Lupins at Lake Tekapo
This is very first photo I took of the now-famous Lake Tekapo lupins and it’s become one of my personal favourites. It was taken in 2011, only a few years after I got started in landscape photography. While lupin photos were fairly popular back then, this was before the days of Instagram so they weren’t anywhere near as common as they are now.
So in late November 2011 I went on a 3-day landscape photography trip specifically to capture some lupin photos. When I arrived, I was disappointed to find that the area around the lake where the lupins usually were found (near the Church of the Good Shepherd) was looking pretty bare. Apparently they were a bit late in blooming that year, much to my annoyance!
Since the location I had planned wasn’t going to work, I had no choice but to look around and see if there were any other suitable locations. I drove towards Lake Alexandrina, and on the way I noticed a reasonably large patch of lupins not far from the road. I stopped the car and jumped out to explore the location.
These lupins also hadn’t fully bloomed yet and were quite patchy in places, but luckily I found one group that looked quite good. I set up my tripod amongst the lupins and used my wide angle lens to make them look as dramatic as possible. I did this by getting really close to them, with the camera as high as possible and pointing down to maximise the wide angle distortion. This gave them an appearance of ‘fanning out’ which I really liked.
One problem I had to deal with was the wind. It was blowing the lupins around like crazy so it was quite hard getting a shot where they weren’t blurry. In hindsight, I could’ve bumped up my ISO more and used a faster shutter speed, but with the camera I was using back then, I was a bit concerned about the amount of noise that would result in. Luckily I managed to get this shot in between the gusts of wind.
At the time, I wasn’t crazy about the shot when seeing it on the camera’s LCD. It was okay, but I wanted a more dramatic sunset than I got. However once I got home and processed the photo on my computer, I ended up really liking it. In the years since then, I’ve made many trips back to Lake Tekapo and have gotten many more lupin photos, some with amazing light and colourful skies, but this one remains my favourite.
Technical details: ISO 200, f/11, 11mm, 1/10sec, 3-stop graduated ND filter
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