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The Dunedin railway station is ridiculously pretty. It was built when cash from the gold rushes flowed freely through the city and the council wanted to make a statement about what a grand and important little town we were. So, no expense was spared to cover it in little towers and fill it up with mosaics and carved wood. It's years since it was an actual transport hub. Freight trains pass it, and tourists use it to board the Taieri Gorge railway, but other than that it's mostly just something to look at. This morning, early, before the tourists arrived, I went to look at it. I took my camera and one lens: a wide angle. I have a half dozen lenses that I have gathered up over the years to fit on the front of my Nikon camera. They cover a range of focal lengths from 16mm (extreme wide angle) to 600mm (extreme telephoto) and I pick one or two of them to take with me depending on what I think I might be taking pictures of. A wide angle lens is all  about inclusion: lots of ...

Wall of a derelict house. In the Maniototo, near En Hakkore retreat centre. I have a new monitor: 27" of clear sharp colour, take a bow Mr. Dell. Today, after a week or two of looking at the thing,  I noticed that it has an adjustable base, so I tilted it upwards a little. And an odd thing happened. The oblong screen became a parallelogram, wider at the bottom than at the top. It didn't really of course, it's just that in the time I had been viewing it the screen had been perpendicular, and at an angle to my line of vision and  my brain had got used to it the way it was, and had, without consulting me, been performing the nifty little trick of making a perceptual adjustments so that it looked rectangular. And now I went and changed the angles and my brain reinterpreted the shape using the old maths. I knew it was rectangular but no matter how hard I tried I couldn't see it that way. The illusion was so persuasive I even got a set square and made sure it was safe ...

I was a bit tired after church this morning and lay down on my bed. Four hours of deep, inky dark sleep later I woke to an amazing sight. Outside my bedroom window is an old birch tree, tall enough that I look up to it from my upstairs window. It is filled with dead wood, but because the branches near the top are so spindly, there is no reasonable way to climb into it and prune it, so even in the height of summer it has bare branches. The poor old thing lives in perpetual autumn. But not today. I looked out at it, with my head still on the pillow and its branches were filled with blossom: almond blossom. There is was, bedecked in drifts of the palest pink and white and the deep red centres of the blooms clearly visible, even from a distance of 20 metres. It was at the same time an instant reassurance of the eternal springtime of God and a sight so bizarre I raised my head sharply. And on shifting my perspective by even an inch all was resolved into normalcy. There were no blooms, just ...

A couple of people have questioned me privately about the Leonard Cohen song The Traitor , and about Cohen's comments on the song, "[The Traitor is about] the feeling we have of betraying some mission we were mandated to fulfill and being unable to fulfill it; then coming to understand that the real mandate was not to fulfill it; and the real courage is to stand guiltless in the predicament in which you find yourself". What on earth does he mean, and why am I so excited about it? For the latter, check with my psychiatrist. For the former, my take on the song is this: The Traitor is another of those instances, as in The Partisan , where Leonard Cohen uses a military metaphor to speak of life in general and human love in particular. Many of us hold high ideals: some great quest or other that we pursue. These are often laudable things: finding true love, finding the absolute love of God, becoming enlightened, spreading the Gospel, writing the great novel or some such ...

I have always been pleased with this shot, even though it's not your classic ornithological portrait of a shag. Today this guy left the following comment on it: "“The day you teach the child the name of the bird, the child will never see that bird again.” – Kristnamurti. I want to add to that and say that the day you give the child a camera, the child might see the bird again." It's great when someone gets it.

A fine window dedicated to a former vicar dominates the interior of my church from it's position in the East wall, above the altar. If you were there on a clear morning with the sun shining through it this is what you would see: Raise your camera to your eye, carefully compose the shot and press the shutter button and this is what you'd get: The reason the top is skinny and the bottom is fat is because this is what it actually looks like. You don't see it that way because you brain has recognised the effect of things getting smaller the further they are away from you, done some very clever maths, and compensated for it without you even noticing. What you see in normal, everyday life is not the actual window, but an idea of what the window should look like; you're seeing an ideal version of the window, if you like. To make the camera take the picture you have in your brain requires one of two things: either a very expensive tilt and shift lens, or some jiggery pokery w...

People sometimes ask for my advice on buying cameras. The camera they have now doesn't give them good shots, and they want something with mysterious dials and switches and buttons so they can take photographs they can be proud of. I usually tell them a little of what I know about cameras, but seldom what I am really thinking: that buying a new camera to improve your photography is like buying a new pen to improve your writing. If you are taking rubbish now, a new camera will only deliver you more sharply focused and better exposed rubbish. A good photographer will take stunning shots with a $199 point and shoot. Consider photographs like his or like his , or like hers ; Although all these were taken with fairly good camera gear, it's not the equipment that mattered - it's possessing a photographic eye. (and since writing this, I have stumbled on this blog which eloquently proves my point) Which is what? Well, hard to explain really, but you know it when you see it. It is ...