Middle Earthy equals No Internet

In the last 7 days I have traveled and shot in Christchurch, Oamaru, around the entire Otago Peninsula, the cities of Dunedin and Portobello (yes they grow the mushrooms there) and around Te Anau - Milford Sound.

I have gotten up at way too early and to sleep way to late on a regular basis to get to some locations prior to sunrise and then lay in wait for fog to lift off of mountain peaks and hiked about in amazing mazes of hides to see elusive creatures like the yellow eyed penguin (there are estimated to be less than 24 breading pairs in all of New Zealand, less than 1500 in the world) spent hours waiting for fog to lift from the top of Mitre Peak, shot dozens of images in vain trying to capture an albatross in flight (they may be big, but man are they fast!) and most recently driven 3 hours before dawn to catch morning light on waterfalls that feed Milford Sound.

Those of you who have enjoyed the visuals from the Lord of the Rings Film series may be able to appreciate this: The scenery is amazing.. the old growth rain forests are lush and the animals (Kea birds, Seals, Oyster Catchers, Sheep, Deer, Albatross, Penguins) are abundant... but the trade off is that the world that made up Middle Earth for those films...is not so internet friendly. All this is to say, sorry for taking so long for my next blog post. I'm sitting in a nice little motel room in Mildford Sound after a 17 hour day of early driving, shooting, waiting, shooting, swatting at the scary little black biting flies and more shooting. Tomorrow we get a "late start" and drive out at 8a.m. to See if Lake Manpouri has any pastoral scenes worthy of our clients.

I'm exhausted but happy.. too tired to really pull any images to show, so I'll just include two low resolution versions of the yellow eyes penguins that we waited in a blind at a special reserve to see if we could capture a glimpse of. I'm told there are less than 24 breading pairs in this country. In addition to some shots of a parent keeping an egg warm near a man made safe space, we managed to capture two more wild adults returning from the sea with food in their tummies to bring to recently hatched young. The pictures I'm posting here are of a single adult that waddled his lovely little fat body up from the beach and then after we watched him preen for quite a while he finally moved his way up from the sand and right past where we where hiding on his way to his little family. I was hoping to just be able to see one from far far away... this little man walked past us and then stood with his back to us contemplating his long waddle home and then trudged his way across the grasses to his spouse and new born to trade places and watch the nest.






I hope to be able to post more soon. We should have access to the internet for the next couple of days.. then we are on our way to Queenstown. so there should be some shots of kingston flyer railway line (this is all in the remote area where a lot of the Lord of the Rings was actually filmed...

Mark and I love it when you guys add comments to the blog ( you don't have to register or anything...just click on the comments link below this posting and let us know how you are and or say Hi etc. it makes us feel like there are people we know out there when we travel!

best regards from Middle earth!

bh