Tuesday, March 10: Sunny with a couple of clouds in the distance, and warm

Tramping: 3.3 km

Astray

• Topo
• GPS

Two French girls who are working here have a shared room on our “corridor” and were up very early, which of course had to be followed by everyone else. My first self-provided breakfast was sultana bran, coffee with fresh milk, and toast. Internet was briefly checked for today’s distance, and the clothes that I eventually washed yesterday were still not dry, so I left them on the clothes horse outside reception.

Then it was off to Waiotapu ($32.5) for the photography session. Managed to forget to load the cameras with their usual cards, but had all the spare cards with me and the first one worked for Mel. After buying a ticket I returned to my car where a hitchhiker asked me whether I could ferry him to the geyser, which I did (Tilman from near Stuttgart). We were quite early so I was able to try out various different locations before choosing the very back and getting a couple of sequences of the dormant geyser in the process.

The main shooting was still zoomed in when Lady Knox went off, so I had to stop the sequence and zoom out; caught most of the first burst and that was it (possibly not much of a show due to high barometric pressure). It had been fairly full and people started leaving immediately. I continued on with my shooting for a little while, then moved closer down for some more sequences, but the play was very little indeed.

Finally made my way back to the car where the car park was still emptying. Tilman was nowhere to be found, and there was still something of a traffic jam at the intersection. I’m glad I stayed a while.

Since I wanted to make & have some sandwiches for lunch today, I could use the trip back to recover a card for the SX120. Bought some luncheon meat at Countdown and had lunch (two rounds of sandwiches) here, took down the clothes (including the jeans which were still not quite dry in the pockets) and set off back to the main attraction.

By this time most people were on their way out. Parked next to Tilman (he had an old camper that looks like it was being bought and sold to continuous generations of backpackers for $1000) and started on the noticeably quieter track, doing time lapses now and then. Initially I would set the time lapse going and interrupt it after a couple of minutes, but then it occurred to me that I could get 400 shots (no more, no less) by setting the “number of shots” item in the program to 4 while continuously shooting for 50 seconds. Switched over to this method a little later and it worked like a charm.

The central attraction can be nothing other than the Champagne Lake. I shot this as a time lapse and then a bracketed panorama with the SX120. Along the further path I remembered that I should have used the pol filter as well, so I would have to go back and shoot at least the lake again.

Shot a pol filtered bracketed pan of Lake Ngakoro at the end of the track as well, but closed down the camera before taking it off the tripod (procedures, procedures) and the filter fell off the camera behind the fence and disarticulated, and everything had to be recovered by means of the tripod. A woman (who was also from near Stuttgart) asked me to take her photo, which I did, and then I went along my way back to the Champagne Lake.

Around this time, the set of batteries in Mel finally ran out and were replaced. At Champagne Lake the wind and the sun worked better together (along with the reassembled pol filter) so I cannot wait to see the result.

Also took a couple of brackets of the steam blowing over the surface of the lake. Drove the car to the mud pools & finished off the shoot with a couple of sequences, including one particularly explosive one. Almost 12,500 shots with Mel.

All today I had been wondering about the hills to the east of the main road and the walks that appear to be available there (Rainbow Mountain) – perhaps something to explore the next time around.

Sunset was all the sky on fire, but was caught almost too late.