Denis’ Place

I’ve not been well this past week so since I was feeling a bit better today I worked on getting some of the photos I took on a visit to the Matakohe Kauri Museum on September 20th up on my 35SouthOnLine site.

It was a difficult place inside the museum to take photos because of the variety of lighting. There was a mixture of incandescent, fluorescent, and daylight as you can see in some of the photos.

The museum website is at http://www.kauri-museum.com/

The previous Haruru Falls photos in the Gallery were taken with my Panasonic FZ20 camera in July 2005. Since then I have a new camera but haven’t visited Haruru Falls with it until the other day when there was a nice sunny day for a change after all the very wet weather we have been having here in New Zealand. A good time to photograph waterfalls.

The photos start here http://www.deniswilford.com/pg/displayimage.php?pos=-657. These newer photos are viewable in a 1200 pixel size by clicking on the displayed photo. Enjoy.

So I don’t update this site as often as I should….

I’ve added a few photos from my Auckland visit last December, yes, I took my time adding them. The ones I added today are of my old high school - Auckland Grammar School, Mountain Rd, Auckland.

The majestic original building looks the same but there have been a lot of new buildings added to the school since I attended way back in the 1950s.

These photos are in the Auckland album here.

I’ve also recently added new photos of the Stone Store Basin to the other gallery over at 35SouthOnline.

We’ve had 7 continuous days of rain here - which is unusual for us. No, it has nothing to do with climate change, just a warm moist air stream from the tropics which has stayed around longer than normal.

That gave me the chance to revisit Rainbow Falls at Kerikeri and take some new photos of the falls in bad weather. You can see them here as additions to the Kerikeri photo gallery at http://www.35southonline.com/35s/pg/thumbnails.php?album=2

I’ve been busy lately moving web sites. After moving this site to Lunarpages, as mentioned in my previous post, a few days ago I moved WebTech U to DowntownHost.com

Both this site and WebTech U were sharing a server but I thought it was a good idea to have them on separate hosts, partly so I could see which one was the better over a period of time, and also if one server was out for an extended period of time I could swap web sites between the two hosts.

Then of course right on top of this out came an upgrade to the Wordpress Blog software - which I have now done.

Then to add more to the mix, my washing machine died slowly so I had to get a new one a few weeks ago, and today my refrigerator stopped working. Hopefully the problem seems to be the thermostat so the repair shouldn’t be too expensive or take too long.

I’ve moved this site from AussieHQ to Lunarpages today and it all went quite painlessly. The only changes I needed to do to any files were the database info for the Coppermine Photo Gallery and this Wordpress Blog.

To allow for the overlap between the old host and the new host as the Domain Name Servers updated around the world I set up mail forwarding on my email addresses to my other domain of 35SouthOnline.com so any emails that went to the old site could still be collected by me after I began to access the new location.

Everything has worked very smoothly.

I’ve started another photo website over at http://www.35southonline.com/ specifically for displaying photographs of Northland, New Zealand.

This is a beautiful and interesting part of New Zealand and deserves its own photo site rather than sharing with the rest of New Zealand and other items that are on this site.

There is not that much there yet but I’ll be steadily adding more photos so keep checking there, and here also of course.

It’s been a while since I have been away for more than the one day trip but this last weekend I went to Auckland to visit my son and daughter-in-law and while there took a good selection of photos (of course).

Some of these have been added in the Auckland Album

On the Saturday I got acquainted again with Auckland traffic and took some photos around the City and suburbs. On Sunday I went to North Head and wandered around the North Head Battery - tunnels and gun emplacements from 1880.

The other week Mid-North Camera Club members visited the Begonia House at the Pioneer Village in Kaikohe for a photo session before our regular monthly meeting. The day was overcast and a bit dull - a perfect opportunity for me to try out my Nikon 18-200VR lens in low light conditions, and from the photos of the begonias you can see it worked wonderfully. The softer lighting from the overcast conditions was perfect for the soft colours of the begonias.

See the flowers here -

As a follow up to my post about my new Nikon 18-220VR lens purchase.

This was last Saturday and this morning, 1 week later, I found some water on the laundry floor. The hot water cylinder had started leaking and will have to be replaced. If this had happened the week before I would not have bought the new lens, so one way it was good that it hadn’t happened then, on the other hand I’ve now got an even bigger dent in my budget.

I guess things just happen this way.