Field trip

Glenrock Station cottage, June 2007

I can't believe its been a week since I wrote anything here but life has been full on with lots of adventures. Good fun.

I took an early day on Friday and headed off into the high country for a night away with the local photography club I belong to. The idea was to have 2 photo sessions of late afternoon sun and a dawn before coming home about midday on Saturday and it was a whole lot of fun.

Our car load got up there at about 3pm. It was a beautiful day but bitterly cold. Very little snow around for this time of the year (Mt Hutt hadn't even opened at this point) but fantastically clear. Luckily Fiona (our hostess) had been over and got the fires going in both houses so they were toasty warm when we arrived. Of course, we had to instantly go out and take photos whilst it was still daylight.

We'd organised that everyone bring food to share so once it was thoroughly dark we heated up the food and trekked over to the other house. There were 11 of us in total and we had an absolute food mountain. We even had a couple of huge apple pies to finish with. Fantastic. C. had brought along a hand-eye coordination game, complete with prizes, so much hilarity ensued. Especially with the occasional glass of wine thrown in.

The next morning was extremely frosty but everyone was up and out ready for the dawn well before dawn, well, dawned. It was so cold that our hats got frosted but once again, it was a beautifully clear day. There were gaggles of photographers everywhere. Dawn was approximately 8am so by 10am we were back at the cottage with the fire stoked up and drinking coffee, trying to defrost fingers and toes.

Then off up the valley for more photo ops. We ended up at Manuka Point looking up river to the mountains. I'm afraid I can't be bothered to haul out my atlas to name them.

Manuka Point, June 2007

You can see from this photo how dry its been. Normally you'd expect to have snow right to the bottom of those mountains, if not actually standing in the stuff where I was taking the photo. Fantastically beautiful though. Not a cloud in the sky.

New arrival in the family

Its most exciting! I've got another niece! She arrived this morning at St Georges. I don't have any more information but its very exciting. I only had one niece but an over supply of nephews at 3 (not really, its great). So the iGirl now has a little sister to torment and be tormented by.

Another surprise success

Winter sunrise, May 2006

I've shown you this photo before but I thought I'd show you again as I got an acceptance for it at Photography Club on Monday night. I have cropped this according to the judge's suggestion and it is better. I entered this in the 'Ellesmere Through the Seasons' category. None of my other photos passed muster unfortunately but I did learn a lot, as usual. I've made a promise to myself that I must enter at least one photo every month this year as its the only way to push myself. So far I've been doing well.

Last month there was a Digital Image category for the first time ever. The idea behind it was that the photo had to be obviously "fiddled with". When there were so many options it was actually quite hard to decide what to do. In the end I decided to go with a collage type effect, which is the image below on the left. On the right are the 2 images I started with.

"Adventure"

This photo didn't come anywhere but I had a lot of fun doing it. When it was shown to the iGirl she got very confused and wanted to know when she was there.

This week we got to hand in our mystery object photos (I'll explain more about that next month). On talking to the others after the meeting, almost everyone had taken their photos on the Sunday or Monday (as I did) even though we'd had the mystery object for approximately 3 months! Its that old deadline thing again. If it wasn't for deadlines I don't think I would have achieved anything.