The Landscape Images That Defined My 2025
Looking back on 2025, my photography naturally settled into two parallel threads. One followed my travels through New Zealand, making scenic images of the places that continue to draw me back — coastlines, mountains, rivers, and the changing light that defines them. The other stayed much closer to home, among trees wrapped in mist, where familiarity allowed me to slow down and respond more intuitively to what I was feeling as much as to what I was seeing.
Together, these two sets of images reflect how I worked this year: moving between exploration and familiarity, between describing place and expressing experience. Both approaches feel equally important to me, and together they form a quiet but honest record of the images I made in 2025.
Places That Stayed With Me
Looking back over the year, I’m struck by how each place I’ve visited has left its own quiet mark. From the deep valleys and high passes of the Routeburn Track to the volcanic shoulders of Taranaki, and from the rugged Wairarapa coast to the wild Tasman shoreline — every landscape offered something different, something to notice, something to carry home.
Travel has a way of sharpening awareness. New places reveal fresh possibilities, while familiar ones — like Te Mata Peak — continue to surprise with small changes in light, season, or mood. Whether standing before Castlepoint’s reef at dawn, watching the wind shape the dunes at Wharariki, or wandering through the forests of Fiordland and Taranaki, I found myself drawn again and again to moments that felt both fleeting and grounding.
This collection gathers the places that stayed with me through 2025 — photographs made in landscapes near and far, each shaped by its own character, its own rhythm, and its own kind of light.
Journey into the Wild – Routeburn Track, Mount Aspiring National Park
Rainbow at the Archway Islands - Wharariki Beach, Tasman Region.
Moss Ball - Fiordland
Reaching Goblin Arms - Taranaki
Star in the Park - Havelock North, Hawke's Bay
Unveiling the Maunga - Taranaki
Within Reach - Castlepoint, Wairarapa
Sunset Glow at Castlepoint - Wairarapa
Closer to Home: Trees in Mist
Some of my favourite moments making images this year were spent among trees wrapped in mist. All of these images were made in Hawke’s Bay, during slow-clearing mornings when the land reveals itself gradually as the sun begins to warm it. It is a kind of light that softens everything it touches, stripping the landscape back to its essentials — shape, gesture, tone, and the quiet spaces between them.
In mist, trees reveal something different. Their individual characters come forward, and at times the chaos of nature briefly resolves into order. Familiar places become unfamiliar again, and the ordinary begins to edge into the poetic.
The Shape of Silence - Hawke's Bay
Trees in Fog - Hawke's Bay
Swamp Cypress in Light - Lake Tutira, Hawke's Bay
Golden Reflection - Lake Tutira, Hawke's Bay
Horses and Trees above the Mist - Hawke's Bay
Layers of Stillness - Hawke's Bay
Green Anchor - Hawke's Bay
Trees in Foothill Fog - Hawke's Bay
Order in the Mist - Hawke's Bay
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