Desert Defenders Winter Woolies - video 3

Here is the final installment our trip to Waiouru and playing on the NZDF land courtesy of Desert Defenders Off Road Club and their Winter Woolies Variety Club fund raiser.

Desert Defenders 3 - Land Rover edition from David Kinane on Vimeo.

Two great products

I use LightRoom to edit my images and so am intrigued by the iOS app that is now available.  Adobe have put together this marketing video on Vimeo.  The choice of transport...? 

Lightroom Mobile - Iceland from Aaron Grimes on Vimeo.

Maungatautari Ecological Island

Having got back to Taupo in the dark on Saturday night, we quickly ate and crashed early.  It had been a long and exciting day.  On the Sunday we decided to detour our way back to Auckland by re-visiting Maungatautari Ecological Island, just outside Cambridge, if you have not been there I highly recommend it.

We spent three hours in there and managed to take the following images:

Kaka

North Island Tomtit

Fantail - piwakawaka

One of the primary reasons for purchasing the Defender was to enable us to get to places where we can observe and photograph New Zealand native birds.  You can see more of my bird images on my Flickr page.

Desert Defenders - "Winter Woolies" Tour - videos

I strapped on the GoPros to the car for the day and took over a hundred short clips that I have now edited into three movie clips.  Two of the clips are below, the third will arrive next week.  On my Vimeo account I am only allowed 500mb upload per week and only one HD movie per week.  The first two movies now exceed my weekly allowance and the second one is not in HD!  So this will take two more weeks to upload the three videos as HD, be sure to return regularly!

Desert Defenders - video 1 from David Kinane on Vimeo.

Desert Defenders 2 from David Kinane on Vimeo.

Desert Defenders - Winter Woolies trip

The DDORC held their annual "Winter Woolies" tour this weekend.  The NZDF land at Waiouru is opened up and we were allowed to play.  We drove down to Taupo on Friday afternoon, and had a great evening.  The trip down was quite wet and so we were not really sure what the day would bring.  It was an early start, we had to be at the domain for 7:30 and so we had to leave Taupo before 6:00.  Breakfast was an on the road affair and we arrived for check in and scrutineering  at 7:50 so we made good time.

We pulled up behind a nice red 110 Defender and a new 90 pulled up behind us.  The paddock was full of vehicles of all shapes and sizes, some of them were really tough trucks.  We soon learned that we were in the tough truck group and had to move over into the shiny column.

The NZDF gave us a briefing on spent ordinance and what to look out for.  It was a sobering moment, we were playing on a military firing range after all.  The day was basically a tag along tour.  With lots of fun along the way.  The mounain's brooding presence was implied and felt, but seldom seen, the day was marked by low clouds and drizzle, a complete contrast to my last visit earlier in the year.

Despite the rain and perhaps because of it we had a lot of fun.  I decided to defend the Defender's honour by trying to negotiate the bog and inevitably got stuck!  Obviously I have no images of that!  However, "Big Red" did the hill climb challenge and we opted out of that.  I really must get a compressor so that I too can lower my tyre pressure when off road.

Below is a selection of images from the day.  Will we be back?  Most definitely.  We started the weekend a shiny and returned a grimy!  You can follow me on Instagram and see all the images of Land Rovers that I take as I see them around and about.