2017 was an absolutely awful year in my photographic journey, and I have a hard time identifying why. However there are only 15, count 'em, FIFTEEN days which had photo galleries. 15 out of 365.
More than half of those days were from a week and a bit long trip to New Zealand's South Island, specifically Canterbury and Queenstown. For some reason that trip never came into focus. I had planned it so that we were never short of things to do but it never felt like it "gelled", even before one of us (not me) slipped down an icy slope at Queenstown resulting in her cracking her ankle as well as my 12-40 Pro lens which was on the E-M1 which she was carrying at the time. Leaving that aside, there are a lot of things that happened on the trip that were memorable and enjoyable, but something about it seemed a little "off"... probably like the whole of 2017, which is why I didn't so much have a photographic journey as a photographic pit stop that year.
(Edit 22 December 2022: Er, so I thought at the time. I bought a new PC in early 2018 and naturally backed up its contents. Exceeeeepppt... I never got around to restoring most of the 2017 photos to the primary working drives of the new system. That is, until today when I was looking for a specific photo, couldn't find it, searched the system, and... oh, there it is on the backup drive, along with a bunch of other 2017 folders. Ooops. So it looks like I actually shot for about 40 or 50 days that year, excluding phone photos. Not GOOD... but not as bad as I thought.)
The 40D was already entombed in one of my camera bags, and to the best of my knowledge has not been used since. All of my legacy Canon lenses had been sent on long term loan to a friend who also has a 40D (which is still in use at the time of writing in 2022), and the E-P1 was in the same bag and only remembered as "Oh yeah, I used to have one of them, didn't I?" when I look at a gallery like this one. The 12-40 was repaired later that year and went back into service with my E-M1... well, when I finally got out of my photo funk.
This is a shot from the second last day of our trip, showing the historic steamship TSS Earnslaw (built 1912) which runs cruises on Lake Wakatipu. I do have some shots which are far more zoomed in and which show the Earnslaw more clearly, but I'll leave those for a future Queenstown gallery. I chose this one because I wanted to show the steamer in the context of its lake, with the late afternoon sun hitting the snow capped Cecil Peak in the background.
The shot was taken from Queenstown Beach (conveniently located at the bottom of the street containing our hotel), where seagulls flock to raid whatever food they can from the tourists. (Or from locals; they aren't fussy.) A flock of them had just taken off as I took this shot, and I wanted to include them as well since they're part of the environment here.
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