Every workday morning I arrive at Macquarie Park railway station and take the long escalator up to street level. The sun was blazing outside this morning, and the impression rising out of the relatively dim underground station is of ascending to a blinding heaven.
I took a detour on the way home today, getting off the train a stop early and walking home via the Gore Hill Cemetery. This is one of the oldest cemeteries remaining in Sydney, established in 1868. Most of the burials were in the first decades of the 20th century, and the last was in 1974. Since then the cemetery has been allowed to become overgrown, but still receives some minimal maintenance. It is located right next door to the Royal North Shore Hospital, one of the biggest hospitals in Sydney. I suppose many of the rooms have views overlooking the graves…
It was back to work today after the Christmas/New Year break. This time of year many businesses are still closed. Normally we have a wide selection of places within walking distance of work to buy lunch, but today only about half of them were open. I went to Go-Hun Thai, where they cook yummy Thai food to order. Here are some of the cooks, making my lunch!
For the past few years I’ve wanted to start a 365 days photo project, but each year I’ve only remembered it a couple of weeks into January. But not this year! I went out for a walk this morning and took some photos of the bushland near my place. And so this is the first of my 365 days project photos for 2013.
It’s a view from the Bridge End Valley walking track, out across Balls Head Bay towards the Sydney CBD. The actual CBD is behind the headland on the left. You can see some naval ships there, moored at the HMAS Waterhen base – a small base housing the Royal Australian Navy’s mine clearance and diving units. This view is about 12 minutes walk from my place.
I probably won’t be posting all my 365 photos here, but you can keep up with them in the Flickr set.
In 2001, my wife and I went on a trip to Italy. We visited many places and had a wonderful time. (You can read our travel diary if you wish.) We had such a great time, that we vowed to return to Italy one day. This year, we did. We revisited Rome and Venice, and then continued our trip into France (our first time there).
On that first trip, I took photos using a 35mm film camera. I’ve since scanned the photos to convert them to digital format. A couple of those old photos in particular I really like: a photo of my wife standing in front of the Pantheon in Rome, and another I took in Venice of us sitting together on the bank of the Grand Canal, setting my camera on a tripod and using the timer release to get myself in the photo. That latter photo was taken on black and white film – I took a few rolls of black and white film, as well as colour, on that trip.
Now, as it turned out, we were in Rome on exactly the same day in 2012 as we were when I took that photo of the Pantheon in 2001. So I decided to see if I could recreate it, with my wife in the same position. I had the previous trip’s photos on my iPad, so I had a reference and set up the scene as closely as I could manage – not incredibly close, as it turned out, but good enough. Here are the two photos: the original shot from 2001, and then the shot from exactly 11 years later.
And, for good measure, it happened to be (completely unplanned) that we also ended up in Venice exactly 11 years to the day after that original black and white photo. This time, instead of recreating it with a tripod and timer, I asked an American couple standing near us to take the photo for us. I showed them the original on my iPad, and explained that it was taken exactly 11 years ago on the exact same spot, and if they could please take a photo as close as possible to the same framing. While we sat there with our backs to this couple of strangers, they had our iPad and camera. They spent several minutes lining things up before taking the photo. For some reason, I neglected to ask them to take several shots, in case some didn’t turn out – they ended up taking exactly one shot.
Here they are: the original shot from 2001, and then the shot from exactly 11 years later.
I’ll probably never know who that couple were. But thank you.
I took this photo in the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice earlier this year. It’s a detail of the painting Presentation of Jesus in the Temple by Vittore Carpaccio, painted in 1510. This detail shows an angel playing the lute, sitting on the steps below the alter where Mary is presenting the baby Jesus.
It turns out this is a very popular detail from this painting, and you can find dozens of similar images just showing this portion of the painting on the web. The weird thing is how different in colour they all are. I presume many of them were taken as photos some time ago, and since then the painting has been restored, giving it the vibrant colours you can see in my photo. Because that’s what it looked like to me when I was standing right there in front of it. The skirt (pants, whatever that is) was a vibrant blue, as you see here in my photo. But most of the other web images of this same painting show it to be a drab, and even non-blue colour. Wikipedia’s version is astoundingly poor in colour.
Curious.
Went out hunting birds today with my long lens. I didn’t spend too long out, since I’m still getting over a bad bout of laryngitis and associated head-clogging stuff. Only got a few shots, but I was pleased to get a crested pigeon. Although this is a common bird, it’s the first time I’ve photographed one. (I’ve captured cormorants 
, pelicans 
, and ravens 
many times before.)
Still going through all my photos from Italy and France earlier this year. Here are ones from Rome and Paris.
This is a photo of houses on the small island of Burano, in the Venice Lagoon. I took it when I was there in May this year.
I’m pleased with this both because I like the photo, and because it’s given me my first entry into Flickr’s Explore for just over a year. :-)
