Back to Work

After three weeks off at home followed by a week in Tasmania, I'm finally back at work. Once again I’m surrounded by all my familiar and loveable distractions like the internet, scrabble and online chat - and all is right in the world.

Travel is not something that I'm very good at. The nature of it doesn't suit me. The early starts, the unfamiliar beds and the constant car travel just aren’t for me. For me, travel would be ideal if only I could spend the night in my own bed; spend the day seeing the sights and then at the end of it all, head back home and curl up in my comfy king size bed with a cup of tea and a book. (What’s that you say? Am I 68? No, I’m a young person, I swear!)

It took me the entire first three days of the trip to adjust to walking non-stop all day, having dinner at 6:30, sleeping in a tiny bed then getting up at 8am for breakfast and starting the entire routine all over again. My poor fitness (of which I always brag) hit me hard on this trip. I remembered almost immediately why my holidays usually consist of sitting on my bum doing as little as possible. Sight-seeing is hard work!

Despite my low levels of energy, I couldn’t help but get sucked into tourist mode – Tasmania is absolutely beautiful. Trying to describe it is pointless, since a written description of a place is still just a bunch of words; so instead, here are a few shots I took on the trip - I'll post some more once I've finished sifting through the 1500-odd photos I ended up taking! So far I've only made it through to day three of our seven day trip.

A place in Oatlands

On a property in Hamilton

The Harbour in Hobart

The view from our second night's accommodation

Fish & Chips for lunch at the waterfront in Hobart

Callington Mill, Oatlands

My only true disappointment with the trip was that when we made it to Port Arthur, it rained so heavily that our visit to the ruins had to be cut short. And despite the fact that I’d left us another whole day to go back, it rained so heavily that we didn’t even try to get out of the car the second day.

The good thing about the rain is that it means I have an excuse to go back!

Photo5 Finals

So today the finalists were announced for the Canon Photo5 competition and....

I didn’t make it. I must admit that I’m a little disappointed. I felt certain that this little beauty was going to make the cut:

It's a fish! Swimming in a droplet!

But then I’m sure everyone else felt certain that their photos would make it too. There are quite a few good entries, so I’m not too disappointed, although I do think that the finalists for the incense brief are really average, especially considering some of the entries that were passed over for the finalists.

I’m pretty happy with the photos I took though, and it gave me an opportunity to take some photos that I otherwise would never have attempted. There should be more photography competitions like this one.I guess I'll just have to have another go at it next year!

Done

So after a month of slogging away trying to get my photos done for this year’s Photo5 competition, I’m DONE.

This year I set myself the task of taking all 5 photos, no matter how uninspired I felt. I did pretty well with them I think – I only really had trouble with the confetti brief.

Now it’s just a matter of waiting for two weeks to see if I made the finals – although in all honesty I’m so happy with the photos I’ve ended up with, I wouldn’t mind at all if they don’t make it.


Now I guess it’s time to get back to normal life. I can’t spend the next two weeks obsessing over my photos the way I have for the last month. Well, I could give it a go, but I’m not sure I have the stamina for that kind of obsession. I’d never be able to become a stalker. I’m too easily distracted.

In fact, I’m so easily distracted that I’m having a lot of trouble concentrating on work at the moment. I think it’s a combination of the Photo5 distraction and the fact that I am just 8 weeks away from wonderful, glorious, magnificent holidays. I’m choosing to forget that this also means that Christmas is only 9 week away. I love Christmas, but I’m not quite prepared yet for the chaos that it brings.

Instead I’m focusing on the fact that for the first time in as long as I can remember, I don’t have to work right up until Christmas Eve. I have the entire week off before Christmas, which never happens. I feel that it should always end up this way. For me, Christmas is a bigger signifier of the end of the year than New Year’s Eve. It’s symbolic of making it through another year, the way NYE is for so many other people. Plus it works out better as an end of year celebration, because there’s no such thing as a Christmas resolution - which means you don’t have to make a heap of resolutions that you will ultimately end up breaking anyway.

