It was time I got out on the road again. I had been at my desk too long and had only been shooting pics for my day job. One of my jobs is to take students to cool locations around the Auckland vicinity and capture them capturing the location – all in the name of marketing. This gives me many opportunities to practice what I love doing: photographing. But often the subject material isn’t of my choosing. Hence, it was time I did some more interesting landscape work again.
My partner and I traveled to the South-West of New Zealand’s North Island where I scouted around for lovely sites to shoot, as you do. And as is usual in NZ, it was either raining or had been raining recently – that’s why there is no greener place than NZ – and as a result tracks into the forest were extremely boggy. Nonetheless, in the spirit of the art of photography we trudged deeper and farther until we came upon this beautifully enchanting waterfall. On the contrary, the long exposure belies the volume of water that was actually passing over the cliff. It was plentiful and thunderous.
The waterfall is known as Dawson Falls and is a popular summer trekking area in the Mt Egmont National Park in the Taranaki region. Setting up my Really Right Stuff tripod was a pleasure. As an aside – I’ve just got to give a plug to RRS, their tripods are superb! I used my everyday lens, a Sigma 17-50mm on my solid as a rock Canon 7D. I also used a Hoya ND400 to enable me to shoot a long exposure in the early afternoon. This shot was taken at F/6.3 for 25 seconds at ISO 100.
Sometimes you really just have to make the time to get out and shoot somewhere new and interesting. I got some great shots from this four-day weekend away, I hope you enjoy this one.
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Susan Blick is the founder of Photoopolis and an Australian freelance photographer currently working in Auckland, New Zealand.
Twitter: @photoopolis
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