Victor's photos

I am an amateur photographer and this blog is the place where I show some of my photos to you. Any comments are welcome. If you have any suggestions about the ways the photos could be improved do not hesitate to say.

Tuesday, August 29, 2006

Natural fountain


This is a photo taken 1.5 years ago on Muriwai Beach near Auckland, New Zealand. This geyser is caused by waves coming to a small cave beneath a rocky plateau.

The following, more dramatic picture is the same place one year later. The big piece of rocks in the hole has already collapsed so, probably, this attraction can disappear soon.







Monday, August 28, 2006

Bay of Plenty and the Coromandel peninsula

Bay Of Plenty
Aug 25, 2006 - 9 Photos

It was a lovely day, Saturday, the end of the winter, so we decided to go somewhere out of the city. This album shows some photos of our journey from Auckland to Karangahake Gorge to Waihi Beach to Bowentown to Whiritoa and back to Auckland.

Sunday, August 27, 2006

Shutter speed

Here is my experiments with shutter speed. The first picture was taken with 1/1000 s and the second is 1/10 s. I prefer the first one; with the higher shutter speed we can catch what our eye is unable to see - single drops in air, liquid like a solid body. The second picture looks like a milky river contaminates a pool below.



Posted by Picasa Here is another photo, showing an ocean wave.








All this pictures were taken during our short trip to Bay Of Plenty.

Friday, August 25, 2006

I like the most

I like the most
Dec 27, 2004 - 1 Photo

Browsing through my collection I found this - a picture taken in Wellington during our Xmas trip around the North Island. It is colours, memories and a dream of the lands you have never been before. "Туда, где за морем синеет гора" - from a russian song, I can't translate this, because it will lose all its poetry.

Small creatures

It was a lovely sunny day, so I went out to take some photos in our garden. When shooting flowers I saw tiny ants crowling on the petals. Here they are.




Many small lizards - bronze skinks - scampered among grass stebs and chips. As I raised the camera they instantly disappeared. After about a dozen of shots I finally got this, not the perfect one, but good enough to show what I wanted to shot. This lizard received sun-baths on the fence and felt relatively safe behind the rose pikes. Posted by Picasa

Wednesday, August 23, 2006

August favourites


Here I am going backward. This photo was taken last Sunday on Te Henga (Bethells beach), the closest beach on Tasman Sea from our home.

I guess I have already had tens of pictures from this place, but I always make new shots when I see the ocean. It is now cold and un-friendly, the wind plucks foam from the wave tops. But the sea is always beautiful.

Te Henga (it is a Maori name) is a black sand beach on the Auckland west coast. Black sand differs from white one as it is volcanic ash, while the white (golden) sand is the result of crushing rocks and sea-shells. Black sand has tiny particles which easily go among your swim-suit threads; it also looks like dirt and is very hard to clean up. This sand is brought by sea currents from Mt Taranaki (Mount Egmont), a big volcano located about 250 km to the south. Nobody has seen its eruption, but scientists claim it happend recently - the last major eruption occurred around 1655 - from Wikipedia.

Google Earth has a pretty detailed picture of this particular beach where you can see even the rescue shed.


Another photo, now it is from the winter gardens in Auckland Domain taken a day before. Just a funny effect of the water lilly growing from a lamp.

Lucy

Lucy
Aug 4, 2006 - 3 Photos


Here is some recent photos of our female cat Lucy. She is about one year old.

These photos were taken in the winter so they are rather dim. The main goal here is composition.

The beginning

I have created this blog just to try a couple of things:
1. to learn what the blog is and why it is so popular now
2. to find a place where I could keep my ideas about photography

(Actually there could be a third thing - what's about typing in Russian? Теперь я проверяю русский).

Google makes a great progress in its products, so I have empoyed some of them: GMail, Picasa, Google Earth amd Maps. This blog is a new one I am trying from Google.