At right is the ‘title’ shot for the new set Warbirds Over Wairarapa 2007. This airshow pre-dates Classic Fighters 2007 by a few months.
In an earlier post “If a picture is worth a thousand words…“, I extolled the virtues of geotagging my Flickr photos and viewing this location by way of a third party web site. The method I used on that occasion was somewhat manual.
Well, I was searching for a better way and have come across one that is utterly brilliant! Check out Sumaato.net for this incredible ‘bookmarklet’ (a bookmark that actually contains a script). You won’t believe how simple it is, nor how effective.
Check out this photo (shown at right) for the result. Note the tags listed and the link under the photo (part of the description field). Of course to see the brilliance of how you get this information in there, you’ll need to sign up for Flickr yourself. Go ahead. It’s free!
If there were a Nobel Prize for software, it should go to this guy. Having looked at half a dozen alternatives, his is still blowing me away with its superiority.
And yes, I know Flickr have added mapping to their bag of tricks – but they (of course) use Yahoo! Maps which, quite frankly, aren’t up to it for this part of the world. For example, compare the maps of Paekakariki by Yahoo! and Google. Both maps are at identical locations (check the links!) and I would have zoomed in a little more but Yahoo! is so lean on detail I needed to back off to be sure I was getting the same place! Also, Yahoo! gives up after one more zoom level (which adds no detail whatsoever), whereas Google goes in several more levels and names all the streets in the township.
