*drum roll* Photowalk #6 - Cornwall Park / One Tree Hill

Hi all! I'm not going to head this post "No tree hill" because this place has heaps of trees!! LOL LOL *dry* LOL I love cornwall park. Its sooo beautiful even though its winter I still love this place. The trees are just amazing :-) Just the sense of history you get from looking at them.

This was our sixth walk as a little photoclub and still we managed to lose some people haha. :/ OH WELL.... We waited as long as we could and finally we had to venture on.

Just for a little bit of background on Cornwall Park, here is some info from the Auckland City Council Website :

"Maungakiekie is the largest and most complex volcanic cone fortress in the southern hemisphere. It has hundreds of living terraces, food store pits, defensive ditches and banks that for centuries supported a population of 5,000 people. From the tihi, signallers would communicate with the network of volcanic Pā across Tāmaki.

Sir John Logan Campbell, who is buried on the summit, gave the name One Tree Hill to Maungakiekie. He was inspired by the sacred Totara he saw on his first visit here in 1840. Te Totara i Ahua was cut down as part of the colonisation of Auckland during the 1850s and 60s. Campbell attempted to replace the Totara however only a single Monterey Pine survived. The tree was damaged after successive attacks by Maori protestors, and was eventually felled for safety reasons in 2001."

So sad, that tree was such a neat icon for Auckland City but unfortunately there is no longer a tree on "One Tree Hill". booo.

Anyway I still love this place. Here are some of my favourite shots from the walk:

I loved the way these shadows fell on the crater slope

Fellow groupies

Like I said, beautiful beautiful trees!

Friends walking & talking - part of the club btw

Some sunlight on the steps..

Detail shot from Acacia cottage

Dryke had a blast on the walk! He loves his walks let me tell you. haha. He will drag me along. He's a big boy now.. still relatively small but strong!

Doug's neice trying to take a rock home lol. Umm no! lol

Well that's it friends.. sorry its not many this time., we had to leave early to take the kiddies home :P..

Oh I've made some exciting purchases this week. I know I'm such a shopaholic!! I bought an ipod touch off the 1-day website, really cheap only $250, I couldn't resist! Its so so awesome. First thing I did was upload some photos on to it!! Now I can share my photos with everyone I meet HAHAHA. . omg. lol. And yes., I did put music on it too *rolls eyes*.

Have an awesome weekend everyone!

What camera do you have?

Sorry guys! I've been a bit slack with the blog lately! The weather hasn't been too kind here on this side of the world lately (besides the last couple of days, they have been beautiful!). We're really into the swing of winter now having 4 degrees the other morning.. brrrrr!

Anyway I don't have any photos to share right now (boo). I will do in another week after our next photowalk on Sunday. For now though I wanted to share this email subscription I get every week. Its from Elizabeth Halford - a photographer who is based in England. You can find out more about her here. I really enjoy her style of writing and photography - its fresh and fun! I discovered her when reading one of her articles on the dps website.

If you are a keen photographer like I am., and/or enjoy learning more about photography, I really encourage you to do what I do and get online. There are thousands of very inspirational and informative blogs and websites that can help you improve in your passion. I find that email subscriptions are also very handy & convenient. Websites can often email you updates as they appear on their websites. If you think its not relevant for you, you can just delete it. But often I like to quickly browse these subscription emails and get my daily fix of photography info. (I sound like an addict huh LOL) Its just great!

Below is one subscription email that I felt I needed to share. I hope that you also find it inspirational, challenging and eyeopening!


Q. “Last year I bought a Nikon D80 as a “more professional grade” camera for myself. Lately, I have been kicking myself because it just seems that Canon shoots better portraits, and my husband says I am already too invested to switch. So, I know that you are a Canon user…did I make a mistake, or can I achieve the same gorgeous shots with my Nikon that I feel others get with Canons?”

A. Hi Kelsey! Oh, I’m so RELIEVED that you asked me that. I really should have thought to cover that myself since I know it’s probably the #1 reason baby photographers quit in the embryonic stage of their discovery. The answer is NO! A Canon isn’t better than a Nikon. And a point and shoot isn’t worse than a DSLR either (yeah yeah I know, people…boo…hiss…get over it!) Photographs have EVERYTHING to do with the photographer, not the camera!