The only problem with Christmas as an end of year event is that when you work right up until Christmas Eve, it feels a lot like you’ve worked right through the entire year without a break. So naturally, having a week off work pre-Christmas is ideal. Or I imagine it will be. I’ll let you know in December.

Thank You GFC

I haven’t had much time to write over the last week, as I’m smack bang in the middle of the deadline for the Photo5 competition. Every spare minute has been spent thinking how I’m going to manage to make confetti look interesting, or how I’m going to translate a sound into a still image.

One thing I do have time to share is this:

Just posting this photo is making me drool.

How did I ever live without this before!?! It’s the best chocolate bar I’ve ever had. It’s like a Snickers bar without the chunks. And it has only been brought into my life because of the falling American dollar.


Now I know that the GFC is supposed to be a bad thing. It’s supposed to be causing a lot of problems. But it has also allowed me to discover a world of food that might otherwise have been beyond my grasp.
I should have guessed that American candy would be the best I’ve ever had – years of stereotyping should have told me that. How could they not be the best when the number one ingredient in their chocolate bars is ‘sugar’? Not chocolate, like it is in Australia, but sugar, followed by chocolate (whose main ingredient is also sugar).

And now that I’ve discovered this incredible, wonderful chocolate bar, I have to try others. I have to work my way through that entire imported candy shelf until I’m so hyped up on sugar that I’m shaking like a dodgy Elvis impersonator.

Thank you, GFC. You're good for the taste buds (if bad for the hips).

Photo5 2010

Daylight savings is kicking my ass at the moment. I feel as though if I rested my head down on my keyboard for just a second, I could be asleep instantly. I want my hour of sleep back!


I’m hard at work at the moment on my entries for this year’s Canon Photo5 contest. I’m determined to get all 5 briefs completed this year – last year I only completed 4 of them – but so far I’m not having much luck, and the deadline is in 10 days. I have a couple of ideas, and I’ve spent a pretty large chunk of time trying to get brief one completed without much luck.

The brief is to take a close-up photo using an eye dropper, but since I don’t have a real macro lens, I’m using an 85mm lens sticky-taped in reverse to the front of my 50mm lens to get really close to my subject, and it’s starting to give me a headache attempting it. Also, because I’m sort of going blind in my old age, it’s pretty hard to focus properly since I need to do it manually. What I wouldn’t give for a proper macro lens!

The biggest problem I’ve come across so far is that by the time I get home from work, there really isn’t enough daylight left to do much happy-snapping in the outdoors. I’ve pretty much only got this weekend left to take all 5 photos, and since I’m busy all day Saturday, it might be a bit of a struggle. I may have to give up on my ideas and just aim for getting any photo at all done.

Wish me luck!

Spudarama

Here it is, my final choice out of 30 possible parmas:



The 'Spudarama Parma'. Chicken topped with mashed potato, gravy & cheese. Ok, so it’s not very adventurous, but it just sounded so damn good, I couldn’t resist.

We had planned to head out to Alexandra at sunrise on Sunday, but the weather had other plans. There were thunderstorms and rain forecast for the early morning, so instead we headed off at about 9. It actually ended up being quite sunny in the afternoon and we still got some good photos. We spent the whole day out there, stopping at a lot of places along the way.

To get to Alexandra we had to drive through some of the areas that were hit hardest by the black Saturday bush fires, and it’s odd to see the way the trees are starting to regrow. They’re sprouting leaves all the way up their trunks, which gives everything a weird, fuzzy kind of look. Then in other places, everything is still as blackened and dead as it was a year ago. It’s good to see so many people rebuilding in amongst it all though.


I’ll definitely be going back to Alexandra, and soon. The parma was absolutely awesome, and now that I’ve gone the safe route, I’m going to head back and have something a bit more out-there.


