My apologies for the delay in posting this. Due to the nature of my work and the new part time job that I was able to secure I'm not able to post that much fortunately weekend has come and we are not loaded with numerous tasks at work that I can finally get down to updating my blog and finally posting these other pictures and sharing my experience with you guys here in this wonderful platform.

If you missed the first part of this 2 part Journey you can just click here for the 1st part.

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The bus on this photo is HeadfirstNZ and you can click this link to see their facebook page and if ever you find yourself in Auckland you can easily book them as they have regular tour schedules. Full disclouse I don't get paid to refer them I enjoyed my time and part of it was because their service was great.

My travel time was the whole day and I was surprised with the people I joined with on the way to the tour. I thought it would be mostly caucasion and pacific islanders but no a majority of people living now in Auckland are asians (which is not a bad thing) I was just surprised by the level of diversity now in this city. I met Singaporeans, a lovely Korean couple and I even meet people from very far away there's this cute exchange students from Canada and Mexico and their studying in Australia, there's this part Chinese guy who lived all his life in California. So the bus itself was ethnically diverse which made the ride interesting from the get go.

Bywater Lake

This is the well known Bywater Lake of course that is not the name of this body of water, its just that its the name of the Lake in the books and so this is it. A few of the scenes in both the Hobbit and LOTR where the Shire was shot this was that body of water.

I could have gotten a much much better shot if only there were little visitors at the time. There are a lot and they really do mess with the shot if there's people wearing civilian clothes. If only they wore hobbit costume ;)

Here is another shot of the same lake but from a different location. As it turns out it really is small but still takes minutes for you to get around it. The house that you can see from afar are all props for the movie but make no mistake about it, its life size with its own fully working watermill. You know the one that gets turned by the water, very common in the middle ages. Pardon me if I don't know the correct term for it.

Frodo and Bilbo's famous house

This is the side view of the most famous house in Hobbiton. The house where Frodo and Bilbo lived. I made sure to capture the sign as it was the distinguishing mark from outside as these houses tend to look alike. I wish I have a very good view of the tree at the top of the house as it has a very interesting story. Thankfully we have the internet for that

An interesting story here is that there are two replicas of the this house. The first one is half sized and this is where all footage of Gandalf inside the house was made this was on a separate location. The on the picture is the life sized one. So imagine the difficulty of going back and forth from two different houses just to film a certain scenes. Remember the scene where Gandlaf bumped on the ceiling, its not this house. Remeber the scene of Bilbo and the Dwarves now that was filmed on this house

Photographer Notes

I'd like to point out that not only does blogging this take an absurdly amount of time but so is the post processing of these photos. I start with first getting to that place, taking a bunch of pictures and then picking the best ones for posting and then after that comes post processing and then finally blogging.

I can't tell you how much effort this is for me especially when you are not a great writer as you can see I take photos and even that I'm not that good of a photographer either and this was not my DSLR camera but my mobile, what I have is passion in sharing my experiences and doing it at the best that I can. So yeah no bashing please.

To give you a bit of a sample. Here is a photo of a Hobbit home that I snapped, the right side is the raw photo and the left side is the post processed. This is not just some color adjustment that you do on your phone and stuff. I had to carefully choose the right amount to give it the Hobbit feel, as if it was straight from the movie or at least close to it because when you are there it hardly looks like its movielike maybe because it was a bit old and its been weathered but the much more plausible reason is that when they shoot it, it goes to a much much more post processing unlike mine but you would agree that its far better than the raw one right?

On my next post. It will probably be my visit to the famous Glowworm Caves of New Zaealand. Until next time.

This photo belongs to my Photography Portfolio under the Category : Travel

This is my original work, if you are interested in using my photo feel free to reach out to me or just credit and mention me.

This photo is taken with my Note 8 with some post-processing.

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