This juvenile Australasian Gannet (Morus serrator or Sula bassana) is trying to pluck up the courage to jumps off the cliff. If he can not figure out how to fly he will plummet into the sea and as he is too heavy to take off the water, he will certainly die. If he works out how to fly his next stop is probably Tasmania, 2,000 kilometer away (against the prevailing winds, by the way!). 
Only about 30% of the juvenile birds that leave the nesting site at Cape Kidnappers will return (in about 3 years) however on return the adult birds will remain close to the colonies and they are very territorial about their nesting sites.
He missed the fish by the way.
There is recognition of the importance of conservation of wetlands in the Hawkes Bay area. The best vantage points probably along the Rotary Cycleway & Walkway, which we are slowly meandering along from Clifton Beach to Napier.
The wonderful Chamber’s walk, though part of the Te Mata Park, was a great place to do a PhotoProject, looking down at the detail of what is around and beneath your feet.
1) Use all available SD cards (I have two 4GB cards on 2 GB and 3 single GB cards). This is a really simple solution as SD cards are getting cheaper and have larger capacity so they a lot like purchasing more film. However not all the places I visit have SD cards for sale so I always carry a few spares.
2) Switch over to taking mainly JPEG files rather than RAW. On my camera this reduces a typical landscape shoot from 14MB to 6MB (under half the size). The trade off here is quality, or so many “internet” experts would have you believe (I’ll do seperate post on this). Both HDRI Bracketing and multi-image panoramas force me to take lots of images but my software of choice for both techniques just use JPEG file in any case.
3) Use cyber cafes, to download, review and backup/archive your photos. Cyber cafes are getting very common at all the tourist destination, but they probably aren’t as fast and reliable as you might prefer (Uploading to flickr or even just looking at your flickr stream will probably involve many tedious time outs and lost uploads.) Yet most computers will have a USB port so I can attach my cheap portable cards reader (which worked like a charm) to upload my photos to the computer (temporarily), If I have time I can also one or more of my stable of favorite post-processing software on my portable apps USB key
3.1) Autostitch is the multi-image stitcher of choice and is a big bonus that I can run it off my memory key. It only handles JPEG files and can be slow and memory intensive for big output files so I just use it to preview the stitching on the road.
3.2) Picturenaut has become my default HDRI tool the fact that I can run it off my USB is a big bonus. It only works with JPEG files
3.3) Noiseworks is a bit luxury but if I have to take photos in lowlight with Higher ASA I know I will need to do some noise cleanup.
3.4) If the cyber café computers don’t have Picasa or Microsoft Photo Gallery (many do) I find XNView Portable, a fast and reliable photo viewer and manager that can handle RAW format images.
I always carry a little seagate free agent USB Backpack style hard dick(its getting on now but it does have a handy 120 GB of storage) and I use this routinely as my working backup/archive for my photos as I travel. Its only downfall is it need two USB cables, one just for power and some special drivers. Whilst most cyber café computers will let it load and connect a few don’t seem to set up the right drivers and was a bit flakey on some file copies (I never lost any files but….) However this mean I was able to confidently remove my photos from my SD cards every third of forth day.
The slow internet speeds here in New Zealand & bandwidth issues means I have avoided on-line storage like Sky drive, flickr or picasa web.
Don’t forget to empty the recycle bin on any public computer after you have deleted your images. This ensure that your precious photos are not “found” (aka Stolen) by other at the cyber cafe
So taking my own advice a little bit of preparation (extra SD cards, my PortableApps USB key with a few key programs, Card Reader and Backpack Drive) I was able to avoid undue stress and I could carry on taking photos just as I wanted too.
I eventually managed to “wake up” my computer with a cheap set of jeweler’s screw drivers and carefully removing both the rechargeable battery, backup battery & hard disks and equally as carefully replacing them.
Sunny one moment and then a full on thunder storm with driving hail the next. The storm was so intense it even made the National news (complete with a photo of a water spout further up the coast).
It was a very overcast day and that makes large view distance photos very washed out. I saw the sheep on the next ridge and thought it would make a good photo, so I took a bracketed set (5 photo at 1 EV steps). And surprise, surprise they are washed out! Not to worry I took the set expecting to use the HDRI technique to restore some tonal depth and detail. Using my version of picturenaut on my portable apps memory stick, I used ass the basic defaults and exposure tone mapping with automatic contrast set in the histogram dialogue. This insures that picturenaut tries to use all useable pixels across all the photos to reproduce tones across the extended tonal range. So you will be able to appreciate how closed to the edge the sheep are grazing.
These multi-image stitched panoramic views of Lake Taupo are more about the clouds and sky than the lake and landscape. I’m informed these unusual clouds are locally know as “Mare’s Tales” (thanks Wendy). Clouds alone are something that I have found can be a challenge to match up for Autostitch, especially for hand held sequences. So I was careful to keep a little bit of the horizon in each image also I have taken the photos in the vertical “portrait” mode to maximize the vertical range and having two rows of images within each composite panoramic image.
