Recently I spent 10 days across the ditch in New Zealand. It was the first time I got to experience what this wonderful country had to offer.
We began our travels in Queenstown, which is located in the South island of New Zealand, in the Otago region about 500km (310mi) South-West of Christchurch. Sometimes more well-known for its adventure sports than its scenery, Queenstown has much to offer everyone!
The minute you land you know its going to be special. The vast mountain ranges you briefly got to know from the air, now majestically tower over you as you disembark. Greeted by
friendly customs officers, you know that this has already begun to be different to the norm. Such a relaxed town it sits alongside Lake Wakatipu, which is NZ's longest lake stretching for around 80km (50mi). I knew this was going to be the place I was going to do majority of shooting. On this particular day, however, my wife and I had spent most of the day travelling and were ready for bed. We did the watch the sun go down at no doubt a popular area to do so - on the tip of Queenstown gardens. A beautiful area that is only a leisurely 5-10mins walk from town along the lake to the awaiting park benches.
So whilst the shot below was taken in Queenstown it wasn't taken until later in my trip, when we returned for 3 nights to conclude our trip.
On this particular sunrise shoot I had noticed the multitudes of thick but parting clouds, that I thought were going to give me a spectacular sky. I turned this way and that to try and get the right angle for the sunrise. The clouds actually hindered more than helped, because they blocked the rising suns light from hitting the clouds correctly. I ended up shooting looking away from the sunrise, which can be the right thing to do in many cases (as long as you don't have your own shadow in it). This image was shot with a 15sec exposure, giving me a nice water calming effect and a dramatic cloudscape over the aptly named Remarkables Mountain Range watch over the city of Queenstown and are simply stunning. In shooting an exposure for that long I had to use a 3 stop graduated filter. Which is almost like sunglasses for your camera. Because the scene has two very different intensities of light - the foreground (lake/mountains) and the sky, I had to level the playing field by filtering how much light the camera was capturing in the sky. Otherwise once the 15 secs was up, one of two things would occur - the sky would be perfectly exposed, but the foreground would be silouetted (not always a bad thing) OR the foreground exposed correctly, but the sky would be heavily overexposed (just white and boring).
This is the result below. I like the result, because I think it teachers you that the shot is always there for the taking you just need to know how to capture it.
