It’s been a while since I’ve written a blog, not intentionally; I have a friend who has Bowel cancer which is taking a bit of time and my grandmother young in spirit but no longer with the body to match is in hospital struggling with age, and the day before Christmas the suicide of someone we knew, a broken heart from a bitterly busted relationship. Sometimes words are hopeless creatures when life becomes fragile walking with others, but not always it just takes a while to dig for those rough diamonds and to let them speak.

And in amongst all this working to bring the Manawatu book to print Bettina and I have been photographing, writing, editing, thinking, designing,  the stage it’s going through at present and hopefully  will be on the bookshelves in March all things being equal.

I guess I have been pondering a whole heap for quite a while now, it’s not like death and serious illness accidents and work haven’t come knocking before, but this time it’s different for a reason I do not understand.  Two thoughts keep echoing around my heart one, the lyrics to Pink Floyds, “Wish you were here” which go like this

So, so you think you can tell Heaven from Hell, blue skies from pain. Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail? A smile from a veil? Do you think you can tell? And did they get you to trade your heroes for ghosts? Hot ashes for trees?  Hot air for a cool breeze?  Cold comfort for change? And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage….

And this, All men are like grass and all their glory like the flowers of the field, the grass withers’ and the flowers fall…

Life is temporary of that there is no doubt, at times it isn’t easy, but it is at times magical mysterious wonderful, but it’s the echoes we leave behind the way we live in spite of the troubled trickiness of any day that count more than curling up dead while living some TV fantasy with a bag of chips and various concoctions of bubbling water with a kick, which for the most part bruises us and often those we love.

But anyway what has all this to do with the Manawatu? Nothing and everything, It’s time we as a wider community started being known for doing cool stuff, being creative in giving voice to our place. Why don’t we have a formula one styled Luge track (similar to Rotorua but way better) on our ranges a place surely we can create The World Gravity Races? We could have a Ruahine to the Tasman Sea adventure race, Starting at Wharite, hang gliding, paraponting or mountain biking to the Manawatu or Pohangina River then a Canoe leg to Foxton then a bike and running leg finishing back in Palmerston North in the Square returning via Feilding and or some of the other small towns in our district, this could be a really awesome truly multisport teams event.

We could have creative science events for educational institutions, Go cart racing in the square again, a trolley Derby down the Saddle road, once the gorge is fixed…We have a car wreckers on the way to Ashhurst why not have a Recycle and Race day once a year for apprentices or anyone for that matter to enter as a team…We could have the 24 hour sculpture challenge, the Recycled arts challenge, we could do lots of cool things.

We need to stop talking creative and BE creative, we need to get off our communal couch and to quote Pink Floyd backward, “Trade our ghosts for Heroes”

We need to be known as “the” place to live life on the edge and not the place to come where falling asleep head first into a chippy bowel seems to be the norm while watching others have all the fun on TV…”somewhere else”

Anything is possible

My friend who has Bowel cancer also has mental illness a double whammy in any ones book, but each time we go to hospital and he sees and talks with another patient who is also seriously ill, he just keeps telling me how lucky he is that he isn’t that unwell, every time he says this I feel broken to tears knowing how difficult his journey is.

We have a community of awesome talent, I know I get to meet them in my job, let’s stop looking at what we don’t have and look instead at what we do have and create a place little step by little step that becomes us, is us, lets become what we can, what we will, not what others think we are.

A fading flower or a blossoming beauty?

This year our Manawatu spring is stunning, everywhere I’ve been with my camera, the flowers are just beautiful either hugging the ground or laden in trees standing in for sky, it has been and continues to be a magical time.  It’s been interesting to try and photograph some of this, it’s never easy to capture obvious beauty, fickle light, clashing colours, gnarled backgrounds, the random gardens of creation, and the overly organized human versions, everywhere a picture.

This year I was struck by the way the change of season was described by groups of trees, blossoms’ in one, still naked branches in another, leaves uncurling into life in others, this collective unravelling of winter to spring in one place I just found moving.

Strangely though I spent a lot of time observing and helping others out with their spring photography as I worked, they used all kinds of cameras from the incapable inexpensive to the best money can buy, but all of us seemed to be struggling in some way to photograph what we were seeing.

Talking with others photographing as I photographed it wasn’t what they were seeing that was the problem but that their eye camera relationship somehow seemed incapable of relating to and capturing what lay before them. Surprisingly most were wrestling with similar issues, they hadn’t read the camera manual, they didn’t understand how their cameras worked, they were unfamiliar with the controls, and they lost control of their camera while trying to program them and just buried themselves in the unfamiliar.  And those functions that promised to deliver the moment... just didn’t live up to expectation, it’s no wonder “Eye” type phones and Apps have become so popular. It sort of struck me that the easier technology becomes the more distant we are to the heart of possibility, the bit that really matters, we just want it to work... doing and being involved as little as possible all the while expecting it to read our minds desires and will.

