The trees and plants help to define a place. New Zealand has a lot of unique and beautiful foliage: the famous pohutakawa, kauri and fern trees and the smaller plants as well.
New Zealand’s spirit
Tag Archives: New Zealand
Way up north
Cape Reinga is the northwesternmost tip of the Aupouri Peninsula, at the northern end of the North Island of New Zealand. Cape Reinga is more than 100 km north of the nearest small town of Kaitaia.
Up on the sand dunes
A year ago I was in New Zealand. It feels like longer! I’ve been reliving that through photos. Te Paki Stream is way up north on the North Island. Boogie boarding on the dunes is a popular. I skipped boogie boarding so I could walk around and look more closely at the scenery .
Since I posted a few square today I’m going to declare myself caught up.
Another look up
I lost a day of Becky of Winchester’s Square Up yesterday and will try to make it up this week.
Dorsal fins up
One of the highlights of our trip to the Bay of Islands in New Zealand last January was when we had the opportunity to enjoy a large pod of pseudo-orcas, over 100 by the estimate. They were feeding and we were able to enjoy their company twice, heading out to and heading back from the mouth of the bay.
Fun up high
This looked amazing, but I am not a courageous type. I am not so much afraid of heights as afraid of falling (had a couple bad ones as a kid).
Sun up
2020 Hindsight
A year of flowers, clouds, raindrops…
I just finished going back through the posts from this year, a longer project than expected. I posted a lot this year, including two months where I posted at least once a day!
Going through the posts, I noticed a few trends: lots of flowers, mostly taken while walking the dogs around the neighborhood:
Lots of sky photos with dramatic clouds, mostly taken locally (Puget Sound region), although New Zealand had some great clouds as well:
…And raindrops: a lot of pictures with close-ups of raindrops, perhaps a sign of spending most of my year in Seattle:
I’ve also been spending time learning about photo processing. I learned how to take things for a spin (and a lot about blending modes in the process):
…And spent quite a bit of time learning about black and white:
These experiments, and wanting to give myself some structure around keeping the experimentation up, led me to start a new monthly challenge on my other website:
In conclusion
I was not in a great place as the year started, because of some turmoil in the family. Until I reread the first post from 2020 : Another year over…I’d forgotten how depressed I was! I even left my 2018 wrap up in the featured block because it wasn’t sad. Turns out my conclusion was almost foresight, although not in the way I would have predicted!
We were truly blessed to have been able to spend some time with our son over Chinese New Year, we met in the middle (more or less) in New Zealand, and the pandemic was rearing its ugly head as we parted.
Since parting we message daily and have a video talk once a week. We are so fortunate to have these connecting technologies. It was so much more difficult for families living apart during the 1918 flu…most people didn’t even have telephones in those days!
So ends 2020.
I am opposed to making New Year’s resolutions and too many things are up in the air right now to make predictions…maybe it has always been so and, until now, we just didn’t realize how fragile our norms were.
I wish you all happiness and health in the year ahead!
North island textures
Sometimes it is the close ups that give you a real sense of place:
Shadows and textures really make the carving below. I think it looks more dramatic in black and white. The colors distract.
We spent a couple of weeks, amazing, delightful weeks, on the north island of New Zealand last January. It feels like more than 11 months ago. We were able to see our son over the Chinese New Year. He went back and while he was in the air going back the state department sent out its “do not travel to China” message. (I have some very pithy ideas about the US state department.)
Seeing him again is not in the cards in the foreseeable future, so I am sooo happy that we had that time right before everything closed down.
Where the seas meet
I intended to post this along with yesterday’s post but was too sleepy to remember that detail when I remembered that I had forgotten to do my daily perspective post last night.
I believe that the ripples and color change in this photo are the type of characteristics that the sticks in the chart in yesterday’s post, A different way to see the sea, represent.
Photo taken at Cape Reinga, the north-most part of New Zealand’s North Island.
XingfuMama 