Photos & life

Photography & philosophy of life

Even though Martin started playing with a camera as a child, photography started to be a serious hobby in his twenties thanks to his neighbour Angelo Purgert who persuaded him to buy a SLR camera and to look at the world via a viewfinder. Then Martin lived in Israel in 2000 where he captured the soul of this culturally rich, diverse and occasionally polarised country. It was here that he captured photos sparking his curiosity to learn more, and a desire to get to know and understand the big picture of the said subject. Martin's first photo exhibition was at Tel Aviv University. In 2001 Martin first visited New Zealand and while travelling all over the country he captured many photos and wrote his travel diary. Using both photos and the diary, Martin organised a big photo exhibition of New Zealand in the Czech Republic which was seen in several prominent Czech towns. Martin moved to New Zealand in 2004 and settled in the beautiful Southern Lakes region. While his bread and butter has been organising tours and guiding, his camera was all the time ready to capture a special moment. Tour guiding and photography complement each other - they provoked in him an endless desire to learn about the environment we live in and to try to understand it. The opportunity to travel all over the country again and again gave him a chance to capture ever changing moods and in some cases also document changes of the landscape related to development of towns and countryside. All the experiences, either as a DOC volunteer bushbashing in difficult terrain of rugged mountains, farm and business excursions, meeting people, etc, helped Martin to create and keep up to date his own big picture of New Zealand.

Martins goes out to enjoy places and as a by-product might eventually come a photo. Or where needed, Martin loves to scout the desired photo location / subject to get the best outcome - either scenic, people or promotional photo. To take a photo gives him an opportunity to relish the moment - either it is a dawn, night sky or a singing bird.

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Photo presentation offer

Martin would like to offer a photographic presentation to clubs and retirement communities.

The 45-minute presentation includes Martin's best photographs of New Zealand taken over his 20 years in New Zealand. It also covers some of the transformations that occurred during this period.

If your club or retirement village members are interested, please contact Martin directly: martin@go2newzeland.nz

We hope that this presentation would be entertaining and thought provoking for your club members or the people within your community.