Strange as it may seem my camera is always set up as simply as possible, gimmicks off, overly clever stuff, mostly off, I just rely on a low ISO, the aperture set for how I want the background to work with the subject either sharp or colour blending soft, a tripod always if the shutter speed drops too low and I want sharp images and that’s about it. Funnily most of my time is spent walking looking framing editing with my eyes before an image is taken, the mechanical stuff of photography always in response to how I feel my image should look.

The more time I spend in our landscape the more I’m captivated by it, lately the longest photographic journeys I seem to take are the ones most close to home.

I’ve been pondering the Snow covered tree image I was trying to give away, its up the Pohangina Valley, it can only be on the right hand  on just one of a few roads climbing the ranges, all the clues were in the Blog and I thought they were simple, so hopefully this might spur someone on to locating it...
If you feel like you need some photographic inspiration Galen Rowell’s, “Inner Game of Outdoor Photography” is well worth the time.

Sometimes things just do not work out, this photo is the perfect example of it, its unique it has no compositional cousins, it’s all I have of that once in a lifetime moment of  snow falling on the  Butterfly Pond in the Square.

I had been working hard photographing the clock tower in as many ways as I could as the snow fell, working big and not so big compositional angles, foreground background, flash no flash, steaming spot lights as snow melted on the hot protective glass, colours lines of light, light. My camera was soaked but never missed a beat, unlike me. I packed up to leave and at that moment I realized there were still coloured fountains and a clock tower combination waiting...

I walked quickly, arriving I walked into the scene which was pretty amazing raised my camera took one shot adjusted my flash raised my camera to my eye again and the lights went out...and that was that. It was one of those moments where no words are ever enough to express a somewhat bigger than small amount of frustration. This was one of those times when I needed to dig into my quote bag for meaningless comfort and this is all I could find. Gary Winnograd the great American photographer was asked what about all the pictures he was missing when he changed rolls of film, his reply...”there are no photographs”  Gary... thanks’ for nothing.

I pressed the replay button to see “ the one”  on my camera back and as I looked at it my finger hovered over the delete button, I knew what I wanted when I started photographing the scene and this wasn’t it, this was the start of journey that didn’t. I really, really wanted to delete this image and just remember the moment rather than be reminded of something that didn’t live up to the experience... Fortunately I have three girls who love the Square, at night they find it completely magical, and that was the only thing that saved this image from becoming digital trash, I thought they would love to see it even if I didn’t, and they did.

That’s photography, that’s life, eventually the lights go out and what remains, something we are proud of or a series of missed moments or some eclectic lopsided mix of the two, next time I will arrive earlier because the end, well, who knows.

If the snow we have had in the past couple of days has anything to say, it is that the beauty of the Manawatu doesn’t always sneak up on you.

Not hurrying to slow down, I piled my camera gear into the car, and drove up the Pohangina Valley, carefully hugging the ranges to Apiti finally turning for home via Kimbolton when my creative battery was truly flattened by all that white land, grey sky cold air and misplaced sun glasses.

It’s funny how something so enchanting beautiful wonderful is so frustrating to photograph with meaning. I’m not a snow person, it’s not something I play in go out of my way to visit, maybe that’s why I find it so magical when I encounter it and so challenging to photograph when I do.  I think for me this was just one of those times when the experience was more powerful than the image making; powder snow is so cool it’s like walking on really tiny crunchy feathers that sink away under you. Every step to the roadside fences where I love to photograph a journey in what lies beneath as my boots broke through to unseen ground below, and my foot I did break once was hoping it wouldn’t again.

I took lots of images torn between the experience and my lack of experience to connect the emotion to the moment, and every now and then I caught something that joined my feeling with the fleeting. The familiar made unfamiliar, beauty made radiant and me, running to stand still, not. (To quote U2)

Day two was better, a slow drive up to the wind farm a few stops lingering longer, seeing slowly, sharply much better pictures.

Beauty is a strange creature nothing is easy about her and what is, is the cliché, beauty is easy to misunderstand, to miss, she can spin your wheels and make a mess of a perfectly fine moment, she will not let you love her until you can see into her without lust.

I think the photo I was trying to give away proved to be a little tricky to locate, I took it on Sandon Block Road and if you drive the road from the turn off just above Vinegar hill, following the Rangitikei River high up on the thin gravel cliff carved road you will see a huge gum tree in front of you and that is where I took the picture.

