forgot to take a picture, and forgot to post this the other day, but went to the napier in fitzroy to celebrate ozzy's birthday haha. looked at the menu, and thought stuff it, i'll take on the bogan burger, and it's heart attack inducing fat. i had a horse shoe beer as well (really shouldn't have, to save my stomach), but it was good. that ridiculous burger was massive, tasty at least, the steak burger that ozzy had wasn't much smaller, and alf's parma was pretty big too. don't know if i cheated or not, but i took the chicken schnitzel and the potato cake out so that i could actually fit the burger in my mouth.
yeah, i managed to down the whole thing (with the potato cake and schnitzel), and the salad, and all but one massive potato wedge (it was half a potato), so a successful meal i say. not gonna eat it again though, once in a lifetime type of meal i think.
pic stolen from supersizedmeals.com.
woohoo 
, went to the accountant yesterday, and he told me to clear my hecs debt for maximum benefit, so it's gone. after four years (nothing compared to others) it's finally gone, the whole thing worked out well for me too. i only did one semester more than normal uni students, and ended up with two qualifications at half the price. talk about under achievement paying off 
. anyway, i'm glad that's off the books now, some more money in my pockets i guess.
obviously the ato logo was taken from the ato web site.
time for another site update just after the olympics started. mostly technical stuff that is not terribly exciting, but anyway. one thing that i hope is kind of noticeable, is that i'm using zend cache now on a lot of news and gallery pages, so there should be a lot less database access tying up the server (and we all know how poor mysql is on dreamhost). basically storing data in the cache for retrieval rather than having to ask the database every time. i fixed the comments feed, now it shows all comments whether they are for the same item or not, which is good, so it's possible to keep track of all comments all the time. i found a fix for the timezone thing, can't remember where exactly, but it was a tutorial linked from phpdeveloper.org on how to use pear GeoIP and the maxmind database (binary format), i was previously using the maxmind csv and importing into the database, but this way, there is no database read so it theoretically is much more efficient. seems to be working so far, so that's good enough for me.
that is all, i took the picture at the melbourne vs geelong tom wills game last night, and in the spirit of the game, i made it look like it was from olden times . too bad there was only one team there last night 
.
ok, second book review for tonight (and ever), i just finished reading this book by paulo coelho that was recommended to me by my brother. it's a very famous book and story, so i'm not going to go into all the details, that's what wikipedia is for. i looked at it on wikipedia and thought i can't be stuffed, then on a particularly boring day, i decided to buy it. amazon amazingly predicted a delivery date of 4th august when i ordered it in late june, it actually arrived within a couple of weeks.
it's basically a story about a young man that wants to travel and follow his dreams. his journey takes him far from home, and he learns many things from people he meets and experiences he has with the world. there are religious connotations, but i think you can construe them however you want. it's got more to do with psychology and personal well-being than anything. i actually read some things about psychology before i read this book, and they basically said the same things regarding doing what you want and achieving what you want.
one other note i found amusing was that there is a reference to falling over seven times, and getting up eight times (that part is in his introduction of the 10th anniversary edition), which is the same slogan that d-wade had for his converse ad campaign a couple years ago, if you think about, it doesn't really make sense 
.
ok, so the book, it's an inspiring blah, blah, blah, seriously it's a good story, and i can certainly take away a lot of things from it, those are personal so i won't share them. now i just have to find another book, maybe i should join a book club 
, not. in conclusion, good book, good read, very worthwhile, and it's even pretty short at only ~170 pages.
pic stolen from amazon.
ok, first book review for tonight, my blurb book arrived, at the short end of the 7-15 business day delivery cycle i must say. alf's arrived on the long end, so there isn't much to say about that, pot luck i guess. anyway, it cost $40 bux, i got the image wrap hard cover and had 76 pages. as the old saying goes, first impressions last (i think that's a saying), i will just say that i was a little underwhelmed after removing the book from the package. the front cover appears more purpley and darker than it does on my calibrated monitor, and there are some bits of damaged (minor) plastic. the hard cover feels nice and all, but you know. one thing i noticed about alf's book, was that it really doesn't open up much, maybe i was expecting too much, but it's the same with mine, so full bleed pictures probably are only good if the inside section is not important at all, don't even bother with panoramas.
