The long hot days of Summer have arrived. I love daylight savings but I have yet to make the most of the evenings with the camera. I plan to correct that very soon but for now I am just getting out whenever I can. This morning after a dip in the pool (where dip means several lengths and then a soak in the spa), a fellow photog and I headed out to the Wainuiomata Coast to see what we could see…
One of the things that always amazes me about this beach is its lack of people. It’s just not the sort of beach you take the kids to on a sunny day, it is very remote, there’s no shelter and I suspect the beach itself is not that good for swimming in either, but I don’t know that for sure. It is, however the perfect place to raise a family of banded dotterel chicks, or a flock of sheep. Today the sheep were easier to find than the dotterels but I am not fussy, I just wanted to make Summer images.
After I found the only visible dotterel on the beach I started to look around to see what else would give the impression of a hot summer’s day. I started playing with blur and focusing on different areas in the image. A young magpie posed for me on a rock with power poles in the background, and while I don’t actually like magpies that much, the resulting image is interesting. The sheep also gave me an opportunity to play with the focus point in the image. I might have experimented with this a bit longer, but my feet were telling me it was time to stop, and the heat from the sun was way too hot. So my fellow photog and I came back home to do some sewing instead.
