The past few days have been glorious. Clear blue skies and no wind. It’s been really quite cold, but there’s something rather nice about these cold, clear, crisp mornings. The first shot in this post was taken at Te Puru Park looking towards Rangitoto. If you look carefully you may be able to see some frost in the foreground. Not a common occurrence here in Auckland.
We often start our walks at Te Puru Park and head along the clifftop towards Omana and Maraetai. The next few shots are taken as we did this walk a little earlier today.
I suppose it was as a result of a house shoot yesterday that I was tempted to try shooting into the sun today. To be honest, we’d picked the wrong time to shoot the house and I ended up making a second visit later in the day. It was the wrong time due to the position of the sun and I ended up shooting into the sun. Not always a good idea, but the effects can sometimes be of interest. The lens I was using was the Nikkor 14-24mm f2.8 that is quite prone to flare. Indoors it’s wonderful, but outdoors, on a sunny day, it’s quite a challenge to stop lens flare. Anyway, a couple of yesterday’s images were rather nice, even when shooting into the sun. Somewhat inspired by these images I thought I’d have another go today … but with a different view.
Any dust or dirt on the lens will result in extra spots or reflections in the final image so I tried to make the lens as clean as possible before each shot. Unfortunately, if you look carefully you’ll notice there’s still a few extra highlights around the sun. I’m not sure if this is something to do with the lens or my inability to clean my lens! Perhaps a little more experimentation will determine the answer.
