3/5 photos out late at night, a photo by Lester Ralph Blair on Flickr.

some recent photos while out walking at night

2/5 photos out late at night, a photo by Lester Ralph Blair on Flickr.

some recent photos while out walking at night

1/5 photos out late at night, a photo by Lester Ralph Blair on Flickr.

some recent photos while out walking at night

going around in circles

Excuse me while I spend a little time in my childhood. I lived on a small dairy farm until I was about 18. The farmhouse was on the top of a hill. The house was towed by a bulldozer up to the hilltop when I was around 5 years old, probably 1957.

Looking East from the house was a view over protruding hilltops from cloud shrouded valleys that stretched far in the distance to a range of snow capped mountains on the central plateau of the North Island of New Zealand. One of them was still an active volcano and little puffs of smoke could be seen arising from Mt Ngauruhoe. To the West was the near perfect peak of Mt Egmont, now called Mt Taranaki, it seemed only a few fields away and loomed large often with a little capped cloud that was a clear sign of rain the following day.

During winter we as a family would travel North on holidays,  before the cows had new calves and the landscapes of Mt Messenger and the Awakino Gorge were imprinted on my impressionable mind. I often imagined films being made here, well before any films ever were made in NZ. Though it all seems idyllic I spent most nights of my boyhood twiddling the knobs of the radio trying to find a station playing rock and roll and looking longingly at the glow of the lights in the distance of the nearest town. I wanted to live in some city.

I have lived mostly in various cities since, and for me it has been the bigger the better, I love the visual stimulation, the architecture, the way we aestheticise our landscape and our homes, the convenience of art galleried and book shops etc and just the busyness, the constant stream of humanity. In contrast the hills of Taranaki seemed a lonely place to live.

But I still remember what it was like to awake with the sound of nearby magpies and the sound of larks on a summers day, plus those landscapes now just seem to be a part of my DNA. I can’t live anywhere now and be completely satisfied. Maybe I just wait for that perfect city, the new Jerusalem.

In the meantime I guess I will always be photographing those rural landscapes to fulfill some inner need and respond too to those urban themes that I find so stimulating and interesting. Below are five landscape photos I took a week ago, while staying up north on the coast.

5/5 photos from a road on a steep hill

5/5 photos from a road on a steep hill, a photo by Lester Ralph Blair on Flickr.

I spent a few days up on the coast north of Wellington. There is a road there called Paekakariki Hill Road. I went for a drive to see what was up there...
Lightroom view from a steep road

4/5 photos from a road on a steep hill

4/5 photos from a road on a steep hill, a photo by Lester Ralph Blair on Flickr.

I spent a few days up on the coast north of Wellington. There is a road there called Paekakariki Hill Road. I went for a drive to see what was up there...
Lightroom view from a steep road

3/5 photos from a road on a steep hill

3/5 photos from a road on a steep hill, a photo by Lester Ralph Blair on Flickr.

I spent a few days up on the coast north of Wellington. There is a road there called Paekakariki Hill Road. I went for a drive to see what was up there...
Lightroom view from a steep road

2/5 photos from a road on a steep hill

2/5 photos from a road on a steep hill, a photo by Lester Ralph Blair on Flickr.

I spent a few days up on the coast north of Wellington. There is a road there called Paekakariki Hill Road. I went for a drive to see what was up there...
Lightroom view from a steep road

1/5 photos from a road on a steep hill

1/5 photos from a road on a steep hill, a photo by Lester Ralph Blair on Flickr.

I spent a few days up on the coast north of Wellington. There is a road there called Paekakariki Hill Road. I went for a drive to see what was up there...
Lightroom view from a steep road

how a photograph is presented changes everything

Photographers seems to follow one of two streams. One way seems to be an inquisitiveness of the places and things and a wonder of life in general. It seems to me to be a child like thing, a romantic simple joy of taking in a place, and the things that inhabit these places. It might even be a thing of faith, an intuitive thing, as our Lord says, to enter the kingdom of God one has to be like a small child.

The other stream seems to be a cerebral way, it is about ideas, and often referenced to art and photography itself, the art and craft is often done before the photograph is taken, a quote by Jeff Wall says it very simply, some are hunters and others are farmers.

I don't think one can successfully, or it is maybe better to say, find that comfortable natural and ultimately satisfying way by making some choice to follow the fashionable path at the time. It comes down to ones personality, our genes probably point the way. I know from my own experience in former times of being a painter, I was always restless standing in front of a blank canvas, but out in the open air with a sketch book the images seemed to spring up everywhere.

how a photograph is presented changes everything Well maybe ... for me it does. I like big photos, especially if they are filled with lots of seductive detail. Standing before a large Gursky in a gallery, I've only seen one, is different to reality where ones eyes take in a small circle of focus. The gallery experience is like standing above the grand canyon and using a pair of binoculars.

Now this sense of awe has one profound effect on me, I begin to have an inordinate desire to purchase big format cameras, at least 80 megapixel sensor. I'm not much interested in using film, I don't like the idea of spending the equivalent of a days groceries for one exposure. I am addicted to instant gratification, a sense of spontaneity and exploring ideas with instant feedback on the LCD screen. The dilemma here is the costs are about six years worth of my disposable income.  

I will make this as brief as possible, With sturdy tripod, panoramic tripod head, L plate, canon 5d mk II and stitching software  I filled my hard drive with 0.5 gb tif files. I had one printed on a durst lamba machine and  framed at considerable cost. It looks great, I still admire my handiwork, all that detail my eye did not see at the time of the 4 or 5 exposures that make up the print. I'm glad I made the print, and maybe I will make some more, but it is a dead end street, I just don't have the wall space for more than three 1.5 metre photographs.

This logic didn't follow quite as I have outlined, lt is more hindsight actually. I was reading the essay in the book "the pond" by John Gossage, written by Gerry Badger, here is the paragraph that switched the light on for me.

"he would be pleased to be termed an 'auteur' rather than an artist, for this seems a more accurate description of his attitude towards the medium. Or an editeur-auteur, to paraphrase Atget, one of the photographers he most admires" ..... "He consistently sees photography in terms of the collective statement contained in the book rather than the individual statement circumscribed by the picture frame". - Gerry Badger on John Gossage.

Notes to myself: 1. don't worry about expensive exhibitions. 2. Start thinking books, this is the way I mostly enjoy photography anyway. 3. Just use the camera gear that I have, even  ten megapixel is ample enough.

Posted below are 4 photographs around the streets near where I live.