The abstract, artful and eclectic with some travel - yes, a varied blog this week:

In the spirit of recent photography experimentation on Thurs. evening I had a session of making photos from my cathode tube style large TV set. The idea being to play with the flicker as the screen continually refreshes, or you could say lazy creativity from the armchair, as opposed to my usual racing around for landscape photography.

This flicker effect makes for some interesting ghostly almost, shadow or multiple exposure effects...


Here rather amazingly I caught the transition between two frames I think [Tandi Wright and Stuart Devenie in Willy Nilly]...


On Saturday the 7th of February 2009 the Australian township of Marysville and the surrounding area was ravaged by bushfires and is still in a state of emergency.

My cousin Deirdre sent me a PowerPoint file during the week of some amazing art work in Marysville by Bruno Torf, that was recently severely damaged by these fires. It's worth clicking on the "Take the Tour" link here


Traveling in the New Zealand bush will never seem the same to me after looking at these works of art, as our greenery is a lot like the Aust. variety...


Another topic up for publishing today is the well written and illustrated travel blog of my Hawea friends Georgie and Dave. I'm hoping they'll see a moose - these are very shy animals with an acute sense of hearing...

So they're having an amazing trip through the Rockies and sampling the powder skiing...


And on the topic of the US I found this: a nice 11 min animation of the reasons behind the credit crunch.

Last week's blog attracted a record number of comments [thanks all], so for closing here is another image of the Central Otago landscape variety of one of the huts [cribs in Otago Kiwiana speak] at Poolburn.

From a visual environmental perspective good old NZ aged corrugated iron makes for just the right look in our unique landscape, and I find it a joy to make a photo of this sort of thing. It should be an inspiration to us all as we build and create...

Fishing at Poolburn - Lord of the Rings country.

I'm just back from an overnight trip at Poolburn Dam deep in the heart of Central Otago and one of the outstanding locations used in the filming of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The objective was fishing, but due to many previous visits, landscape photography was on the agenda too, as the scenery is amazing and I should imagine unique in the world, and within New Zealand. It's at about 1000m above sea level in a snow tussock alpine environment, and holds brown trout.

To get there Robyn and I headed over the Thompsons Gorge in my camper truck. The route provides a 4WD access over and through the Dunstan Mountains, linking Omakau and Tarras [photo by Robyn from above the road]...


We had lunch in the shade of some unusual trees by a cattle yard. I've always wondered what they are - they're normal willow size but have quite a translucent darker green colour, yet present the under belly of the leaves to the sun a little bit, which contrasts pleasingly with their grey trunks and branches. All hard to make a photo of so I went in close...


The road up from Omakau to Poolburn always delights me with it's expansive views of the landscape with rocks, and I really like the grasses this time of year...


What Poolburn is all about [note camper truck on the right]...


There are many Kiwiana cribs [batches/holiday huts] around the area...








Our fishing spot [caught nothing though!]...


In lieu of fishing, the camera got a hammering...






On our early return today [Sunday] we were stunned to find a crane on the skyline. Some investigation revealed a Japanese green tea commercial was being made. Flying Trestles catering trucks were on-site, and Colin the owner is a friend/client, so I took a few photos for his web site...