Is it sad that the most out-there thing that I’ve done lately is eat a strange food? Yes, I think it is. I need to get out more.

Chicken Parma

This Sunday we’re taking a trip to Alexandra at sunrise to take some photos. It’s surrounded by mountains and pretty dense forest, so should make for some great landscape photography, particularly if there is a bit of mist hanging around as the sun rises.

Afterwards, we’re having lunch at the Commercial Hotel, which is the part I’m looking forward to most because they’re widely known throughout Victoria for having an incredible 30 different kinds of Parma on their menu.


Chicken Parma would have to be in my top 10 favourite meals (which are mostly made up of comfort foods) – as I’m pretty sure it is for most Australians. Parmigiana is a term that’s used pretty broadly here. Aussie Chicken Parma is not very close to traditional parmigiana. Usually in your typical pub, it’s a chicken schnitzel topped with Napoli sauce and cheese. But it’s also been extended so that it really covers putting any kind of topping on chicken schnitzel.

A while ago we stopped randomly at a pub that had a small chicken Parma menu. I don’t remember them all, but I remember that the one I had was topped with egg, bacon and cheese, and the whole lot was grilled so that the cheese was crispy, but the egg yolk was still a bit runny.
Heaven.

It took me about 20 minutes to decide on that one from a menu of about 8 different types – I can’t imagine how long it will take me to decide from a list of 30.

Its’ a tough choice –do I go with safe and innocent, like the ‘Italian’, or do I go right out there and choose something that I would never think to put on top of chicken if I were making it myself, like the ‘Bananarama Parma’? And most importantly, can you pass up something as glorious as the ‘Nacho Parma’? Because if there are two kinds of food that were ever meant to be combined, it was these. Although maybe Nacho Parma is more of a late night drunken food because it combines the beauty of one of the world’s greatest drunk foods with one of the world’s greatest comfort foods.


So any suggestions on which one might be the best choice are more than welcome, and I’ll definitely post some photos of whichever one I end up choosing – it is supposed to be a photography trip after all.

Remembering Black Saturday

Yesterday marked one year since the Black Saturday bush fires that killed 173 people.

I have to say, it’s left me a little on edge. There’s a lot of hype about fire safety and preparation this year and it’s given me a kind of quiet paranoia. We live about 20km from the edge of where the Kinglake bush fires reached last year. A lot of our friends lived in badly hit areas, but thankfully they all managed to survive, and most of their homes did as well.

We were lucky last year. The suburb we live in is basically the first real, densely populated suburb before all the proper bush areas start, and the fires didn’t spread that far. They easily could have though. So I’m quietly a little tense at the moment while we hit the hot period that caused so much trouble last year.


On what ended up being Black Saturday last year, we knew it was going to be a hot day so we headed into the city before sunrise to take some photos. I shot this one at about 6:30am, and even though the colours are pretty wild, it doesn’t really do justice to the intense colour of the sunrise. Everything was bathed in this incredible red and yellow light. The whole city was glowing.



It’s really just odd how a day that started out with something so beautiful could turn into something so nasty. I shot this one at about 7am, and not long after this, it had gotten so hot that we had to head home.



I think in the end it reached about 47 degrees C (117 F) and the wind speed was about 100km/h plus. But at 6am it was a beautiful, balmy, calm morning.

So you can’t help but be a little paranoid when you wake up to a beautiful morning and the forecast is for high temperatures and you just want to close all the curtains and turn on the air conditioning so you can’t see what’s going on outside. I suspect it will be a long time before the paranoia subsides.

Super Secret Power

You know, I think I might have a secret super-power – The power of being unmemorable. In fact, I might just be the most unmemorable person ever.

On Tuesday evening I went along to a car show sort of thing to take some photos. There are a bunch of photo-taking people that we know, a few of whom I’ve only met once or twice. There is one in particular who I met a couple of months ago – let’s call him Jake.

