Last month during my social media darkness I went on a mission with my mate Nathan (Go check him out on Instagram) to take a look at Waitangi falls near Waiuku. A spot neither of us had visited before.
While I was at it I had the opportunity to borrow a lens from the good peeps at Fujifilm NZ as I was considering potential upgrades for my 35-70mm. If you had watched my GFX kit “Whats in my bag 2023” video you’ll remember I mention looking to upgrading it to the 45-100mm, but the 32-64 was a contender as well.
Anyway! The weather was pretty gloomy but Nathan and I spent an hour or so at Waitangi falls. While there were a few compositions I settled on this one after gingerly walking across the slippery rocks.
Moving on from Waitangi falls we decided to take a look at the coast at Karioitahi beach. We were greeted with black sands, some horse riders and some epic coastal fog!
The undulating layers below the high tide mark made for some interesting foreground but you know I couldn’t resist a pano here:
Though I did find 16:9 suited things best to give a sense of the vertical scale - especially with a trio of horse riders to fit in.
Naturally the ultra-wide had to find its way onto the body as well.
With some time up our sleeves we decided to take a look at Hunua falls - another spot Nathan had not been to before.
Despite the obvious straight on composition, I found myself drawn over to the side of the falls
and on the way to collect this shot I got distracted by some green mossy covered stuff.
On the 32-64mm. It was a fantastic lens, and solved one of my gripes about the 35-70mm - the lack of aperture ring. But with the 2nd hand market pricing both this and the 45-100mm around the same I decided the 45-100mm was more versatile. I ended up doing a whole kit revamp over December so i’m probably going to have to do a bit of an update when
One.
More.
Thing
arrives sometime January/February. *grin*
The day after these shots were taken my poor old X-T4 gave up on my while recording my first video scheduled for 2024 - On printing some 8x10 images with my Canon Pro-200. Thankfully the team at Fujifilm NZ were able to loan me a spare X-T4 while mine was off for repair. That video should go live in the coming week or so so get over to Youtube and subscribe! That said I decided now that I’m going to be taking youtube more seriously that an upgrade was in order.
More on that also coming soon.