For most of my first week in Gisborne, the weather was terrible and rainy. This was our first crystal clear night… so I made the best of it by staying up till about 4 AM taking photos… I kind of wanted to stay awake all the way until the next day, but I could not make it happen. I was so exhausted and I just crashed onto the bed for a very rough 2 hours of sleep before waking up early for the sunrise.
Machine Elf 27 – Avoiding the Void – 360 | Trey Ratcliff & Sam Wave
Here’s something quite cool! This is the second 360 version we have released. You can interact with it on YouTube by grabbing the screen and pulling it this way and that. It’s also super immersive (especially with Sam’s cool tunes) when you have it full screen and the volume up high.
What’s a bit more about this creation? I decided to explore the math of V3 of the Menger, which has all these beautiful spherical structures that are created by the minutest of filaments. It calmly explores the evolution of a void and allows you to relax in the unraveling, fundamental nature of its creation. As with the last one, Sam Mehrtens (Sam Wave) did custom music. He explains “with all these worlds there seems to be a pulsing balance of life and release. When I was making the soundtrack I was instantly drawn into the void and felt a passive tribal tone urging to come out… as the void unravels so does the sound, and the beat becomes a distant memory. Accompanied by sprays of tonal delay and psychedelic guitar, ‘Avoiding the Void’ is our most explorative creation yet.”
Be sure to see it in your VR goggs (Oculus or Playstation VR) inside the TRIPP app.
During the three-day walk, we saw a ton of different scenes like this. It was incredibly peaceful and the walk was quite easy. There are two ways to do the walk, and this was the more “posh” way where we would stay in nice places and have hot meals every night.
How many people have to be in the same room for the odds of you having the exact same birthday as someone else? Since there are 365 days in a year, you might think 183, right? Wrong… way off… watch this! I just shared this with my daughter who had her birthday… she’s a math nerd like me, but this will blow your mind!
Daily Photo – The Beautiful Road to Glenorchy
I’ve taken like 700 photos of this road, and each one is incredibly unique. I got this one from the air with a quadcopter and it was created out of a 3×3 grid of 9 different photos. This spot is only about 40 minutes down the road, so it makes me feel lazy I don’t get out there almost every day!
It was a rainy and moody day when we started the Routeburn track, which is one of the most famous walks in New Zealand. I was kind of hoping for perfect weather, but I actually really like the way it turned out… it reminded me a lot of Scotland, even though I’ve never been to Scotland!
On day 1 of the hike, this is one of the first stops along the way. Pretty nice eh? These mountaintop lakes are called tarns. They are formed when a small cirque is excavated by a glacier. These tarns are refilled through the year via rain and snow…
Every Sunday, there is a fresh how-to video for Passport Members. I hope you enjoy this one as much as the others! Today’s shot was made out of 9 different photos in a 3×3 panorama.
The Making off…
Today’s video shows more about the creation of this photo – enjoy!
I don’t usually put people in my photos, but this shot called for it. There’s this strange thing in landscapes (especially in New Zealand) where you can’t quite tell the scale of things. By putting a human in the shot, it gives the whole thing a sense of scale. My friend Monni spent a few weeks with me here and she was often wandering around with my second camera, and I happened to catch her right at the end of the pier in the middle of this estuary near Gisborne.
Every day during the lockdown in New Zealand, which I think only lasted about four weeks, I would go on an afternoon hike. I found myself drawn to this area again and again… these tiny little perfect pools of water… I actually took these with my mobile phone, although I don’t think most people would guess that in 100 years.
Daily Photo – Lonely Clouds and Trees at the Hills
I think maybe photographers have a particularly fun life because perhaps we notice things more than other people. I mean, I see non-photographers notice interesting things too, but I am usually thinking, “Yeah, I saw that ages ago.” Haha… not in a dismissive way, but I think once you start taking photos you just notice a little bit more of everything.
As soon as I moved to New Zealand, I got about 250,000 bees. I’ve always wanted to be a beekeeper, so I thought it was a great opportunity to give back to the planet a little bit. It’d be kinda awesome if everyone did that, eh? We have a little farm with that’s about 10 acres big and it’s had all sorts of ups and downs. We’ve had sheep born and die (even buried one but not deep enough so its legs sticking out of the ground…) We’ve had chickens that have been killed by dogs and birds of prey… but the only thing that keeps on going without fail is the beehives. It’s not that I’m a great beekeeper; I’m actually terrible! But I’m learning all the time.
The reason that I got into bees is because I’ve always been fascinated by superorganisms. I first got interested in ants then got into bees. From the early days of the internet, I kind of got the idea that humans were going to someday form a superorganism and we would use the internet the same way ants use scent trails or bees perform the waggle dance. I’ve learned so much from my bees about nature and the fundamental inter-workings of the world… I’ve also learned that I’m a pretty crappy beekeeper and I still have a lot to learn!
Daily Photo – Beautiful Braided Rivers from the Glaciers
Here’s the Dart River that flows down from the Southern Alps then fills up Lake Wakatipu. I took this from a helicopter with Choppy and Over the Top while we were on the way to one of our first glacier landings. You can get a quadcopter up over this as well, but you can’t get nearly this high to get this perspective… to me, the more braided rivers, the better!
Here’s a photo I got early one morning up at the Remarkables Snowfield. I forgot the exact reason I went up here, but I got on a snowmobile and rode up to the very top for photos. It was freezing cold, naturally, but it was pretty cool to get up there before it officially opened to get some clean photos. I’m actually so lame that I haven’t snowboarded in about five years! Although, on this day, I wish I had brought my board! 🙂
