Advertisement
This morning we walked through Hyde Park via the War Memorial to our first stop for the day at the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition at the Australian Museum on the corner of College Street and William Street right opposite St Mary's Cathedral. Bonus, our Museum Victoria membership allowed us to enter for free ... once we had showed ID proving that we are residents of Victoria. Apparently their annual membership here is more expensive so they had a problem with Sydney residents becoming Museum Victoria members so that they could visit the Australian Museum in Sydney for free. How cheeky is that?!
The exhibition was incredibly inspiring. You have to admire people who plan for months, years even, in order to take a particular photograph, often in adverse conditions. For example, I think that anyone who is prepared to camp out in a hide tent in winter in the Himalayas, to capture an image of an elusive snow leopard, deserves an award! Some of the images from the 2013 Wildlife Photographer of the Year Awards can be viewed at http://news.yahoo.com/photos/winners-of-wildlife-photographer-of-the-year-2013-announced-slideshow/. I'm not sure if the winner 'Essence of Elephants' was my favourite photograph, but it is an incredibly
ethereal image of elephants which I am sure made it stand out from lots of other photos of elephants and other wildlife in general.
We walked back through Hyde Park and stopped in at the Metricon before walking to Central Station to catch the train to the football. Well, sort of anyway. As in Melbourne, track works are ongoing around the Sydney rail network!! This resulted in us taking the train as far as Strathfield North and then transferring to a bus to travel the rest of the way to Spotless Stadium. We found some rather good gozlemes (Turkish pancakes filled with beef and onion) for lunch which we ate in the concourse before finding our seats - which other people were sitting it, despite the fact that there was hardly anyone at the ground. Not to worry, those seats were face on into the sun so we went a bit further back and sat in the shade which was much more comfortable.
Right from the start of the game Richmond was on fire, especially Jack Riewoldt who was almost dropped from the team for being a bit too honest with the media during the week. Jack ended
up bagging a personal best of 11 goals and 2 points in the Tigers demolition of the Giants. Despite it being a Giants home game the support for Richmond was very strong. In fact I would say that there were more Richmond supporters at the game than there were Western Sydney supporters.
After the game we took the bus back to Strathfield North and then the train back to Central Station. We put our feet up and had a pre-dinner drink in our room before heading back to the harbour to take in some more of 'Vivid Sydney'. With huge crowds tonight the trains were not stopping at Circular Quay so we had to disembark at Wynyard Station and walk the rest of the way down to Circular Quay. With queues at restaurants ridiculous (and we were still quite full after our HUGE lunchtime gozlemes) we decided to look at some of the installations between The Rocks and Circular Quay before doing our Canon walking tour.
We checked out 'Ray', an installation that would not have looked out of place on the set for Frankenstein before wandering over to 'The Pool'. The Pool consisted of disks that lit
up in different colours as people stepped on them. While we were standing there we could hear screaming like people riding on a roller coaster. Following the sound of the screaming we found ourselves at the installation titled 'When the Fairies Come Out to Play' - a field of butterflies that lit up and jiggled when they were activated by the sounds of people screaming! So many installations are interactive which makes it entertaining for children and adults alike!
We wandered back to Canon HQ up in The Rocks. After registering that we had arrived for our booked tour we were taken out the back to check out some of the cool stuff they had going at Canon HQ. We sat mesmerised for quite a while watching images being projected onto a girl in a white dress in front of a white wall. Sounds ridiculously simple, but the effect was really interesting with the model literally disappearing into the images.
Time for our Canon Photography walking tour which took us to another spot where we could see 'Colour the Bridge' from the southern side. Nifty, here were we thinking that we had to go to the North Shore
to see the lights on the bridge! Next we walked around to the installation 'Cars That Feel' and took some photos across the harbour to Luna Park. The cars lit up when you touched them and had signs on them imploring people to hug and kiss them! Right underneath the bridge the Canon Ambassadors demonstrated an example of painting with light - using coloured pen lights to draw around the group during a long exposure photograph. We've seen pictures of that, but it was cool to see it demonstrated. Our next stop was the installation 'Intrude' - a field of giant, white inflatable rabbits - where we tried to capture silhouettes of people against the rabbits. All too soon it was time to return to Canon HQ and relinquish the new 7D that we had been given to play with, but we got to keep the SD card which was a great bonus from a free photography tour!
We had a late dinner at the Löwenbräu Keller before returning to our apartment - after midnight again! Distance covered 22,155 steps / 15.14 kms.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.113s; Tpl: 0.018s; cc: 8; qc: 24; dbt: 0.0791s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Dancing Dave
David Hooper
MMM...INTERESTING
You saw sights of Vivid I did not see. That is interesting considering we caught a train to Circular Quay and walked to the Rocks to the tall ships then to the Oversea Terminal seeing building facades changing and evolving and other delights. Just shows there's so much to see it depends on what route you take. Of greater interest...68 pts to Riewoldt...that's got to be close to a record is it not? Your a Victorian do you know?