Available Light

The sun rose this morning at 7:12 am so I made sure that's when I was on the end of the jetty at the Broad Bay yacht club. The wind was quiet enough to leave the surface of the harbour untroubled, and there were a few clouds, so I was hoping for a spectacular sunrise. It didn't happen. The sun rose thin and weak and pathetically pastel pink. There were no birds except a few welcome swallows - too small and fast to photograph in the available light. I gave it a few minutes and was about to walk back to my car but decided instead to follow my own advice to beginning meditators: wait; be still; don't mind if nothing happens; just be here. It was so quiet and beautiful, and who cared if I didn't get my trophy shot? It was healing and calming and enriching just to be. After a half hour or so I turned again, walked slowly back to my car and noticed the subtlety of the light on the clear still water. I got my shot. Not the one I had planned, but a better one. And another....

It's been a wet day in Dunedin and I took my camera out into the greyness, because I didn't know what the harbour might look like. I know this place, but I never know what I might expect to see.  I stood in the place where I have have taken a hundred versions of the same shot and found something different. Change is constant. But with every shift in the way the light falls on land and water I learn something new about the things that are constant. Christmas is only a few days away, and it will be different from the one we were all expecting. The light will fall, in ways that surprise us, and reveal some unexpected new shade of the verities which lie, only thinly veiled, behind the tinsel and the eating and the coloured paper: incarnation and grace.

Very windy day, today. The Easterly was howling down the harbour when I woke and it's been around pretty much all day. The weather has been odd this November: more rain and more wind than anyone can remember. Snow in the high country. Fog. Hail. And sometimes warm, clear spring days. The weather is decided by the movement of vast currents, moving in the oceans and the atmosphere, like the currents in a heating pot of soup. Turn up the gas a bit and the soup moves faster. Turn up the temperature on the planet, and the air and the oceans move faster, and everything is amped up a bit: more clouds and fogs, more rain, more heat, more hail, more wind, more floods, more droughts, more hurricanes and typhoons and tornadoes. In the vast scale of things the 20 years we have been in Dunedin is not a long time, but we have seen the changes in the weather. I wonder what it will be like in another 20? I wonder why all of us seem pretty lethargic about doing something about it, even the major...

They put in a causeway across Andersons Bay and turned the sandy little cove into a tidal inlet. It made for easier traffic flow when driving to Portobello, I guess. Then they put this little islet in the inlet to give the birds somewhere to sleep, away from nosy people and the cats which may have found them in the dark. My neighbourhood is the result of a century of tinkering. Sometimes I imagine it as it must have been before the improvers arrived but there's no going back now. It is what it is, and most days, when the spoonbills are sifting the mud for crustaceans and the damp clouds hang over the distant city I forgive those old bewhiskered blokes for their Victorian addiction to improvement. Nikon D7100; Nikkor 18-200 VRII @38mm; 1/40 f11

In describing a photographic composition, positive space is the main subject of the picture and negative space is the area which surrounds it. Sometimes, for instance when I am standing on the end of a pier on an overcast day and the sky and sea are huge all around me, the negative space seems the most important bit. As it is in many other things I encounter in the course of the day. Photo: Nikon D7100; Tokina 12-24 F4 @ 22mm; 1/320 f6.3; iso 200

Its raining in Dunedin and the harbour takes on yet another of its infinite personalities. The Otago Harbour isn't a thing, its a process. It's the malleable space where the quickly changing ocean meets, and is contained by, the slowly changing land.  The weather shifts and so does the way the land meets the sea. And so does the way I view it all. And so do I. Photo: Nikon D7100; Tokina 12-24@12mm; 1/200 f6.3; iso200

Ordination changes a person's self perception in ways that only those who have experienced it can understand. Urban Holmes says that when the community singles us out and sets us aside we become living symbols. We evoke various archetypes in people, particularly the shaman archetype, and people react to us in ways of which often they themselves are hardly even aware. We are the screen onto which all manner of psychological and psychic stuff is projected, and people react to their own projections in ways which are deep and unexpected. I noticed it most markedly a few days after I was ordained deacon, walking through Cathedral Square in Christchurch. I walked past a group of gang members, perhaps a dozen of them, who were laughing and talking and clowning around just outside the Cathedral. As I walked past, wearing my crisp new black shirt and shiny new clerical collar, they all fell silent and stared at the ground. It wasnt me they were reacting to, of course, but what I ev...

