I’ve reached the end of the trail with the images from my trip to New Zealand and Oz. There may be odds and ends that I edit from time to time, but these pictures of Bink represent the last of the best. It makes me a little sad to wrap up this creative journey that started a year ago starting to plan the trip and ending now editing the last pictures. In between was a lot of hard work planning a New Zealand trip for 4 fun companions to eventually join more than 20 talented creative souls from OZ, Scotland, England, and the USA in Mission Beach, Australia. And though the sights were incredible, the unforgettable thing for me is the bounds of old friendships strengthened and the new friendships made, the unselfish sharing of talent by some amazing photographers and the intrepid spirit of the models as they climbed rocks and trees, waded in muddy pools, greeted the dawn in warm tropical breezes, balanced on logs, fought off swarms of jungle flies and wild killer birds. Of course all of this made smoother with the local lubricants of Toohey’s and Murder Point. I’ve never seen a 30 pack of beer before. 🙂
And in the end, I am blown away by all the incredible images I’ve created from the trip with the help of such talented, creative people. I felt like I was able to experiment with new technical aspects of photography – becoming a better photographer as well as new directions in editing that have expanded my creative abilities.
Well, Back to the final images. As you may notice, you don’t see Bink’s feet in any of these shots. As told before, the poor lass had cute her foot on some rocks and then had a crab bite her other foot and she could barely walk and needed to keep her shoes on. So we shot around her boots. In spite of all that she kept going as we hiked and limped up the Mt Kataloo trail on Dunk Island with me worrying if we should stop. We made it half way up the mountain not seeing many shooting sites until we came upon this massive tree, which I believe is a Banyan Tree. It was so huge it must have been 100’s of years old. Bink expertly used her famous green shawl to create some classic images complimenting the dark brown bark and green moss on the tree.