as alf noted, the pictures showed up darker than he expected in his nz book, he also has a calibrated monitor might i add. if you have images with lots of black in them, probably better not to put them in, or really lighten them up. contrast (possibly because of the photos appearing darker) seems to be a little less than i was expecting. apart from the aforementioned covers, and one over-saturated photo, colours seem fine to me. after looking through it a couple times, the quality of the prints seems pretty good to me.
so in conclusion, will i use blurb again? maybe, depending on if there are other options. regarding the photos, my advice is make sure that your photos are bright but not over-saturated, keep the amount of black (shadows) to a minimum (unless you have bright subjects), grey is fine, the right hand page seems flatter. full bleed is fine, but make sure that nothing ends in the middle, and obviously the edges. and i wouldn't bother with panoramas, nor stretching full res pictures across two pages, you'll have to crop or resize to a smaller version, the pages just aren't flat enough to look at a picture stretched across properly. at least i have a reference now (or two if you count alf's book) for future books if i go that way, and yes, i'd recommend the hard cover over the soft cover for sure, it does feel cool 
.
quick picture i took of the front cover, haha, the picture i took makes it looks worse than it actually is, i couldn't be bothered using the flash, or processing it properly.
si, si, haha, no more spanish for now (i promise), anyway, it's all official now, i'll be going there for several months starting from november. i've got leave approved from work, and now it's just a matter of getting my shit together i guess. visas, vaccinations, gear, etc, i don't know everything i need, but i'm sure it'll all come together by november. either way, i'll be starting in argentina, and i don't think there is anything that especially needs to be done for there. yes, it's only been just over two months since i got back form mexico, and it'll only be six months when i leave for argentina, but some things need to be done, and this needs to be done, just to clarify, i do not consider this a holiday, it's more about education, which is not to say that i won't be having fun .
i'll post more stuff as the date gets closer and i get things sorted, i do plan to update the blog with news while i'm away, so don't worry . there will be less frequent and less crap talk, but the quality should be good, that's all for now, just thought i should announce it to the world.
pic taken from the lonely planet site, this book better look after me.
that was fast, took it in on tuesday, and the guy rang me tonight and i was able to pick up the framed picture tonight. it looks good, i think pretty much anything in a nice frame like this would look pretty good. the picture is lacking a bit of contrast, my main issue being that the light rays don't seem to be as clear nearer the bottom. i just have to work out where i'm gonna put it now i guess, don't know if i really want it hanging over my bed like in the picture (which by the way, is purely to show the size, also there is still a plastic wrap around it which i need to remove). i know where i'm gonna put it when i move out (haha), just not right now.
i reckon next time i'm gonna get a slightly smaller canvas print, it'll be smaller, yes, and pricier, but they look freakin' awesome. a little off topic now, i was driving home from basketball, and all these sporty cars (read rice) were lined up on the inside lane for some reason, then when i drove past, they started driving slowly. they never really took off or anything, they were following me for a little bit, then they all just disappeared. it was like i had driven onto the set of a cheap fast and the furious knock off or something.
and finally, back to the picture, yes, it's a crap upload here (the white balance is stuffed, and it's crooked, etc), but it'll look good hanging up on the wall when i get around to it.
review/synopsis: the dark knight
went and saw the much hyped new batman film, and for entertainment value, i have to say, the hype is well deserved. it's quite long at about two and a half hours, but only at the end do you really notice. it's got a bunch of stars in it, but obviously everyone talks about the late heath ledger as the joker, and once again, that is deserved as he does steal the show. he plays a psychotic crook with nothing on his mind but anarchy, and he does it well, probably the best character (in a non comedy) that i can remember (maybe the hired gun in no country is close). anyway, about the film, basically batman has cleaned up the city, and all the crooks are running scared. in steps the joker wanting to bring terror back to the streets of gotham city.
