Photos Going to Good Home

As some of you know amongst many other subjects I also take photos of country churches around New Zealand and have built up quite a portfolio over the last 4-5  years. And I'm sure it will come as no surprise that once we were on the road I've been adding to the file everyday while heading south. In fact I have over 500 photos to sort & process and these will add another 100 plus churches to the list.

 

I upload and store all my photos in a Flickr photo account, a worldwide photo storage & sharing website. For awhile now, after uploading, I have also been adding my church photos to the New Zealand Historic Places Trust (NZHPT) group account. There are thousands of Flickr Groups, if you were to think of something, there's bound to be a group for it. It's where similar themed photos are grouped together for viewing. The NZHPT have a group so they can build up their database of photos of historic buildings & items around New Zealand. For them to take a photo of every listed &/or heritage building in NZ would be near impossible, so they, with permission, use the group photos to slowly build up their national database.

 

Back in September, & because I am one of their more prolific suppliers of photos, I was approached to see if I'd do an interview for an article that was to appear in the next quarterly Heritage magazine.

 

 

Of course I was happy to and to also supply high resolution photos of a few particular churches they had picked out. Strangely enough they chose all Hawkes Bay churches. I also had to provide a photo of myself to go with the article and as all photographers know we are not very comfortable on the other side of the camera. Luckily I was able to get Sophie, my daughter-in-law, to take one of me while we were parked up at the Mount Campground. And thankfully it turned out to be a reasonable shot (you can click on the photos to increase their size I you wish)

 

 

 The magazine came out in mid-October and I've been hanging out ever since to see a copy. They were going to send one to our mail box number but of course by the time it was published we were on the road & every time we had the mail forwarded on to us it wasn't in the pile! I've been getting pretty frustrated at not seeing a magazine especially as a few acquaintances made mention of the article.

 

 

 Every book shop or supermarket magazine rack I found I'd quickly scan to see if it was there, all with no luck. It's quite a specialist magazine that is mainly distributed via subscription. But finally it arrived yesterday by special courier, our son-in-law Cameron who had flown up to Tauranga to collect a car and drive it back here to Invercargill. He checked our postal box and also did a few errands for us while he was there.

 

At long last I was able to view it. The article highlighted the work of four different photographers, here's the rest of the article. And if you'd like to look at my Flickr Church sets you can find the North Island Churches here and the South Island Churches here . I have still to add a lot of South Island church photos that I'm in the middle of processing & of course there will be plenty more as we travel around the South Island. There's a couple more of my photos in the montage on the opening page; the belfry from a Tutira church(middle left) & a special (a friend got married there) chapel on Napier Hill (bottom right).

 

 

I had another church photo requested for a magazine that came out at the end of last year too.