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 basketscalabashes, 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 …

John P. Hoke

John P. Hoke headshot

Cyber Security Professional, Photographer, Coffee Junkie, Mac Addict, Craft Beer & Whiskey connoisseur, all around curmudgeon and generally sarcastic SOB – Not necessarily in that order.

The opinions expressed on this blog are mine alone and not those of my employer, family, pets, the voices in my head, or anyone else for that matter … hell in an hour they may not be mine either 🙂

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