Sad news

Prominent Auckland painter Peter Siddell has a terminal illness. Stuff has an article:

"A lot of my painting relates back to childhood memories," he adds, "that, and a lot of it are about places I know, certainly the vistas of Victorian villas and volcanic hills are just the sort of stereotype of Auckland that I remember from my childhood."
His paintings are noted for their lack of human interference no telephone poles, cars, pollution or graffiti mar his work. His art is a monument to the memories of his childhood, featuring significant images held by a young and inquisitive mind.

I really like what he says about painting:

Siddell sees painting as "an exercise in controlled disappointment you start off at the beginning with a brilliant idea and think `oh, this is going to be a great painting', but as soon as you make a few marks on the canvas then you find that what is planned is going to be affected by the initial brushstrokes and the painting ends up very different from its original conception.

Read the whole article here.

And you can enjoy a selection of Peter Siddell's paintings here. Many of the paintings in his image gallery are accompanied by his own illuminating commentary.

Mutant space jellyfish!

It's so tempting to look at astronomical pictures and find forms we recognise, or think we recognise, in the shapes of nebulae and dust clouds.
This is a very handsome view of the Carina Nebula. But tell me you don't see the mutant space jellyfish in this detail.

Crepuscular and anti-crepuscular rays

Crepuscular rays are areas of brightly-lit air that appear to radiate outwards from the sun when it is setting or rising. They are caused by clouds or mountains near the horizon casting shadows across the sky. Under good conditions the rays can be seen crossing the sky all the way to the point directly opposite the sun, the anti-solar point, where they appear to converge. In fact both the apparent divergence and the apparent convergence are illusions caused by perspective. The sun's rays are parallel but we perceive them as converging in the same way as we perceive a railway track as converging in the distance.

A full explanation, diagrams, and examples, can be found on Les Cowley's brilliant Atmospheric Optics site, here.

There was an amazing sunset here in Christchurch on January 17th. Clouds near the setting sun cast shadows across the sky that resulted in dramatic contrast between sunlit and shadowed air.

This was the view towards the sun:


This was the view to the north. You can see the rays' paths across the sky, travelling to the east...

At the anti-solar point in the east, the rays appear to converge. Around the anti-solar point these are known as 'anti-crepuscular' rays:

Crepuscular rays and anti-crepuscular rays are different ends of the same phenomenon, as can be seen in this wide-angle image taken of the same January 17 sunset at Birdlings Flat, some 50km from where I took my photographs.

I photographed a dramatic single crepuscular ray on April 5:

Phil Judd interview

Stuff today has an exclusive interview with Phil Judd, formerly of the Swingers, Split Enz, and Schnell Fenster. Read it here.

And here are a few clips:




I particularly remember The Sound of Trees, Schnell Fenster's first album, which featured Love/Hate Relationship and other such classics as Whisper.

The Road



I've just read The Road, a haunting, post-apocalyptic novel by Cormac McCarthy. While it describes momentous events, it does so through the very intimate story of a man and his son as they struggle to survive. In McCarthy's story, the only good thing left in the devastated world is the father's love for his son and the son's love for his father. They walk a deserted highway, scavenging for whatever food they can find, hiding from roving bands of cannibals, and hoping that somewhere there might be others like themselves.

The subject might seem like a departure from McCarthy's usual novels set among cowboys and ranchers in the American West, but his themes of physical survival, forces of nature, love, fate, and moral goodness run through it. And his descriptive language is just as rich and evocative as always. Below are some samples to whet your appetite.


"When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one that what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looks toward the east for any light but there was none...."



"When it was light enough to use the binoculars he glassed the valley below. Everything paling away into the murk. The soft ash blowing in loose swirls over the blacktop. He studied what he could see. The segments of road down there among the dead trees. Looking for anything of colour. Any movement. Any trace of standing smoke. He lowered the glasses and pulled down the cotton mask from his face and wiped his nose of the back of his wrist and then glassed the country again. Then he just sat there holding the binoculars and watching the ashen daylight congeal over the land. he knew only the the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke."



"They began to come upon from time to time small cairns of rock by the roadside. They were signs in gypsy language, lost patterans. The first he'd seen in some while, common in the north, leading out of the looted and exhausted cities, hopeless messages to loved ones lost and dead. By then all stores of food had given out and murder was everywhere upon the land....the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell. The soft black talc blew through he streets like squid ink uncoiling along a seafloor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes. Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond."