he succeeds in killing a lot of people and bringing mayhem and chaos to the people by turning them against each other. harvey two face makes a brief appearance (i haven't read this (or any) version(s) of the batman comics, but in cartoons that i've seen he is a recurring character, not this one obviously), but i didn't find that that part added tremendously to the film. it almost seemed like a bit of an add on to prolong the film a bit, and not particularly necessary. it doesn't matter though, it was a good film, and probably one that you want to get on blu-ray and watch on your true hd tv (along with most of will ferrell's films haha).
pic taken from the wikipedia site.
i took my photo into the photo lab to get it printed yesterday, and the guy said it was too dark. i tried a few different things to get the shadows up without losing the rays of light, but i just couldn't find the right compromise. so i thought maybe i'd try exporting a couple of tiffs (one underexposed, one overexposed) and see if i could get some exposure blending or tone mapping with an hdr program. i tried qtpfsgui, but i just couldn't work out how to get it working (i'm not very patient), and didn't particularly like the gui anyway. i tried using cinepaint to just brighten the shadows, but i can't work out how to save a file (and the gui is crap). so having exhausted my freeware options (i didn't look too hard), i decided to see what photomatix could do, i've never been particularly impressed with what it could do with hand held bracketed shots (probably my fault), but i did like the results in terms of colour and contrast.
i was able to get something that worked well (i thought), so i decided to get it and get rid of the watermark, hopefully this printout looks good, it's getting to be a pretty expensive poster . i'll post a picture of it once it's done, all framed and everything. but i think it's not a bad investment, now i have the ability to really fix up under or over exposed pictures without working too hard or throwing away the picture. i'm not going to go back and fix all my other stuffed up pictures now though .
picture taken from the hdrsoft web site.
i didn't notice it at first, just thought it was a bruised finger, then after the game i was looking at my left pinky and it was sorta bent out of shape. the other guys said it looked dislocated, it didn't really hurt, just a bit numb. so i looked on the net, and they all say check it out at the doctor, so i did. they did x-rays but the doctor said it looked normal, so probably just some kind of tendon thing or something. it's pretty annoying, cos the doctor wrapped it up (not even tightly) and said don't get it wet, and check it again on saturday, hopefully it's straightened out by then, and i don't need to do anything else. damn, i was gonna be like kobe, it's probably better that it's nothing serious. oh and btw, we lost the game .
that's it, i've uploaded them all, only took a couple months. now i start posting to flickr (only a select few), and panoramio (i've already done but i'll have a kmz file for google earth soon), but i can start posting links around the place to try and bump up my visit records. i've got my blurb book (which i think i stuffed up) coming (sometime in the next year ) and i'll try to get my poster print this week. i'll definitely post a picture of that when i've got it.
picture i took playing with the wireless flash and the aperture ring on my fa50, where is the focus?.
ok, so i've had it for a bit more than two months now, and finally post something substantial about it. i definitely like it a lot more than all the windows systems that i have to use, the file system is a million times better, and it does just seem to look and feel better. another good thing is that the os is based on unix, so it means i get to improve my command line skills as i go. software wise (with a couple exceptions), everything just feels better.
my gripes on the software side are a bit grey, first, eclipse seems to crash a bit, and also behave in a strange way when editing files sometimes, but that's more of an eclipse issue. the application menus can be a bit of a bother, for example with firefox, they don't have control over that, so middle and right clicks don't work properly. spotlight is very cool (i haven't tried quiksilver, don't see a need at the moment), as long as i can remember to use it. the other thing is that a lot of the free/open source apps that are available for windows aren't for mac, there are usually alternatives, but they're not always as good (or take a bit of time to get used to). my one real gripe has been installing php, partly because it's a 64bit system, partly because it's a mac, i still haven't been able to get it working the way i want. it means i have to have apache compile as a 64bit binary, mysql as a 64bit binary, php as a 64bit binary (or all as 32bit binaries). so far, i just haven't been able to crack the code to get it up and running, i'll get around to it eventually.
