Flock photo highlights drone use

New York Times magazine published this photo, taken at Kereru station.

A photo of a Hawke's Bay flock of sheep has featured in the New York Times Magazine.

It was taken by photographer and book publisher Grant Sheehan for a soon-to-be-released book on a sheep station west of Hastings, Kereru Station - Two Sisters' Legacy.

The New York Times Magazine story was on Dronestagram, a website featuring aerial drone photography, where Mr Sheehan's photo was featured.

Mr Sheehan, who grew up on a farm near Nelson, said sheep were very difficult to photograph.

"Their attention, if you ever get it at all, is about a nano-second. I bought a drone to do this book - I thought it would give a different perspective to look at animals - and the first sheep I tried to shoot was freaked out and ran off.

"After a while, I found that if you went really high up and then came down really, really slowly, they were quite okay with it."

For the sheep picture that ran in the New York Times Magazine, of a flock in a yard waiting to be scanned, he brought the drone down slowly to about 3 metres.

"They were intrigued but were completely unconcerned by it," Mr Sheehan said.

"They stared at it for quite some time, it was bizarre."

Mr Sheehan has published several landscape books but never one on a sheep station.

"I was really keen to do one," he said.

"When the Molesworth [Station] one came out, which is great, I was even more keen, so it was terrific to be able to do the Kereru one.

"The Kereru Trust have been keen to do this book for quite a while and had been looking at various options.

"I heard about it, contacted them and we put it together.

"I was delighted."

It is written by Napier journalist Mary Shanahan.

Commuting regularly from Wellington, he sought a variation of weather and was pleased to capture "an amazing frost that covered the whole farm with this white fairy dust - from the distance it looked like snow".

Kereru was founded in 1857 by 20-year-old James Nelson Williams, as one of Hawke's Bay's earliest sheep runs.
It was successful but declined until his granddaughters, Ruth Nelson and Gwen Malden, bought it back into the family in 1946.