We had a wonderful trip to Kaikōura last weekend. So good, I thought I’d been away for a full week. Here are a list of the highlights:
Filming near Oaro, the sea plus Haumuri Bluff. Then as I was filming a little baby seal started surfing the waves and jumping in and out of the waves in front of me. How fantastic. Plus I caught it on film. Yay!
The sun for that first hour when we arrived at the beach. We even had a large truck beep us to say hi, I see you are doing photography, I’m going to annoy you!
The second highlight was going up to the top of the Ocean Ridge subdivision and filming Mt Fyffe. However I learnt something – wind noise is annoying. I’m not sure I can use the clip yet and need to find a way to improve the sound. Bellbirds were singing. However there is nothing much moving in the clip, no trees swaying or sea crashing, so it looks very static like an image with some bad noise over it. I learnt something. I did get some photos though of Mt Fyffe with snow on it, which was good. The video itself I think I can improve it a lot next time.
I got photos at our section which is soon to be called Flaxton Heights. I got an excellent shot of the snowy mountains with the bay below. It’s so gorgeous and will be going on my website.
We filmed some seals at the seal colony. Two little baby seals – one quite hidden and one that looked a bit tired, but was still super cute. This is a tough time of year for them as they need to keep finding food and they are new to the world. It’s tough out there in the wild.
We had lunch at the South Bay Domain and it was a bit cold but we had some bread and cheese and lunchie things. I then went down to the beach and filmed. There were paradise ducks, normal ducks, shags (cormorants), and lots more. I was happy getting the sounds of them all, but realised later I was still suffering from a bad case of wind noise. I was annoyed. I’m not sure what I can do with the footage now. Above me the shags were screaming in the macrocarpa and doing loop flights from the tree, around the bay, through my video and then back to the tree again. Very interesting.
We checked into the Peketa Campground and all felt exhausted. We had been taking photos for a few hours by now. We had a rest and then went out again to get fish and chips for tea to eat them on the beach. We decided to go to South Bay which was perfect, near where we used to go kahawai fishing years ago. The clouds were like giant hands in the sky. I filmed it. Again, got a little bit of wind noise but not as bad as I had used a special function on the camera. I’m going to get some fur to muffle the wind once and for all!
The next morning we woke up early and I looked outside. It had been raining a lot. This was the biggest highlight of the whole trip was after taking some sunrise shots in the morning, we saw amazing clouds over the mountains to the south. We took off in the car and then saw the most enormous rainbow which developed quickly in the sky. We raced down to South Bay and I got a full double rainbow photo going from the sea to the land. Amazing!
Back at Peketa campground we decided to leave a bit early and head back . We had Sunday events on in the afternoon. Anyway, a guy operating the campground took my key, I told him I saw this rainbow and he said “it’s good to be alive.” Loved his comment, it was so true and I realised how grateful I was to be in such an amazing place like Kaikōura.
