When I know the sunrise will be a good one I usually sneak out early from our household – especially in summer when the sun is rising at 5:30am. If it is during the school holidays then I will inevitably discover my eldest daughter Taya, dressed and ready to go with her own camera, waiting in the hallway.
She is fascinated by the magic of photography and joins me on lots of excursions around the coastline to shoot images for Dunedin Light. All the images in this week's edition are hers.
She used a Canon G12 to begin with, but that was sold with a dive housing and so she inherited a Canon Eos 1D MkIIN. Coupled with a 16-35mm f/2.8L series lens this combo weighs in at nearly 2kg – quite a handful for a seven-year-old.
She struggled under the weight of this hefty combination for several months – so it was no surprise that she wanted a tripod for her seventh birthday. She ended up taking over the family's Canon PowerShot G1 X – a miniature digital SLR perfect for her smaller hands.
But it's not the camera that makes these pictures so great – it's the perseverance to get to the locations and the ability to see the image and make it happen with the black box in your hands. It is always surprising to me to see the way she frames her images – we'll often be standing side-by-side but we nearly always see different things.
For her shot above of the city at dusk, I was using a tripod to keep my camera still for the long exposure – she used a concrete wall at Signal Hill and it adds something extra to the image.
What you can't see in her self-portrait shot below is that we had walked for 20 minutes in complete darkness with head torches on and had scrambled through thick shrub to get to this location. Her self-portrait and her shot of the harbour entrance are two of my favourites.
Whether you are a pro or a keen enthusiast photography is a life-long learning curve – it's a great, creative adventure to see your children embarking on.
See you at the beach ...
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