At that time, we had all met up and had dinner at a Vietnamese place in the city before going out to take photos. The place was small and kind of crowded, so the group was split up all over the restaurant. KJ and I sat at a table of 4 with a guy we know pretty well and Jake, who I was meeting for the first time. We were in the restaurant for about an hour. We chatted the whole time. We laughed a lot. Jake taught me how to eat noodle soup with chopsticks (the source of most of the laughter). We left the restaurant and went to take photos. A good night.

Fast forward to Tuesday night, and a group of us were all standing around having just arrived. Jake wanders over and greets the guys that he knows quite well. One of them is unsure if we’ve met Jake before so introduces me and the girl I was standing next to. “Jake, this is Torrygirl & Lara”
Jake reaches out, shakes my hand and says “Nice to meet you Lara”.
What the...?!

I can only blame my social retardation for this really. I assume that my total lack of small talk ability means that I never really say anything interesting enough to make me memorable. That or I overestimate the average person’s memory. I never forget meeting people like that.


This isn’t just a one-off sort of thing, it happens to me all the time. It’s not good for the old self esteem really. I might have to resort to making up things so that people remember me. Or dye my hair bright pink. You don’t forget something like that. Unless this really is a super power, in which case I probably can’t get around it. I might just have to buy some spandex and a cape and learn to live with it.

Photos and a Hot House

The Photo5 finalists were posted late yesterday and sadly, I didn’t make the cut. A couple of people I have met through my photography did though, which is great because if I can’t be in the finals, I’m glad that someone I know is.

I thought some of the judges choices were a bit odd, in particular in the close up brief, where they seem to have picked some of the less creative entries, which doesn’t really seem to match with the info from the judges about what their choices would be based on. I guess there’s no accounting for personal taste though.


We’re in the middle of some kind of random November heat wave here at the moment. Apparently this is the biggest streak of super hot weather since 1925 or something like that. It’s been 34 degrees for the last few days, and it will be a minimum of 30 degrees every day for the entire week. I don’t mind hot weather usually, but when it’s consistent for a week like this it sucks because the house bricks heat up and no matter how long the air-con is on, the second you turn it off, you’re in a sauna again.

Also, sadly, we only have one air conditioning unit in the house and it’s on the entire other side of the house to the bedroom. So when it’s boiling hot in the middle of the night, you’re in the hottest part of the house. I might have to take to sleeping on the dining table so that I can keep cool. I also briefly considered replacing my bed with a wading pool so that I could stay cool, but the risk of accidentally drowning in my sleep far outweighs the benefits of being cool all night. Although then again, a wading pool is a hell of a lot cheaper than another air conditioner...

Final Photos

The Photo5 comp ended this morning, and my entries are all uploaded and waiting to be judged. (Tyge, I emailed you the link. If anyone else wants to have a peek let me know).

In the end I never did get around to taking my last photo. I had it all arranged to shoot on Wednesday night, but my model(aka my sister) fell asleep instead and never showed up, so I missed out. It promised to be a good shot, with some levitation involved. Oh well, I might take it anyway just for the fun of it.

The finalists are announced on Monday, so I'm looking forward to seeing what makes the cut. All the entries are on the website so it's been fun looking through them and comparing to see if anyone else had the same ideas that I did.

I'm a bit sad that the photo taking part is over, because it's good fun trying to do something specific rather than just shooting whatever is around me. There's always next year's competition I suppose.

Deadline Extended

I had resigned myself to not being able to get all 5 of the Photo5 briefs finished in time, but because of a site overload error on Canon's part, they have extended the deadline until Thursday! So I may be able to get that last one done after all. I'm on holiday today and tomorrow, so hopefully that will give me enough time to get the last shot finished off and my entries uploaded. Wish me luck!

Liza with a Z

Sunday night was the Liza Minnelli concert – you’ll have to forgive me for waiting until today to post about it, because a few post-concert drinks meant that I wasn’t really feeling up to coherent sentences yesterday.

