After the insets about skydiving and the Kaka, here comes a real article again! We are back in Auckland. During the last days, my macro lense has really proven what it's worth.

From Whatuwhiwhi (landmark A), we drove to Kaihu (landmark B), while the weather became more and more rainy. We certainly did several hikes and other activities, but this article will mainly be about macros and fauna shots (in every article so far I ommitted lots of stuff in order to straighten things and keep everything readable).

In Kaihu, we had quite a bit drizzle, which enabled very nice waterdrop macros on plants.

From Kaihu, we drove to Orewa (landmark C), where we stayed for several nights (this is also the town where the skydiving guys got me). We drove to Auckland several times, for instance to visit a nice sea life centre including an antarctic world with king penguins. This enabled some nice tele shots of penguins, as well as nice macros from sea life (however, it is the worst situation you can get in photography, lack of light and macros of moving objects, and aditionally, one wants to keep the aperture reasonably low to get crisp photos).

Tonight, we will be sleeping in Auckland (landmark D), and just for fun visited a butterfly farm! From the macro perspective, this was one of the definite highlights of the trip. I am really looking forward to putting those photos in lightroom . Among the butterflies, there was also the largest of all moths, an Atlas Moth (the one with the cellphone in the same picture, and the strong feathered antennae in one of the next pictures). Among this moth are several interesting things, one of them being that it is not able to eat, which limits its life to two weeks (see Wikipedia for details).

Tomorrow, we are going to take off heading for South Korea, where we will stay for one night – the day after, we will fly to Frankfurt again.

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