Still Waters
There is a particular quality to inland water on a still morning. It holds the light differently from the sea, quieter and more contained, more willing to reflect whatever the sky and the land bring to it. These images are made at the edge of lakes and tarns, in the hour when the surface is barely moving and the world above it is still deciding what it wants to be. Sometimes the reflection is clear enough to read. Sometimes the mist arrives first and softens everything into something less certain. Both conditions belong here.
Autumn's Awakening | Lake Tūtira, Hawke's Bay
A Pair of Twins | Hawke's Bay
The Shape of Silence | Lake Tūtira, Hawke's Bay Region
Lake Tūtira is fifty minutes from home, and I photograph it a few times a year. On the right combination of cold night, still air, and early cloud, the water becomes something else entirely: a surface so flat and responsive that the trees along the shore seem to exist twice, once in the world and once below it. I keep coming back because that combination is unbeatable, and because when it arrives, it is brief enough that you feel genuinely fortunate to have been there.
Autumn at Lake Ohau | Canterbury
Golden Reflection | Lake Tūtira, Hawke's Bay
Afterglow | Lake Wakatipu, Otago
Still water has a quality that moving water doesn't, a kind of patience. It accepts whatever the light and the atmosphere bring to it without resistance. On a misty morning the reflections soften and lose their edges; on a clear cold dawn they sharpen into something almost architectural. Both conditions interest me, not as opposites but as points on the same scale of stillness, the water doing different things with the same basic instruction, which is simply to hold.
Pekapeka Calmness | Hawke’s Bay
Swamp Cypress in Light | Lake Tūtira, Hawke's Bay Region
Calm Obscurity | Otago
I find myself returning to lakes and wetlands in autumn more than any other season, partly for the colour but mostly for what the colour does to a reflection. The warm tones of a willow or a stand of poplars, doubled in the water below, produce something that feels slightly unreal, as though the lake is generating its own light from underneath. You know it is just physics, angles of incidence and the flatness of the surface. But knowing that doesn't make it any less worth getting up early for.
Golden Hour at the Pekapeka Wetlands | Hawke’s Bay
Ben Ohau | Canterbury
Remnants of Autumn | Lake Tūtira, Hawke's Bay
Connected Perspectives
BY LOCATION
Explore the geography and specific local horizons that provided the canvas for these works:
BY NARRATIVE
Read the stories into the 'why' behind the work — the method, personal reflections and the journey:
The Lake Was Still. Now It's on Your Wall.
These mornings don't repeat themselves. The mist lifts, the light shifts, the wind finds the surface, and the water returns to being just a lake. A selection of images from Still Waters is available as archival fine art prints, made to hold what the water was doing in that particular hour before the day arrived. If one of these mornings has stayed with you, it can stay with you properly.
