KT and Coffee: photography

Showing posts with label photography. Show all posts

Wake up and smell the roses

Walking around the roses always makes me think of my mum and then my nan. So it's a happy time, but I miss them so. This time I also thought of our first trip to Wellington where I sought out the rose garden in the Botanical Gardens. I took photos of nearly all of them to share and show my mum. Back in Auckland we have the Rose Garden in Parnell as well as the Botanical Gardens, so really never far from my mum and nan at all.

Auckland Botanic Gardens 2015

My 2008 Rose Collection. When sharing photos of Roses the names come to life in the same way the fragrance does when you walk by them. These are all from my Flickr photo stream, so you should be able to see the title if you hover or some internet magic thing. These were taken with a Casio EX-Z1000 and I can pretty much guarantee back then I would have been shooting on auto.

Onto 2012 and the Rose Garden at Parnell. Here I am playing with the Hipstamatic app on the phone. the phone has added a whole new world to my photography but in even in the short time since I took these photos so much has changed.

New sunglasses

Day 4

Who leaves their sunglasses in a public toilet. Or maybe the question is who takes sunglasses that have been left in a public toilet.

We got to Lake Moke and no sunglasses. After day two's walking in the bright sunshine knew I couldn't or wouldn't be silly enough to walk for 3 hours without them, so back to Queenstown.

Not where I left them. Now I have a rule for never buying expensive sunglasses, because if I'm not losing them I'm breaking them. Quick shopping stop.

Back to the walking.

We've been to Lake Moke a few times, but never none the walk around the lake. It was windy and cooler when we arrived (the second time) so we wrapped up and off we went.

What a great walk. Undulating, with mountain views, a glorious snack stop and then proving my magical bag packing skills by putting our warm stuff into the backpack.

One of those insanely happy days.

Hats, glasses and ready to roll

The black and white version on the phone

The drive to the lake (in the far distance). Blown out sky. Damn this wonderful weather

The colour version on the Nikon with Adam for added value

An insanely happy day

Oh yes

The first half

Day twenty nine. My smile

Not that fond of photos of me, though I do like my smile.

Day fifteen. My favourite camera

2014 was a year I tried to learn a wee bit more than point and shoot. Adam brought me the cannon (influenced by Clive Cussler and the Fargos, but heh, that is also the reason I brought an iPhone, don't judge) and I love it. Then an amazing thing happened and I came second place in a photo competition and won the nikon - which is waterproof they tell me, though I am yet to be brave enough to test that out.
Mind you, that iPhone is a bit of a well used (and well loved) camera.

August Broke

Thanks to the August Break, August is often a blogging peak for me. Not this year.
Maybe it's the ease of Instagram, maybe the new job, maybe my natural laziness, anyhoo, it started well but I couldn't stick at it.
I think the laptop was stuck under stacks of paper, reading, notes, cards and the like. Does it sound like I'm trying to find excuses.
I did mange the photos, and this year followed the prompts. Now at times I was rushing round the house before jumping into bed (this all sounds very active and I don't think there was a much energy as this implies) to take the photo for the day. At the end of August we had a little break and I lost sense of time and dates, so it may have gone a little awry, but here for your viewing pleasure my August Break

Mixing it up

Slacker that I am, lounging around with a bad back, if I think about it, it started to go awry a few weeks ago. Surprise Saturday moved to the Sunday, then Friday night movie night moved to Sunday morning.
Surprise time then and it was my turn and I choose another museum, this time to see the National Geographic Exhibition at the Auckland Museum. I loved reading the specs on the photos, I loved the stories and while the overall winner wasn't my favourite it was very poignant. The journalism story board of the ivory trade made me sick to the stomach and I wonder what we are up to as a human race.

Movie morning then brought back all sorts of childhood memories of morning cinema trips with my brother. It was coffee, not wine as we got the tickets at The Capitol and settled in to watch this movie. Not without making an entrance though, Adam dived up the stairs, laying flat down and not spilling a drop of coffee. Class.

Balance finding me

Some rather amazing things have been happening in my non work life and I'm beginning to feel that balance may be finding me. Not that I'm managing it very well, but nevertheless I am making progress.
First up, I was honoured to be collaborating here. This post was shared as part of the Weekends Collected. Thank you Leonie, Ive never written with the intention of being shared before. I was nervous but it was me and that after all is all we have and all we can give. I went a little into internet shut down. Rather than running with it and creating more, I ran and hid, made excuses and hunkered down into serious coffee drinking and reading. Forgive me.
Next up, a total bolt from the blue. A random phone call at 4pm on Tuesday tells me I have won second place in the Auckland Photo Day Competition, which is part of the Auckland Festival of Photography. Stoked does not even come close. Super excited, pleased as punch and totally blown away. Yep, the prize is cool, but wow, second place in a competion.

Wow indeed.
Now…any top tips for using a Nikon.

Getting around

What to do on a rainy day, well, finding old draft posts and tweaking them slightly is one option I guess. This post first formed several years ago after finding one of my photos on someone else's blog, this made me think about my growing internet use - Pintrest, Flickr etc. Guess now you have to add Instagram and Tumblr to the list. Blimey.

Not sure why I didn't deem it worthy back then, maybe I thought I would find lots more 'bits of me' but I haven't looked again. I don't tend to worry to much about my photos being taken, maybe because I have such a low readership and my photos aren't that good. I think the best of everyone, maybe naive, maybe optimistic, maybe I figure life is a bit too short....Anyway, enough rambling. Given I wrote this back in 2010 I thought I should check the links - not all working but I've left the original draft and added comments in italics.

Well here (link not working anymore) from a trip to Memphis, and if you scroll down a bit on this blog (working and still credited to me) there is a mosaic photo I made of our potted Christmas Tree. My Nigella mincemeat photos and blog seem to have made it to this site! (now this one is looking very odd, and clearly not my mincemeat photos but I didn't stay there very long). A photo from the aforementioned Memphis trip was added to the Schmap (still there, hurrah) site, they asked in advance and it was rather exciting, but you have to really hunt to find my photo now. As for the networkedblogs site, I had no idea really (still not much of an idea).

Walk 34 - Brick Bay

OK, a little backtracking, this was our Easter Sunday outing. The autumn call to Brick Bay Sculpture Trail was answered. The rain held off until the end of the trail so we could concentrate on taking photos. I seemed to more interested in leaves than sculpture. There you go.

View to the Glass House

No, not sculpture. Enjoying the leaves

The pond, no still not sculpture

The path.

Ah, trees. oh yes and one of the sculpture pieces.

the light on the bark was fascinating

Adam doing his Shrek impression at the listening post

These bells were fascinating. There was a whole series of them as you walked through the Kauri trail. I loved it.

Back to enjoying the leaves

Leaves attached to sculpture, even better

Standing in rain

100 Happy Days

My sister challenged me. I'm a generally optimistic, Pollyanna kind of spirit. I sometimes get knocked down, but I always get back up.

I posted them via Instagram as I'm also the kind of girl that (mainly) does what she is told, but here are my 100 days from Flickr as that's the way I'm rolling.

100 Happy Days Challenge, should we be worried that the Daily Mail is writing about it.

A night time interlude

Back in March when the world was spinning so fast and we whirled about with joy and gusto with guests we also managed a night time photography workshop. It's been a pleasure learning about photography and Adam is a very patient teacher. This was one of those special deal things and I didn't rate it that much but it was a different way to spend a weekday evening. With my little cannon I clicked away. What did I learn...a tripod and shutter release cable are essential, that and keep trying oh and of course what you like the look of the person you are standing next to really might not. These photos are just as they were taken, no tweaking or filtering malarkey.