From wide-angle landscapes to macro marvels, Stephanie Vogel shows off New Zealand with her Tamron lens.

By Jenn Gidman
Images by Stephanie Vogel

Stephanie Vogel had always longed to travel to New Zealand, but she was never able to carve out the time to go. This past March, she finally made the time, setting aside a month to visit some must-see sites like Mount Cook and the pancake rocks and blowholes of Punakaiki, as well as to do some mountain biking in Rotoroa. "That's my absolute favorite sport, and it was some of the best mountain biking I've ever done in the world," she says.

For her treks around the island nation, Stephanie brought along the new Tamron 16-300mm VC PZD lens. "I thoroughly enjoyed using this lens there," Stephanie says. "For one, it's quite compact. I moved around from place to place and didn't have to lug many lenses around for different scenes. Then there's the dust and dirt factor that goes into bringing multiple lenses and having to switch them out, which I didn't have to deal with. Finally, having the Vibration Compensation (VC) feature on that lens to prevent camera shake was handy since I shot everything handheld. Sometimes I was on a boat, and the VC was very desirable when the seas weren't cooperating."

Working with whatever Mother Nature presented to her on any particular day meant Stephanie had to stay flexible in her shooting times and techniques. "I mostly had to shoot whenever time allowed," she says. "Sometimes there was a hike and I didn't get to the site until midday, like in my photo of Fox Glacier near the more scenic side of the West Coast of the South Island. Sometimes there was a lot of vegetation and I had to shoot in low light. So I really had to make do with whatever came my way, and the 16-300 gave me the flexibility and mechanics to do that."

The local flora and fauna gave Stephanie the chance to use the 16-300 at a variety of focal lengths. "Shooting wildlife is tricky," she says. "The majority of wildlife I came across in New Zealand were fur seals—and luckily, they're very lazy and make great still subjects. But it’s important to not get too close, which is where I found the telephoto zoom to be handy on this lens. I was able to take images of the animals while still keeping my distance and not disturbing them."

That's how she approached her photo of a flock of sheep she encountered. "They were literally everywhere," she says. "I wanted to focus on the one sheep in front but still give an overall experience of what I saw—which was hundreds of sheep—so I needed to create depth for that image. The focal length was 185mm, at F/6.2, 1/125 of a second, at ISO 200." She adds there were times when she would take multiple photos, perhaps one showing the wildlife up close and then an image that showed the entire scene.

The 16-300 also came into play for macro images she captured, starting with a photo she took of a silver fern, New Zealand's native plant. "That photo is very special—it's what New Zealand is all about," she says. "The unfurled spiral shape of the fern is called 'koru,' which is Maori for 'loop.' It symbolizes new life and new growth and is used in Maori carvings and tattoos, with important symbolism in the Maori culture."

Stephanie wanted to showcase how special that spiral was, which is why she tapped into the macro capabilities of the lens. "I wanted to present a beautiful bokeh in the background and keep the koru in focus," she says. "I captured this photo at 300mm, F/6.2 at 1/60 of a second, ISO 800. This was one of those images where there was very little light, and the Vibration Compensation (VC) feature came in handy shooting handheld at that shutter speed."

The red mushrooms were an unexpected find as Stephanie was hiking near Te Anau, the gateway to Fiordland National Park in the southwest section of the South Island. "I was half-looking for a caterpillar smoking a pipe when I came across those," she laughs. "I really wanted to highlight how bright red they were. Again, I used the macro feature of the lens with a focal length of 100mm at F/5.6, 1/60 of a second, at ISO 200."

Although Stephanie doesn't consider herself a landscape photographer, landscapes are New Zealand's claim to fame, so she tried to brush up on her landscape photography skills before she arrived. "First off, I wanted to create depth in my images, making sure there was something interesting in the foreground, as well as in the background," she explains. "Holding the camera straight and using the guides in my camera's viewfinder also helped with my compositions."

And the landscapes presented plenty of photographic opportunity—but as Stephanie discovered, they were often wildly different opportunities. "Not only were the two images I show here captured on different islands, but one is a desert scene and the other is a glacier," she says. " Take the desert scene, Tongariro on the North Island, with those dramatic clouds. It was magical driving through that area—so different from what I had been seeing on the greener South Island. The ominous clouds were just right and the plants were so different that I had to stop to tell its story. I took this photo at 35mm, F/8 at 1/200 of a second, ISO 200."

Meanwhile, the image of Mount Cook on the South Island is where Stephanie was able to photograph the peak with no obstructions. "I love how the scene leads the eye right to the peak," she says. "The alpine lake was so blue, the view was so clear, and the car off to the left was in the perfect spot to show the massiveness of the area. Being a huge fan of New Zealand native Sir Edmund Hillary—there's an alpine center dedicated to him there—it was a definite stop on my sightseeing itinerary. I took this photo at 87mm, F/16 at 1/125 of a second, ISO 200."

Stephanie got her chance to photograph local architecture with the Church of the Good Shepherd along Lake Tekapo on the South Island, a New Zealand heritage site that Stephanie considers "a must-see" in the region. It can be challenging to photograph it, however, as all of the tour buses stop there, bombarding it with a constant stream of visitors. "I was very fortunate to get this image without any other humans in it," she says. "I found a very nice angle of the church with the sun hitting it just right while still getting the view of the lake and mountains behind it. Again, I tried to create depth with the brush in the foreground, the cross in the middle, then the church with the lake and mountain behind. I shot it as wide as I could at 16mm, F/8 at 1/320 of a second, ISO 200, from a low angle."

Her New Zealand adventure now behind her, Stephanie is already ready for a return trip. "It's a beautiful country, the people are genuine, and I'd go back in a heartbeat," she says.

To see more of Stephanie Vogel's work, go to www.vogelphotography.com.