My apologies for the delay in posting this. Due to the nature of my work and the new part time job that I was able to secure I'm not able to post that much fortunately weekend has come and we are not loaded with numerous tasks at work that I can finally get down to updating my blog and finally posting these other pictures and sharing my experience with you guys here in this wonderful platform.

If you missed the first part of this 2 part Journey you can just click here for the 1st part. and here is the 2nd part

The Fake Tree

Source

The interesting part of the tree above Bilbo Baggins house is that its 100% Artificial. As you can remember in the Lord of the Ring films this was shot for a few frames, the problem is that it would be impossible to put a real tree on that heal as the foundations of the hollow house will not be enough, instead a tree was brought in and assembled piece by piece and then this tree which is without leaves was then dressed with 200,000 fake oak leaves, yep you read that right its 200,000 leaves each of them manually attached leaf by leaf to the three. At the end of the filming for LOTR the tree was decommissioned.

So imagine the horror of the people who made that ( or maybe the delight ) when the new Hobbit film was announced. This time the tree was completely fake, but very sturdy. Since the timeline for the Hobbit takes place some 60 years before LOTR they had to take extra steps to make the tree look younger and the tour guide told us that they had to make simulations and studies as to what the same tree would look like if it was 60 yrs older so the tree was made smaller and more juvenile looking and once again this time 250,000 leaves were brought manually pieced to the fake tree to make it look real.This was so work intensive that they had to postpone the shooting for eight months just for the tree! When they got back with two weeks till filming they found out that the fake leaves, just like a real fake leaf had faded and so these poor (or lucky) workers then had to paint each leaf individually to get just the right look.

All this hoops they had to jump just to get a perfect piece of art only to be shown in the film by a staggering 8 seconds. 8 Frigging Seconds you dont believe me? Click the link then start counting at 0:41.

Here's a photo of the Green Dragon Inn where they serve one of the most tasty ginger beer I've ever tasted. Their ale is so so but yes the ginger beer is like a better version of the ones we get from Australia. They serve the first one for free as well.

In the stories of JRR Tolkien's book Sam Frodo and the gang frequent this pub. There are even a few photos of old Hobbitses that are not a pleasure to the eye I tell you.

To sum it up

Over all it was an exciting journey, the travel guide was very hands on with everything. From the buying of the tickets (its very different here, as they buy the tickets for you maybe because they buy it cheap, but its mostly because you fully pay them upfront and you don't have to make any payments anymore.

The weather was absolutely wonderful and the views incredibly stunning. Even just the clouds are a marvel and scenic views totally worth the travel. Have a look at this photo above. I was not entirely sure that the weather would be good that day as it was raining a few days back and it actually rained a bit when afternoon came but luckily we were already driving back home.

We waited to be picked up by the van in Auckland around 5:30 in the morning and it was very dark with the streets of the city almost devoid of people and the van left us off right were we were picked up at 8:30 in the evening. It was tiring as hell but definitely worth it. How come it took that long? Well because we traveled to the underground caves where the glowworms are and that story is gonna be in another time.

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Photographer Notes

I'd like to point out that not only does blogging this take an absurdly amount of time but so is the post processing of these photos. I start with first getting to that place, taking a bunch of pictures and then picking the best ones for posting and then after that comes post processing and then finally blogging.

I can't tell you how much effort this is for me especially when you are not a great writer as you can see I take photos and even that I'm not that good of a photographer either and this was not my DSLR camera but my mobile, what I have is passion in sharing my experiences and doing it at the best that I can. So yeah no bashing please.

To give you a bit of a sample. Here is a photo of a Hobbit home that I snapped, the right side is the raw photo and the left side is the post processed. This is not just some color adjustment that you do on your phone and stuff.

This photo belongs to my Photography Portfolio under the Category : Travel

This is my original work, if you are interested in using my photo feel free to reach out to me or just credit and mention me. This photo is taken with my Note 8 with some post-processing. You may follow me to see more of my Orginal works.

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