Hugh Deck's photostream  

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The Great Barrier Reef? The Whitsunday Islands? The Bahamas? The Maldives?

Nope, it's Crater Lake in Oregon.

Large version, if you feel so inclined.

I recently decided to tidy up my hard drive, so I've been deleting old RAW files that will never get used - basically, poor shots that I don't think are any good and have no interest in. There were quite a lot of them because I'd hadn't been aggressive about it the first time around, but along the way I did spot a few pictures that I thought could be worthy of a second chance at life. This isn't a winner of a shot but I sort of like the vertical panorama and the place holds good memories, so it's up on Flickr. I know it's not super sharp, because it was taken with just the equivalent of a 64mm lens on my old 40D (40mm x 1.6 sensor conversion), and cropped to give the pano effect. This isn't an image to enlarge for a wall, just something I thought looked okay in this size and medium - and it breaks up the run of New Zealand photos I have going.

As for the location, well, Crater Lake is totally cool. Cool to visit because a volcanic eruption entirely hollowed out a mountain summit, then filled it to a depth of nearly 600m (600 metres!) with nothing but rain and snow melt. With no rivers carrying sediment into it, the lake is an amazingly clear and incredible iridescent blue, with the small strips of shallows around the lake edge and Wizard Island offering shades of sapphire and emerald. The water seems to glow in the sunlight and I had a hard time taking my eyes off it, it was just so nice to behold.

It's also cool because, well, it's alpine and it's filled with rain and snow melt ! We'd been sweltering in heat all the way through late Summer in California, with a high of about 40C the previous day when we stopped in Redding, then arrived here to find it was cold. I mean cold, like having to wrap myself in my sleeping bag while listening to the ranger's evening talk, and with snow still in places on the inner slopes of the basin. (We spent the next week sweltering again in the unseasonal heat in Washington state) Nonetheless, I resolved to go for a swim at the only place you can reach the lake edge. Let me tell you, this may make it look tropical, but it sure as heck didn't feel it.

Brrrr....
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See all the detail in large format

More than two months after returning to Australia and I've bought myself enough time to work on another photo from my New Zealand trip. This is one of the other shots I came home with that is of acceptable quality. It doesn't rock my world, let's just say that.

I took this in Hokitika on the south island's west coast. The weather may look pleasant here, but I was actually enduring a cold and howling onshore breeze. I had a hard time preventing even short exposure shots from being ruined by camera shake, which is also why this photo was taken at ISO200 - you won't see me doing that often. My tripod isn't exactly light and I tried to shelter the whole setup using my body as a wind-shield, but it rarely seemed to do any good. I stood there watching the bubble dance inside my camera-mounted spirit level.

This was at the tail-end of a big storm that had just swept across the south island, flooding valleys and washing away roads. The mid-point of this shot is actually the confluence of a river and the sea, and the river was absolutely pumping. The sand bank to my left showed signs of the river being even higher than it was during my visit, and trees and logs - just like the ones seen here - were being swept past as I watched. Off in the middle-distance of this shot, behind the pile of trees and sticks was a dead cow that must have fallen in and drowned upstream, and returning the following morning I saw another dead cow being washed up. It all complied to create a scene of no small savagery.

That's about it really. I looked at my uploads this evening and realised that this is just my twelfth upload in the last year. I was actually surprised it was that many. My job demands a lot of time and the little I have leftover rarely gets granted to Flickr. I also spend so much time doing planning in front of a computer that I can't be bothered to spend my free time the same way. The thing is, I'm okay with that. I don't even really get out and take photos much anymore and I feel like I need something to fire my imagination. In the past, dissatisfaction with work would inevitably lead me to dreaming about (and often undertaking) a long holiday somewhere - camera in hand. But I love my job and even though I've started thinking again about an extended holiday driving around Australia, it's not likely to happen for another 8 years until I have some long service leave accrued. So, what to do until then? Probably the same as usual - go out for a shoot with my mate Ian so we can complain to each other that we're bored of all the local spots!

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Canon 5D MkII
Canon 24-105mm f4/L @ 35mm
0.5 second exposure / F13
ISO 200
Circular polarising filter
Lee 0.9 + 0.6 Hard ND grad filters (...I think)
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What an awful few months it’s been for the people of Christchurch. At the time of writing the death toll from Tuesday’s earthquake stands at 145, and there’s still some 200 people left unaccounted for. Unfortunately almost none of them will have survived. For the survivors there's dealing with the trauma and the nagging fear of further shocks.

I know that more people die in bigger, more expansive events around the world, but my wife and I visited Christchurch recently, and these things are always relative. I once heard someone say, 'Read about a thousand people dying, you might forget about it a week later. Watch someone get killed by a car accident and you'll remember it forever.' For us, our visit occurred between two big earthquakes, one of which has truly devastated the city, so it didn't take much for us to imagine what might of been if it had happened when we were there.

When my wife and I visited in early December the town was gamely carrying on after the magnitude 7.1 quake from September. Some city streets were blocked off for demolition/reconstruction, and a good handful of downtown buildings were closed due to structural weaknesses. The general attitude seemed to one of knowing nonchalance – sort of, ‘hey it’s a part of life here, but we’re okay and we’ll carry on’. Two weeks after our stay, a moderately large aftershock jolted the city again. I’ve thought a few times this week about how terrifying it would have been if it had occurred when we’d been asleep in our tiny hotel room, a few floors up and deep within a big building. Just getting out in a hurry would have been near impossible, and this week proved that the streets themselves don't make for much of a safe haven.

