Hi everyone, Lisa & I have recently returned home from our annual New Zealand Winter trip. The two New Zealand Winter Workshops we do every year are always our most popular workshops & book out quickly every season, some clients even return multiple times to shoot this magical landscape. I guess you could call winter in New Zealand “our speciality”, it’s something we’re both extremely passionate about & combined we have many years of knowledge & experience photographing these magnificent landscapes. I would say that our favourite photos we individually capture each year almost always include a majority from Winter in New Zealand. Why is winter in New Zealand so good, you may ask? Well combine already magnificent scenes of majestic Alps, glacial blue lakes & streams, rolling tussocklands, & pristine backcountry valleys with snow, ice, fog, pink skies, moody clouds & maybe even some hoar frost & you have easily one of the most photogenic landscapes on earth! Middle-earth!
So today I thought I’d share with you some of the images we’ve enjoyed so far from this winter & a brief story around each image, for me personally, i enjoy the story around an image just as much as the image itself & i think so much of this gets lost in the fast paced instant world of social media, so to document it here for you to read means something to me.
Taken on only our second day in New Zealand prior to the workshops, we briefly experienced a Hoar Frost & this image was a work in my head for a long time, a strong flowing stream foreground surrounded by Hoar Frost covered trees & fog.
An aerial view from my drone of the Hoar Frost covered trees & fog, I love the hint of orange & the softness of the fog.
A multi image vertical panorama taken with my drone of a braided glacial river delta with some gorgeous sunset glow on the alps. The recent snow storm really simplifies the scene.
A handheld multi image panorama of our first workshop group shooting sunset at Tasman Lake, in my humble opinion one of the best landscapes in the world.
Hoar Frost covered birch trees, took this one at f5.6 so as the back ground would fall out of focus & just have sharp trees at the front & pushed the exposure to the right, desaturated the blues.
Minimal colours in the scene to start with but i took more colour out to give it a blue steely feel, i especially enjoyed the moody clouds & fog on the lake.
Everyone knows this place, we had front & centre prime position & some really nice soft glowy pastel colours on our first workshop for sunrise.
This was a morning where the forecast wasn’t good, so i made a last minute plan change to shoot this location & attempt to move away from some rainy weather, the shoot was amazing & we nailed great images & some epic rainbows.
The final morning of the melting hoar frost & we chased the conditions hard, managed to get this stunner & you can still see tinges of frost on the tree limbs on the little island, again a colour palette i really enjoy.
A few days off between workshops & Lisa & I went chasing waterfalls after some pretty heavy rains, there’s a couple of videos on our YouTube channel about this. This location will be one we shoot on next years Ultimate New Zealand Workshop.
Probably one of my favourite images of the year thus far, compositionally its really strong, i just love the layers in the landscape, the tinge of snow in the foreground, all anchored by the pine tree & the blue colour contrast pulls you back to the background & the soft mountains & low cloud are perfect for this scene.
My style of image once again, you simply don’t need bright colours to make a great photo, I think i prefer the muted colour palettes to the vibrant colourful ones, it’s all about contrast & a clean, balanced, minimal composition.
One of the mornings on our first Winter workshop we were on the road early around an hour & a half before sunrise & you could see the crimson glow in the distant sky starting to build very early, we knew we were in for a colour show! Because I’ve photographed this place many times before I decided to roll the dice & try to shoot a composition I’ve never tried before, I like the way this one turned out.
If you’re still with us, now it’s time for some of Lisa’s images.
Our second Winter Workshop group shooting the ever beautiful Tasman Lake one moody evening. What a great enthusiastic bunch
Between workshops we headed to the Catlins to scope out some locations for our Ultimate NZ Workshops next year and couldnt drive past this very pretty pristine scene covered in some fresh snow
A stuuner of an evening at Tasman Lake. This place seriously never disappoints and this evening provided lots of happy smiles from our workshop participants.
Nugget Point Lighthouse has to be one of the most iconic lighthouses to shoot in NZ. We got very lucky with some stunning light this evening! Keep your eye out for our YoutTube coming soon from this location.
A fresh snow at Lindis Pass on our sunset shoot for Winter Workshop 2 made for some very pretty conditions and a great way to kick off the weeks photography.
Lenticular Clouds over Mount Cook and the Nun’s Veil for our final sunset shoot. It really doesn’t get much better than that!
Those epic Back Country vibes never fail to deliver beautiful scenes like this. This shoot was superb and kept us all on our toes as the light and fog just kept lifting and rolling in and out all morning.
Thanks for viewing the images & reading along, we’d really like to hear your feedback so please go ahead & post a comment below on the Blog. We filmed several videos from our Winter in New Zealand & the best place to watch those is on our YouTube channel here. Thanks as always, Brett & Lisa.