The first person who can guess on which road I took the above photograph gets a print of it, hopefully this will be a little easier and there is a clue or two in the text...and it’s not a day two image.

How do you find an answer to a question using Google (or most search engines for that matter) when the desire to answer is driven by different motivations? Search and for the most part you will be “dollar’d” by Digital Darwinism, yep the magic, the days of asking a question and a myriad of intrigue wonder help and possibility flowing back are mostly over, the buck literally goes to the top, we get what we ask for... well sort of.

Golf on the other hand is a whole lot simpler, in theory, you put the dimpled white ball in the hole with as few hits as possible, it’s a game where the real opposition is mostly yourself, desire without technique skill attitude and practice can leave you feeling really bunkered.
And here in lies a problem for photographers, we express what we visually consume, other things become us, our drivers often don’t let us see the woods for the trees and without realizing, our hero’s become enemies.

One of my favourite quotes on being yourself in photography is by Ernst Haas the great colour photographer (and a seriously good black and white image maker also) it goes like this.

“There is no original in photography, you are the original. Basically at the end it is your vision which is your original and you sew it all up and it becomes your work and you have organized it and you have made the statement and you give this vision to the world.”

If you could Google yourself, asking who am I? It’s more likely, in the listed answers who you think you are, who you really are, might be a little tricky to separate, to see, but if you’re comfortable with your originality and let your vision who you are flow out of this, and combine it with skill, you will be what you photograph, and that will be really interesting to see. 

One of the tricky things about shaping up an image is layering elements from front to back, in many ways the subject is the least important thing in a photograph, it’s a given, but what isn’t is what exists surrounding the subject that gives it life.

Light foreground background juxtaposition tone colour contrast all these things help create life within an image, trying to give life to animate something that lays still and flat when you view it is always an interesting challenge. So often when you drive through our countryside “just over the fence” is a great shot, a tree a mountain a sunset but for the... fence... it can be really frustrating to find something you cannot remove without the aid of a helicopter a bulldozer or if you’re really desperate some endlessly complex bit of photo editing software.

I’ve come to enjoy the challenge of photographing the fence as an element in a landscape using it to add depth mystery or location to the main subject no matter what it is, fences are a bit like the onset of old age you have to find a way to reconcile, otherwise you and cousin frustration are going to get a whole lot closer. Light can turn a fence into a manmade spider web; a shallow area of focus can lead the eye along a softened line of posts wire and battens to rest on the subject in the distance, the colour of light can cause it to glow with the colours of dawn or sunset, it could become a picture frame, it might actually be the subject and not that snow covered range in the background... endless possibilities.

When I frame up I look for the light first its quality and colour, next the foreground and background  relationships, next the details that can slide in from the edge unnoticed, finally the subject how does it sit within all this, does it walk the talk so to speak. If I struggle to find the right elements to give life to the subject I keep moving till I do (often not far just a few metres mostly, sometimes I might need to walk or drive a little further around a corner) . This probably sounds a bit backward, subject last, but the things that seem the least really can cause the most amount of grief, images have a lot in common with people, it’s all about relationship...

There are all kinds of photographic fences, the same with life but the trick is to see them for what they can be and not what you think they are.

For those of you puzzled by the location of the landscape it’s up Vinegar Hill way, if you can tell me what road it’s on and what I stood under at the location I took the image from the print is yours.

I don’t know if you’re like me and get a little grumpy at times and have to leave the house to calm down before you say something really dumb, Sometimes I grab my camera and go and try and work something beautiful out of my frustration.

This picture was born out of such a moment, when you gotta go you gotta go, trouble was it was a dark starry cold night, a bit like me at that moment, I grabbed my gear and set out for the walkway along the Manawatu River, parked at the bottom of Albert Street and wandered. As usual I never made it far, once I started looking up, once my night vision kicked in, I knew what I was going to do, camera tripod trees stars. It’s a funny thing it’s easy for a photographer to surrender to the darkness but not so the darkness to a photographer, I’m always up for this challenge.

It always amazes me how the nights can be so clear so close to Palmerston North where I live how the Milky Way inks out darkness with white light in spite of all the light we create to live night by.  I didn’t take many photos, I didn’t need to, I didn’t go there really to take photos but to let beauty take me. When I got home and looked at the results on my computer, I realized I had made a mistake or two but that’s not surprising, never totally trust your technology go with the gut instinct, it’s the happy accident waiting to be born me thinks...  and it takes a while to calm down...

We may have had the odd grey day lately but the starry nights really do make up for it and they aren’t that far away.

The original was in colour but I prefer it in Black and White I feel a phase coming on!

