News and updates

There are lots of photography ‘rules’ regularly parroted, as if breaking one would have the flashing lights of the photo police soon appearing in your viewfinder. Golden hour light directly over your shoulder, head angle three degrees toward you, remember the rule of thirds or it’ll be a night in the cell for you! To confuse the budding nature photographer a bit more we have the other side saying “be different, break the rules”. However, while some are really just handy guides, many of the rules are based on solid foundations buried deep in the human psyche, and ignoring them entirely often leads to a pile of photographs that are just not nice to look at. Knowing a bit about why the rules work, and when and how to bend them can open new photographic opportunities.

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Curlew sandpiper (Calidris ferruginea) at a high tide roost on the Manukau Harbour.

More than a dozen new photos of shorebirds have been added to my gallery. I managed to get close to a mixed flock of birds at a high tide roost and got some nice portraits of sharp-tailed sandpiper, red-necked stint, and curlew sandpiper. These amazing little birds migrate half way around the world to spend our summer feeding on marine invertebrates, building up their fat reserves and growing new feathers. Then, in autumn they turn around and return to the Arctic to breed. The epic journey of these birds is one of the most incredible stories of the bird world, and we are only beginning to understand the most basic aspects of it. Sadly, many species of waders are threatened by the destruction of feeding grounds along East Asian – Australasian Flyway.
A friend and excellent shorebird photographer, Gyorgy Szimuly has launched a website for reporting shorebird records, with the aim of conserving shorebirds and their habitats around the world. I encourage you to visit www.worldwaders.org and report your sightings.

Juvenile North Island rifleman (Acanthisitta cloris granti) searching for insects on a mossy tree trunk.

I’ve added some rifleman photos to my gallery. Riflemen are one of two extant species of New Zealand wrens—an ancient group of tiny passerines.

I have added a few new common copper and black mountain ringlet butterfly photos to the gallery. Check them out in the new images section. We don’t have a huge diversity of butterflies in New Zealand, but I recently photographed these locally common species in the South Island mountains. It was good to get back to a little macro photography.

Over the past week I moved all my websites to a new server. It was a little nerve-wracking at times, but apart from a few missed emails due to a glitch at the host’s end, it seemed to go fairly smoothly.
I have now started on some changes to the site which I hope will make it even easier to find the photos and info you are after. The first area to get a bit of a makeover is the news and updates section. Apart from some styling tweaks, the exciting thing here is that you can now subscribe to this section to get RRS feeds. I intend to make more regular announcements of new additions to the gallery, as well as regular “feature photos”, where I’ll select some of my favourite shots and give you some of the details of their making. Subscribe and you’ll know straight away when I’ve added new content. Click the link in the new navigation panel on the left to get started.
As always, your feedback is always welcome.

Neil.