Ahh, just arrived at Paynes Ford, the coolest place to climb in all of New Zealand. It’s in Golden Bay, in the northern tip of the South Island, in the Takaka River Valley. Paynes Ford is a band of limestone cliffs flanked by a huge river with lots of swimming holes. It’s beyond cool. We ran into a great friend from my last trip here 6 years ago, and here he is on Responsible Lunges, a cool 5.12 up a huge overhanging arete. More later — gotta go cook and relax!

Arrived two days ago at 11:00 a.m., and by 4:00, I’d scored a sweet camper van and a spare bed at my friend Ziggy’s place for a few nights. Yesterday I equipped the van, got a cell phone, hooked it up to my email account, went grocery shopping and picked up Alicia at the airport. Today we’re relaxing with my friend Dave, a seaweed researcher at the University of Canturbury, and tomorrow the adventure begins. We’re probably headed up the coast, past Kaikoura, and onto Golden Bay for a few weeks of climbing at Paynes Ford.

Christchurch’s Port Hills are absolutely stunning. What a beautiful place to live. Ziggy — a doctor of psychiatric medicine with dreadlocks down to his waist — lives with his wife (an ophthalmologist) in a small pad overlooking Lyttleton Harbor. Nice. He’s got some time off in March, so we’re hoping to connect with him and go whitewater kayaking for a few weeks.

So anyway, here are a few pictures as we start off our trip! One’s of our new home on wheels for the next few months, and the other two shots are overlooking Lyttleton Harbor from Ziggy’s front porch.

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There’s something so hilarious about washing a neurotic lapdog, so I figured I’d post a few images of Alicia giving Armstrong (no relation to Lance) a bath. He goes from a fuzzy ball of joy to an irritable skeleton as soon as his fur gets wet. Here he is..

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Managed to squeeze in one last cool photo assignment before the big trip. This one was for Coastal Woman magazine, a cool magazine that’s designed by the talented Andrea Russell at Optasia Graphics. A few years back I shot her Bahamas wedding in Eleuthera, which was a lot of fun. At any rate, Andrea needed two quick portraits, one for a cover and the other for an inside profile. For the cover, we had a few ideas, one of which was our model jumping on a trampoline for a Spring beauty/fashion issue. The other was a more classy portrait in a huge chair, with a little rim lighting from an off-camera flash to add a little magic light. I think both came out well — now Andrea is figuring out which image will be the cover shot. The next was a head shot of a counselor, which I actually shot in a friend’s hallway against a white wall. It’s fun to try to make the best out of not much! I used two tiny Canon flashes with umbrellas and came up the two black and white images. I’d like to think the horizontal shot has an Avedon-like quality to it, but then again, that’s just a pipe dream! Here are the pix!

So we just cruised out to Joshua Tree for a final few days of climbing before the trip to New Zealand, and it was COLD. Like, so cold that our mugs froze to the picnic tables in the campground. So cold that we took a bottle of water out of the car and actually WATCHED the crystals forming, which didn’t make any sense but nevertheless happened. Maybe it was some pressure-related thing or something. We were all pretty unmotivated to do much other than stand around in the sun telling bad jokes.

As the weekend wore on, it warmed up a tad and we got some climbing in. Right as we were leaving, my friend Yishai decided to try a new climb called Iron Resolution, which is supposedly the hardest boulder problem in the park. It’s a Chris Sharma line that’s seen only one repeat, and Yishai, a V9 climber, managed to get to only the second move. Hmmm. I got a rad picture, though!

Then we bailed and drove back to Santa Barbara to go bouldering on Monday in the sun. As we left, I grabbed a few lifestyle shots for Spire USA, a company that makes the best computer bags on earth (I shoot some of their advertising and catalog images). Turns out it was one of the coldest weekends EVER! Yikes!

We’re getting ready to go to New Zealand for the next three months for a bit of traveling, a bit of climbing and a lot of photography. It’s going to be awesome — I’m going with Alicia, and we’re going to buy a van and tool around until mid-April. We leave really soon, but I had a cool opportunity to shoot Danielle and Kristopher’s fun wedding in Newport Beach. The guests were off the hook — I’ve never seen such a command of 80s dance moves! Here are some shots from their big day

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What an insane New Year’s Eve! I shot a huge wedding bash in Phoenix with a fellow Colorado photog Brett Butterstein, an awesome guy based out of Durango. If you haven’t already, you have to check out his images — they’re totally amazing.

Anyway, the wedding was a ton of fun, and what was going on in the foyer of the Phoenix Ritz was nuts. I guess there was some sort of hip hop New Year’s Eve party, with $300 admission tickets. The parking lot was filled with Bentleys! Brett and I were people-watching and photographing the goings on after the wedding around 1 a.m. when a woman walked into the frame of one of my shots. I politely put my camera down and motioned for her to keep going, but instead she started modeling on the wall. She’s the lady on the left… The one on the right just joined in.

I was cracking up but somehow managed to snap off a few ridiculous, horribly exposed images. While I was looking at my camera’s LCD, the lady snuck up on me and started playing a one-way game of grab-ass. Whoah! “Hey big boy,” she whispered into my ear. “What’s your name?” I was bewildered, and managed to sputter out my name. “Oooh, Naughty Nathan,” she said. And then she started biting my neck! WTF! Check out this shot Brett managed to snap off!

What a riot! So that was the end of a 12-hour shoot, but Joanna and Reeve’s wedding was awesome. Here are some of my favorite shots from it