New Zealand 2026 – Day 1
In April 2026 I took part in a 6 day landscape photography workshop in the South Island of New Zealand. What a remarkable place! We could have spent many more days there and not run out of fabulous, dramatic landscapes to shoot!
I was part of a small group of five, plus the leader of the group Dean Cooper and his wife. They arranged everything – accommodation, driving, meals – and Dean knew lots of non-touristy spots for us to shoot. Couldn’t have asked for a better teacher/guide, nor a nicer group of people to spend the week with. Learned heaps, which hopefully shows in some of these images.
It was so good to simply spend so much time behind the camera – hopefully committing many things to muscle memory for future use.
I ended up shooting around 1700 images over the week, and what follows is a greatly distilled collection. That probably should be cut down even further – except that each of these images represent something to me about the trip – often they’re a reminder of how quickly the light and sky can change, and so I grab ‘just one more’ shot, just in case!
As usual, most images are best viewed on a large screen (ie: bigger than a phone!)
We started in Christchurch and worked our way south to Queenstown over the week, stopping at a different location each night and doing sunrise, sunset and lots of other shoots in between each day.
Day One – Castle Hill/Kura Tawhiti Limestone Outcrops
Most of day one was spent on the road, but we did a couple of stops and got the camera out. This is the first.
These are remarkable ‘explosions’ of limestone out of the ground. They are of considerable Māori significance. While clear during our visit, they are often covered with snow in the winter.
More information: https://www.nzgeo.com/stories/the-rocks-of-castle-hill/
Images
Lake Alexandrina
Although the single image below shows no lake(!), it is a zoomed shot designed to capture the dramatic sky above the snow-capped peaks. The lake is in the (invisible) foreground.
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