The Moeraki Boulders are quite a famous spot on the eastern coast of New Zealand. They’re about an hour north of Dunedin near a town called Hampden. There are quite a few of these boulders (apparently there were a lot more before people started taking them for themselves, which has now been made illegal).

The boulders are formed as something called “concretions” which to me is a sciency way of calling them round rocks. You can imagine them like a bunch small death stars. I’m sure Darth Vader would have had this on his itinerary if he was visiting.

It turns out that these aren’t the only rocks or boulders of this kind in New Zealand either and there a few other places that these have formed. This is definitely the most well know though. Even though it was early May (which is the beginning of winter here in NZ) there were still quite a few other people down at the beach when we arrived at sunrise.

For these types of photos, the shutter speed is definitely the key element that I am focussing on. You can have a short shutter speed to freeze the movement of the water (if you’re trying to catch a splashing wave or something) or you can have an extra long exposure that blurs all of the water into one smooth sheet. For this one, I was trying to reach a happy medium where the water still had features, but it was a bit blurred and smoothed together. After playing around for a while I liked the shutter speed just under a second. I had some ND filters with me, but I was feeling a bit lazy so I just stopped down the lens to f/22 so that I could get a long enough shutter speed.