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Explosive eruption of Ruapehu on a clear day in June 1996. All photos by Lloyd Homer from the book Flying HIgh.

Aerial photographs of New Zealand volcanic eruptions from a new book

Lloyd Homer took more than140,000 aerial and landscape photos in his career as a photographer for the New Zealand Geological Survey. He used a Pentax 67, and his favourite camera, a Technorama 617. He worked on the edge of gravity: his thing was to photograph from the open door of Cessnas with a perspex floor in the plane.

Tightly strapped in, Lloyd Homer takes photos through the open door of a Cessna. Photo: Alan Knowles.

Simon Nathan's new, splendidly illustrated book of Lloyd Homer photographs is loaded with images of mountains, glaciers, volcanoes, eruptions, landslides, fiords, rivers, coasts, headlands, and islands. Homer photographed the Inangahua earthquake in 1968 and the following year he covered the Ngauruhoe eruption.

On a quiet, clear day during Ruapehu eruptions in June 1995, the ash column formed lazy patterns in the sky.

There are aerial photos of Banks peninsula, Mahia peninsula,  Lake Wanaka, Lake Waikareiti, manmade epics such as the steel mill at Glenbrook and the oil refinery at Marsden Point; and manmade polluters, like the freezing works below.

A 1996 photo of the Pareora freezing works discharging bloody effluent into the sea.

Les Homer is 76 now and lives in Trentham. In a story published on the site of the Summerville retirement home, he said, “The structure of the country is exciting to me. I love the formation of the land and how it changes with earthquakes and volcanoes – the manufacture of the Earth.”

Ash cloud blasted into the atmosphere during a major eruption of Ngauruhoe in January 1974.

Flying High: the photography of Lloyd Homer by Simon Nathan (Geoscience Society of New Zealand, $45) is available in bookstores throughout New Zealand.