Driving north from Wanaka, State Highway 6 leads via Haast Pass towards the West Coast of New Zealand’s South Island. Only a short distance north of Haast where the highway meets the coastline, is Knights Point with its beautiful view of the Tasman Sea. The road here turns inland for most of the next 200km, running parallel with the coastline on one side and the Southern Alps on the other, neither of them far away.

This part of New Zealand is also referred to as the Wet Coast due to the large amounts of rain that the clouds having travelled the open sea have gathered. When they hit the barrier of the Southern Alps, they often discharge in heavy rain – and for me at least the definition of “heavy” has changed after my first visit to New Zealand. On this day, however, everything was different. There had been a thick layer of clouds on the eastern side of Haast Pass, but on the western side the skies were blue. The West Coast had seen way too little rain over the last couple of weeks so that there was a shortage of water – something rarely heard of in this corner of the world. With this image I tried to capture the transition from the green coast towards the blue void of sky and sea. This is emphasized by the clouds – New Zealand’s name in Maori being Aotearoa, the Land of the Long White Cloud.

The photograph was made with a Canon EOS 6D and an EF 35mm f/2 IS USM lens. The exposure was 1/100 second at f/8 and ISO 200. The photograph was edited in Adobe Lightroom. You can find all of these photos along with others from this journey across New Zealand’s South Island in my album New Zealand 2013 or on Flickr.