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Karekare Beach Location for "The Piano"

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Karekare Beach location for filming of the movie The PianoMany of you will have seen the Oscar-winning movie "The Piano" which opens on a beach in New Zealand with a piano being unloaded from a ship onto the beach. The beach in the movie is Karekare beach on Auckland's west coast. Auckland is surrounded east and west by ocean. To the east is the blue island-filled Hauraki Gulf, and to the west is the Manukau Harbour. After the Manukau spills into the Tasman Sea to the north you encounter the Waitakere Range which hugs the coast. Karekare beach is one of the beaches that the Waitakere Range plunges to on its western edge.

The sand on the beach is black iron sand, testament to New Zealand's volcanic activity past and present. And with prevailing westerly winds blowing across the Tasman Sea that separates New Zealand from Australia this coast is frequently buffeted by strong winds and storms.

A Kiwi friend of mine has a very nice beach house nestled in the bush above the beach which is available for rental. (Send me an email if you are interested in renting the house and I'll forward it to Gregory.)

Anyhow, I thought I'd share some photos I took of the beach on my visit there back in 2005.

Karekare Beach slideshow

Karekare Beach static photo gallery

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Samoan Youth

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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
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Cool Granny in Her Austin A35 — © John Corney 2026 This one has a real backstory, and I'd like to tell it properly. An Auckland Sighting On one of my annual visits home to New Zealand, I was walking through central Auckland — at the corner of Queen Street and Karangahape Road (K Road, as everyone calls it) — when a small yellow car went past me and stopped me mid-stride. It was a beautifully kept Austin A35, one of the little British runabouts that were everywhere in New Zealand when I was growing up in the fifties and sixties. Driving it was a woman of a certain age with the confident bearing of someone who had been driving that same car, or one like it, for decades. She looked entirely at home behind the wheel. She belonged to the car and the car belonged to her, and neither of them was in any hurry to change. If you know Auckland, that particular corner will register: Queen Stree...
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Three Hearts in Shadow — A Sepia Fine Art Photograph from Hollyhock House

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Three Hearts in Shadow — Hollyhock House, Los Angeles. © John Corney Some photographs surprise you by turning out to be about something quite different from what you thought you were photographing. This is one of those. The Afternoon at Hollyhock House I was visiting Frank Lloyd Wright's Hollyhock House in East Hollywood on a bright, still afternoon in 2017, camera in hand, doing what most visitors do — trying to capture the extraordinary modernist geometry of the building itself. Hollyhock House was Wright's first Los Angeles commission, built between 1919 and 1921 for the oil heiress and arts patron Aline Barnsdall on Olive Hill, the site now known as Barnsdall Art Park. It's a genuinely important building — the first UNESCO World Heritage Site in Los Angeles, inscribed in 2019 as part of "The 20th-Century Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright" — and it has that instantly r...
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