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Samoan Beauty Queen at Pasifika Festival

Polynesian Beauty Queen at Auckland Pasifika Festival
Polynesian Beauty Queen at Auckland Pasifika Festival 2007
Pasifika is an annual Polynesian festival held in Auckland in early March. All the many and varied Polynesian groups gather at Western Springs Park west of downtown Auckland and celebrate their cultures with traditional dancing, entertainment, and food. It is the largest Polynesian festival in the world, which isn't a difficult feat for Auckland which enjoys the largest population of people originating from the South Pacific Islands in addition to the native Maori people of New Zealand. The Maori name for New Zealand, by the way, is Aotearoa.

This photo is of a contestant in the Samoan beauty contest. And quite a beauty she is too.

You are invited to share your impressions of this and any of my photos by posting a comment below. I appreciate your feedback below.



Comments

Anonymous said…
hae datz my friend titi!!

Samoan Youth

This young man was preparing with his friends for his moment of fame on the stage at the Samoan Village at the Polynesian dance festival called Pasifika in Auckland in March this year. Samoan Youth Canon EOS 20D 1/30sec at f/20 ISO 200 Canon 70-300mm lens at 300mm More photographs from the same Pasifika Festival day can be found in my new post, Faces of Pasifika 2007 — A Day at Auckland's Pacific Festival .

Faces of Pasifika 2007 — A Day at Auckland's Pacific Festival

The 15th anniversary Pasifika Festival poster — a collage of the Pacific cultures the festival celebrates. On Saturday 10 March 2007, I spent the day at the Pasifika Festival at Western Springs Park in Auckland. It was the festival's 15th year — an annual celebration of Pacific Island cultures that has been part of Auckland's calendar since 1993, and which typically draws crowds of well over 100,000 across the day. Nine Pacific villages are traditionally represented — Samoa, Tonga, the Cook Islands, Niue, Fiji, Tuvalu, Tokelau, Kiribati and Tahiti — with music, dance, food, arts, and craft from each community sharing the same park for the day. I usually visit New Zealand earlier in February, but in 2007 I was there in March and it was the first — and, to date, only — time I've been able to attend Pasifika. I hope to make it back one of these years. But I came away from that single visit with the str...

The Watchman and Virgin River — Painterly Winter Landscape

The Watchman and Virgin River, Zion National Park — Painterly Winter Landscape — © John Corney The Watchman is one of Zion National Park's most recognizable formations — the peak that rises up just past the south entrance, often photographed reflected in or framed by the Virgin River as it winds through the valley floor. I photographed this view on the same January 2006 trip as the other winter Zion piece in this collection, with the river running low and the cottonwoods and willows along the bank stripped bare for the season. I worked this one up with AI assistance into a full painterly interpretation, the same way I've approached the rest of this Zion series — directing the process the way a film director works with a cinematographer, choosing what to carry forward from the original photograph and what to push harder. Here that meant leaning into the warmth of the low winter light against the cool snow on the upper ridgeline, and letting th...