The Kingdom awoke to thunder & lightning yesterday, robbing me of that last, precious half-hour of sleep (grumble, grumble!).

The journey to work made up for my loss, with most of the traffic lights between home & the city out of action. What would normally take around fifty minutes was reduced to twenty, with traffic flowing smoother than it ever has. No Police directing traffic, they just weren't required! Without cars in their hundreds being banking up at the lights, everyone could find a gap in the traffic to pull out & get on their way. Makes me wonder whether some of these major roads need lights at all. Hmmm!

Anyway, the storms which did the damage hung around throughout the day & 24 hours later, the remnants are still drifting across. Their display last night was rather spectacular & a good chance to try out my new Christmas tripod. With my finger holding down the button for some high speed shooting & living in hope that something would happen before either, my memory card hit capacity or my finger turned numb, I got lucky & here are the results.







Of course, for every frame of lightning there were 400+ duds which I had to keep clearing from the camera & every single time I had to do so, the sky would be bathed in forks which would have made brilliant photos! (add further grumbling here!)

 

How darn quickly can each Christmas come? Feels like just a few weeks back since the last one.



I've always been a non-believer of the religious side of Christmas, but the principles behind it are good, you know, the whole spirit of giving & sending people good wishes. Personally, that stuff shouldn't just exist for a "festive season", but hey, that's just my opinion. Celebrate it all year round & shopping would be a damn-sight easier as well!

Despite my non-belief & my dread of Christmas, I am still yet to convince my family that we should celebrate a couple of days after the inevitable sales in which case everything you bought before the 25th would be around a third of the price or better! Whoever came up with the gift giving side of Christmas did some brilliant marketing & kudos to them!

I admit to falling foul of desperately searching on Christmas Eve for some trinket which will make someone happy for a couple of nano-seconds before they then have to work out where to store that hideous statue of Elvis or work out whom to give it to next year. I did the whole Christmas Eve shopping madness thing today with a few hundred-thousand like minded, flustered persons & finding the perfect present is soon overwhelmed by finding an elusive car park. Fun in abundance!



My hope is that one day we all hold off on festivities until the sales are in action. Just think how much less pressure there would be & for all those families struggling to buy copious amounts of presents for kids when they really can't afford to, it would be bliss. It's crazy that we are all hopelessly obligated to spend cash on overpriced items to celebrate a day which has little relation to the birth of some dude called Christ!

& just for the record, I have never purchased a statue of Elvis for anyone or am I ever likely to.

 

Back in October I bought a new Canon S3 IS camera which I'm putting to use in providing the majority of the shots on this very page. This new high-tech beast was my update on a Canon A20 which was effectively a point & shoot camera & my first venture into digital photos. It has taken & still takes some great shots, but it has had a pixel die which shows up as a red spot in every photo & with new cameras falling in price every day, I had to take the plunge. I suspect the little A20 will survive forever & whilst it has been superseded, it remains in my car's glove-box for emergency purposes.

I updated for the purposes of getting creative & the S3 IS became the best choice. It is image stabilised, has a 12x optical zoom, swivel screen & was around $300 less than I paid for the A20 at the turn of the century.

Now, I'm snapping away at everything & thought I'd present a couple of those shots which everyone has to try at some point which makes them feel like they're breaking some creative ground. So, I'm doing the same thing & whilst you can find similar images all over the web, I'm taking the effort of you having to search for them!

Firstly, the good old dripping tap. Catching a drip & getting it in focus isn't terribly hard, but getting the timing right to actually catch the drip as it falls between the tap & the sink is frustrating. High speed shots help the issue & then it's just a case of filtering through the shots with no drips! Thankfully, I found one in the mix!



Light globes just tend to work out perfectly every time. I've taken stacks of photos of various lights & I don't have any which aren't crisply in focus. I'm putting it down to luck! This one was taking without actually looking through a viewfinder, but just pointing the camera in hopefully the correct direction & pressing the shutter. Simple & effective.



This little guy is a little pewter Squee from the third installment of Myst. He became my photographic study one night & of all the photos I took, the images which were most intriguing were those in which the light completely blew out & overexposed the subject.



The Canon is a great camera & it's effectively one step down from an SLR, but the gap between the two is still quite significant. I'm finding the compression of the jpeg format causes the images to be slightly soft which is a minor annoyance but since I'm not taking shots for the front page of a daily newspaper, it's not really a concern. The price is what makes the Canon S3 IS a winner. At half the price of an SLR, with 12x zoom & no extra lenses to carry, it's pretty good value.

 

It took me eleven years to get up the courage to change up a gauge on my Strat.

