Autumn isn't usually this visually arresting in coastal New Zealand. Colder areas like Central Otago get all the Canadian-style tree-based visual excitement while here it's more often a soggy maritime intermediate sort of period, characterised by towels staying damp on the line and turning slightly stinky and getting too hot in the clothes you've selected because it turns out to be 22ºC and not 12. It's not cold enough to light the fire but too cool to be entirely comfortable without it. There's a lot of crone-faced squinting into angled sunlight and not bothering to sweep mouldy leaves because you know there'll be 55066776 lying in their place the very next morning. Our native vegetation is mostly evergreen, so those leaves overwinter and funnel copious amounts of rain down the back of your collar. So autumn is often fucking annoying and blessed with only token deciduous business.
But not this time! 2016 has been pretty warm and dry and shit's just turning now, really, about two months later than a wet year. The maples and birches have been particularly intense.
But not this time! 2016 has been pretty warm and dry and shit's just turning now, really, about two months later than a wet year. The maples and birches have been particularly intense.
 We stopped off on our way up the hill to have a look at the Lady Thorn Dell garden and bust out the trusty wee Canon S95.The Kashmir Rowan (Sorbus cashmiriana) was droopy with fat tassels of milky white fruit and, curious as to why they hadn't all been burgled by greedy birds, I encouraged R to try one, remembering (somewhat) belatedly that they're bitter as fuck when ingested. As bitter as my treachery o_0 |  |
   Madonna may loathe hydrangeas but that bitch doesn't know shit. The great summer heads of the specimens clustered against the foot of the quarry wall turn dreamy shades of absinthe and kulfi and float, disembodied, over their tiers of leathery bay-green leaves. They age well and naturally. Hydrangeas >>>> Madonna. |  If I were poor R, I would have left my trifling arse by now, but it's almost like he never learns and I am loathe to entrust him to anyone else. Oh well. I could photograph dead leaves for a whole week. There is very little one can do to improve the composition of such natural scattershot arrangements; even the odd cigarette butt/chocolate wrapper/stray pube just adds flavour. If you do try to edit them, it blows up in your face once you get home and see that your precious images have the dreadful tang of fussy arsehole about them i.e. the photography club curse. I say that as someone who has never belonged to a p-club and has won a couple of photography awards without knowing what depth of field or aperture priority meant. Tee hee. Don't tell anyone.   |
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Strange new roosters keep arriving to supplement the already outstanding array ornamenting the Scott Memorial area. This one was particularly odd- avid, miscegenous and velociraptory. I don't know how anyone could have parted with it, but then we do live in a soup of insensible twats, don't we? Good luck to you, peculiar rooster.
Might do some movie reviews this week.
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