The car trip started here in Kingston on Lake Wakatipu. It was a perfect spring day, and there was a lone sailboat down on the lake. Everything is on such a big scale here, maybe you can get a sense of the overall size of the lake from the tiny sailboat on there… it looks like a toy!
On a helicopter flight, we flew out over where the Dart River empties into the Wakatipu lake in Glenorchy. I don’t know about you, but I’m mesmerized by the patterns these deltas make. I’d love to see a time-lapse over the past 50,000 years of how it has changed. I wonder if there is a computer simulation out there that shows it.
Dug this one out of the archives when working on a soon to be announced project… looking forward to sharing. For now, this is Lake Wakatipu in gold…
Here’s Lake Wakatipu being its normal awesome self…
Here’s a previously unpublished pic from above Lake Wakatipu…man, I have soooo many of those. It’s almost impossible to take a bad picture here!
Here’s a view across Lake Wakatipu in New Zealand. I often share shots of this lake when it’s showing off the amazing blue colour during bright days but on this occasion, it was the cool lines crisscrossing in the sky that caught my attention.
How many people have to be in the same room for the odds of you having the exact same birthday as someone else? Since there are 365 days in a year, you might think 183, right? Wrong… way off… watch this! I just shared this with my daughter who had her birthday… she’s a math nerd like me, but this will blow your mind!
I’ve taken like 700 photos of this road, and each one is incredibly unique. I got this one from the air with a quadcopter and it was created out of a 3×3 grid of 9 different photos. This spot is only about 40 minutes down the road, so it makes me feel lazy I don’t get out there almost every day!
As soon as I moved to New Zealand, I got about 250,000 bees. I’ve always wanted to be a beekeeper, so I thought it was a great opportunity to give back to the planet a little bit. It’d be kinda awesome if everyone did that, eh? We have a little farm with that’s about 10 acres big and it’s had all sorts of ups and downs. We’ve had sheep born and die (even buried one but not deep enough so its legs sticking out of the ground…) We’ve had chickens that have been killed by dogs and birds of prey… but the only thing that keeps on going without fail is the beehives. It’s not that I’m a great beekeeper; I’m actually terrible! But I’m learning all the time.
The reason that I got into bees is because I’ve always been fascinated by superorganisms. I first got interested in ants then got into bees. From the early days of the internet, I kind of got the idea that humans were going to someday form a superorganism and we would use the internet the same way ants use scent trails or bees perform the waggle dance. I’ve learned so much from my bees about nature and the fundamental inter-workings of the world… I’ve also learned that I’m a pretty crappy beekeeper and I still have a lot to learn!
Here’s the Dart River that flows down from the Southern Alps then fills up Lake Wakatipu. I took this from a helicopter with Choppy and Over the Top while we were on the way to one of our first glacier landings. You can get a quadcopter up over this as well, but you can’t get nearly this high to get this perspective… to me, the more braided rivers, the better!
Here’s a new photo from the lake that I live near – Lake Wakatipu. This is a 9-photo panorama, stitched together in Lightroom. It was shot with a drone, and the final image is even higher rez than my best Sony camera. This exact spot is about halfway between Glenorchy and Queenstown. Pretty soon, we’re gonna get some snow… so I’ll head back out here with all the mountains are icy white.
Here’s a nice video from here in New Zealand.
My friend Brandin blew into town for a few days with his lovely wife. He was able to get a hall pass to come spend the day with me taking photos all around the Queenstown area. This is one must-stop location. The clouds were not super-amazing, but they were still good enough for us to take a few panoramas. I think this one was made out of about six vertical shots.
