Yesterday my friend and former colleague Patrick Brennan messaged me and invited me to go for a short scenic flight with him out of Wellington Airport. Patrick is based in Auckland but travels to Wellington often enough on business that he decided to become a member of the local Aero Club.
I hadn’t been expecting a sudden change of plans, my phone was low on battery and my camera was mostly-drained and sitting neglected. Raced home to pick them up and headed to the airport.
The flight was pretty much exactly one hour long. Took off to the North, turned over the city and headed west across Makara and the Cook Straight to Marlborough Sounds.
My poor camera doesn’t see much action these days. I took random photos of what I thought looked good, playing with — in turn — the tilt-shift filter and the back & white settings. I wish my camera would save RAW images of the photos even when you’re using its effects filters, but I don’t think it can.
I only ever take good photos when I have heavy constraints on what I can do. That’s where black and white is nice and where tilt-shift forces me to try to (literally) just focus on what I want to look at.
We pretty much ended up following the ferry route to Picton, overflying one of the Bluebridge ferries on our way back.
It was a beautiful day for a flight, but we were racing the subset back across the strait to get home, and there were low clouds over Makara that gave the North Island a proper ominous look as we headed back.
These two black and white images will probably be my desktop backgrounds for a little while.
The wind had picked up as we were heading back around to Wellington airport, the approach was — as you can probably guess if you’ve been there before — bumpy.
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Tom Eastman 