The September quake luckily occurred at about 4am, so the city was deserted. Not a life was lost and as far as natural disasters go that was pretty much dodging a bullet. Tuesday’s event happened around midday, and though the quake was smaller, the epicentre was much closer to the surface. So the buildings came down, with people inside, and onto those on the street and those in vehicles. The central business district has basically been destroyed and I heard yesterday that at a quarter of the city’s heart will need rebuilding, let alone great swathes of the outer suburbia.

In essence, these quakes aren’t separate but just notable jolts in what has been one long barrage. There were thousands of individual aftershocks after the September quake, and it now seems that this was just a continuation. Look at a geological map of New Zealand and you’ll see that Christchurch sits just south of where two very active tectonic plates meet. Look at newspapers and you’ll see articles wondering how long these shocks might last, and whether or not the city itself has a future at all.

I hope it does, it really is a lovely place.

(The image is of the waters of Lake Pukaki. Something simple felt appropriate.)
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See all the detail in large format

I thought it was time for another upload. Do have a look at this one in large format with the 'large format' link provided above. The background isn't that great, but the sandstone rings look so cool I think. I really managed to get the focus and sharpness of them right on this one.

I won’t write much for this photo, mostly because I’ve just exhausted my supply by writing a blog post, so you may as well go and read that if anything. It was raining yesterday so I gave my oft-neglected blog a bit of a makeover - so for those who didn't like the white text on black background, you'll be happy to know it's gone!

hughdeck.wordpress.com/2011/02/13/the-national-parks-amer...

As for this photo, I think I took this about mid-2010, while on a weekend away up the coast. Coincidentally, a saw another photographer hanging around the same area and a few days later on Flickr I recognised their photo. Turns out it was my contact Ilya Genkin, but we didn’t talk at the time, we just got on with our photography.

These are an example of a geological formation known as liesegang rings. They look like nature’s fingerprints to me. I would tell you how they were formed but I still don’t know myself, despite spending about 10 minutes trying to understand what Wikipedia had to say on the matter. Apparently it’s got something to do with precipitation reactions that take place in the absence of convection... ah, yeah, okay then.

I intend to return to this spot at some time, and hope to take advantage of more favourable lighting than I got on this drab morning. Because of the dull sky I don’t really like this photo, but I saw it while backing up some files this morning and realised I’d never given it the light of day, so here it is. Despite not being what I want out of this location, I figure I may as well show it as a curiosity piece.
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See all the detail in large format

Well, I’m back after spending the last five weeks driving around New Zealand. If you’re expecting a whole bunch of nice photos and great locations, I suggest you go have a look at Yegor Korzh's recent uploads. He has some really nice photos of a lot of places I went - only he got good weather and I got bad. Otherwise, you’ll be lucky to see three or four shots from me. I’m not kidding when I say that – I quite literally think I’ll be lucky to have a handful of acceptable shots, but not ones I really like that much myself.

I just endured what is without doubt the worst run of photographic conditions I’ve ever had on a holiday. Photographically speaking, it felt like I was almost always in the wrong place at the wrong time. Wrong tides, ugly debris on beaches, winds so strong and constant that they left images marred with camera shake, rain (almost constantly for the first three weeks), rain that swirled and came in underneath my umbrella to coat my lens within instants of removing the lens cap, floods that made roads impassable and closed whole areas, floods that dirtied normally clean or colourful waterways, clouds that obscured whole mountain ranges, clouds that were just plain ugly and scrappy looking, flat and boring blankets of high cloud that drained colour, sunrises and sunsets that competed to see which could be most devoid of colour. We got lightning and hail on our overnight cruise of Milford Sound and snow on the peaks there and during our time in Queenstown. Welcome to Summer in New Zealand.

It got to the point that I sort of stopped worrying about it, which was nice in many ways. Nice for my wife too, who didn’t have to be subjected to early morning drives and walks to locations, and who got to spend more time actually on a holiday with her husband. I still love NZ, and I still think it’s a beautiful country, it’s just that I wasn’t able to highlight that with my camera.

So here’s one of my few uploads, taken on yet another ridiculously windy evening on the very northern tip of the south island, at a place called Wharariki Beach (the ‘wh’ is pronounced almost like the sound of an ‘f’ or ‘v’, apparently). Awesome place, and nice to be able to exhibit a location that really doesn't have much of a presence here on Flickr. The beach is probably 2.5km long and is adorned with rock arches, dunes, tunnels, caves & sleeping fur seals. It’s probably one of the most interesting beaches I’ve ever visited, and there’s not too many people around because it’s about a 3hr drive from the nearest major town. In the right conditions, with a colourful sky and a falling tide, I think this could be a superb shot, so maybe I’ll make it back there some day.

Hope everyone is well, I’ll see if I can do a little bit of catching up over the next week or so.


Canon 5D MkII
Canon 24-105mm f4/L @ 35mm
3.2 second exposure / F22 (slack to not use filters rather than maxing-out the aperture, I know, but I was probably annoyed and didn’t care)
ISO 50
Circular polarising filter
No ND grad filters employed (didn't seem to need them)
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