There's a photo I've been wanting to take for a long time. I know the place. I know the light conditions I want. I know what time of day I need to be there. This morning looked like it might just fit the bill nicely, so I was up early, did my morning routine, and had the car out of the garage with camera and tripod well before sunrise. I drove to the spot but my photo failed to show up. There wasn't enough cloud in the sky and there was a fog, and anyway, what on earth did I think I was doing? Going out with a particular shot in mind is the antithesis of what photography is about. I was wanting to impose my idea on reality, rather than looking to see what was before me. I've been taking pictures for nearly fifty years now, and still I fail at the first lesson! I took the long way home. I stopped and saw  the fog rolling over the harbour around my beautiful town. I waited for the photos to arrive. I pressed the shutter a few times, but mostly watch...

I've taken to carting my camera around with me again. This morning the harbour was still and the light was a diffused silver. So, what with it being my day off and everything, I drove to Aramoana.   Otago Harbour.   Nikon D7100; Nikkor AF-S DX VR 18-200 zoom (18mm) 1/250 f8. Post processed Nikon D7100; Nikkor AF-S DX VR 18-200 zoom 50mm 1/400 f10   Nikon D7100; Nikkor AF-S DX VR 18-200 zoom 70mm 1/800 f5.6   Nikon D7100; Nikkor AF-S DX VR 18-200 zoom 95mm 1/800 f5.3  Can't go anywhere without running into a Red Billed Gull  Nikon D7100; Nikkor AF-S DX VR 18-200 zoom 70mm 1/640 f6   Nikon D7100; Nikkor AF-S DX VR 18-200 zoom 90mm 1/640 f6.3 C/Pl filter And Earlier in the month I drove to Gabriel's Gully after visit to Lawrence. In the hills above it I encountered Blue Spur. Once a town with a population of 500, shops, a school and two churches, nothing much now remains.   Nikon D7100; Nikk...

Monday. It's my day off. I lay in bed for longer than usual, until almost 7:00 am and watched an interesting little film on my phone. It was an Aeon magazine piece about a guy burning a stack of mouldering Encyclopaedias . He talks about the way the possession of knowledge has changed; once knowing stuff was the preserve of the moneyed elite and now it is accessible to all, for good or ill. It was a beautiful Dunedin day when I finally got up. In the middle of the morning I drove the Portobello road with my second best camera and took a few pictures It was one of those days when I know without a shadow of doubt that Dunedin is the most beautiful city in the most beautiful country in the world. The air was crisp and the low sun provided sharp edged clear light. It was impossible not to feel blessed. I drove a comfortable, powerful well equipped car on a delightfully twisting road. I listened to Palestrina's Missa Papae (I'm willing to believe there is mus...

Fog on the harbour, and time for a short drive before dark, looking to see if there were any photos lying about. Not many. It was a nice little cruise anyway. 

It's Monday and the harbour, a few hundred metres from my home is rippling in a light breeze. The low sun is back lighting clouds of small insects swirling over the water. It's time to drive around the bays and see if anything is crying out to be photographed. Nothing is really. Or nothing I haven't shot a thousand times before. There are boats sitting picturesquely above their own reflections and quaint old boathouses ditto. There are Southern Rata trees with the sun behind them and a clear blue sky and a flat horizon. But nothing to point a camera at, especially. I do notice, outside of the range of the gear I own, that  seabirds are gathering in a great moving cloud above the water: Black Backed and Red Billed gulls, Terns and Shags. No doubt there are schools of small fish beneath them. I stop to watch and am fascinated by the shags. They swim with their necks protruding from the water but with the rest of their bodies submerged, bobbing along as though a ship fu...