“We had arrived in this area the evening before. Knowing that low tide, when the boulders are mostly out of the water, would occur shortly after sunrise, we got up well before sunrise and drove to the parking area that was close to the beach. I hiked down the beach to this spot that my wife, Jean, and I had scouted out the previous evening. I was planning to shoot a set of images just as the sun peeked over the horizon. Some 10 minutes before sunrise, the light was so beautiful I couldn’t resist shooting a set of images. When we got home to the USA and I started processing my images, I felt that this image was by far the better of the shoots I did that morning.
The original full-sized photo is derived from 136 individual focus-bracketed/stacked images. I shot this using my Canon R5 Mark 2, RF 100-400mm zoom lens at 100mm.
Moeraki is most famous for its boulders: mysteriously spherical stones scattered across a beach. Each boulder weighs several tons and and is up to two meters high. Scientists explain the boulders as calcite concretions formed about 65 million years ago. According to Maori legend, the boulders are gourds washed ashore from the great voyaging canoe, Araiteuru, when it was wrecked upon landfall in New Zealand hundreds of years ago.
The Moeraki Boulders are unusually large spherical boulders lying along a stretch of Koekohe Beach on the wave-cut Otago coast of New Zealand, between Moeraki and Hampden. They occur scattered either as isolated boulders or in clusters within a stretch of beach where they have been protected in a scientific reserve. These boulders are grey-colored septarian concretions, which have been exhumed from the mudstone and bedrock enclosing them and concentrated on the beach by coastal erosion. Especially in recent years, the boulders have been a popular tourist attraction.”
