This week’s post is unapologetically image heavy. I had a brilliant time with Paul at the Rotorua world record haka attempt yesterday. This coincided with the touring British and Irish Lions visit to the city to play the Maori All Blacks at the Rotorua International Stadium. The mood was fabulous with a mass of people from young children through to Rest Home residents in wheelchairs, throngs of Lions supporters and media. The final count was 7700 which well exceeded the previous record haka performed in France. 

The crowd was coached from the stage before a practice session to sustain a 5 minute haka.

Students from local schools on stages throughout the village green helped keep the crown in sync.

A comment from a visiting Lions supporter overheard as we were leaving reminded me of how much we have to be thankful for in New Zealand – ” If this has been back home, the whole area would have been surrounded by armed police”.

All photos with Nikon D810 with 24-120mm f4, Nikon D500 with 10.5mm f2.8 fisheye or 300mm f4 PF lens. Black and White conversion in Macphun Tonality using a preset I created specifically for this batch of images. Tonality is an extremely powerful Photoshop plugin and addresses the main issue I had with Nik SilveEfex Pro. You can layer and mask 2 or more conversions and so apply differing treatments to seperate parts of an image without round-tripping back to Photoshop to do the layer masking.

Paul did an excellent job of videoing the haka and has uploaded a video to his Youtube channel that really captures the feel of the event.