Shooting

Today’s objective was the Tongariro National Park, where we would spend the rest of the time on this trip. But first we had to drive to Turangi and go to the Visitors’ Centre to gain email access, check the weather forecast for the alpine areas and arrange accommodation for the next two nights. (We had pre-booked accommodation for our last three nights as we planned to meet friends who were arriving from Australia in time to join us for the Tongariro Alpine Crossing on our last day in the area.)

After a chilly night we arose to a frosty morning and assembled a quick breakfast in order to get up to the Iwikau Village car park in the Whakapapa Ski Area where we would meet our guide, Mike Fox. We had been instructed to bring lunch, wet weather gear, hats, sunscreen and plenty of water. We also brought our walking sticks and cameras.

When you mention New Zealand’s thermal regions, the first name to come to mind is Rotorua. Often described as ‘Sulphur City’ the area is dotted with thermal springs which contain boiling cauldrons of water, pungent gas and steam emissions and bubbling mud pools – as well as the occasional thrusting geyser.

Today’s plan was to visit two thermal areas and end the day camping on the shore of Lake Taupo, en route to the Tongariro National Park, which was the main focus of our trip. After starting our day with a swim in the Waikite thermal pool and packing the camper van, we headed directly for Wai-O-Tapu, which was only a couple of kilometres away. Our aim was to be on site for the ‘performance’ of the Lady Knox geyser, which erupts daily at 10.15 a.m.

Like many Australians, this year my partner and I have decided to holiday close to home and, having a long-standing interest in geology, we thought a trip to New Zealand’s thermal regions would provide us with some great picture-taking opportunities and, at the same time, provide a chance to explore some radically unfamiliar landforms.

For the first half of the 20th century, photographers had to gauge exposures without a light meter. It was common at the time for film packets to have a set of exposure guidelines printed inside them to help photographers obtain correctly exposed pictures under a range of typical lighting conditions. Many photographers still use these guidelines, especially for tricky lighting conditions, when difficult-to-meter subjects like large areas of snow or wedding groups containing white dresses and black suits can produce incorrect exposure readings.

The normal distribution of tones in a digital image produces a smooth histogram with every one of the 256 tonal levels occupied. In a correctly exposed image, the peak of the graph is in the centre and the graph tapers down at each end to the 0 and 255 points.