My original Fender copy had 0.010's attached upon purchase & at some stage I thought going down to 0.009's would make my life easier. Instead it just warped the neck until I changed them back.



Ever since, I've been wary about messing about with such things & all the manuals & magazines recommend consultation with a professional before taking an allen key to a truss rod. Since this is one of the major issues with changing string gauge I shouldn't have been worried. Due to various circumstances, I've made plenty of truss rod adjustments along the way.

I once had a frequency problem with my Stratocaster, which at certain points on the neck I would get an additional sound other than what I was playing. It was a reverberation which felt like the wood of the guitar was singing along out of tune. I eventually took it to a local specialist, but there was no way he could hear the sound. He kept it a few days just in case the temperature was a factor. Of course, when I got it home, it was still there & in frustration I started turning the key in the truss rod slot. It fixed the problem & it played better than ever. However, I was still reluctant to change my strings to anything other than what was installed by the manufacturer.



Eventually, I took the plunge & now wondered what all the fuss was about. Whilst changing from 9's to 10's isn't a huge jump (as we're talking in hundredths of an inch), the difference in feel is significance, as was the improvement in tone. The best part was, I didn't even need to attack the truss rod to compensate for the extra tension! Just a couple of intonation adjustments was all which was required.

It was the massive improvement in tone which made me think going up another gauge would produce similar results. Hell, Stevie Ray Vaughan used 13's & it was effortless for him, so If I went up a gauge at a time I should be fine! Wrong. The tension was harder on my fingers, but I also play an acoustic, so it wasn't something I couldn't get used to. The problem was, where did my tone go? Why did the sound suck no matter the adjustments? In changing the strings, the whole guitar, no matter what, sounded like it was trying to escape a vacuum, muddy & squashed.



After a week or so of trying to salvage a set of strings, they were removed & replaced with a fresh set of 10's & I once again had brilliant tone, which I'm sure the neighbours appreciated all over again! I do hate destroying a complete set of strings though, as they aren't cheap & I always know I can get months from a set & after sticking with the Fender brand, I haven't had a single string breakage in about eight years!! I tried a few other famous brands & couldn't survive a couple of weeks without having a string separate from itself & whip around in front of my face.

So, now I'm back to where it all started & I'm finally settled on using Fender 3250R 10's forever & a day.

 

I found a little clip about the Pacific Princess stopping by in today's newspaper, so worked my way to Outer Harbor to catch it leaving.

I have memories of visiting the same area many years ago when the QE2 was in town & it was possible to walk right up to it in the dock. Those days are long gone & getting to a position for a decent photo is now impossible unless you hold a ticket to sail.



However, I spotted someone disappearing down a small dirt path & thought there may be a good vantage point somewhere on the nearby shore... which there was, along with dozens of others who had picked out their viewing areas. The exact area is in this nice little webcam which shows viewing platform in the lower right (used primarily by fisherman today!).

Eventually a big black cloud ventured from the Princess before it drifted out of the dock & then gained impressive speed for something so large. It then powered by directly in front of me with passengers waving & yelling, & everyone on the shore returned the favour regardless of whether we knew anyone on board or not!



I once worked for a boating operation to Kangaroo Island & tried to get a job with a shipping company (without success obviously) a few years ago. They really are a glorified hotel on water, so it wouldn't be a big change to what I'm doing now, except everything is tax free & you get to see the world! That should explain my fascination with cruise ships!



After her backside added more distance between itself & the Kingdom, I headed home through Port Adelaide & the old Wool Stores which I will return to when I have time to photograph before they get knocked down.

 

I actually feel pretty safe walking around Melbourne at night. It seems a whole lot safer than the streets of the Kingdom which is probably quite naive of me but when you see families out walking around, there is a sense of calm & decency. (Coming from the murder capital of the world will do that for you!)

Night life along Southbank is busy, especially heading down towards the Crown Casino. We walked from the Hotel across the Princes Bridge where I was able to snap the first of the following shots.



With some very lucky timing, we reached the Casino foreshore in time to see the hourly fire display which leaps from pylons spread out every 25 metres or so along the riverbank.

Obviously, these photos are of this display, taken near one of these pylons with the Eureka building in the background. The pattern of flames which burst forth in sequence are spectacular & when the flames leap, you certainly feel the intense heat, even from where we were, which was roughly 20 feet away.


























This final one is looking back up the Yarra at the city on a warm spring night.



I know this little page is starting to get image intensive, so over the next while I'll add links for weekly archives & for a gallery showing bigger images than what's here & some photos which don't make a post but I want people to see!

More from my Melbourne expedition soon!