A Travel, Photography and Points Blog
After spending the morning packing and having one final homecooked breakfast with our lovely AirBnB host, we packed up the car and headed to Rotorua’s Redwood Forest. It was actually a bit of a spur of a moment decision to check out the Redwood Forest that morning as we had some time to spare before our midday flight to Christ Church.
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We started our second day in Rotorua early as we were hitting two popular tourist sights that required a bit of a drive. First up, it was Wai-o-tapu Thermal Wonderland. Beware, there is quite the rotten egg smell throughout the park given that it’s an active geothermal area. To be honest though, you get used to the smell quite quickly that you hardly notice it after a while. It’s a fairly large park with a variety of colourful and interesting hotsprings and boiling mudpools. Definitely worth a visit and you’ll have plenty of photographic opportunities. One of the special attractions is the Lady Knox Geyser that shoots up to heights of 10 to 20 metres. Some of my favourite images from the north island was actually taken here at Wai-O-Tapu.
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Over the last 2 months, with social distancing, I’ve had a bit more time at home. This meant I finally finished editing my photos from my 2 week New Zealand road trip taken several years ago. I feel grateful that I have had the opportunity to travel quite a bit over the last 4 years and as a result have constantly fallen behind on my photo editing. As I edited and went through my photos, it reminded me all the things New Zealand has to offer and I can’t wait to go back this year if the boarders between Australia & New Zealand opens up.
My previous blog posts on New Zealand can be found here:
The Church of the Good Sheppard is probably one of the most photographed little churches in New Zealand. While I knew it was popular with photographers I did not expect so many tourist to be visiting and walking around the church late in the afternoon on the day we arrived in Tekapo. Mind you, I can see why its so popular. Tekapo was probably my favourite of all the towns and cities we travelled to during our two week road trip around New Zealand. It’s just such a beautiful and quaint little lake side town. Given we visited New Zealand in the Autumn, the Autumn colours were spectacular, especially late in the afternoon. Lake Tekapo felt so peaceful, beautiful and calm.
I actually photographed this church twice, once in the afternoon in golden hour (this photo here) and another time at night with the stars in the background. As there were lots of highlights and shadows in this scene, I bracketed the scene at +1, 0 and -1, then processed this in Photomatix Pro. This is a HDR photo that is part of the Technocolour Series. It’s been fun experimenting with HDR photography and seeing what my little Fujifilm X-T10 can do. Thanks for stopping by today.
J.
This post kicks off my New Zealand travel series. Auckland is the city where my two week New Zealand adventure began and ended. We spent the first and last day in New Zealand exploring and relaxing in Auckland.