The New Zealand Herald 11:28am Sat 1 August Network Partly Cloudy 15째 / 10째 Auckland Login Subscribe Now Help & Support
Photographer's stunning aerial shots of Auckland By Mark Meredith
Photo / Mark Meredith
No sooner had the helicopter attained several hundred feet of elevation -- at the point where cars on SH1 seemed as small as Lego toys on the thin strip of tarmac cutting through the rolling fields of Dairy Flat -- than my palms began sweating. I hardly dared to move. There was nothing between me and the ground far below except my safety harness -- because the door had been taken off. Read more: Auckland: How to see the city from above App users tap here to see all the images. My friend, helicopter pilot Brent Hemple, had asked if I'd like to go up in his machine to see how Auckland and environs looked to the birds. I had thought long and hard. A helicopter ... couldn't it just drop like a stone into the Waitemata? The helicopter was a four-seater with a big bubble windscreen. Any photographs taken through it would be distorted by its curve. There was only one solution: to take my door off. We continued our ascent from North Shore Airfield. Brent banked the helicopter to turn south and I found myself leaning into a ghastly void ... "Are you all right?" asked our pilot. "Shall we go back and put the doors on?" It was time to man up. "No thanks, Brent, I'll be fine in a minute." I found that once I focused my camera on the toy houses and patchwork fields, my fears vanished. The biggest worry was that I would drop the camera through the hole where my door used to be. I became engrossed by the way the late afternoon shadows accentuated the topography of our incredible landscape, absorbed by the revelation of this new perspective of the familiar North Shore countryside and amazed at the number of extravagant lifestyle blocks we flew over in Dairy Flat and Coatesville. I tried to spot Kim Dotcom's mansion.