Snow Covered Mountain Homer Tunnel Area

Though late summer, Fiordland National Park is in the far south west corner of New Zealand's South Island, and with some very high elevations as well, it was not surprising to come across some mountain peaks with snow on them as I traveled the road to Milford Sound.

Early morning fog and snow wrap this towering peak near the Homer Tunnel on the Road to Milford Sound

Photo by John Corney,

Canon EOS 20D
f/10
1/1000sec
ISO 200
18-55mm lens at 40mm
(c) John Corney 2007

Fog Filled Mountain Valley Photograph

It was early morning that I set off for Milford Sound from Lake Te Anau. The morning fog still sat in the mountain valleys as seen in this photo taken on the road from Te Anau to Milford Sound in New Zealand.

Canon EOS 20D
f/10
1/1000sec
ISO 200
18-55mm lens at 40mm
(c) John Corney 2007

Mountain Meadow Photo

I took this photo of this meadow of golden tussock grass on the way to Milford Sound from the road going from Lake Te Anau to Milford Sound in New Zealand.

Canon EOS 20D
f/10
1/400sec
ISO 200
70-300mm lens at 70mm
(c) John Corney 2007

Glade Wharf Lake Te Anau

This photograph of Lake Te Anau was taken in the vicinity of Glade Wharf at the start of the famous Milford Track in New Zealand's Fiordland National Park. The Milford Track leads from near this point to Milford Sound. Four-day hikes of the track are common. Visit the New Zealand Department of Conservation website for information on hiking the Milford Track.

Canon EOS 20D

f/5.61/500sec

ISO 200

18-55mm lens at 55mm

(c) John Corney 2007

External Link: Hiking the Milford Track.

Photograph of Lake Wakatipu, New Zealand

New Zealand offers some of the finest scenery in the world for landscape photography. I had the privilege of growing up there, but have only recently seen much of its most beautiful places as a tourist visiting from my adopted home of California. Here are some photos I've taken over the years on my visits home to New Zealand.

This photograph of Lake Wakatipu was taken from Highway 6 en route from Queenstown to Kingston which is located at the southern end of the lake. The photo was taken about half-way between Queenstown and Kingston from a view point at the side of the road.

Canon EOS 20D

f/221/80sec

ISO 200

18-55mm lens at 18mm

(c) John Corney 2007

Introducing Photographer John Corney

As I start to write this, I struggle over whether I should use the first or the third person, the reason being that I am the owner and webmaster for ArikiArt.com.

I started building this website at the end of 2002 as a way of promoting the art of my friend Raymond Neher who was in the early days of his struggle with lung cancer. For the last four years, ArikiArt has never been about me as I gave thousands upon thousands of hours for free to my artist friends that are represented here.

Over those 4 years I have however often thought about putting some of my photography on ArikiArt. Although I have no formal training in photography, I am a serious enthusiast, and have always loved photography since I was a kid. In fact, I can pinpoint the exact time that my passion began, which was when I was 9 years old and went on a school trip during the spring vacation and my Dad gave me his "box brownie" camera to take along with me. (To be exact, the camera was a Kodak 'Six-20 Brownie C' roll film box camera, c.1948. These cameras were to the history of popular photography what the Model T Ford was to the history of the automobile, with their low-cost and wide availability placing photography firmly into the hands of the masses.)

What the "Box Brownie" did for photography in the 1950's, the digital camera has taken to the nth degree in the 21st Century. Everyone is a photography enthusiast these days, and computing power, image software, and the internet has enabled all these newly-minted hobbyists to publish their art form cheaply and widely for all to see.

I am apprehensive to go public and have no intention of telling any of my friends or family or the ArikiArt artists, least of all ArikiArt photographer Michael McLane, that I have published some of my photographs here! Perhaps they will stumble upon them one day. I guess it will be a test to see how deeply they surf the pages of ArikiArt. So it's a secret endeavor to be discovered by those that alight here courtesy of the internet search engines such as Google, and Yahoo, and MSN - the cruel beasts to whom I have sold my soul as a webmaster these past 4 years.

I feel I do know a little about the art of photography, but am very conscious of how much there is to learn, how much I don't know, and the deep gulf there is between all the weekend and vacation snap-shooters and the true artist. I wonder that I am just one of the weekend masses, not remarkable in any way. I do not consider myself an artist with the camera by any means yet, but have a passion to get there, and believe that over the 40 years since I first shot that Box Brownie I have at least learned something about photographic technique and composition. One thing I do know for sure as I have photographed the artworks of the ArikiArt artists and prepared these images for arikiart.com is how much I love "the image" and "color" and working with them with Photoshop. And I know that the most bitter pain of my life was to lose in transit between Japan and the United States the 4-years worth of photographs that I took while living in Japan in the early 1990s.

Friends say that I'm a good photographer, but so are so many more people, the masses of them I see with their Canons, Nikons, and Pentaxes on the trail with me. I hope one day I might feel I deserve the title of "photographer" that I gave myself in the title of this page, something I did awkwardly only because there seemed no way around it. So I invite you to be a companion on my journey if you dare and if you are so generous to travel with me. I allow you and ask you to be the judge over time of my art form, and hopefully one day you will call me "a photographer".

So, let's begin! Here I bare my soul!

John Corney