Continuing our series on 'great photo locations' landscape art photographer Jackie Ranken looks beyond the extreme sports and ski-bunnies and to find a Queenstown missed by many.
My favourite place to shoot is 30 minutes drive from Queenstown, New Zealand. I’m very fortunate to live in a country with such wonderful landscapes and the landscapes I love most are the ones I’m able to visit frequently. I’ve made some of my favourite award-winning images here.
Head of the Lake: Lake Wakatipu’s water level was down by a couple of metres, revealing a foreshore which is usually underwater, and the calm weather made the lake reflective. At first I responded to the reflection and made a stitch of the distant view, then I roamed around looking for an interesting foreground. Nothing was strong enough so I hunted further afield and found an interesting log which happened to look ‘head shaped’. It was about 60cm wide and light enough to pick up. I then positioned it on a large stone that looked remarkably like shoulders, and spent the next hour playing around with different focal length lenses.
Kinloch- Hanging Branch: The frost was growing around my boots as I came across this broken branch. The vibrant coloured leaves of this willow tree would soon die, along with the branch and the photographic opportunity. I like finding things by chance, and objects most people would possibly walk past. It helps make the image unique.
Kinloch- Tree-house: It’s wonderful to find places to stay where getting out of bed on a frosty morning is almost always photographically worthwhile! Kinloch Lodge is one of them. It sits on the edge of Lake Wakatipu, surrounded my mountains. This view looking up the lake is one of my favourites, and it’s just one hundred metres from the lodge. The ladder has been put there for the children to climb into a cubby. The tree on its own is a nice simple shape, but the homemade looking construction of the ladder adds some sort of narrative and humanity to the shot. Fog often forms at Kinloch at this time of year, as the air condenses over the lake. It then helps to separate the tree from the majesty of the background mountains. It will generally happen just before the sun rises.
See www.jackieranken.co.nz.
Between Queenstown and Glenorchy, Otago, New Zealand. Canon EOS 5D MKII, focal length 80mm, f16 @ 1/32 seconds, 125 ISO, ND Grad filter, Tripod.
Kinloch, Otago New Zealand. Canon EOS 5D MKII, 17 mm focal length, f16 @ 2 seconds, 100 ISO, tripod + live view + ND Grad. 
It is Autumn at Kinloch, Otago, New Zealand. Canon EOS 5D MKII, focal length 17mm, F8 @ ¼ sec, 400 ISO.
See below for more 'great photo locations':
The Blue Mountains, NSW
Patagonia, South America
Tokyo Fish Markets, Japan
Kakadu National Park, NT
Kastellorizo, Greece
Rome, Italy
West MacDonnell Ranges, NT
(Article first published in Australian Photography + digital, February 2013.)