January 19, 2011

The Kepler Track is one of New Zealand’s “great walks”. I’ve put “great walks” in quotes only because that’s what they call them, not because they aren’t great. They are great. The Kepler starts off meekly in Te Anau, meanders for a bit around the absolutely huge lake of the same name, then suddenly gets serious by pushing uphill to the grassy tops above the tree-line, where it stays for the next day or so, admiring the misty mountains, before plunging once again into the cool embrace of the beech forest, which is full of ferns and moss and clear rivers and all the other good things that only a yearly rainfall measured in metres provides.

This trip away from Canberra saw my pack more full than usual and I was forced to make a hard decision on leaving – to only take one lens. The choice of which lens to take was made a lot easier by the fact that the 50mm 1.4 is so small, so that’s the one that came with me. Canon’s 50mm 1.4 really is a gorgeous lens – it’s super sharp and fast, and I enjoyed the challenge of having only a fixed lens. These photos are therefore all taken using a 50mm fixed lens, with no cropping allowed. As an aside, there was a minor kerfuffle when the check-in lady at Air NZ asked casually if she could please sniff my camping stove. After getting over the unusual request it took me a good few minutes of digging to bring it out from the depths of my bulging bag, after which the stove passed the sniff test and was allowed back into the protesting backpack. My point is that I really was low on space, and that you’d better not go travelling with a smelly stove.