NZPhotographer Issue 10, Aug 2018

Interview with
KANE HARTILL
This month, we get to know the
winner of our Wanaka Tree photo
competition.
KANE, WHAT’S YOUR STORY? IS
PHOTOGRAPHY SOMETHING YOU’VE ALWAYS
BEEN INTERESTED IN?
Let me take you back in time to the moment when I
turned just in time to watch my pack slowly tip off the
ledge and tumble away into the darkness. Not my
best gear management performance! But it was 2am
on the descent of Mount Arrowsmith; we were just
high school kids and we were tired out. Because the
pack was open, my gear was scattered down 300m
of Cameron glacier snowy rockyness. It took a while
to locate the VHS-c video camera and Canon SLR I’d
borrowed from my dad… both just wreckage... It was
a great adventure but not an auspicious beginning to
my photography hobby!
After a year or so I bought another SLR camera and
a couple of lenses and carried those weighty items all
over the hills and crags of this fair island from the tip of
Mount Cook to the shadowy lushness of Paynes Ford.
Those years of exploration and risky adventures with
fellow geology students were amazing and after each
trip, I’d be chomping at the bit to get my boxes of
Fujifilm Velvia slides back. At over one dollar per click
and on a student budget, it definitely helped hone a
keen sense of composition!
I met my wife Steph and under subtle coercion mostly
moved away from the risky alpine to concentrate
more on rock climbing and snowboarding. We both
swapped lens duties and enjoyed seeing our images
6 NZPhotographer
and the odd ramble featured in magazines and
guidebooks. To be honest, as the years went by it was
increasingly Steph’s eye at the viewfinder with myself
and friends on the sharp end.
When the big Indian Ocean decadal switch occurred
in the late nineties we gave up on Mt Olympus
powder and started dabbling in a fringy sport I’d
been trying since 1987 through my high school years;
kiteboarding. It soon became an obsession and
Steph and I were both swept up in the new sport.
A whirlwind five years or so of mostly back-to-back
summers as sponsored athletes on the world cup
tour. Based in The Hague, between competitions and
demos, we also worked in equipment development
and did promotional video and photography.
EXCITING TIMES! WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?
One day in 2007, on the monotonous commute down
gridlocked Blenheim road I realised I’d had enough
of urban-ness and decided we should go bush.
Luckily, after subtle coercion, Steph concurred so we
sold up and bought an overgrown run down 10 acre
organic farm up toward those Abel Tasman beaches
and soon had a little guy accompanying us on our
adventures.
Family life, work, and renovations kept things simple for
a long while… a phase of point and shoot cameras!
I ended up attaching a waterproof compact to the
leading edge of my kite for many missions. I would