Ovens Natural Park

On June 4th, after Blue Rocks had only two hours earlier finished providing my second sustained encounter with Nova Scotia’s seacoast, Ovens Natural Park gave me a chance to spend two more hours engaging with the coast.

Below is a closer view of that visually yummy rockweed (probably Fucus vesiculosus, according to staff member Ana):

Oh, those upturned rock layers:

And look at this seaweed on what I take to be granite or something akin to granite:

Imagine replacing the symbol in “I ❤ You” with a closeup of this seaweed. Okay, so maybe the only person who’d ever want to do that is a phycologist or somebody cozying up to one.

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman

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Blue Rocks

On June 4th, the day after we visited Peggy’s Cove and had our first reckoning with the Nova Scotia coast, came another important coastal encounter at a place I’d likewise never heard of called Blue Rocks. There I found upended and eroded strata akin to those from 2017 on the other side of Canada in British Columbia’s Yoho National Park.

Here’s a better look at some of the sharp upended rocks and the patterns in them:

And here’s an even closer look:

That last view has entered the realm of abstraction, so here are three more abstractions from Blue Rocks:

The rock in the next-to-the-last image has a shape reminiscent of Vermont’s, don’t you think?

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman

Peggy’s Cove

6566: that’s the number of miles our trip odometer showed on the evening of June 16th when arrived back home on the 25th day of a long drive that had begun on May 23rd. The vacation was a combination of visits to family, friends, and scenic places in the northeastern United States and the Atlantic provinces in Canada.

On June 3rd, our hosts in Halifax, Nova Scotia*, took us to a site on the Atlantic Ocean called Peggy’s Cove. While most visitors probably go there to see the lighthouse, you’ll understand that I found my joy in the rocks and the water and the plants. Here are seven photographs from that encounter.

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman

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* Did you know that Nova Scotia is on Atlantic Time? That’s one hour later than Eastern Time. Except in airplanes to and from Europe, I’d never been in that time zone.

New Zealand: large and small projections

On March 6, 2017, we followed New Zealand’s State Highway 25 north through and beyond Thames on our way to Whitianga. In one place on the west side of the Coromandel Peninsula we saw this roughly conical rock projecting out of the shallow water in the Firth of Thames. Yes, that’s another pōhutukawa tree (Metrosideros excelsa) at the top of the rock. Elsewhere on the beach I looked down at contrastingly small projections wind-rippled up from the sand.

And look how another pōhutukawa projected out over the craggy rocks along the shore:

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman

New Zealand: crossing Cook Strait again

3:23 PM

A year ago today we sailed eastbound on the Interislander from South Island to North Island. I took the first photograph when the ferry was almost out of the Marlborough Sounds, and the second one four minutes later after the ship had entered Cook Strait.

3:27 PM

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman

New Zealand: Tunnel Beach

A year ago today we visited Tunnel Beach a little south of Dunedin. In addition to the man-made tunnel through the rock that allows people to walk to the side of the headland that’s shown above, weather and waves on the other side have created the natural tunnel shown below. Some good wave action was in evidence while we were there.

And look at the colors provided by minerals, mosses, and lichens in one of the shaded areas that was behind me when I took the first photograph:

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman

New Zealand: Stirling Point

A year and a day ago we reached the southern end of the South Island in a town called Bluff. At Stirling Point, which for my purposes should have been called Swirling Point, I watched the bull kelp (Durvillaea antarctica or D. poha) flowing in and out with the waves. Last year I showed one of the more than 270 (!) pictures I took of that. Here are a couple more. Because the kelp moved fairly rapidly in the water, I set my camera’s shutter speed to 1/640 of a second for closer pictures like the one below.

By the way: in addition to this New Zealand retrospective, you might enjoy scrolling back through the New Zealand series that appeared on the Fotohabitate blog in 2016. The text of each post there is in German first, followed by English, so you’ll be able to follow along. The photographs speak their own language.

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman