New Zealand: Lake Matheson
Lake Matheson is a photographers dream. Without any real evidence I am willing to wager that it is one of the top three most photographed locations in the whole of the country.
Famous for its perfect reflections of mount cook framed by the surrounding trees and vegetation it is THE picture postcard shot of New Zealand.
Located about a 10 minute drive from where we were staying in Fox Glacier, it is really easy to access. The lake itself can be circumnavigated by walking track in around an hour and there are a few lookout points along the way from which to take in some of the areas outstanding beauty.
We had a couple of opportunities to head out to the lake for sunset and on the particular occasion that these shots were taken it had remained clear-skied for most of the day but as was the pattern during our 3 days in Fox, the clouds started rolling in just when we wanted to grab some views of mount cook bathed in the light from the setting sun. However the whole scene was just so magical we were only slightly disappointed that the very tip of the mountain was hidden from view.
The conditions do have to be just right and we got very lucky with how still the air went which kept the lake nice and calm letting those reflections really come through. I later learned that one of the factors in how reflective a lake like this is, is how dark the water is. It seems counter-intuitive to me and I can’t re-produce the scientific reasons for it here, but rest assured that a dark and murky lake will give much better reflections than a clean and clear one.
The shot above is taken from the same lookout as the first, but is just zoomed in a bit to really fill the frame. You can see a few ripples in the water in this image which help to demonstrate that the reflections are not some camera trickery with long exposures to flatten the water out – it really was this calm!
This third shot was taken from a lookout slightly further along the track, which ascends slightly to a higher vantage point than the previous. I like how the trees in the top and bottom of the photo really frame the scene and how the angles and lines of the shoreline add a bit of dimension. The light changes so quickly and so this image is not quite as golden as the last two, but I’ll make up for that with the last photo now…
I took this last photo from the car park at Lake Matheson just as the sun disappeared over the distant hills. We were back to the campervan by this point as the sun had become too low in the sky to give us the light we wanted on our lake shots, even though it was still casting this warm haze across the landscape which was out of sight from our lake viewpoints. We were sat in the van, preparing to drive back to camp when all of a sudden it was like someone flipped on a lightswitch and this awesome glow just lit up the sky – I have never rushed to grab my camera so quick in all my life when I realised the scene that was unfolding infront of us. Anyway, I had time to shoot only a handful of frames before the switch was flipped again and the lights went out!
I hope you enjoyed these photos, they are some of my absolute favourite from our holiday so I thought I’d test placing them slightly larger on the page even though my sidebar may overlap depending on your screen resolution. I guess I need to work through that one, but for now I couldn’t resist the larger image format.
’til next time.
