Cathedral Cove is one of the iconic New Zealand sights. Access requires walking, water taxi, kayak or private vessel. Previously it was an option to park at the lookout which abbreviated the walk slightly. This car park is now blocked off apart from 2 disabled parking spots for much of the year to force the use of a shuttle bus. As the most significant part of the walk is from the lookout to the cove and back it seems illogical to pay to burn fossils fuel to drag your sad carcass up one incline. If photography is your aim the shuttle hours don’t synchronise with the best light.
This visit was more about the walk so packing light with a few snacks and water I limited my gear to the Nikon D500 and 10.5mm fisheye and used my iPhone SE 2020 for a few other images. Our walk began at the southern end of Hahei beach before ascending to the lookout.
Distortion is inherent in fisheye images and can be challenging with landscape images. Most disturbing is a curved horizon but this can be avoided by keeping the horizon exactly through the middle of the frame and cropping for composition in post.
The hot early spring day made us appreciate the tree cover on the climb to the lookout.
On the way to Cathedral Cove there was quite a bit of decent bird habitat, especially the flowering harakeke/flax near the lookout. Due to the bright harsh light conditions, I had decided not to carry a long lens and didn’t regret the decision. If we had had cloud cover I would have carried the 300mf4VR and TC14E teleconverter.
This hike wasn’t really with the intention of taking any special images as the light was harsh with the timing of the visit around midday and I was expecting it to be quite busy with other visitors. All things that can make landscape photography frustrating. The hope was to get some fisheye lens images that I would process as Black and White.
My standard conversion for Black and White involves Nik Silver Efex Pro. When this suite of plugins was purchased by Google and made free it seemed that it would die without the incentive for it to be updated to maintain compatibility with evolving operating systems. I decided to explore other options and especially found MacPhun Tonality to be useful. This morphed into Skylum Luminar and Tonality became a collection of presets that you needed to go hunting for so I was really pleased when DXO purchased Nik and committed to updating it.
The image at the head of this post shows a standard colour RAW conversion prior to processing through Silver Efex Pro. To my eye the Black and White images suit the subject better and minimise the impact of the harsh daylight.
Photos with Nikon D500 and Nikon 10.5mm fisheye lens apart from views to north and south from lookout with iPhone SE 2020.
