Available Light

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 ...

I have it on good authority that these flowers are primulas. They're actually very small. I was taken with their audacious colors.  Two young fish are swimming happily along when they pass an old fish. "Good morning," says the old fish, "lovely water today, isn't it?" Once the old fish was well out of earshot one young fish turns to the other and asks, "what the heck is water?"  **** There's a change which happens to every photographer at some stage. They begin to see light. Before that they see objects - people or hills or bees or birds -that are potential subject matter, and of course they still do that, but there is something else as well. They see the light: its direction and strength; its colour; whether it is direct or reflected or refracted or absorbed; the way it takes on the characteristics of whatever it has bounced off. They notice that when hitting film or a photographic sensor, reflected light  behaves differently than di...

Here is the sermon I preached yesterday, in St. Paul's Cathedral on the 150th anniversary of the Diocese of Dunedin. Of course this is just the sound. It misses so much: the assembled choirs; the large church completely full of people with a high degree of interconnection; the colour of the glass and the soar and sweep of limestone; the children coming and going; the clear strong voices of the young people from Selwyn and St. Hilda's;  the inspired liturgical leadership of Bishop Steve. For me, preaching is more than simply reading an essay to the people. It is a connection in which all the elements mentioned and more besides combine in an act of communication. So an audio recording can give the content but not the completeness of the sermon. You had to be there. But all that aside, here's what I had to say. If audio features do not show, it is because your browser does not support them

Many of you will have seen this picture before. I took it a couple of days ago, and it, or one very like it, is on my Facebook page or on one or two other places online. People have told me it makes St. Clair look quite exotic, fair enough, because it is, if you don't live there, and several have asked if I have modified it. Well, yes, of course I have modified it. I modified it the moment I pressed the shutter button, but that's not the point. There's a perception out there that edited photos are kind of cheating; that the "best" pictures are the natural ones, unaltered from the images that pop out of the camera. Well... let's think about that for a bit. I stand on a cold Spring evening, just after dusk. What I am in the midst of is a multi sensory, 3-D experience, which, for reasons you'd probably best ask my counselor about, I want to share. So I get out my camera which is about as capable a digital camera as you can buy without taking out a mo...

On St Clair beach is a group of old pilings. When I first bought a decent (for the time) digital camera I photographed them and made a picture I was happy with. Way back then,  I took the picture at dusk, used a tripod, set the lens to a narrow aperture to get as much depth of field as possible, and used a slow shutter speed (around 20 seconds) to smooth out the water.  I've visited the pilings many times, and made much the same shot. Last night I realised that the tide and the light were appropriate for yet another iteration, and took the picture above. Same settings, though the old wooden logs have aged a bit. We revisit our past. It's not now as we imagined it. Things that seemed so strong and straight are succumbing to the tides of the universe, as everything does.  The piles have suffered the indignities of all that is constant in their environment. They are still lovely in their decline, though, and make their own statement about impermanence and the movement...

There’s a particularly worrying phone call which most of us will one day receive: “Hello, this is your doctor. There’s nothing to worry about, but could you come and see me first thing tomorrow morning?” I have had four such phone calls in the past decade, the last one, strangely, on the day after I began reading Myk Habet’s book. Each of these conversations has driven me to revisit what I think will happen on that day when I finally step out of three dimensional reality. I believe that whatever lies over the horizon for me will be characterised by the most complete picture of reality we are ever going to get, namely the life, death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. Like a child emerging from the womb into the real world, I will, sooner rather than later, emerge from this current reality into one that is infinitely bigger than I can imagine but I generally try to set aside guesswork about what that might be like.  Catching me when he did, however, Myk Habets enco...

Photographers call the periods just before sunset and just after sunrise "the golden hour" because of the colour of light and because its strong directional nature makes for some great shots - sometimes at least. This is the golden hour in the countryside just outside Canberra in Australian Capital Territory.  I've been away, and here is a diary of the last week. Friday 31 May. Flew to Australia via Auckland. Flights around New Zealand were delayed because of bad weather, so our flights were all late. got to Melbourne about 9.30 pm, picked up our rental car and found our way to a small but perfectly formed AirB&B on the 14th floor of a building in the docklands area. Saturday 1 June . Breakfast at a wonderful cafe in Footscray, then went to some favourite places in Melbourne - St. Kilda and Prahran, before driving into the city. We had seats for the two parts of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child at the Princess Theatre. First show 2.30 pm, second 7.30 pm. A...