This is what I have been working on over the past couple of days.

The iconic view of Mount Taranaki with the Pouakai Ranges, that I captured from Tongaporutu,

a location situated about an hours drive north of New Plymouth.

The image was created by joining a number of separate images together, this technique basically increases

the detail in the final art work, to be clearer on the amount of detail in this image, ( pun intended )

the overall width of the final canvas is 1,160 mm, but this is not an enlargement.

The Plant at Motunui is just out of this particular crop,

so I thought I’d put it in under this column.

I’m not a city or a town person, but what I did was to capture the centre of Christchurch.

Obviously this was captured some time ago.

I captured something like 43 images, 360 deg pano in two layers ( pointing up and down )

to get the perspective that I was after. For the few hours that I captured Christchurch that day,

I only shot about 60 frames all told.

The insert is cut out of the pano, showing the detail from one of my prints that I made.

For copyright reasons I removed all logos and trade names off all of the buildings, not a small task.

From memory it took about three days work to put all the images together.

The Mangorei Mist image from Burgess Hill, just outside New Plymouth, was on my capture list for many years.

On this occasion I was intending to capture scenes from South Taranaki.

Unfortunately / fortunately I was running late.

It was usually the case, that I would stop, all too often on my way south, that I wouldn’t get there

whilst the light was good. The morning of this scene was no different. I didn’t want to stop, but as the

sun was just warming the very top of Mount Taranaki, what I saw got the better of me. I couldn’t let this chance pass me by.

The mist was heavier and there were cows or beefies on the far side of the paddock. By the time I had set up,

the animals were on the other side of the fence wondering what I was doing, with the all important mist fading fast.

The light was also changing on me.

( For the techno heads, this was a multi image stitch to increase pixel density, of six to eight single captures. )

The digital artwork that I did on the image was to clean objects in the capture, that

 I would have otherwise left out, if I was to paint the exact same scene onto a canvas.

A painter starts with a blank canvas and chooses what to add to it, a photographer starts

with a overly full canvas and has to decide what to show and what to leave out.

If I could paint, this is probably what I would have ended up with.

Unfortunately / fortunately – I can’t.

Mount Taranaki looks majestic before sunrise on a winter’s day, while the sun was hitting the upper

reaches of the atmosphere and the slopes were only getting the morning glow.

It is difficult to see the real detail in my images online, I have put this together in an attempt

to show exactly the quality of files that I use.

This was from a few years ago and since then I feel my digital processing skills have improved.