Denis’ Place

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.

On Saturday - 3rd March 2007 - I went to the 23rd Northland Agricultural Field Days at the Dargaville Racecourse.

I expected to see the usual trade stands and agriculture related exhibitions that are the very reason for these shows but after wandering around for a while - it was a big show, lots of walking in the hot sun - I found some things going on that made interesting photographs. The tractor pulling races, the chainsaw race, the cutting horses, and the Clydesdale team.

One attraction that I hadn’t counted on was helicopter rides out over Dargaville. I had just enough cash on me to pay for a ride so I took the opportunity and had my first helicopter ride.

Photos from the Field Days are in the Kaipara District album.

Last Saturday I went for a drive to Whangarei, the nearest large shopping centre to me, and bought a new lens for my Nikon D50 camera - an 18-200VR. I’ve been wanting one of these ever since I got my camera last year but, well, you know, these things have to be fitted into my budget.

Anyway, although I read about how hard these lens are to find, Harvey Norman’s store in Whangarei had 2 of them so I didn’t have to order one and wait. (I did phone and check first before going there.)

I have added a few new photos in the Whangarei section of my Photo Gallery taken while I was in Whangarei - some at the Town Basin of the boats, and some at Whangarei Falls.

It would have been nice to have had this lens a couple of weeks before at the Water Gardens. I have mostly used the 18-55mm kit lens that came with the camera and not only the extra reach of 200mm would have been nice, but this lens is of a higher quality than the kit lens and gives sharper cleaner looking pictures although you would not notice that on the smaller web sized photos.