I really love art galleries, but people who take junk and turn it into a story steps it up for me. Add in Victorian-era machinery – steam trains, copper pipes, goggles and the clothing of the era combined with science fiction and you get Steampunk.

Oamaru, a coastal town south of Christchurch, is home to Steampunk HQ. The old waterworks has been transformed, with a Zeppelin above the gate, a steam train ready to launch into the sky out from and the inside crowded with robots, creatures from outer space, mishmash technology, surprising lights and sounds.

The backyard has all sorts of Steampunk machinery – bikes, trains, cranes and lots more.

It’s an amazing place to photograph, with high ISO and odd lighting inside, extreme contrast from dark subjects and a while building outside and some cramped spaces to make life difficult, but you’re almost guaranteed to get some memorable images.

We rented a flat via Air B&B for our one night in Oamaru, a pretty town on the NZ East Coast which happens to be the presumably self-proclaimed ‘Steampunk Capital of the World’.

I love Steampunk, the delightful mixture of Victorian technology with sci-fi, creating ray guns covered in brass tubes, astronauts wearing flying googles and steam trains powered by gas cylinders.

But that’s tomorrow, we arrived after Steampunk HQ was closed, so we ended up enjoying a very long twilight on the old industrial pier, waiting for the Blue Penguins to emerge from the ocean to climb into their little houses built be the locals.

They showed up after dark, which was a challenge to shoot…

After the earthquakes of 2010 and 2011 – the latter being the big one – Christchurch’s residents started the big clean up, but they left some interesting remnants of the disaster.

Their inventiveness came to the fore too, when many merchants and food sellers needed a place to trade in the devastated city, and the Re:Start project was created, a temporary shopping centre built from shipping containers.

Street art, blue skies and sculpture made for an interesting day being a travelling photographer.

The rain was coming down before dusk, the boring grey skies of the afternoon loading upon us as so often is the case in the Land of the Long White cloud.

But the rainfall broke up the clouds in time for a spectacular sunset, which i’ve captured here with the Olympus OM-D E-M5 mark II and the 7-14, 12-40 and 40-15mm f/2.8 PRO lenses.

The last two frames are crops from long exposures made after sunset.If you’d like more details on how I captured these images, leave a comment below.

OK, the plan is to shoot, write and post from the holiday. 

We’re reliving our past taking the kids with us to retrace our honeymoon in New Zealand, where we were 20 years ago. 

That first trip was on a motorcycle, this will be in hire cars, the first one I shot with a Bronica, this time it’s m4/3 and drone. All stills last time, lots of video this time. 

Here’s a scan of one of those giant transperencies from the first trip.