We recently arrived back from New Zealand after spending one month traveling around the South Island. It is a phenomenal natural landscape. Vast snow-capped mountain ranges, golden beaches, rainforests, glaciers; the experience was sublime.

The trip was both relaxing and incredibly creatively inspiring. I took almost 800 photos and over 2 hours of video footage. I will showcase some of the best photos on here in the near future, and am planning on creating a short film based around the captured footage. I will also be using the footage in my video compositing and editing experiments.

After a ‘slight’ drama – I realized the day before we left that my passport had expired – we arrived in Christchurch and headed north up the coast to Hanmer Springs and Kaikoura. Click here to see our itinerary. The drive to Kaikoura was incredible; massive mountain ranges right down to the edge of the coast – you literally drive a couple of meters away from the pounding waves of the ocean. In the morning a thick sea fog covered the area; the beach consumed in an ethereal glow.

We then headed to Marlborough Sounds at the northern end of the island. I hadn’t heard of ‘sounds’ before but they seem to be coastal areas with masses of finger-like land protrusions into the sea. There were so many intersecting pieces of land it was hard to tell whether the water was from a lake or the ocean. After a horrific night of being devoured by maniacal mosquitoes we arrived at the Abel Tasman National Park, a lush unspoiled rainforest and coastal area. There were some great walks around the park and we went on a 15 km walk to Separation Point, passing through rainforest, golden beaches, and spectacular rock formations.

I began experimenting with some of the manual settings of our Canon EOS 300D digital SLR camera. It is a fantastic camera in automatic mode, but in full manual you can use it to explore some very interesting artistic effects. I used long exposure periods to explore the relationship between time, movement and the image. Light becomes a fluid element that can move around the image, creating different forms and textures. It almost feels like painting photographically with light. I will post some more detailed blog entries centered around these explorations in the near future.

After Abel Tasman we moved south to the Nelson Lakes National Park where we had a quiet, solitary Christmas. The lakes were formed by glaciers in the past Ice Age and are surrounded by mountains. The area was forested and had a distinct alpine feel, reminding me of the mountainous ski villages in the US, Canada and Europe. There were some very powerful cloud formations one evening that were framed perfectly against the mountain ranges.

Our next major stop was the Franz Josef and Fox Glaciers. We went for a fantastic walk up to the terminal face of the Fox Glacier, ending up at a mouth-like cavern, glacial melt streaming from the cavity. It was incredible to see something so slow yet so powerful gorging its way through the mountain-side. The New Zealand glaciers are very unique in the world – they drop rapidly from over 3000 meters to almost sea level, ending up in quite temperate rainforest. Apparently it is one of the fastest glaciers in the world, moving somewhere around 1 meter a year! The glaciers around the world have been retreating over the past century – even only 300 years ago the glacier extended a few kilometers further down the valley. Apparently glaciers always go through periods of retreating and extending so it is uncertain whether this recent retreat is due to human-induced global warming.

After some stopovers through the Queenstown region, we ended up at the awe-inspiring Fiordland and Milford Sound. This really was the most incredible place I have ever seen. Fiordland is a huge untouched World Heritage National Park in the south-west of the South Island. It is a mass of mountainous snow-capped peaks, glacial valleys and moss-enshrouded forests. The drive down to Milford Sound is well know as one of the best in the world. You pass through valleys and forests, up into dominating rocky mountains, then tunnel through a solid rock face, plunging down to the ocean cliff-faces of the Sound.

We then went on a cruise around the Sound. We passed cliffs soaring a sheer 1000 feet or more straight out of the ocean, and massive waterfalls cascading into the Sound. The rivers and waterfalls of the Sound are driven by Fiordland’s average 7 meters of rainfall a year (last year they had 11 meters!!). So much water pours into the Sound that there is a constant 20 feet of fresh water on top of the ocean salt-water. The Sound is one of the few places in the world where you can see deep sea-life so close to the coast – the fresh water blocks out sunlight, keeping the depths extremely cold and dark.

Sadly, after a five day retreat in paradisal Fiordland, we had to leave and make our way back to Christchurch. We stopped over at Mt. Cook Village, a small town sitting at the base of the towering Mt. Cook – at 3700 meters high, it is the tallest peak in Australasia. We endured a massive storm during the night, and then left to make the final voyage back to Christchurch. Along the way we passed brilliant turquoise glacial lakes. They have this surreal blue glow due to their glacial construction. In the last Ice Age the glaciers of the Mt. Cook region dragged rock over rock, creating a fine powder that now fills lake waters. This powder gives the lakes a milky consistency which then reflects the blueness of the sky.

We spent our final night in Christchurch at a Youth Hostel. We had a fantastic meal at an Organic Japanese restaurant called Aiki, then had an early night and flew back to Melbourne early the next morning.