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 .
Mackenzie Country Barbed Wire Landscape — Golden Tussock, New Zealand I took this one in New Zealand's Mackenzie Country, a stretch of high country I don't remember precisely enough to pin to a single back road any more — this was long before cameras recorded GPS data, and the details of exactly where I was standing that day have faded. What hasn't faded is how much I still like the photograph itself. I framed the landscape through a rusted barbed wire fence that cuts diagonally across the frame, golden tussock grass rolling out behind it toward a mountain range, all of it sitting under a heavy, toned sky that gives the whole scene a moody, almost brooding quality. The Mackenzie Country takes its name from James Mackenzie, a sheep rustler who was captured in this same high country in 1855 after driving off around a thousand stolen sheep. He escaped custody more than once and became something of a folk hero in the retelling, and the basin and the pass through...
Most of what I shoot ends up living on a screen — in a Redbubble listing, in a blog post like this one, in a folder I rarely revisit. But a handful of pieces earn their way onto my own walls, printed and framed, something I pass a dozen times a day without really looking at them, and then, every so often, I actually stop and look and admire my work. Here are three of my photographs that made it to the walls of my home. Fuchsia Flower — Sepia-Toned Botanical Photography My dad was a fuchsia enthusiast back in his day. I think he had something like 60 varieties spread over our half-acre property. In memory of him I grew one of the ones I remember he had ("Party Frock") in a hanging basket, so this one has a head start on sentiment before it even gets to the photograph. This is a double bloom, caught close enough that the ruffled petals go slightly soft at the edges, with the long pollen-tipped stamens doing what fuchsias do best — hanging there looking like they were...
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...
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