Inside Macraes Mine

Take the road known as the Pig Root inland from Palmerston and you'll find yourself approaching a tiny township known as Dunback. Climb Dunback Hill to the southwest and you'll find yourself in as pretty a piece of high country as you'll find. I found myself in a perfect ten minute window up here when the wind dropped and the sun warmed my shoulders. Tussocks whispered. A fleeting, perfect moment, there and then gone. A singularity in a universe of time.

Continue along Macraes Road and you'll find the landscape transformed.



Over the last 24 or so years, kilotons of Ammonium nitrate explosive and millions of dollars of heavy machinery have created the massive network of pits and shafts that make up Oceana Gold's Macraes mine.



To say it's big is a ridiculous understatement.  You just can't get it from the road and you still don't get how large the operation is from the public viewing platform.  You can only start to get your head around how big it all is when you enter the mine as I did, to take some pictures of the big Hitachi EX3600 digger for a client a few weeks back.



Once I got the shots I needed, I was lucky to be taken on a brief tour by my minder.  It was mind blowing. The scale of the place is massive, and you only just comprehend it when you get up close to the machinery.  This is the Caterpillar 789D, a 78 litre turbo diesel truck with a 2,000 litre fuel tank and 200 tonne carrying capacity.





The Macraes mine operates around the clock, blasting, digging and hauling rock, to dump the waste in terraced mountain ranges.  The gold is extracted from the rock in a chemical process using cyanide. This is the processing plant, sitting among massive man-made terraces of spoil:



Of course the deep pits will fill with water if allowed to, so it's pumped out, and along with some of the waste from the extraction process, forms shallow lakes in this strange sculpted landscape.



I have to admit I had mixed reactions to all of this. My first was the Tonka Toy boy's thing. Excitement about being around these great machines and the works of man. Then of course, a kind of despair at what had been done to the land here in such a short space of time. But then I discovered there had been mining in this spot for well over 100 years.  Keep taking the road past the processing plant and you come to a delightful little historic reserve known as Golden Point.  You can see the vapours from the nearby plant up on the hill above.



From 1891 to 1936, 70,000 tons of scheelite (tungsten ore) and 13,000 ounces of gold were taken from Golden Point. Compare that to the approximate 500oz Oceana Gold gets from 14,250 ton of ore every day.


The workers lived on site, in a collection of sod cottages and other dwellings. The process of mining wasn't too dissimilar to that of today. The ore was blasted and hauled out from shafts, water was piped in to drive stamping batteries, and the gold was extracted by the same chemical process from the crushed rock.

 

Because of the ore types and extractive methods used, plenty of New Zealand's old gold mining areas have water contamination issues... sometimes mercury, sometimes cyanide.  They're great places to visit, but you should be careful about drinking the water.














Will Macraes be as delightful in 100 years time?  They are undertaking landforming works with the spoil, but I have to say for now the terraced earth sculptures look odd in the otherwise folded landscape. Maybe that will improve with more vegetation. I just hope the groundwater is protected from contamination.  This is the catchment for the Shag river. Economy versus environment... same old battle.  How much of our environment are we willing to modify to maintain our standard of living?  The only thing that's certain is that one day, many, many years from now, no matter what we do, the earth will recover. But in all likelihood, we'll be gone. The planet sustains us, but like the trilobites and the ammonites and the dinosaurs, it doesn't care about us. It just moves on. And one day, just like all of us, it too will be gone. Another singularity in an infinite universe.

Shooting in the Gold Mine.

As promised, here's a little more on my shoot at a gold mine.  Oceana Gold's open cast mine at Macraes flat, to be more precise.  They do have underground mines on site too, but this combined stills and video shoot was for my client West-Trak, who were looking for a calendar photo of the Hitachi EX3600 digger and bucket they supply.

The ground at Macraes is hard, quartz-bearing schist, and wears those buckets down quickly, as my guide told me. That hasn't stopped them gouging out a series of massive pits up at Macraes, returning thousands of kilos of gold over the last 23 or so years.

When there's a little more time I'll share more of the story of my visit. Meanwhile, here's a little BTS video for you to enjoy.

Catching up on work

It has been so long since I posted a regular entry here, I thought it was time I just caught up on what I've been up to in the meantime.

Work! And plenty of it.

Lots of the work has been for my tourism video business, Destination Content, mostly shooting video or stills in Queensland Australia. But there have been some little stills projects back home to keep me busy. For instance...

...a motel shoot, where I had fun mixing light temperature and size of my sources for the interiors...

























...a straightforward showroom shoot at an industrial supplier. The challenge with these shoots is to make Kiwi blokes relax in front of camera without every man displaying folded arms and double chins...




...a great little excursion to Stewart Island. More on that to come...




...my first set of prescription glasses, just in time for a portrait session with a local CEO. Wearing glasses to see close up stuff is a pain, but like I say, growing old ain't for sissies...




...a trip to Brisbane to shoot stills and video for a boutique hotel opening...




...an epic road trip and air trip around Queensland, shooting video of 13 golf resorts for Chinese audiences. Sounds fun, but becomes kind a gruelling when you factor in the 12-hour notice I had of doing the shoot, the daily travel, a 110 km/h tyre blowout on a busy motorway, arm injuries and a bit of emergency treatment of a tooth abscess before flying to a resort island...






...a great little crew though, and we had some laughs among it all...




...some shooting for local government candidates, including the incumbent Mayor Dave Cull, and Mrs C herself.  She's one of my favourite subjects but also my harshest critic when it comes to her portraits...




...and another little truck shoot.  Fun getting real Kiwi blokes to model again...

...especially when I tell them it has to be topless.

