harbour bridge bungy jump

tuesday night there was an amazing lunar eclipse. we got to see it perfectly outside our flat.
i told a guy what the difference between a lunar a solar eclipse were (because he was saying it turns green and thats so wrong)..he looked dumbfounded. i also don't think he really cared to know these little facts either.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/4168299a11.html

thursday jessica, davis, duga and i went bungy jumping for dugas birthday.
scariest thing and most exciting thing i've ever done in my whole life. it was seriously AMAZING!
the jump is around 45 meters and the walk under the bridge was pretty spectacular.


i was scared for my life at this point.


halfway down i thought this is the stupidest thing i've ever done. then i hit the water and came up thinking why is my face salty. it happened so fast it didn't register what just happened.


we got a dvd of all our jumps which i'm prolly going to send into america's funniest videos because of jessicas jump. i think we watched hers over 5 times that night and it gets better every time. i can't even describe the piss your pants laughter of it all. i just wish they had the video of her face and not just the bloody screams followed by "just let me go!" ..oh and i should prolly meantion she got completely submerged and got a sweet black eye from it all to. but shes recovered so no worries. she is still accepting sympathy cards however..
i can't wait for everyone to see.

oh how technology blows

so i upgrade my system to tiger x this weekend. in the mean time it seriously messed something up with all my current programs and i had to in turn erase the harddisk and re-install. prolly cause i don't ever read the fine print. story of my life. well i lost all my software. my entire adobe cs2 suite, my vid edit pro express crap, corel paint, word, i could go one. but it just makes me feel worse.
life is shitty in the computer world. considering my laptop is my life and where i do my lifes work. ya i know. maybe i should get a life outside the computer screen...just felt like a little complaining would do me some good. so bare with me.
in other news. i can't remember my name or password for flickr. cause my computer logged me in automatically for so long that the login has just slipped from my memory. guess i'll just start a new one. i'll keep you all updated on that.

i miss everyone terribly.

moi weekend

not much has been going on. jessica and i have been being bums for the most part.
this weekend was pretty crap. real rainy and extreme wind to the max. so we didn't get to take the ferryboat to the island we wanted.

i drove for the first time friday. don't even know how to describe it. a complete and udder mind fuck, just cause everything is opposite and all. even the turn signal and windshield wiper things are opposite. so i go to turn on the blinker and the windshield wipers start. its quite amusing. but i'm catching on fast. just have to get used to driving our big boat of a car we call "Amilo."

saturday we (jessica, lena, and i) went to victoria market. they had a lot of touristy things and homemade goods. jessica got donuts. cause thats what she's good at. ;)

sunday i went to church to jessica, davis, and ben. it was pretty amazing. they put on a whole production. its was like being at a concert. all really good until this lady sat down in front of us who was literally methed out or at least something apparently seriously wrong going on with her. don't even know where to begin to describe that one. it was just obnoxious everything she did and you could barley even pay attention to the sermon because she was putting on her own one act show. but she kept giving davis the "eye." so that was good for some laughs.
then we went to lunch...where they forgot about are order. so it took twice as long. i got some carrot cake so that cures just about any impatientness.
then we went to the zoo! and i saw sealions! and i got to watch them swim through a glass window underneath the tank! then i was like, "okay guys we can go. saw the seals..time to go home." ya they were super cuties!

other then that the zoo is your usual zoo but this one just so happens to be in new zealand. i saw an elphanet pee for like 2 minutes straight. long enough for me to grab my camera out of my purse, turn it on, select the settings, and then take three pictures before it stopped. prolly the highlight of my day. oh wait or was that the meth lady in church. hard one..

today i went back to my brunette roots. i missed my brown and was ready for the red to get lost. however i was sporting some sweet trailer trash roots in previous weeks. ya it was getting pretty bad and something had to be done.

i made curry chicken tonight mom. in honor of you. it was delicious and i will fed-x you some tomorrow.

WHANGAREI

Bay of Islands. Scratch that.
Whangarei will do.

This weekend we planned a little outing with Lena, Julianne, Jessica and I. We were headed north to Bay of Islands. We stopped at Snells Beach just on the skirts of Warkworth. The beach was covered in seashells..and the usual squawking seagull family. Nice though. Very nice..

Then we headed to Whangarei. Found a hostel with a beauty of a view and grabbed some Chinese takeaway and a couple bottles of wine to finish the night.
In the morning we drove to the Whangarei waterfalls. WOW! That’s all I got to say for that one. The pictures do no justice. Actually half the pictures I take do no justice to the real thing. Its like I can capture what I see, and it can be the most beautiful picture of whatever the scene. But to me, it shows no comparison to what it appears in real life. Its funny how that works. Even with the best camera I don’t think it could happen.

After the falls we headed out of town to Bay of Islands. Got about 30 minutes out with hrm. Smoke starts steaming out the hood of the car. Yep. “Shit” is right. The car dies and we are stranded on the side of the road with a few cows on one side and speeding cars on the other. People here don’t care if your hazards are on and your car is halfway on the road. They just keep speeding on ward.
A nice old man stopped to see if we were all right. He called his tow friend who used to be a mechanic and that’s when Roy came to the rescue. Roy shows up in the tow truck. A man of 60+ wearing some short shorts with socks pulled up and boots. Oh and a nice black sweater. It was classic. Pretty much what I live for.

Roy looked the engine over and well. Bad news. What I figured, but just didn’t want to say.
[Mom I’m turning into you. At least that’s what it felt like in this situation. I, out of the four of us girls was the only one that could make since of what was wrong with the engine. Too bad I didn’t know how to fix it, that’s when I wish you were with us.]
The damage was either fix the engine for over two grand or buy a new engine for $1500. I’ll cut the story short because the rest consists of hours of discussion to figure out what to do and well. Roy finally just saying “how bout I just charge you $100 for the tow and I take the car back to my farm myself.” He had a deal and we all got to have our first bus ride back to Auckland. But I should add that the whole way back into town in the tow truck, we saw like 5 or a dozen rainbows. We were just like you’ve got to be kidding me. Alls well that ends well I guess.


