Saturday, May 26, 2012

Photography

So, I got this new camera, like...

Up till now, I've been taking pictures using the automatic settings on the camera. But it's got all these other fancy-schmancy settings and button and wheels and levers and whatnot, and I don't know what they're for and how they work. So I booked myself onto a photography course, and learnt all about F stops and ISO and shutter speeds and what-have-you.

Of course, I promptly forgot the lot, but fortunately there's a website where I can remind myself of what it all was. Anyway, the upshot of all this is that I now use my camera on the M (for "manual") setting, and adjust the other settings myself according to the conditions. So goes the theory...today we went out and took it for a first test run. It was a cloudy day, so not the ideal bright sunshine which has probably been the cause of my good photography so far. We went up to Zealandia once again, and photographed some of the bird life there:

Fantails are notoriously hard to photograph

Pied cormorant
 There are problems trying to photograph from the gloomy ground up towards the sky...
A white-eye


The kakas do stay still enough to get some good shots...

A kaka
 I got loads of out-of-focus pictures of bellbirds and saddlebacks, but these two seem to have come out quite well:
A bellbird


A takahe - one of two resident at Zealandia. Beautiful plumage!

A black cormorant

A grumpy cormorant
So I shall continue to work on using the different settings and hopefully get better at predicting what to use for different light conditions.

Sunday, May 20, 2012

Point Dorset

It was another cracking autumn day in Wellington, so we decided to go for a walk around Point Dorset, on the Eastern side of the Miramar peninsula. We spotted some surfers in Breaker Bay as we set out, but they were just waiting for the big waves to come in, so we didn't manage to get any action shots of them.

Climbing to the peak from the entrance at the Pass of Branda, we came across the site of the Oruaiti Pa marked by a pou whenua:


A kingfisher flew past and landed on a stalk:



A man paddled past (far below) on his paddle-board:



The kingfisher kept following us:


Back down to beach level, and the waves were attempting to be spectacular, but not very successfully:


As we walked back along the street to the car, the kingfisher turned up again: