Maniototo Skies

The Maniototo is a wide open plain in the South Island of New Zealand. It sits at the same latitude as Queenstown, and is half way from there to the eastern coast of the island. In the late 1800s it went through a gold rush with towns such as St Bathans and Naseby being established alongside an increasingly sluiced landscape. Today the Maniototo is known for its agriculture, with merino sheep roaming the high country a stereotypical scene.

Bounding the Maniototo plain are numerous mountain ranges. To the south are major north-south valley-bounding ranges – the Rock and Pillar, Rough Ridge, and Raggedy Range. If you’re a fan of the Lord of the Rings Films, this is Rohan country. Jagged schist boulders sit in fields of grass and golden tussock. In summer this tussock has a radiant look. In winter it sits beneath snow.

The northern edge of the Maniototo is bordered by several more ranges – the Kakanuis, Ida Range, and Hawkdun Range. These northern ranges stand iconic. No endemic trees or scrub grow on them, only grass and tussock, so every ridge and feature gets revealed when the light dips low. The western boundary of the Maniototo is kept by the Dunstan Mountains and St Bathans Range.

The Otago Central Railway once ran from the east coast port of Dunedin through the Maniototo into Central Otago as far as Cromwell. The first section of the line opened in 1901, and the last section was ripped up in 1990. Today, the old path of the railway has been converted into a track for walking and cycling. Dotted about the Maniototo are signs of its history. Kokonga, once a railway town, is now nothing more than a couple of houses and a church. After the railway line was removed, the Kokonga Station building was moved to the foot of Mt Buster to act as a hut for farmers and trampers.

I find the skies in the Maniototo magical – they feel large, vast, and there’s a deepness to them. Perhaps it’s something to do with the clear air and geography of the flat plain surrounded by mountain ranges. On this trip I wanted to capture that scale of the sky in my photography. When it comes to lenses, I dislike shooting landscapes with anything wider than a 35mm due to the distortion it brings to elements in the frame. Perhaps mental gymnastics, but I thought square format would allow me to capture more of the sky while preserving a normal horizontal angle of view. The Hasselblad 501cm with its standard 80mm lens (~40mm in full frame equivalent) was the primary tool for this trip. On close up shots like the Kokonga Hut above I switched to a wider lens on the same camera.

I’ve shot with square format for about a year and am finding the change in aspect ratio challenging and freeing. Challenging, because I enjoy wide landscape vistas in a panoramic format. It’s my default to compose in 3:2 and crop to a wider image. The title image of this post shows one of these vistas that I’d otherwise shoot panoramic. Indeed I did take a series of three images to stitch in post later, but the film gods disapproved because when I saw the negatives it looked like the film somehow wasn’t sitting flat during exposure. On the other hand, square format is freeing because I can make photographs like below. That amount of sky is needed to balance the image. Who cares that the horizon line is nearly half way up the frame — it’s what makes it work.

Peak summer in the more remote parts of the Maniototo means a golden foreground. Whether bolted grass or tussocks on the ranges. It’s the perfect shade to complement the blue skies. The question on whether to shoot black and white or colour never occurred to me. I chose Portra 400 because of the dynamic range and speed needed to shoot handheld.

After sunset the mood changes. The details in the mountains are no longer as visible and they fade as a major element of the photograph. Likewise the grass has lost its luminescence and the scene takes a more sombre tone.

See more photographs from that trip on my blog: Hawkdun Sunset and Maniototo Landscapes.

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