Tuesday 17 February 2026 – Warning! Photographic Nerdery Alert!

The activity that Jane found for us this evening was prompted by a conversation she had with Peter, in whose company we spent the day with Kiwi Dundee, back in the Coromandel Peninsula. He’d mentioned that Sue and he had walked a trail through Redwood trees near Rotorua, the trail being walkways actually up in the trees. Jane discovered that these walkways are open during the evening as well as in the daytime, with the process of teetering in the dark across narrow, bouncy rope suspension bridges leavened by lanterns hung among the trees. I had also heard passing comments by some American tourists in our hotel about doing the Redwood walk, so I knew it was A Thing. It’s also a Popular Thing, so we went late in the hope that the queue might have died down a bit.

There was space in the car park, which was a good omen as we approached the trail.

However, there was a substantial queue,

which an operative opined was about 45 minutes’ worth. I nearly bailed out until I saw the expression on Jane’s face. We joined the back of the queue, which moved slowly forward as people were released into the treewalk. It wasn’t too bad, actually – I suppose we queued for about half an hour – but immediately in front of us was an extremely annoying American student, who clearly came from a wealthy background and spent pretty much the whole time in the queue talking to his companion in a gratingly loud voice about his two million dollar trust fund and what he might do with it when he got his hands on it.

But eventually, at about 2215, we reached the front of the queue and were released into the treewalk. One walks up a spiral ramp to get to the start.  The trail consists, as I’ve said, of narrow and bouncy suspension bridges between platforms; the platforms encircle the trunk of the various trees. The rules said no photography on the bridges and there were theoretically limits on the number of people allowed at any one time on bridges or platforms, but it was never an issue for us – it was not at all crowded once we got started.

The lanterns hung among the trees were pretty spectacular.

The entire lighting was designed by David Trubridge, who specialises in designing pendant lamps, and it’s touted as New Zealand’s “first design-led tourist venture”. There are 85 lanterns in total, with designs inspired by New Zealand’s flora and fauna, including the owl, cicada wings, falcon, and Kowhai flowers. Some more numbers: the walk is 700m long, with 28 suspension bridges and 27 platforms.

The challenge posed by this lighting is capturing it photographically.  I took my Nikon with me on the basis that the bigger sensor would give me the best chance of capturing decent images; and both Jane and I also used our Samsung phones which have a “night shot” facility to help capture images in dark situations.

See? I warned you that there would be some photographic nerdery.

The comparison between what you get with the Nikon and with the phone is quite striking.

The night mode of the phone takes multiple images at different exposures and overlays them to fill out dark areas.  On the surface, it looks like the phone has done a good job, but examining the details reveals that the noise processing algorithm as part of night photography has smeared quite a lot of the detail in the darker areas. The Nikon produces a much darker photo, because I dialled in a 2-stop darkening exposure compensation when I took the photo. In the above example, I have tweaked the photo to bring out the darker areas, but it’s still left things quite dark in the margins.  To match what the phone has done, I had to push the exposure back up by those two stops

and apply the world-class noise reduction that DxO Photolab offers. The result looks similar to what the phone produced all on its own, but the details show that the Nikon image is technically cleaner.

I actually took the same photo again on the Nikon, this time without the -2 stop  exposure correction

and this has actually come out really well.  What does this demonstrate?

1. The phone does a pretty good job if you’re going to showcase your results on the web
2. For most of the photos I took on the Nikon, I was too aggressive with my exposure compensation; I didn’t do a god job of judging the exposure
3. But at least with the Nikon I had the option of control. With the phone’s night mode, it makes all the decisions and you’re stuck with those in whatever the results are.

Here’s another comparison, in a section where a laser was playing multiple beams across the trees below the walkway.

You can see that the multiple images used in the Samsung shot has resulted, unsurprisingly, in a much brighter image with more laser reflections. The Nikon image again is technically much superior, with deeper blacks and much less noise. But which is “better” really resides in the eye of the beholder: which do you prefer?

It was in this area that Jane took a picture to show the bridges that are slung between the platforms.

A fundamental point demonstrated by the exercise of taking photos in these tricky situations is one of individual preference. I took several images of an owl illumination (all with the Nikon), and this is the version I settled on.

I did this by using High Dynamic Range (HDR) processing, taking advantage of a RAW image – I compressed the dark and light parts to bring out the dark areas a bit.  On the other hand, I could have simply pushed the exposure up by two stops, and got this.

Neither is “better” than the other – they’re just different ways of processing a tricky subject. I also took a version without stopping down the exposure so much, and this is what I got.

Now, I think that’s over-exposed. But someone else might not.

We saw again the difference between phone and Nikon later on.

actually not exactly the same scene, but once again it shows the propensity of the phone to provide a brighter image.

The walkway splits into two about half way round; one can opt to carry on at the same level, which is 9m above the forest floor; or to go up to a higher walkway, about 20m above the ground.

On the higher route, the bridges are outlined in light.

I think what matched best what one saw is shown in the last image; the Samsung photo is dramatic but overdone.

OK, enough with the nerdery.  Here are some more images from the rest of the walkway.

We eventually reached the end of the track, with a spiral down that runs outside the spiral up to the start.

As you exit, you pass a section of Redwood trunk cut in 1952. It is, of course, set up as a selfie- or group photo backing

Someone with much better eyesight than me has counted the rings in from the outside to determine that this tree was over 2,000 years old. And then put labels on to show what was going on in the world as the tree grew.

Thought-provoking, eh?

It was fun walking the trail, and, with thanks to Jane, I’m glad I overruled my usual impatience with queuing to walk the trail at night. That was our last activity in Rotorua. Tomorrow, we move on a short way down the road to Taupo. There are a couple of possibly interesting things to see en route and a cruise on Lake Taupo once we’re there. I shall report back and hope you return to read all about it.