The long list of Antarctica blog posts means that what I’m up to at the moment will get pushed until later this year. Normally due to university this wouldn’t matter, but we spent a week in Canterbury in the South Island over Easter, and there’s photos that I’m too excited to wait to share! So now that we’re in the Antarctic proper with the Sunday blogs, I’ll continue to do the short mid-week posts with more recent events.

Tekapo is probably most known for the Church of the Good Shepherd, which has been photographed to death (well, maybe not to death, but it’s been done a lot). A few steps down the road is a gorgeous bronze statue of a Collie dog – the shepherd’s high-country companion that has a long history of herding flocks in the rugged terrain of the Mackenzie Country. I haven’t seen many photos of the Lake Tekapo collie statue, and the only ones I’ve seen have been during the day or around sunset.

Tekapo also boasts the darkest skies in New Zealand, but we arrived on the night of the full moon, which dimmed the stars considerably. It also happened to be the night of the lunar eclipse, so as the moon disappeared into shadow, Dad and I decided to photograph the Collie statue against the Milky Way. We packed up the big lenses after we’d finished shooting the moon, and set off with wide-angles and tripods to do a bit of light painting.

With the dim lights from the town bringing detail to the front of the statue, Dad assisted me in light-painting from behind to outline the profile of the dog. With a max aperture of f4 I had to push the shutter speed further than I would have liked – 25 seconds – which drew a little movement out of the stars. Still, the night skies in Tekapo are phenomenal – I’ve never seen anything quite like it. The stars are fiercely bright when the moon is obscured, and I’d love to be there on a new moon.

So there’s my Tekapo shot – not the historic church, but the dog looking skywards.