File:Lake Pukeko with Mt Cook in right background, circa 1918 (16632527097).jpg

Image is of Lake Pukeko taken circa 1918 by Leslie Hinge. In the right background stands Mt Cook.

Leslie Hinge was born in Woodend, just north of Christchurch, New Zealand on 16 January 1868. He was first employed with the Railways Department, but left to work in England. He also spent some time in the Outback of Australia. When he arrived back in Christchurch in 1900 he began his career as a newspaper photographer for the Lyttelton Times. In 1902 he married. He was a tenor in Christchurch choral and madrigal societies and was a Mason in the Robert Burns Lodge.

Hinge was an adventurous photographer. He trekked on foot through the King Country in 1900, covered the Cheviot earthquake in 1901, and took part in two rescue missions to find wrecked ships on remote islands. He visited Mount Cook, c.1913, and his photographs helped open the district to tourism. He travelled, on horseback, with surveyors mapping the proposed road between the East and West Coast of the South Island, and also accompanied naturalists checking the growth of the Wapiti deer population in Fiordland. Hinge also climbed Mt Ruapehu to photograph the crater.

From November 1914 to December 1915 Leslie Hinge attended the Panama Pacific Exhibition in San Francisco. It was at this exhibition that Hinge won the World Gold Medal for photographic animal studies.

In 1918 Hinge was the first to photograph Christchurch from an aeroplane.

In 1919 he joined the Auckland Weekly News as the staff photographer, and was in the first motor car to reach Murchison after the 1929 Murchison earthquake. In 1920 or 1921, he was the first to photograph Wellington from the air, and he also covered all the Royal visits to New Zealand between the two world wars. By 1931 Hinge was a photographer with the New Zealand Railway Publicity department, retiring in 1939 or 1940. He died on 21 June 1942.