On Saturday 5-9-09 I went hunting for street photos at the Viaduct Harbour in downtown Auckland, New Zealand (click here to view a map of this trip).
After getting off the train at Britomart (click here for photos of that most unusual railway station) I went over to the Ferry Building, which is a pile that was done in the Imperial Baroque style and completed in 1912:
Outside the Ferry Building I caught this lady unawares…
It’s times like that I’m grateful for a near-silent camera; she had no idea that I’d taken her photo, despite the fact that I was less than an arm’s length away. I’m almost certain that the book is in French. I then found this little girl who thought that dancing backwards was a great lark…
Next stop was the Viaduct Harbour, which is almost entirely enclosed and contains both working and pleasure boats. The main area has a promenade beside the water, a string of bars and restaurants beside the promenade, and above it all apartment buildings. Who would want to live in an apartment where the businesses below are pumping out music until the wee hours?
People parade on the promenade in unusual ways…
I’d arrived in the city about two hours before sunset – when the light starts to get good – and the sun was getting very low by the time I got to the Viaduct Harbour. This guy was at one of the bars, facing directly into the setting sun:
The colour of that photo is natural, and you too can get a similar effect in your photos by setting your camera’s white balance to Daylight (usually indicated by a sun symbol). If you were there at the time the scene wouldn’t have looked so strongly coloured because your brain knows what colour things really are and corrects colour casts so that you perceive things as they “should be”. When your camera’s white balance is set to auto it too will try to remove colour casts, so to capture the true colours of sunsets, street lighting, candle lit rooms and so on use the Daylight setting.
This kid enjoyed circling a tree but it would appear that he got his licence out of a cereal packet that very morning:
After the paternal tow truck rescued him he went looking for a wife…
…and the rejection left him feeling rather stunned…
Once the sun went down the photo opportunities dried up, so I went back to the Ferry Building and found these kids doing what kids do and trying to choose their gelato flavour (gelato is a type of icecream)…
I also spotted these teens doing what teens do and cruising around town in a pack…
That was enough hunting for one day, so I headed back to Britomart and found a train that would take me home…