Oriental Bay, Wellington

In my brief tour of Wellington, we stopped by Oriental Bay for some coffee and Gelato, the Gelato was amazing by the way.  There were patches of sunshine breaking through the clouds, here's the view from the beach.

Auckland Morning Time Lapse 3

Alright, this is the final time lapse that I did of the clouds the last morning I was there.  I had switched to Jpegs so that the Buffer wouldn't fill and so I could have many more images on the card, however I forgot to switch the White Balance off of auto to a predetermined Kelvin.  Since they were all shot with Jpegs and not Raw, I am unable to adjust the color temperature easily for all 2924 photos, so the color temperature does pop in this time lapse.  Oh well, next time I will remember...  Since I had so many images in this one, I am running at at a full 24 fps, and I captured it at 1 fps, so it is running at 24x realtime.  Anyway, here it is...

Auckland Morning time Lapse 2

Here is the second Time Lapse form the morning, a small storm came by overhead, but didn't quite fill the sky.

Auckland Time Lapse 1

My last morning in Auckland, I woke up too late to get to the pier for the Sunrise, but I took a series of time lapses from my window as several squalls blew over.  This is the first one, the shortest.  I started taking them in Camera Raw, but the Buffer would fill up too fast, so I switched to Jpeg for the second and third ones.

Auckland Sunrise

The sun broke through the clouds for sunrise one morning, so I was able to run out the end of the pier and grab a couple shots.  However as soon as I got out there, a small squall came up, almost blew me off the pier!  It did produce a nice rainbow however!

Weta Cave

I had a business trip to New Zealand recently and things have been a little hectic since, but I am now starting to go through my photos and resume posting.
While in Auckland I rented a car and drove down to Wellington for the weekend, beautiful country.  We stopped by Weta and the Weta Cave to take a look.  This guy is hanging out above the cash register!

Hippos!

DragonFly Close-ups

Looking at the last post, I noticed that the smaller Jpegs didn't really show the detail, so I did some smaller crops...

Dragon Flies

Into the Spillway

This photo is of one of the two Spillways at the Hoover Dam, it is an immense gaping hole that goes deep down into nothingness.  Even in the bright sunlight and 100 degree weather, you feel the heat getting sucked into this black hole...  This is an HDR exposure covering 8 stops made from 24 images, yeah a bit of overkill, but I didn't want to get home and realize I didn't have enough latitude, so I went on the safe side, next time I'll know better!!  The Spillway tunnel is about 50 feet across and drops 700 feet in elevation with a flow rate of about 200,000 cubic feet per second, that's a lot of water!

Abstract Water

Low Water Levels

Last year I went back to the Hoover Dam, and I was astonished at how low the water levels looked.  I had been there a few years before and thought it was low, you can see the differences below.

From deep inside the Hoover Dam

Urinals with a View!

The men's restroom in the soul tower had quite a view!