When I was recently in NZ on a photo trip and a holiday I spent a day walking along the Kepler Track whilst Suzanne went on a day trip to Doubtful Sound. We were staying at an Air BnB at Lake Manapouri overlooking the Waiau River. I wanted to spend a day ambling along  the Kepler Track just taking photos,  in contrast to my usual urban drifting; or taking the odd  quick snap whilst walking quickly and purposefully to reach  a specific destination by a certain time. 

On my previous visits to New Zealand I didn't have the camera equipment to make photographs when I was walking in the forest without using a tripod. I travel overseas without a tripod,  and so  all the photography on these photo trips had to be hand held.  Though the film in  my film cameras  was good enough to photograph hand held  in urban areas,  the dynamic range of film was too limited to allow me  to photograph  hand held in the deep shadows of a beech forest. 

The  Sony digital camera  --a Sony a7 R111---that I had  for  this  trip did have the capacity to enable me to photograph hand held in low light. I was working from experience here and here. So the technological  problem had been solved. 

On this trip I had both the time and the equipment to do  low light photography in a mountain beech forest. With two problems solved  it was all looking promising  as  I set out  from the  southern carpark at Lake Te Anau with lots of other  happy walkers. Unlike them,  I was going to do slow looking and close observation.  

What I  discovered  as  I was ambling on the path  through the green world of the mountain and red beech forest  towards  Brod Bay was the contrasty light---bright sunlight and deep shadow. With no cloud cover  the morning sun  was shining through the trees to the path I was walking along was bright and sunny. It was ideal for all those  walkers  doing the Kepler Track's 3 day walk and making it to Luxmore Hut for the first night of their walk but  tricky for me. 

 I  recalled this recent experience about the limits of digital, despite the camera's 15 stops of dynamic range.   I could not wait for the right light--eg., an overcast day-- as I only had that day.  I had to work within those contrasty conditions. So I had to photograph in as much open shade  with a minimum of sunlight as was possible.  

I walked so slowly that I never made it to Brod Bay--only to Dock Bay.  I sat on the shore of the lake  at Dock Bay to have my lunch, then I turned round and retraced my steps. I needed to meet Suzanne in the mid-afternoon  at a cafe in Lake  Manapouri when she had returned from her Doubtful Sound trip. I hoped that the sun had moved to the west enough for the sunlight to be no longer falling on the path on my  return walk.

This is slow art. This kind of close observation  could be done with an 8x10, if you lived in NZ, I mused. Is there such a thing as a slow art day I wondered?