New Zealand Wanderings Day 4 – Trees and Towns

Really, today was all about trees and towns for day 4 of our New Zealand Wanderings. We photographed many trees, one much more special, but lots of others as well. Plus we went to a small town to check it out.

As I said last night, we arrived in Wanaka and have spent the day here and leave tomorrow.

New Zealand Wanderings Day 4 – Trees and Towns

While yesterday was about water, in some ways the first part of today was as well. We looked at “that Wanaka tree” first thing. Then we headed off to Arrowtown to see the historical part of the town with the autumn colours.

That Wanaka Tree

It has to be said that there are many places around the world that photographers will travel to take photos. The tree in Wanaka is one of them. If you are coming to the south island of New Zealand it is one of those places you have to go to and take photos.

You won’t be alone, that is for sure.

We decided to try for sunrise. We got up early to a freezing morning. It was so cold. Apparently, it got down to -2 overnight.

Was it worth it?

Absolutely. Take a look.

This is one of my shots. It was taken with the Fujifilm X-T3 camera and I had the XF10-24mm lens on it. I also used the Formatt HItech .9 soft grad. I keep forgetting I have those.

It was also my first time using the 3 Legged Thing Billy tripod. I had no issues with it and was really happy with how it performed. The size of the tripod is perfect for what I’m doing.

I meant to take a photo of the set up, but forgot, so will try next time.

While here I’m also taking photos with the Struman Optics phone lenses. The cinematic lens is being used a lot and seems to live in my pocket. This next image was taken with it.

If you ask me it did a brilliant job.

The one thing that was surprising was how many people would be there as well. Actually, I knew there would be others, but maybe not quite as many. There must have been around 50 to 60 other photographers there. It was a bit crazy.

Here is an image to give you an idea.

This was taken by my travelling companion Suzzanna.

Arrowtown

We wanted to go to Arrowtown to see the autumn colours, but also to see the historic part of the town. It certainly looked old, but seriously there were so many people there it was a pain. We couldn’t be bothered with the rudeness of them. I really don’t like people. When you get them on mass like that it is even worse.

We gave up and headed down to the river to see all the trees along there. The colours were incredible.

It helped that there weren’t a lot of people down there. Though as we were deciding that we had had enough more and more people were finding their way to that spot.

There will be a gallery at the end with all the photos.

Fujifilm colour effects

One thing I am loving about the Fujifilm cameras is how many different ways you can manipulate the colours when taking photos. Some I knew about, while others I’ve discovered by mistake.

One setting I’ve been using a lot is setting the camera to the film type Velvia. It is so good for the autumn colours. There is another one you can do too, which I discovered by mistake and took me a bit to figure out. Not sure exactly what it is called, but I will find out and let you know if you are interested.

Check this out.

Suzzanna doesn’t like it, but I think it is great. Would I frame something like this and put it on my wall, perhaps not, but fine for the blog.

Day 4 concludes with us trying to get some washing done and spending more time working on our photos. It is nice to have some time to just sit. As we go to the laundry it is clear it is going to be another cold night. Going to be hard getting up in the morning. Oh well. Onto Queenstown tomorrow.

Let’s not forget the photos were processed with Lightroom using the Wacom MobileStudio Pro 12.

Gallery

Here is a selection of images from Arrowtown. If you want to see bigger images of That Wanaka Tree then click on the images.