One of the curious things about photography is how so many of us love the stuff the toys the cameras more than we love the end result, far too many people seem to know a lot about the “best” rather than trying, being their best.  I’ve spent a lot of time using the best gear that I can afford the reality is, it’s built to last longer, hopefully be easy to use, and it should work day in day out in tough environments without complaint. The reality is the best camera’s  don’t take better pictures often, at all, ever, that’s my job they just ease the way toward the end product by simply doing what you need of them. I choose my cameras to suit me not the other way. A while back I changed to a different camera brand after being utterly frustrated by the system I was using, it was like an annoying relationship where one partner wouldn’t listen and kept imposing its will, not much fun, a technology divorce ensued and now I’m a happy camper really happy.

More than ever I’m convinced the relationship we have with stuff place life matters, all the cool clever advertisements,  aspiration invisibles just don’t matter, if it’s not a meeting of relative  relational equals...  give half your stuff away now, cause it’s just going to cost more later...

I’m finishing up a book on the Manawatu with a friend,a writer.  The reason why we did it was to quiet a little if this is at all possible, those Manawatu divorcees, those incessant babblers in newspaper magazine columns on TV and even those who live here who have nothing good to say about our place, but haven’t the will to leave and will not see to stay and hopefully, hopefully to inspire us who do.

The Manawatu is beautiful, and we are a cool bunch of people quirky some overly serious daft fun “normal” we are just typical New Zealanders.  Over time we cut the bush, grassed and fenced, built, made roads settled, and without realizing the landscape quietly inhabits us.  I love coming home seeing the line of Manawatu Gorge V’d into the ranges marking the, “we are there now”, walking out my backdoor on a clear night and seeing the Southern cross, The iced dawns of winter the winds that clear our dust from the sky, the endless rich colours of dawn and dusk the acres of towering clouds being held up by high earth, the patterns left by smoothed fenced land etc...

I’m always left wondering about those who love their cameras more than the purpose those who love technology more than the relationship, the instant hit over wonder, place over life, I get the feeling it’s all easy to end up an environmental divorcee, all too easy to leave home without moving and to move on unable to stop kicking back.

In the last third of my previous blog I wrote about the location...

It’s ironic I think we’ve become so keen on hearts,  what good is a heart if you ain’t got fingers the power of love without sensation, physical engagement, it’s all a bit rubbish a bit downwardly one sided.  I love the edges where without you will never find the centre, I think that’s one of the problems we have with the Manawatu, we don’t know what our centre is.  I’m pretty sure it’s not the geographical middle, certain it’s not Palmerston North or Feilding and it sure ain’t me.

But I do think edges point us back to that which sometimes is a little difficult to define.  We are bounded by rivers, sea, ranges and big sky, and often I head to these places to look in or out from, to get a sense of place. I have spent a lot of time on and under Wharite waiting for the sun to set deep into a sea that will not boil and a night to rise from the falling light. It’s amazing to watch the huge sky fires of colour inking into diamond lit blackness, and then little by little seeing the land light up with scattered intensifying human stars, an earthly mirror of the eternal above.

To stand camera on tripod sinking in a wet sand low tide way out watching the sun set at the Manawatu’s mouth, waiting 'till the only guide to safety is a torch and a night lit Foxton Beach settlement. Or to drive up the southern side of the Rangitikei River at dawn backlit ice sparkling in the long roadside grass, long sharp fenced shadows creeping toward you, valleys opening as the sunburnt fog falls away.

The edge of things is the heart of a place to me at least, and to walk the edge takes time, effort and patience, and I often wonder if this is why we haven’t truly discovered the heart of our place, here in the Manawatu.

By way of a start to encourage a personal journey around the Manawatu, if the first person can tell me where I took the above photograph an original signed print awaits.

Winter is the time the landscape gets naked, the light is magical no matter if it’s glowing with the slow burning colours of dawn or dusk, the multiple greys of a seemingly doomed day or crystal white iced grass under a long slow warming blue sky. This is the time of year I love in the Manawatu, it seems the more layers I put on to go out into a day to photograph the more nature strips off. (I think summer at Foxton beach must cause the black sands to laugh gently at the almost naked humans lying on them... at least for them their impression is washed away come each high tide).

First impressions is what the photograph above is all about, I was on a journey looking for images, these trips mostly start well before dawn and finish way after the sun has sunk into someone else’s sunrise. I was up Kimbolton way and rounded a corner and saw this layered scene of light tree hills...and sheep, framing up was easy I photographed portrait and landscape versions playing the tree off against the light and hills in different ways... but, there’s always a but, most of my time was spent waiting for those soon to be mobile carpets to move into position so they were not the photo....

The naked landscape and its butt, the tricky part is separating the two.