Most people come to Queenstown and see it in fragments. A gondola ride. A walk along the waterfront. A jet boat. Each thing ticked off a list, each one shared with a hundred other people. AuthenticAs Day into Night is something else entirely.

Your day begins with a pickup from your accommodation. From that moment, your time is your own - or more accurately, it's ours together. There's no group to keep up with, no commentary delivered to the back of a bus, no rush to the next stop before you've properly taken in the last one. Just you, Simon, and a landscape that rewards the people who slow down enough to actually look at it.

We travel in JAS, our 2015 Land Rover Defender - one of the last six factory Defenders imported into Aotearoa before production ended. She's not a prop and she's not a workhorse. Leather seats, factory plush, genuinely beautiful, and looked after the way you look after something you love. Everyone who travels in JAS comments on it - clients, mechanics, people who just see her parked on the street. She's part of the family.

As the day unfolds, Simon guides and photographs in equal measure. You don't need to think about capturing anything - that's taken care of. What you get to do is be present. Stand at the edge of a lake and actually look at it. Walk into a valley that most visitors never reach. Eat a picnic somewhere that would take most people half a day to find on their own.

Then the light changes.

As evening comes in, the experience shifts. The landscape you've been moving through all day takes on a different quality, and kā whetū begin to appear.

Ngā taka o te marama is a 24 hour way of seeing. What is observed in the sky is reflected on the whenua. What the day delivers is shown in the stars.

Simon began his formal study of kā taka o te marama in late 2024, guided by leading experts who carry intergenerational knowledge spanning time to before people arrived in Aotearoa. They gave him a start and an inspiration. The more he learns, the more he finds there is to learn. It's become a way of living and observing that shapes his photography, his guiding, and how he moves through this landscape every day.

When the stars appear and the conversation turns to the night sky, what you hear isn't a rehearsed presentation. It's someone sharing what they're genuinely in the middle of discovering.

Meanwhile the camera keeps working, this time placing you inside the frame of the Southern night sky. Astro portraits that are unlike anything you'll find anywhere else in Aotearoa.

This is a long day. That's the point.