Waimiha Sawmill photographic adventure with Rotorua and South Waikato Camera Clubs (plus others)

Waimiha Mill just past Bennydale on the road to Te kuiti about 2 hours drive from Rotorua was this Saturdays Creative Adventure.
 It's like going back into a giant dishevelled,  yet intensely beautiful  time warp.
I love the colours that  occur on man-made objects that are left to decay out on the weather over time.

          Rusty  metals melting into swamp

             Patchwork of corrugations against the wheel of misfortune. 

                                     Crustations of  concrete,  slowly  dissolving 

                          Wall paper stripped by  fingers of weather

                           Fantail, a sentinel on her  crusty post

 
              requires a lightening fast shutter speed for sharpness,  not attained in this snap

                Miniature orange grove survives on lichen

              Vermillion, teal, ocre-an artists palette on a fender

                                Collapsing with the weight of a rain filled watertank, with no-one left to drink it.

                                    A chute for woodchip smoke, smokes no longer

                                  The once whirring balls and blades,  broken and bent

                Rusty  funnel, discarded, like a spent shuttlecock after a  lost game of  badminton.

                              Peeling paint, like sunburned skin  two days after  too long a day at the beach

 

                Crash landing the old truck rests in a graveyard with other old timers

              Orange marks the spot in this cemetery of cog and wheels

                                       Layers of rust, eating cars for breakfast, dinner and  lunch

   A straw and orange coloured  picnic spot for so many sheep

     Favourite truck in the heap
   Which ever angle  you look 

  it's beauty calls out to be

        celebrated  by  the clicks of a thousand cameras.

                        A web of discarded junk that was once valued

                               now forgotten like old people placed  into a Rest Home.

                The tyre falls off and is left, languishing in a field full of sheep

     Memories of getting stuck in black sand at Raglan beach in a Ford Cortina as a kid with the pareants  and a bucket of  pipi shells.

            Boards dying to be cut up and

              re -fashioned  as Rosalie Gasgoine  masterpiece on

                          a Fine Art  Gallery wall.  ( See previous posts about Rosalie Gasgoine art pieces in the Auckland City Art Gallery)

                                  An unexpected blurry  encounter

                                    with a fellow photographer and his

                      wood  retrieving  wooley best mate.

             Happiness,  the definition of a dog with a wooden bone

                                    Doors, the portal to another room in a past long forgotten

                              Teal;  a fifties decorative favoured shade by refined tea drinking  ladies of the era.

                       What went on inside number two between two people when the mill closed down and they   had to move on, do these walls remember?

 Fantails pop up from clouds of  midges released  from  feet of photographers who trample through tussock in search of the next killer shot.
It  is their village now and we are the intruders.

Wood and iron houses, chamelions, gradually  molding into the landscape  instead of clashing.

 From the back it could be a mini

From the side it could be a painting

 From the front it's a Bedford having it's last laugh.

 Chainsaw teeth no longer capable of biting

           A tryptich

         of Lichen on metallic

     blue grows like seaweed on a tropical Queensland Reef, could the rust spots be fish?


This place is still haunting me, it's one of the most interesting places full of  rust and decay that I  have ever seen.
 With photography there is always another day and moment in time where the shots would all be totally different because of the power and the quality of the light.
I will be returning some day but it will be early in the morning or just on dusk.

Thanks to the organisers at the Rotorua and South Waikato Camera Club.

 Creative Quote of the day

A truly good book is something as wildly natural and primitive, mysterious and marvelous, ambrosial and fertile, as a fungus or a lichen.
- Henry David Thoreau