Episode 074

The Frustration and Elation of Landscape Photography with Meghan Maloney

9 February 2024 39 min

Episode 074

0:00 / 39:32

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I was really really looking forward to this one, because when it comes to photography, I mostly wing it. When I'm out on an adventure I don't check the weather. I hike for sunrise because there aren't many other people around, and then I work with whatever's there.

Meghan Maloney does the opposite. She's a landscape photographer, a Sony ambassador and a finalist in the Sony Alpha Awards, and she runs photography workshops all over the country. She'll also drive silly distances to get a shot (her words), and she has the stories to prove it.

So we get into how she reads the weather and the clouds (I've learnt soooo much about clouds), a mad winter day from the Moeraki Boulders to Lake Matheson, Roys Peak above the fog, and seven years of chasing the aurora. Plus her best tips if you're starting out, the shots still on her bucket list, and the one she drove straight past.

In this episode

How Meghan got into landscape photography
Pouakai sunrise and the Sony Alpha Awards
Reading the weather and the clouds
Moeraki Boulders to Lake Matheson in one day
Roys Peak above the inversion
Chasing the aurora in the Mackenzie
Landscape photography tips for beginners
Hoar frost, Fiordland and stopping for the shot

How Meghan got into landscape photography

Meghan has lived all over: North Auckland, South Auckland, the Waikato, Wellington and a few years in the UK. These days the Waikato is home, a green and rolling base to come back to between trips.

Her love of the outdoors started with her dad, who was always into hiking and took the kids out whether they wanted to go or not. She had a stretch of life when she wasn't so into the outdoors, though she always loved travelling. Landscape photography brought her back, and it's been the catalyst for a lot of her adventures since.

She's always had a camera of some kind, even a basic point and shoot in South Africa in 2002 (she laughs at the photos she thought were amazing back then). With her first DSLR, she shot everyday life around Wellington for a blog, and it grew from there until she was far more into the landscapes.

Pouakai sunrise and the Sony Alpha Awards

The recognition Meghan rates most is being a finalist in the Sony Alpha Awards in 2018. The image was taken at Pouakai on a beautiful morning, with subtle golden light and a scarf of cloud hanging over Mount Taranaki. People who follow her will know it, because she shares it a lot.

It's one of her favourites because she feels it kickstarted everything, including becoming a Sony ambassador. It wasn't an easy shot to get, either. She hiked up in the dark, climbing all those stairs for two and a half hours, stayed the night and got up for sunrise, all on the hope that she'd get something out of it.

Reading the weather and the clouds

I'd guessed weather was one of the biggest factors in landscape photography, and with four seasons in a day here, I wondered how anyone plans for a shot.

Meghan says I'm completely right about the weather. She calls herself an obsessive compulsive watcher of weather apps: she checks several, and if they all agree, great. Most landscape photographers around New Zealand will point you to Yr, and Windy is the other one she uses a lot.

It's never simple, because New Zealand has crazy microclimates. In the Mackenzie Country you can have four different forecasts in the space of half an hour's drive. So a lot of the time it comes down to turning up and hoping. She'd stay home for a forecast of 200 mils of torrential rain. When things are marginal, the forecast is wrong so often that she goes anyway. On her workshops she can't reschedule, so she makes the best of whatever she's given.

What the clouds tell you

100% high cloud. Her favourite forecast, because you can get underlighting just before the sun comes up or just after it's gone down.
Layers of cloud, not at 100%. Always good, because different clouds light up at different times depending on the angle of the sun.
100% of everything. Usually grey, dull and boring, unless mood is what you're after.

Yr and Windy both show high, middle and low cloud, and each gives really different results, so understanding what the clouds do helps her plan.

Moeraki Boulders to Lake Matheson in one day

People sometimes laugh at how far Meghan will drive for a shot. Because conditions vary so much from one region to the next, she's constantly looking ahead.

In June 2021 she was on the road with a good friend who has a campervan, a fellow landscape photographer. They'd finished a workshop in the Catlins, done some astro at Nugget Point, and planned a week of going where the weather took them.

One morning they shot sunrise at the Moeraki Boulders. They'd also spotted a good weather window at Lake Matheson on the West Coast, which is known for its rainfall, so they decided to do both and drive all day to get there for sunset.

It was a mental day. In winter there are fewer daylight hours, they got stuck in awful roadworks along Lake Wānaka, and you can't drive fast in a campervan. When they finally pulled into the car park, low cloud was hanging over most of the mountains.

They did the walk round to Reflection Island anyway, where some of the best shots are, and little by little the cloud broke up. By half an hour before sunset it was completely clear, as forecast. At that time of year, the light on the mountains changes from yellow to orange to copper and through to light purple by dusk.

My own experience of the West Coast is four days of rain and no sunshine.

Roys Peak above the inversion

In the middle of winter, the South Island can get an inversion: cloud that sits low around Wānaka, Queenstown and the Mackenzie for days if there's no wind to blow it away.

The next day, driving back through the pass, Meghan suggested they climb Roys Peak. Her friend thought she was crazy, because it's not a short hike. But Windy has webcams around the country, including one at the top of Roys Peak, and they could see it was beautifully clear above the cloud sitting in town.

So up they went for sunset. Meghan had walked the Milford Track not long before, so she had some residual fitness, which helped, because Roys Peak is hard going: it's the same track the whole way, with none of the variation of a tramping track. Coming down after dark, they ran into cattle, scary eyes glowing in the head torch light.