Layers of sunset

I don't think there have been nearly enough cloud pictures recently, so here are a couple. :-)



What these images show is how low cloud can be scattering the sunset colours of pink and red and gold while most of the sky is still blue. It's at sunrise and sunset that the layering of clouds is shown most clearly.

Falcons for grapes

Country Calendar has a nice feature on the Falcons for Grapes project in Marlborough, where New Zealand falcons are introduced to vineyards to discourage smaller birds which damage the grapes. They also look at research into the breeding patterns of these magnificent birds, which are rare and threatened, and the challenges of ensuring their long-term survival. You can view that video here.

The terrific NZ Birds site has background information on the NZ falcon.
And Te Ara has some particularly fine photographs.

congratulations, Ichneumons!

You know who you are!

Image: Herpestes ichneumon, by Johann Christian Daniel von Schreber, 1780

Robin Morrison: Photojournalist

NZ On Screen has a 20-minute chunk of this excellent 1981 documentary in which Robin Morrison talks about his work. It's well worth a look. Hat tip to Russell Brown for the link.

Sharing photographs on the internet

I love showing people my pictures, saying: this is where I've been; this is what it looks like; this is what I saw; these are the things I like; this is my way of seeing....

Taking photographs is something I do for money, and although I love it, I also take it seriously. I love people to look and enjoy, but I don't want them to appropriate. Copyright applies on the web as it does anywhere else.

I have begun marking the images I post here so they are clearly identified as mine. It's hard to find a balance between making a clear, legible marking, and not wrecking the appearance of the image; I'm not sure I've got it right yet, and I'd value feedback on this.



I sell prints of my photos; I also licence them for use on the internet and in print media. If there's something here you want, contact me at info@ratadesign.com for a quote.

Hallucinating Tony Fomison

These pictures are also from Tunnel Beach. As I say, it's a magical place.

Tunnel Beach

I was at Tunnel Beach recently, and it really is an amazing place. It's just South of Dunedin city, seaward from the suburb of Green Island, and it costs nothig to visit. Try to visit when the tide is out, as you will be able to explore more of the beach. Reasonable fitness is required as the path is steep: you realise exactly how steep, on the way back :-)



There are fantastic cliffs:

The beach access is through a short tunnel carved in the limestone. The walls of the tunnel have a wonderful texture:

On the beach, there are more amazing cliffs:

Some of the eroding limestone cliffs take fantastical shapes:

So long, Noah

American photographer and blogger Noah Grey is a legend to anyone who ever saw his incredible pictures or read his writing. For many years he was an example of just how much great work could be shared on a website.

And now it's gone: his amazing portfolio in its ever-expanding glory; Grey Expectations, his daily photolog; and Noah's Lark, his blog.

For some years Noah lived in Redondo Beach, California, and his pictures were of beaches and seabirds and surfers and Californians in the sun. Then he and his husband separated and he went home to Texas for a spell: I remember pictures of liveoaks and leaves. Then, after publishing his book of lush Californian pictures, California, he met a new love, Barry, with whom he moved to Dublin, Ireland. His Dublin pictures were misty, foggy, rainy: as gentle and subtle as his Californian pictures had been bold and brassy. He wrote of his great happiness with Barry, and his new life in Ireland. And then the unthinkable happened: Barry had a seizure in his sleep and could not be revived.

All that remains of http://www.noahgrey.com/ is a picture of Barry, vignetted with shadows.

Noah has moved on, obviously. I hope he is all right, and still taking his amazing pictures and writing about things. In all the years I followed his website I never bought a print of one of his pictures, I never commented, I never emailed him. But I admired him hugely. Is it fatuous to say I revelled in his successes and grieved for his sadness?

So long, Noah, you are much missed. I'm sure many others feel the same.

Beautiful nature photographs

BBC Nature photographer William A. Bolton is featured in the Guardian with some recent works. They're all very striking, but this one is my favourite.
Thanks to Tom for the link.

You *shall* be a mermaid!

If anyone remembers this story, about the double amputee who made a flippant remark at the beach:

"A little boy came up and started asking all the `why' questions about my legs (she was removing her prosthetic legs)," she says.

Rather than having to go through the logistics of amputation with a four-year-old, Vessey said: "Do you know about the Little Mermaid?

"He said he did, so I told him: `Well I'm a mermaid'."

(full story here)

Weta Workshop has actually made it happen. Nadya Vessey *is* a mermaid, look at that! A fully-functioning mermaid tail. Wow!

And the Close-Up video (interview and demonstration) is here.