Business travel may not be glamorous, but has its perks.

I returned home from this weekend from a business trip that took me to Auckland and Christchurch New Zealand as well as Sydney Australia. While I do love visiting these cities, the trip there and back is hellacious and it takes me days to recover from the numbing jet lag.

First Stop: New Zealand

While on the South Island, I had an opportunity to take a bit of a drive down to Koekohe Beach to photograph some really amazing (and odd) spherical (Moeraki) boulders that are strewn around the sand. One of these shots is here, others I still need to work on. These were taken with my Nikon D610, 3 exposures and post was done in AuroraHDR mostly with a few tweaks in On1 RAW.

Local Māori legends explained the boulders as the remains of eel baskets, calabashes, and kumara washed ashore from the wreck of Arai-te-uru, a large sailing canoe. This legend tells of the rocky shoals that extend seaward from Shag Point as being the petrified hull of this wreck and a nearby rocky promontory as being the body of the canoe’s captain. (source: Wikipedia)

We also stopped at Steampunk HQ, a steam punk museum of artwork and sculpture. I grabbed a bunch of shots here, but need to go through them and work them – there is something very cool that can be pulled from them, but I haven’t had time yet to go through them all, but here are two I’ve been playing with 🙂

Jumping over “The Ditch” to Australia

After New Zealand, it was over to Sydney Australia. I stumbled into George’s Camera and picked up a Sony A7Rii and a 24-70 lens for what worked out to an amazing deal with the exchange rate and AU GST refund on my way out of country. I took it down to Circular Quay in the evening just about sunset and played around with the camera. As with learning any new kit, there were a number of unfortunate attempts with the settings, but some came out really nice! This first shot of the Sydney Opera House is 9 (nine!) exposures merged in AuroraHDR and finished up in On1 RAW … simply wow!

As the sun went down, I decided to try out the camera’s panoramic mode, and after a few missteps, grabbed this image and this is, except for alignment, unedited out of the camera

Once I have more time to work on these, I plan on posting more to the Australia and New Zealand galleries … and get out more with the new camera … more on that in another post …