Goodbye Taranaki

The airspace above Mount Taranaki in New Zealand became my training ground.

Countless hours were spent perfecting the entire system — from ESA, JAXA and NASA satellite data, through thousands of lines of Python, Houdini cloud simulations, Blender rendering, and Nuke compositing, to many small custom tools I built along the way.
All of it happened here, high above Taranaki.

Spotted something wrong in China? Back to Taranaki.
Clouds not behaving over the Alps? Back to Taranaki.

It was my safe place: symmetrical, easy to understand, with rivers, pastures, villages and towns, all centered around a mighty volcano I’ve grown genuinely fond of.

Now it’s done.
No bugs left to chase. No optimizations left to squeeze out.
The technology works.

What remains is training my eye — refining the art, image by image, shot by shot.

So I’m leaving my training ground, taking flight to explore the beauty of the whole planet.

Goodbye Taranaki.
Hello, World.