From the course: Travel Photography: New Zealand's Coast

The importance of researching the best locations

From the course: Travel Photography: New Zealand's Coast

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The importance of researching the best locations

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- We're here on the West Coast of New Zealand on a wild, remote, rugged beach on the Punakaiki Coast. We have these incredible sea stacks behind us. Got to say, this is one of the most beautiful beaches I've seen, and I can't wait to photograph it. Now, this particular place can only be accessed in low tide. We had to hike a really wet, narrow trail. We just got a dumping of rain all last night and this morning, and everything was soaked. So as you walk through, you're just getting rained on by the trees, a river of water we kind of were able to navigate through, and then you had a nice ladder with a rope, which was great, it just gives that added element of safety, and a couple little rock ledges before we were able to jump on the actual beach. And we're about 20 minutes away from the peak of low tide, and the waves are really close to us, so you can really see that this place is only accessible for a very short amount of time. Some of the greatest locations to photograph are not at a car park. They're off the beaten path. So it's really important to do as much research as you can. You know, be online, forums are really great. Form a community, find friends that are landscape shooters, and exchange ideas. But there's so many different ways to get that information, but I really want to emphasize that it's just not always the most obvious location. Sometimes it's not too far, but you got to do your research to find these truly special places. Now, it's the middle of the day right now, it's not the golden hour, but we're going to make the most of our experience. But at the same time, you really want to plan out your coast trips the best you can, and if there's one particular location that you love and you find out it's only good at low tide or high tide, or even a specific five foot tide or six foot tide, really try and time it with sunset. And I'm in New Zealand long enough that I'm going to come back to this beach when low tide coincides with sunset, and I hope to make some images then as well. But for today, we're fighting the rain, the storm's rolling through, it's raining right now, sun's out as well, it's a little bit of everything. So we're going to try and get out into the water. There's some amazing starfish we're going to try and capture. There's so much we could do here with all these sea stacks. So, rain looks like it's breaking up just a bit. Let's go shoot.

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