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 .
The Queen Street Santa is one of those pieces of Auckland Christmas iconography that's hard to explain to anyone who didn't grow up seeing it. Standing 18 metres tall, the statue's history is more layered than most people realise: it started life on the original Farmers building at the corner of Hobson and Wyndham Streets in 1960, moved briefly to the Manukau City Shopping Centre in the early '90s, then settled onto the Whitcoulls building on Queen Street, where it stood through the 1990s and 2000s — which is where I photographed it in January 2010, in the photo below. Farmers itself later moved back into that same Queen Street building in 2020, and the giant Santa went back up that Christmas along with them. As far as I can tell, though, it hasn't reappeared since — 2020 seems to be its last confirmed outing, which fits with what a lot of older Kiwis have told me: they remember it fondly, but suspect it's gone for good. The Farmers Santa — Queen St...
Over the past few weeks I've been building out a small collection of botanical pieces using photos taken in my garden here in Irvine, California, (and in one case out on a hiking trail here in SoCal), and using AI assistance to give each one a grunge, painterly treatment — dark, richly textured backgrounds with warm gold light breaking through, turning garden snapshots and trailside finds into something closer to old varnished still-life paintings than straight photography. Here's the full set so far. Epiphyllum oxypetalum — Queen of the Night, Painterly Botanical Art A night-blooming cactus that flowers just once or twice a year, for a single night — three blooms at different stages caught in one frame from a night it happened in my garden. Kangaroo Paw — Painterly Grunge Botanical Art Australia's velvety-flowered native, grown in my own garden, its stems reaching in different directions the way it actually grows rather than posed into symmetry. ...
Comments