(continuing the story of my life..) We returned from Stockholm in 1974 to the lively, cosmopolitan central North Island town of Tokoroa. What a contrast! I had a great job at the pulp and paper mill and listed photography and sailing as two of my hobbies. Sometimes they could be combined:
Some advertising agency people had been hired to produce the annual company calendar. They wanted to feature a recreational area created by the company in the middle of its forests, at Lake Ohakuri. So could I please organise some sailboats? Only problem, they must be on the water well before dawn (so we could catch the sunrise) and it was July. There was a heavy frost on the ground as we drove down to the lake and when the boats were unloaded we saw they had accumulated a thick layer of ice on the foredecks. But hey, we were tough! Oh, and of course wind and heavy frosts don’t usually go together so the initial pace was very gentle:
One year the Institute of Foresters organised a photographic competition. I arranged to spend a day with a logging gang so I could get photographs of people. It was a great day, starting when I was picked up just before 0500. The gang was working with “first crop” logs, trees that had been planted in the 1920s. They were enormous, most of them 40 -50m high. This action shot of Ringo falling a tree won me the $250 first prize!
Years earlier, there had been a sawmilling village just north of Tokoroa. The sawmill had long since shut down and the houses were slowly disintegrating. A friend had lent me a fisheye lens, which was used to get this next shot.