The concert was excellent and horrifying all at once. You could tell that she is (or was) a proper entertainer of 1950’s influence. I guess with Judy Garland as a mother you couldn’t help but be influenced by that era.

The show was excellent because even at 63 years of age, Liza can still perform and can still entertain a crowd. But it was horrifying because at 63 years of age, the inability to show even the faintest wrinkle on your face is just creepy.

In the opening numbers, I was horrified by the skeletor-like grin on her face - a woman shouldn’t be able to smile and show all of her teeth without creating even a few tiny wrinkles. Then after a song or two, Liza seemed incredibly breathless and was panting heavily. I became increasingly paranoid that she was going to keel over on stage. I was convinced that I had come to the show where Liza was going to drop dead on stage, and while that would have been memorable, it’s not something that I wanted to happen.

I guess it was a weird concert for me because her age, illnesses and show biz lifestyle have taken their toll, and I think a lot of what people enjoyed about the show is what they remember of Liza at her peak. For someone who hasn’t followed her career right through, it was more like an echo of something better. A lot of her high notes were lost and her lisp a lot more pronounced than I ever recall it. But she still knows how to keep a crowd entertained, and in amongst it all there were a few fantastic moments – in particular when she sang ‘New York, New York’ to a standing ovation.

It was a chance that I’ll never have again, so I’m glad that I went along. Sometimes it’s nice to go to the sorts of things that you wouldn’t have gone to on your own.


In unrelated news, entries for the Photo5 comp are due by the end of the week, so I might be a little absent this week as I rush around taking last minute shots. I've only finished 2 out of the 5 briefs so far, so I have quite a bit to do still. Wish me luck!

Photo5 has arrived!

My Photo5 box arrived last night! Woohoo!

Because I’m a giant dork, I got very excited and did a little dance when I discovered it in the mailbox. It was such a cute little box with a whole bunch of flaps that folded out to tell you what each brief was. You can check out what the box looks like here (not my photo).


There are 5 briefs all up (hence Photo5), each with a focus on a specific aspect of photography.

1. Shutter Speed –Paint Powder – take a photo of liquid in motion
2. Close up - Hundreds and Thousands – all about taking a macro shot
3. Bokeh - Star Lens Hoods – getting awesome star shaped bokeh
4. Portraiture – Spectacles – pretty self-explanatory I think.
5. Open Brief - Low light – taking a photo in a low light situation while still maintaining details.

I can’t wait to get started on it. At the minute I’m just trying to come up with some clever ways of using these things to take some great photos. My biggest issue at the moment is that I don’t really have a proper tripod, which makes the bokeh effect and the low light image difficult to capture. I have a crappy little tripod that is a bit of a hassle to use, so I think I’ll either have to mess around with that or borrow one from somewhere.

From what I can gather, the creativity of the photo idea is equally as important as the quality of the photo, so I think a lot of brainstorming is in order. I’m lucky that the two lenses that I own are pretty well suited to the tasks, one is a super sharp 85mm f/1.8 and the other is a macro lens, so at least I have the versatility to take the low light and macro shots. The 85mm takes an excellent portrait shot as well.

Time to start the brainstorming – butchers paper and textas at the ready!

Photo5

This has been the absolute dullest week I’ve had in a very long time.

The only redeeming thing about this week is the fact that registration for the Canon Photo5 competition opened on Monday.

Without going into too much detail, the general gist of the Photo5 competition is that it’s a photography contest where Canon sends you out a box with 5 mystery items in it and you can take and submit 5 photos, each featuring one item.

I’ve been taking photos for quite a while as a bit of a hobby, and late last year I finally got myself a new camera – a Canon 40D. At that stage I had just missed out on registering for last year’s competition, so I’m pretty happy to be able to give it a go this year.

I should get the box in the next couple of days and hopefully that will kill some of the dullness around here. I can’t wait to get started!!!