Now you wonder: under what authority do I make such bold statements? Many years of experience, that’s what! Here are prime examples:

• The best photos I’d ever taken until recently were when I first discovered that I loved taking photos and had a little Casio ultra compact ‘credit card’ camera. I wasn’t concerned about settings or sexy lens flare. I just learned composition and emotion and those photos are on my wall to this day.
  
• My best wedding to date was done on a Canon 450d. Moving up doesn’t mean your pictures will be better, it just means that you will think you have to work less for them and they’ll be worse. Don’t fall for it – you still have to work HARD.

Now Kelsey, you said “…that I feel others get…”. This means that you’re comparing yourself to other photographers. Which is great. It drives us to be better. Not so great if you’re looking at photos on the Flickr front page like a 14 year old looks at Britney Spears on the front cover of Seventeen Magazine. Those photos have some serious post-processing ‘editing’ work done on them to make them look like that.

When I’m down in the dumps about my photography, I like to go on Flickr and look at the before/after galleries. Or check out Before & After Monday here on my site. It’s so SO good to see what professionals’ photos actually look like before they have been edited. They’ll probably be a lot like yours!

Another thing…camera envy never ends. I now have a 7D and still sulk about my photos not being “as good as their photos”. But it really has so so little to do with the camera.

One thing I've learnt from upgrading from my previous camera, is that just because you don't have the BEST camera on the market, doesn't mean you can't take intriguing and interesting photographes that people will enjoy. The person who is behind that camera makes all the difference. People always ask me., wow your camera takes awesome pictures., hey what about me!!! LOL You still need to know HOW to use it!

I think its so important to realise this and never look down on yourself just because you don't have the latest gears. Of course better gear does give you a few more options, just because you have a super mean camera doesn't mean you are automatically going to be a pro. It still takes alot of practise, experience and hardwork as Elizabeth has outlined in her answer above. Hope you enjoyed that Q&A as much as I did. Enjoy your weekend!

Ok., I just have to have a picture to go with my blog post! A favourite using my old camera Fuji s1000 & a simple tripod, a much cheaper and less sophisticated camera than my 50D and yet I still love this picture...I know I'm bias (pic of my bf) haha but you get my point. »

Photowalk #5a - Bethells Beach!

HAHA., so last sunday was our 5th photowalk for our club. And we actually had 15 people come along this time! The only thing was, I got lost haha. There is no mobile phone reception out at Bethells beach and silly me, I thought i would be able to find everyone. But no... lol. I was there on time but I eventually gave up on finding everyone as I didn't know what everyone's car looked like and started driving back home. I got to Swanson and realised I had 2 txts from Joy. I pulled over and called her and she told me she was waiting near falls road. So off I sped, back west.

SO YAY., at least I found Joy, Kenneth & Fatma. But alas , we headed off in the wrong direction and did a different bush walk that was actually planned. BIG FAT FAIL lol. ha ha ha. But hey., we still got to see some very awesome landscape. So because this wasn't the "official" photowalk I named it #5a. LOL.

Joy doing her thang

I merged two photos in photoshop to get the photo below. Otherwise , due to the harsh light, you wouldn't be able to see the lovely green of the forest below us. It would just be black like the one above.

I was lazy and just did an automatic enhance on this photo in photoshop. I don't usually like using this as it can sometimes give some obvious fake results, but I liked how it looked and so kept it :-)

Ok this is probably my favourite pic of the bunch. I just love the mist against the strong rock face in the distance. The relatively small people in the photo also just remind you of how rugged and awesome this landscape is!

And like I told Jane, this photo below was actually an exposure accident!! haha. It was totally overexposed. But I kind of liked it when I removed the colour. It becomes mostly white except for the surfer (my subject).

Oh how I just adore reflections!! This photo basically speaks for itself. However, I would have preferred to have the surfer on the right hand third instead of the left, but I was too slow., what can you do lol.

And we found a sea cave turned sea arch! Awesome. I was a bit scared about walking through here., there was a bit of dripping going on., but I made it out the other side untouched lol.

Enjoying someone artwork someone left behind.

Last fav of the day. I like the light in this picture.

And., Tip of the week: Make sure you check your settings regularly! Alot of my photos have visable noise on them. Darn me for forgetting to bring my ISO back to normal from a previous shoot. Its something you can easily forget.

Have an awesome rest of the week peeps! Only 2 more days till the long weekend!! I hope the weather is good and that we can all get a chance to get out there and get shooting. :-)