I'd decided at the beginning of the week that I really wanted to head into town one night and snap some photos of both the Persian Gardens at the Festival Centre, as well as the Northern Lights installation by The Electric Canvas on North Terrace... plus I wanted to try out the mini portable tripod I got for Christmas... and I also figured that while I could do it all on my ownsome, it might be more fun to invite Stu along... so invite I did... and last night he picked me up around dusk and we headed cityward... and fun it was...We stopped off by the Torrens first... get some city lights shots and pick up the last of the sunset, all the while listening to what I think was an English "comedian" (or possibly poet, I'm not sure) who was performing at the Persian Gardens on the other side of the river, and who we could hear quite clearly at times unfortunately (he wasn't really that good, but he did reminded me of the guy reading annoying poetry towards the end of Plunkett & Macleane for some weird reason... same kind of accent I think)...
Then we wandered over to the other side of the river and took some shots of the fountain all lit up with colours... snapped a few of the Gardens (which actually wasn't as interesting as I thought it might have been, from a photography standpoint anyway), stopped and had a drink and perved on the crowd a little bit, then wandered back down the river when the Chinese junk multimedia thing (Junk Theory) set sail up and down the river. The boat was pretty, the idea of projecting things onto the sails was great... but the whole "multimedia experience" thing was VERY naff... overly loud and annoying sounds (I wouldn't even call it music) and images with no real theme or idea behind them... disappointing...
So after Stu had taken a bunch of images of the boat (my camera wouldn't work fast enough in the low light, so I wasn't getting anything worthwhile), we went back to the car and headed up to North Terrace for Northern Lights.
OH! MY! GOD! So cool, so very, very cool...
Seriously, if you're in the state, or you'll be passing in the next week or so, go and see it... it's totally worth it.
Adelaide really does come alive at Festival time... there must have been a couple of hundred people wandering up and down the street... a bunch with cameras, and about every second person had their camera phones out and were snapping shots. What was amusing were the people using flash... *shakes head* I don't tink so!
The buildings looked AMAZING! Some were better than others, and I know that we didn't see all the possible rotations on each building, because there were about half a dozen or more sets per building, and while each one lasted a couple of minutes, there were (I think) seven buildings in all... so it would have taken a while to see the lot.
The two wings of the Museum were probably my favourites (bottom left and centre top in the photo), but they all looked pretty good... except maybe the Art Gallery for some reason... I don't know if it was because they had to work around the giant banners hanging on the front, or if I just didn't see the one or two good images, but it was a bit lackluster.
It's also obviously been a while since I was at the Camera Club (almost a year and a half actually)... Stu said he spotted at least five different people from the club while we were wandering back and forth, but I didn't see any of them... of course that could have been because I wasn't actually paying any attention to the people around us (which is very unlike me), but all my attention was fixed on the buildings.
As the evening wore on, I did discover that while my mini tripod is very portable and will be highly useful while I'm in Sydney, it's also about three feet tall, so I spend all my time either kneeling down in the street or bending over or whatever. Towards the end of the night I started putting it up on top of things... columns, wide railings, seating... anything I could find to just keep it that much higher off the ground. So that should be entertaining. It does weigh almost nothing though, which is good.
When I finally ran out of camera battery and we'd pretty much had enough, it was about 11pm, which wasn't too bad an effort I don't think... yes we probably should have spent less time at the Torrens and more on North Terrace... but whadyagunnado?
Can't wait to show the Northern Lights photos to Ma... she's going to be so jealous... hehe...
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