Patience is a Virtue or something Our second day in Firenze we spent exploring the city by wandering somewhat aimlessly which has beceome my favourite method of touristing.  Whilst wandering the streets, we came across the  Santi Michele e Gaetano, where I made poor Emma wait so I could get the photo of the priest standing alone outside the church in just the right spot. He paced back and forth for nearly 10 mins before he stopped there.  We also came across the Uffizi Gallery, Palazzo Vecchio and the markets near Piazza del Duomo where we stopped for lunch.  New Obsessions To View More >>

A Ghostly Procession After departing the national park, soaking wet and hallucinating moving mountains, we set off to the next accomodation. The one downside to travelling Iceland in the winter is how dark it gets so quickly. We chose winter for a chance of seeing the Northern Lights but this did mean that the days were short. Because of this we had planned to view the Glacier Lagoon the next morning but as we passed by it to get to the Guesthouse the sight of colossal chunks of glacial ice floating in a lagoon as the sun was starting to set was too much to pass up.  Jökulsárlón To View More >>

New Backyard, New Visitors Last year I posted about a pretty cool visitor to my backyard (check it out here) and when I had to move from Whenuapai I was a little bit disappointed that living closer to the city I might not get as many opportunities to see New Zealand bird life quite as close up.  My first day in the new house brought with it some beautiful Kingfishers flying about outside the kitchen window. I was busy unpacking however, so just took it as a good sign of things to come.  So the bad news first. Having an (incredibly small) portion of bush area behind your house isn't To View More >>

Throwback Thursday! Royal New Zealand Navy September 1980 Intake Reunion (2010) Back in 2010, I had the pleasure of heading along to the RSA in Browns Bay and shooting the reunion of the September 1980 intake of the Royal New Zealand Navy. It was an interesting evening, with some interesting stories and some even more interesting characters tellng them. It takes a special kind of person to be able to cope with being away at sea on a boat for any length of time. And these are the people that volunteer to do so. Respect to each and every one of them!  For the full album of photos from that night To View More >>

Living in Auckland often earns you the derision of the rest of the country, but it's home and I love it. I don't doubt the beauty of the rest of the country, NZ is beautiful, but Auckland has it's little gems too. One of those places for me has always been Bomb Point. Up until recently Bomb Point has been open to the public. Thanks to urban sprawl and the current construction going on over there, it's been closed off, so I was pretty lucky one of my previous flatmates showed it to me before that happened. It's 11 hectares of land, at what used to be a munitions dump for the Royal New Zealand To View More >>

It's not often I'm out of a coverage zone for any length of time and never usually in a place that I would describe as breath taking. Pawarenga, in the very far north of the North Island of New Zealand, definitely fit that description.  My cousin and I made the journey, getting up very early in the morning to this beautiful sunrise. A stunning start to a long drive.  Many hours, and a very long and windy drive, later we made it to the bay and marae at Pawarenga where my cousin's family are from. The area is simply amazing. The historic St Gabriel's Church (featured in the David To View More >>

I picked up a linear bearing rail system through my friend Andy to trial for video and time-lapse photography. My first test was just around the house. The bonus to this over traditional sliders is these glide rather than roll or slide, which gives a very smooth movement.  I had an acrylic base plate made to mount a ball head on to the bearings block and picked up a Benro BH-1 with quick release from Apix Photographic Supplies to mount my camera. Will post separately about putting the rail together. Above is the small demo clip put together from the test. Quite happy so far with To View More >>

In the past few years I have decided to expore a bit of New Zealand and one long Easter Weekend I took off to the Bay of Islands with some friends. The very first day, I was standing with my back to the window chatting to Mickey as he managed to spit out the words, "camera, sunset, now". Spinning around, this is the view that greeted me. I raced down to the beach and managed to catch this single shot before the light disappeared completely for the day.  The next day my friends decided that one of the things we should do while on holiday in the Bay of Islands was to go sailing, I was less than To View More >>