Daily Photo: In search of the Sky Tower

A number of years ago, when I was living in Auckland, I was told that when it came to the weather, it was either about to rain or it had just rained. This meant you were generally in one of two states: making sure you had something to keep yourself dry, or trying to dry something that had recently got wet. To be fair to dear old Auckland, it isn’t entirely true. It has its fair share of fine days and, unlike down here in the South Island, it rarely gets properly cold. You don’t often have to worry about waking up to temperatures several degrees below zero and wondering whether the car, or your fingers, are going to work.

So it wasn’t really a surprise that while I was in Auckland, I found myself wandering around the CBD in heavy rain showers. For most of the days I was there, the city was covered in low clouds and mist. The Sky Tower, which normally dominates the Auckland skyline, had almost completely disappeared. Every now and then I’d turn a corner and catch a glimpse of it stretching upwards into the mist.

I would say to myself in a surprised voice, “Oh, there it is.” Then it would disappear again.

There was one period of about three hours on a Wednesday evening when the weather briefly cleared, but otherwise the Sky Tower spent most of my visit as a grey shaft disappearing into a thick white nothingness. It was almost as though Auckland had decided to hide its most recognisable landmark from me.

So I didn’t get the usual photograph of the Sky Tower brilliantly lit in a kaleidoscope of colours, standing above the harbour like a beacon with its lights reflected in the water below. Instead, I got what is probably not the photograph the Auckland tourism people are going to rush to put on a postcard, but after three days of rain and mist, it was the Sky Tower I actually saw.

And that’s one of the things I like about photography. You don’t always get the perfect version of a place. Sometimes you just get the version that happens to be there.