It was so worth it. In COVID times there weren't many people around, and Meghan has since driven past that car park plenty of times and seen how crazy busy it gets.

I find popular spots are often quieter at sunrise and sunset too, because people may not be comfortable walking in the dark.

Chasing the aurora in the Mackenzie

Living in the North Island, Meghan found that timing a trip for the aurora was never easy, because the good displays are mostly in the South Island. So there were near misses:

The flight home. On her first campervan trip around the South Island, she flew home and there was a really good display the next day.
The icy campground. On another trip, after a lot of snow, she woke to her aurora apps going crazy overnight. To be fair, she's not sure she'd have wanted to drive out through all that ice in the dark.
Labour Weekend. She booked last-minute flights to chase a forecast, and there was cloud everywhere from the Mackenzie down to Nugget Point.

Finally, twice in one day

It all came to a head this year, when we recorded, on a workshop she was running in the Mackenzie. Fog had ruled out decent astro, unusual for autumn. On the final morning, as everyone headed for the van to shoot sunrise at Peter's Lookout, a participant from Australia who was into aurora hunting came running over from the back fence, showing them the back of his camera.

Meghan told everyone to jump straight in, because it was still dark. At Lake Ruataniwha, near Twizel, they got some pretty nice conditions just as dawn was breaking.

That day she drove to Christchurch to drop people off, swapped her van for a car and drove back to Tekapo to meet a couple from Perth for a private workshop they'd been planning since before COVID. A big aurora was happening, so they headed to Twizel. Lake Ruataniwha was already littered with people, every man and his dog, and just after dark the display was incredible.

After seven years of bad luck, she captured it morning and evening. It all comes back to a saying she uses fairly often:

"landscape photography is 90% frustration and about 10 percent elation but those moments where you get that 10% shot … far outweighs all of the failed attempts"

You might drive for an hour, wait at a lake for something to happen, then go home without even getting out of the car. Those images never see the light of day, and it makes her so much more grateful when she does get the moment.

Landscape photography tips for beginners

Meghan's best advice if you're starting out:

Get to know the apps. Download Yr and Windy and learn what each one does. She'll often check the satellite view on Windy for incoming cloud, which helps predict a decent sunset. Sunrise is harder, because you're generally asleep.
Try filters. Meghan is a filter distributor in New Zealand. A polariser can enhance the colours in your scene, and a long shutter speed can turn moving water or clouds into something surreal you'd never see with the naked eye.
Learn from your mistakes. She still forgets she's left manual focus on after shooting astro the night before, then shoots a whole sunrise out of focus. If things go right and you don't know why, you can't replicate it.
Put in the time. They say it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert. If you've only taken a thousand shots, you're at the start of the journey.
Find your niche. Meghan loves waterfalls, rivers and forests. Forest scenes can be chaotic, with so much going on, and she finds them more rewarding because they're more constant: on a cloudy, still day you can get a lovely result, and sunrise and sunset are more hit and miss.

She wouldn't be without her filters:

"I call them my get out of jail free card because I think they are just something to have in your back pocket about to pull out and either improve a scene. That's not perfect. Or enhance something."

I find it quite hard to shoot in the bush or at waterfalls, so I might need Meghan's photos for inspiration.

My best photo fail was shooting astro with the lens cap on, at Mount Ruapehu in Tongariro National Park. No tripod, camera on the roof of the car, nothing there, too cold, back inside. Meghan says it happens surprisingly often on her astro workshops.

One of my favourite photos this year wasn't even mine. I was driving, and Isaac had the camera out the window beside Lake Pukaki, which can have proper waves. That day it was absolute glass.

Hoar frost, Fiordland and stopping for the shot

Hoar frost is top of Meghan's bucket list. She'll take any hoar frost, anywhere, because she keeps missing it by a day or so either side of her workshops.

When we recorded, she had workshops coming up on the West Coast and in Fiordland, and on the Fiordland one she was hoping to take a helicopter flight over Dusky, a part of Fiordland she'd never seen. More of remote Fiordland is the other big one on her list.

The hoar frost she drove past

Meghan owns this one. In 2018, on a campervan trip, she was waiting around Aoraki Mount Cook for low cloud to lift for a scenic flight. Then she saw someone had shot a clear morning at Lake Matheson, so off they went the long way round.

There was hoar frost at Twizel, and she drove straight through it, on a mission to get to the West Coast. Not stopping is the biggest regret of her life.

Now, when she sees good light on the way somewhere else, she forces herself to stop, because it might only last five or ten minutes and it'll never look the same when you come back. Her advice:

"stop and take the shot when you see the shot because it won't be there in five or ten minutes it will change … sometimes the journey is better than the destination that you had in mind."

Places from this episode

Pouakai
Mount Taranaki
Waikato
Wellington
Mackenzie Country
Catlins
Nugget Point
Moeraki Boulders
Lake Matheson
Reflection Island
Lake Wānaka
Roys Peak
Queenstown
Milford Track
Peter's Lookout
Lake Ruataniwha
Twizel
Tekapo
Christchurch
Aoraki Mount Cook
Lake Pukaki
Ruapehu
Tongariro National Park
Fiordland

Follow Meghan

Meghan shares her work on Instagram and Facebook under her Meghan Maloney Photography name, and on her website, and she's on Instagram stories most days.