AeriAl Adventure in AoteAroA
back, his face breaking into a wide grin. Of course, I retort happily, before offering him a brief backgrounder of my love affair with the land of the long white cloud. It’s as if I’d discovered a kindred spirit and before long, we find ourselves animatedly discussing our motorhome travels around this beautiful country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean, known to the Maori people as Aotearoa.
The photographs that make up this special aerial project weren’t initially planned for an exhibition or a book. It so happened that Lim, who’d been to New Zealand once before on a work trip to Queenstown many years before, decided to take his wife and young son for a vacation there upon discovering that the air miles he’d accumulated with MAS were soon to expire. “I had just enough points to exchange for three tickets but I could only utilise them during the winter,” recalls the bespectacled Lim, who has enjoyed an illustrious 22-year career as a photographer.
He also intended to use the trip to develop his aerial photography skills further. Elaborates Lim: “In Malaysia it’s too complicated if you want to do this sort of thing. There’s all the logistics to tend to. In New Zealand, however, you can fly any time as long as there’s a plane to take you. And it’s safe.”
Already well versed in shooting from a helicopter due to his job as an industrial photographer (specialising in oil and gas), Lim was keen to explore the plane. “I’d never done it before. I wanted to take photos from a Cessna plane, with the door open and hanging over more than 4,500m in the air. I knew that it being winter would make it even more challenging and that due to the requirements that I had, the plane would need to fly in a certain way.”
Adding, he says: “The techniques and skills required for shooting from a plane are also totally different, say, from the helicopter. With the latter, you can hover, but you can’t do that with a plane. So you really have to plan your shots very carefully.”
Despite all these considerations, Lim