Now if anyone wants to contribute to the Samantha New Zealand fund that would be great.

NEW PLYMOUTH

The whole way down to New Plymouth was rainy and just a crap of a day. But leave it up to New Zealand to turn a bad day into something pretty. Half the drive down we were driving into a rainbow. Then I saw the end of the rainbow at one point, so AMAZING.
The drive was comparable to driving to beaver lake or in the mountains of Colorado with all the windy roads and the edge of the cliffs just meters from the car. With Ryan behind the wheel and my hands on the “oh shit” handle with eyes closed. Yep. That pretty much describes the roads to put it more clearly.
Once we got through the “oh shit” part of the high way the road turned into a drive along the coast. Let me just say, if I was sheep. I would be a sheep along North Taranaki Bight (the coast of the Tasman Sea). It was literally ocean, rolling green hills with sheep and little farmhouses with million dollar views, high way and then more rolling green hills on the other side. I can’t even begin to describe it, its just one of those things you had to see for yourself. We ended in New Plymouth in the afternoon. Stopped at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery to see an exhibition of photographic works then settled in at our motel.
We got an early start in the morning. Headed south along the coast to Wanganui where we went to another photography gallery. This gallery is the only curated photography studio in New Zealand. They had work up by Ans Westra. A Dutch photographer who came to NZ and photographed the maori people. We didn’t stay long in Wanganui, just enough to drive up to another gallery. Then headed back to New Plymouth. Sue and I got into town just in time to catch the last of the sunset on the coast, truly breathtaking.
Woke up bright and early the next morning to watch the sunrise on Mt. Taranaki. Now that is a sight. Then we drove to the coast to watch the sun peak over the water.

Our drive back was nice. Sue had driven her own car, so I rode with her. We left earlier than the others so we could stop along the way and take more pictures. We ended up at Urenui Beach. It’s a black sand beach that looks over the Tasman Sea.
Little fact: the West coast line of New Zealand is black sand and the East coast line of New Zealand is white sand. Sue says that if you grow up on the white sand beaches you don’t like the black sand and vice versa. I’m just happy to be at the beach and not a corn field.

party time

Friday night there was a cowboy and indians theme party at one of the flats in our village. I dressed as a pirate because in my opinion pirates are cooler than any cowboy or indian.

Saturday Jessica, Lena, and I took Julianne to dinner for her birthday. We ate at this yummy italian style restaurant in the city. After we went to Bar 3 at the Sky Tower for dancing and drinks.
The Sky Tower is so pretty lit up at night.


Today I'm leaving for New Plymouth with ten of the photography kids. Three days and two nights. New Plymouth I've heard is very mountainous and naturey. It will be nice to just get out of Auckland for a few days and see a bit of the country side.

studio class

You should know this about me.
I write from the heart.
Photography is an overwhelming passion to me.
To give it any other explanation would be a nightmare to explain.
I love what I do..and that’s enough in it self.

I got a couple books at the library today. I love finding photography books that inspire me. I have to do research for my studio class, well actually all my design classes. Everything is very conceptual here. Every thing you do, every photograph, painting, film I were to turn in has to have an explanation of why? To examine why I did what I did. It makes perfect since in my opinion. And I wish it were required back at UCM so people wouldn’t just turn in piles of crap. Allowing yourself to form an idea, research it to the extend that it develops into your own vision and then to actually create it...In my opinion, it gives whatever I do a deeper meaning and portrays a real truth and not just a pile of crap with no meaning.
I guess to simplify it, my final project for studio will be graded on ..
Analysis – the quality of the initial problem and how you advance it (the solution).
Exploration – media play and how different things play off of each other.
Research – other practitioners who are working in similar or interesting ways.
Synthesis – how to bring it all together. The end result.
Communication – how does it reach its audience? How effective is it?
I also have to keep what they call a “process diary” but what I like to just call a personal journal. But the journal is also part of the grade.
I haven’t had to do something like this since AP art in high school. That’s really what all this reminds me of. So I thank you Mrs. Berry because without you and the amazing art department our school had, I would literally be clueless of how to even begin.

To give you an idea of my studio class during the week and what it pertains to...Mondays all the photography students and teachers meet at 9 am for a brief meeting. (This meeting is all the 2nd, 3rd, 4th year photo students and the three teachers for each other those years. There's around 30 of us.) The next 30 minutes is usually just spend going over events coming up, contests, and having a chance for the students to get questions asked and to talk about whatever. Its actually a really cool idea. Then we all break off and start our separate classes.
I'm a 3rd year and my class is the usual, all girls and one lone boy. Funny how photography is becoming consumed by the whole female race. We talk and discuss what we'll do for the week, then we break for coffee (my favorite part), and join back up in the studio and work on whatever. Right now it is still lives. So this monday we worked with large format cameras shooting Polaroid's of whatever we had brought in. For me its all a review from studio illustrations but I get an extra thrill of working with the large format camera again and shooting instant Polaroid's (i know jessie knows what I'm talking about here). Its all very exciting to someone like myself..
Tuesdays are spent meeting with any of the teachers to talk about how we are coming along on our research and our final project. They're called tutorials and are usually optional. So its pretty much a free/work day for me.
Thursday is spent in our group again. Bringing in what we are working on at the current moment and just being able to discuss it with the class. It nice to have an outside view point, especially when your mind comes to a halt sometimes.