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By dlscape, March 16, 2010 17:07

This is the second year that the Ellerslie International Flower Show has been held in Christchurch. Rather confusingly it’s still named after it’s native location of Ellerslie in Auckland. That aside, year two produced some more outstanding entries.

Last year the huge crowds caused some of the queues to become three hour endurance tests. Some people tried for two or three days straight to get into the Wearable Weeds show and still missed out. Hence 2010 saw some big changes to the way the show was organised. By all accounts things ran a lot more smoothly this year.

Even though the show organisers had changed things around the weather decided to do a 2009 re-run. During set up the sky’s were clear, the winds manageable and the temperature comfortable. The day the gates opened to the public a southerly system arrived, the heavens opened, the winds picked up and the temperature dropped by a good 10°C

Due to the stink weather and other work commitments I didn’t get anywhere near as many photos as I’d have liked.

Why shoot a fountain from the same angle as everyone else? I knew the designer (Carl Pickens) from last years show and he kindly let me walk on to the garden to capture this 1/6400 second slice of time.

I knew that the organisers would be getting standard photos of each garden in its entirety, so I went for detail and arty shots. I love trying to get a different angle to all the other photogs, getting an image of something ordinary that makes people go “Ooo!”

Another cool design was Dan Rutherford’s ‘An Icy Oasis’ (excuse the pun). It featured a huge refrigerated base kept at a chilly -12°C to slowly grow it’s own ice sheet, a huge ice sculpture and an artistic representation of Plate Tectonics. Not exactly what you’d expect at a Flower Show!

This is a crop of the top third of the full image. Click on the link below to see the full gallery of photos.

The above photo did originally have black curtains behind it. The problem was that every time I went over to close them they’d have been moved by people or the wind by the time I got back to the camera. Eventually I gave up on trying to get a full blackout and cheated, the dramatic sky you see in the photo was photoshopped in afterwards. You can still see a bit of reflection in the pool at the far right from where a gap had opened in the curtains.

For the full set of photos click here.