Daily Photo – Chasing Hawkdun Shadows: Following Grahame Sydney’s Vision

If we’re being completely honest, it’s New Zealand’s famed painter Grahame Sydney we can thank for making the Hawkdun Ranges the icon they’ve become. He’s the one who made them famous, consistently appearing as a timeless backdrop in so many of his most loved paintings, which hang in homes and galleries around the country and across the world. So really, when people like me turn up in the Ida Valley with a camera on a chilly yet cloudless Central Otago day, it’s not exactly groundbreaking. I’m just chasing shadows and light across the hills, taking inspiration from a vision that Sydney already nailed decades ago. Any originality? That’s entirely in the eye of the beholder, or in my case, entirely in the clumsy angle of a tripod.