It’s a bumpy ride down to the base of the falls, but so beautiful and so worth it.  Unmissable.

I get to take in so much scenery on these little weekend adventures, it’s breathtaking sometimes, what you’ll find right on your own doorstep!

I can feel the light, fresh spray in the air from the falling water catching jagged rocks on its way to a sulphur blue pool beneath it.  It gently showers me and it feels so good.  Feels like freedom.

I rest my gaze on the most beautiful part of the picture, a small rock to the side of the main stream, which has made itself a main feature of the waterfall by just slightly interfering with the flow, sending a second stream smoothly off to one side of its parent.  As I close my eyes in its presence, I’m taken back to another time, just in the same way as a smell can suddenly throw you through some kind of doorway between times, like when you smell fresh cake batter and you can almost taste those times your grandmother used to hand you the dirty whisk as a treat while she put the uncooked cake into the oven.

But for me, it’s never about cake smells and grandmothers, for me it’s this feeling, the fresh air on my face and that little veil of water settling over me as I take in something nature has created, something I am lucky enough to see and to capture.  No one else in the entire world will ever see this moment in exactly this way and from exactly this perspective, so I quickly open my eyes again to capture it and I store it. Another beautiful memory.

This quiet, hidden gem out in the rocky hills of New Zealand has cast me back to a day spent in Zambia, many years ago, a day I can sadly only imagine the feeling of.  I have been imagining it for a long time, it looked divine, from a few thousand feet in the air, floating over the spray of the magnificent Victoria Falls.  The photos were surprisingly professional, considering they were taken by my juvenile predecessor, I was genuinely impressed!

But alas, I can only see them inside me, I never got to feel the spray, they were just uploaded to my memory when I took on the SD Card of that old Fujifilm… And what a good baby he was, bless him, he really, almost, could have been the real deal, if he had only had a detachable lens.  But it’s all over for him, and now it’s my turn, I have taken up the reins of this once in a lifetime trip, to boldly go, where, probably thousands of other cameras have been before me.  But I will endeavor to do this scenery justice, in honour of my dearly departed Fujifilm friend.  Rest his soul.

The New Camera

A contribution to the series “Observations of an Inanimate Object”