So there. Lots of action and variety. Not ignoring you dear audience, just busy.  I could go into detail on any of these shoots, but won't, there's too much more to get on with, including helping to teach a new generation of photogs studying at SIT.  If you do have any questions though, I'm happy to answer them.


Coming up?  A visit to a gold mine.  Hope to tell that story in a little more detail soon.

The Light Thief II

Carrying on from my last entry - I'd decided to mask my identity in my conceptual picture with light. It made perfect sense, I'm so into my lighting, and it dawned on me that if I do some more with this character, the light and his adventure with it is what it's all about. After all, that's what this blog has been.  I thought I'd started without a firm theme for this shot, but I'm starting to think that there was actually a well-formed plan sitting in my subconscious all along, waiting for me to peel away at my thoughts by just acting until it emerged.

Back to the execution. The idea was to overexpose my face with a cleverly placed flash.  But where?  That part was easy, inside the prop I'd intended to use, a much-loved old briefcase.



Then it was just a matter of trying out various poses.




As the winter afternoon wore on, I had to be mindful to keep my ambient exposure right, so I crept the shutter speed down a stop or two by the time I had finished. Condensation from my breath also started showing up in the flash. I would have liked to have played with it some more, but since I really couldn't see it, it was impossible to work with. I'd originally thought about a smoke machine or bomb inside the bunker for extra effect, but was happy enough with the flare I'd got in the earlier exposures.  Posing done, it was time to go home, pick the shots I liked and work a little Photoshop magic.



And there he is, the light thief. I think he must have found a place where that amazing energy is abundant, and came back here with a bag full of it.

This feels like the start of a story, a journey. The more I look at him, the more I wonder what he'll get up to next. Is the light safe? Is it a force for good or bad?  I don't know yet, but I'm sure my subconscious does, and gradually, it's going to let me know. I can't wait to see where it takes me.

The Light Thief

Ever feel the need to stretch  yourself creatively?  I've had that bug for a while now, feeling far too comfortable in my skill set, doing mostly pictorial work, even for fun. So I decided it was time I got of my arse and did something a little more conceptual. I'll admit what helped was seeing a Creative Live webinar presented by fine art photographer Brooke Shaden.

I've had a bunch of ideas floating around in my head waiting for me to do something with them, and watching Brooke at work made me just mash them together, shake them up and see what fell out. Not exactly the theme-driven approach Brooke uses, but when I realised it could actually make an interesting picture, I couldn't wait to execute it. 

The first element I wanted to use was my location: This bunker-like concrete structure in Leith Valley. I've lit the interior before, and it seemed to me like a portal to someplace elemental, like the lift from Hell.

See what I mean?

The next step was to add some more light for the effect I wanted to create, like the thing really was a portal to another dimension. The idea was that I could layer these in photoshop later for just the right effect.

Next came a character and a model to portray them.  This was a spur of the moment project so...

...I got into costume.  Thank goodness that's the old suit I use for gigging with my band. I got covered in mud by the time I was done. Just taking a test pop with my wireless remote in hand here.

Like Brooke Shaden, I wanted my character to be anonymous. Brooke often uses uses hair to mask her character faces - originally because like me, she didn't use models other than herself for a while. As you can see, I'm not your Fabio flowing locks type, although I'll admit that in the 90's, I had a ponytail for about 15 seconds.

I was really challenged as to how to hide my face with something that wouldn't hijack the picture.  I thought about using foreground foliage, but that didn't seem right.  Sunglasses?  Too Blues Brothers. I'd already struck out, looking for an appropriate brimmed hat in the Op shops around town. Mask? Too Zorro. Blindfold? Too loaded.

Then I struck on it. One of the elements floating around in my head would do, something central to a lot of my work. It would really transform my shot into something intriguing, a story.  It was so...me.

I would make myself anonymous with light.

More in due course.

Brand New Website

Thanks to some fine work from James Hacon of Destination Content and Ian Simpson of The Logic Studio, I'm pleased to announce that my new website is up and open for business!

Clive Copeman Photography.

Do visit me there. I welcome your comments and feedback.

Interpreting Reality

With photography, I don't ever claim to capture reality. Instead I interpret it. I'm presenting to you what I see in the scene before me - and sometimes, what I want to see. The degree of manipulation that goes into making photographs has been the subject of debate ever since its origins. I'm on the side that says the minute you decide where to point your camera, you've started editing the wide reality before you.

So here's an example from the other night when I went out to shoot the aurora.  I drove up to a dark, south-facing spot on the Otago Peninsula and as soon as I turned my truck lights off, this is pretty much what I saw:



Darkness. Not the most impressive aurora, just a barely discernible green glow above the cloud on the horizon but I knew my camera would reveal more with a longer exposure. Here's a stitched panoramic shot of the scene with the aperture wide and about a 30 second exposure:



There was a very red moon out that night, providing just enough detail on the ground to give a little foreground interest and depth to the picture. But I'm not happy with it. In my head, the sky was much more blue, there was more ground detail and contrast. So I wanted to apply a bunch of global adjustments in Lightroom: Saturation and vibrance, sauturation in the blues and aquas, clarity and lighter shadows.

Then I added a few local adjustments on the ground: mainly more clarity and contrast - until I arrived at something more like the picture I had in my head:



Not reality, but my interpretation of it.

Last week, interpreting the scene really helped dig me out of an embarrassing hole. I did a quick commercial shoot in a business. All was well back in the office until I realised in my key shot, I'd positioned myself where an unfortunate piece of foreground material appeared prominently in the crotch of one of my subjects. I won't show you the picture. I'll just say Photoshop's content aware fill and some painstaking cloning came to the rescue. The client thought the pictures were great.

I don't mind admitting I'm not perfect. But I try to make my pictures a perfect representation of what's in my head.