While visiting the SLV to attend a conference last week, my colleagues and I were privileged to be given a tour of the grand old building, including the iconic, perfectly-lit domed reading room (top left) with its ranks of sculpted swivel chairs and desk (top right).
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Visiting Luna Park after tea on Toorak Road, we stopped for a while to watch a posse of photographers take part in a night-time bridal photo shoot with two “wedding couples” outside the Luna Park entrance.
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Four librarians had tea in Toorak at Manhattan Restaurant. One librarian, when faced with a mirror, took out her camera, sending the other three into hiding.
Staying at the Toorak CWA Bed and Breakfast recently was certainly a different experience, and one I’m glad to have had – the gracious old building, set in lush gardens in a quiet street, was full of nostalgic keepsakes from another era. While waiting to go out for tea, I rambled about, camera in hand, enjoying the little details.
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Alright, okay…you know me well enough by now, so I’m just going to come straight out and say this: when I first saw the octopus pressed up against the transparent walls of its bubble, it was love. On my side, at least. With Octopus cocooned and snuggled into that bubble, it was possible (covertly, in the cover of sporadic darkness) to give that thing a kind of psudo-cuddle, rather like wrapping oneself around an unborn baby. I wanted to hang around that exhibit all afternoon, communing with my many-tentacled friend through the glass.
Yeah I know, too weird, right?
Last October I visited the Melbourne Aquarium, and took hundreds of largely awful photos – while I might be able to shoot a reasonable scene from a moving vehicle, I haven’t mastered the art of capturing moving subjects. I keep promising myself I’ll get back in that folder and edit some of them, and finally I made some time to do that tonight.
How cute are these penguins? Seriously.
Today was, thankfully, the last day in hospital for My Good Man, and once again I found myself at the eighth-floor window with the Diorama mode. Looking down at the carpark I was enchanted by a young girl doing cartwheels across the raised central circle, and then watched as a group of patients and visitors took a seat at the edge to get a change of air. (Though that area is marked with a “No Smoking” sign, many of the people using that space disregarded it anyway.)
On my last visit to these parts I drove past this beautifully-lit antiques and gift shop and made a note to one-day stop to take a photo. Tonight I made the effort to actually go there on dark, and spent a little time exploring – from the front windows – the store’s many treasures.
While editing the photos I decided to try something quite different, applying a Comic Book effect, which I think this subject lends itself to, in Picasa.
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It’s not often that I get the opportunity to use my camera’s Diorama art mode setting, which creates a tilt shift effect that renders far away objects to look like scale models.
The window from My Good Man’s hospital room overlooks the leafy Melbourne suburbs, and was high enough up to turn the cars parked below, and a distant house, into something special.
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My Good Man has acquired an uncommon gastric condition that needed a bit of surgical intervention, so after waiting for three months to get an appointment for a Heller Myotomy, we made the journey back to Melbourne to see the capable staff at Austin Health.
Leaving earlier than necessary from our accommodations to beat the early morning traffic, we arrived ahead of our seven o’clock registration time to the hospital. In the waiting area I amused myself with trying to photograph a wee caterpillar – what I know as an “inch worm”, in fact – who all but foiled my camera’s super macro. You can see it on my finger, top left. We were frustrated by the number of people coming in after us but being admitted sooner, until finally (really only forty five minutes later) a man who walked like David Suchet’s Poirot called our name.
We were soon met by the charasmatic anesthetist we had earlier heard charming an elderly patient, and he quickly put us at ease. And then we waited more, until it was nearly 10am when MGM was wheeled off to theatre. And then I waited much more, for hour upon slow hour, trying to fill in time, but in actual fact being too anxious to settle to doing anything practical besides a little spot of photography. I did enjoy some interesting and/or amusing sights, including old hospital building reflected in new hospital windows, a sign about microwave meals, and the aforementioned inch worm. Oh, and the image of a man carrying a child across an internal bridge, reflected in the art installation in the main foyer – a shot which I had promised myself to attempt since the last visit. So that’s an achievement, right there.
At around five o’clock I was called to see the patient, who had survived the ordeal and looked pretty decent – for a man with five holes in his tummy. All’s well that ends well.
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precious ruthless captures 