I’m headed over to Wanaka soon for a mini-road trip! Last time I was there, this tree was hibernating for the winter… now that it is finally springtime, I expect to see some leaves on here! Watch my dumb insta stories to see…
I flew my drone out as far as I could to get this image. I think you can go camping out here at night… that sounds incredibly fun and romantic. I’d love to give it a try. That reminds me I need to get all new camping gear because the stuff I have kinda sucks.
Today’s photo was one of the locations where we shot for the Newest Photography Tutorial! Here’s a preview of it!
This is a cool hut we found on a mountain in Wanaka. I think it’s called the Bob Lee Hut. We were up here shooting a segment for the video you see above… one amazing thing about NZ is that there are about 1,000 of these huts scattered all over New Zealand and they’re all free or at least a very low price! I think this one was $30. Yeah, people just bring their own sleeping back and snacks and camp out inside. I think this one slept about 12, but there were only three of us this night. Everyone is also very good at cleaning up after themselves… I’ve never seen a mess left behind.
I found this on Reddit and I thought it was the coolest thing ever. I wish he was selling them or something! He just built it for a fun project… If I had one, I have no idea where I would put it… It might be fun on the front door.
This is one of my favorite sunset situations… pastel pink clouds on top of a pastel blue sky. When I see this, it reminds me that I need to get over the hill more often to Wanaka. It’s only an hour away, so I really have no excuse!
Grab the new Luminar here and get cracking with some of these hot tips! In today’s video, I show how to use “LUTs” which stands for “Look Up Tables” – I find this to be a very geeky acronym that mostly just confuses people. Despite its geekiness, it’s quite fun and powerful!
Here’s that little island that sits in the middle of Lake Wanaka. From the shore, it looks like a little perfect fairy island… a perfect little secret island to go have some adventures on. It also looks like you could swim out to it, except you’d defo die from hypothermia in transit. I think people are always surprised when they visit the South Island at how cold the water actually is. Some people are really into swimming in cold water, but I think those people might be kinda crazy.
There’s another quirky thing about New Zealand (this might be the case in Aussie as well). Anyway, you know that “heart” shape that we use to describe the shape that is, well, a heart? Well the Kiwis call it a “love heart” shape. I think that’s kind of a nice quirky thing about it… now my little girls say that, and sometimes even with a Kiwi accent!
I believe this famous tree actually has it’s own hashtag. Try clicking on #ThatTreeInWanaka in Instagram to see many different versions of it!
Here’s one of my latest iterations of the tree. I used one of our Lightroom Presets for this one in particular. Thanks again to everyone out there that has been enjoying these presets… been working on a few more, but none quite ready for release yet!
Despite four trips to Iceland, I’ve never seen the northern lights! I’ve tried countless times… but on my list is to go up either there or Norway next winter to see them for sure!
I was driving home from a photo event from over the hill in Wanaka and I got to the edge of the crown range and saw this. So beautiful! The Aurora Australis is just incredible. In fact, when I got home, we got the whole family out on the deck on bean bags to watch it wash over us. So pretty and mesmerizing!
I still have not seen that movie. I understand it gets a little serious, to say the least. I almost took the kids to see it then someone warned me against that!
Well, I ascended it by air, which was much more civilized. I am so impressed by these mountain climbers that do it for real. Those are real dudes for sure… There’re a lot of mountains here in New Zealand that are huge destinations for serious mountain climbers. I understand there are a few extra challenges here because of the ice, snow, and glaciers… I know people die all the time trying to climb Mount Cook, which is not too far away from this one… those guys have some balls! (and some frozen ones!)
I’m finding that I’m using these kind of cards more and more. I have them in my quads and my Osmo. They’re like all over the place and I’m not really that organized with them. I’m still a bit flummoxed by putting the micro card into a bigger card that I then put into my computer. I don’t have a good system to organize all this stuff yet…I often lose them and just confuse myself.
I’m never disappointed when I make the hour-long drive over the hill to Wanaka! It’s beautiful over there… when I took this photo, it was a particularly crazy day because I had an amazing heli ride with Aspiring Helicopters. We went up into the snowy southern alps and had a beautiful landing at this secret snowy cabin where we had wine, cheese, and crackers. This is the view of the cabin as we flew away…
My technique for shooting from the air is pretty simple. It actually took me a while to arrive at this formula, but it always seems to work. I go into Manual mode and then force my shutter speed to be extra-fast… maybe 1/1000th of a second. This ensures there is absolutely no blur. And then I let my ISO float and auto-adjust… I’ll often get my F-Stop as low as possible too so all the dirt and smudges on the window disappear. It works like 98% of the time! And, well, like the title says, this method only works in the daytime… night is a different beast.
The flight into Queenstown is maybe one of the most beautiful flights in the world. This is the Crown Range here, and you can’t quite see it, but there is a road there that connects Wanaka and Queenstown. It’s actually the highest road in New Zealand! It gets A LITTLE icy sometimes in the winter, and they often close it down… but when it’s open, the view there is as pretty as the view from this plane window!