on the hardware side, just one minor quibble (and it may be because i haven't set it up properly), mouse actions (mostly in firefox) aren't quite the same as windows, i've got a fancy mouse with lots of buttons but half of them do the same thing.
on the plus side, it's got a lot better hardware than anything else i'm using at the moment (2.4ghz dual core intel, 4gb ram (installed myself)) which is good because some of the photo processing i'm doing definitely needs all that power, and the os can actually utilise all that ram, and other software will be able to as long as it is 64bit. it's dead quiet (except if playing a dvd), all passively cooled so i can leave it running over night next to me. i'll have to wait a while before i can see how it handles the hot weather of melbourne. i've never really tried running it in the most efficient mode possible, but it gets about three hours (non stop) running off the battery, doing some intensive stuff, like photo processing playing mp3's etc.
the wireless network was ridiculously easy, it detected the network when i started it for the first time, but one glitch, it does seem to hang a bit when the connection drops out (which is my netgear router's fault, not getting one of them again).
i've got a dual monitor setup with a 22" monitor to take care of all the multimedia stuff, but the 13.3" (1280x800) glossy monitor is very usable, but with a big monitor things are a lot easier. so in conclusion, i'm very happy with the macbook, and it will make a very useful companion when travelling i think, as well as being very capable on the desktop. so it's not as upgradeable as a pc (hardware wise), that's all right, i'm sure when the time comes, i'll be able to upgrade, and/or setup an additional server pc.
pic stolen from the apple site.
so i decided to get this monitor calibration device from datacolor, the spyder2 express, which is the bottom of the line model. basically you look at the back of the box, and everything is no, while the next model up has half yes, and the top of the line is all yes. anyway, i don't need anything fancy, i just want to make sure that the photos i want to print will look all right. it's a funny little thing (sensor) that you put over the monitor, then run the software which goes through a bunch of colour options to calibrate the monitor. i hope i did it right, i turned all the lights off, and let it go for about ten minutes.
my wallpapers look better, less of a green tint (when comparing the colour profiles) compared to the profile i did by squinting . too bad the cheapo version doesn't work with multiple monitors, so my macbook still has to use my squinty profile, but i'll get over it. all my pictures look pretty good, so that's a good thing, my squinty calibration isn't so bad, but obviously it's not good for the eyes.
of course i got it from adorama, cheaper and probably faster than ordering from australia. although i'm still confused by ups' shipping, it always says that it arrives in vic, then the next part says it's in sydney, then it says it's in victoria again, before it arrives. anyways, here's to having better colours in my pictures in the future, also i'll be getting my blurb book as soon as i've seen alf's one, and also getting my poster print in the next week or so too, so i'll post about those too (and some other stuff that i have been putting off).
pic taken from the datacolor web site.
just thought i'd post a snippet about the tour, i was watching last night, and originally was just going to watch to the top of the tourmalet, then it was already past midnight, so i thought i'd just stick it out and see what happened (and now i'm stuffed ). well, a bit more than an hour later, the two saunier duval riders came in first and second, followed by frank schleck, and then a few others, and cadel evans just over two minutes down, but it was enough to get him into the yellow jersey for the first time. i was a bit surprised to see valverde dropped on the tourmalet, but jens voight is a monster. i reckon he was riding blind (he had sunnies on so it was hard to tell), but someone was probably telling him which way to turn, cos the way he was riding i don't think it would be possible to concentrate on more than just pedalling. that was a monster ride, i've been up mount hotham, i don't know how they compare, but the tourmalet and hautacam climbs looked pretty ridiculous, once they crack, i don't know how they have the will to keep pedalling till they finish.
everyone says cadel shouldn't take the yellow cos his team isn't strong enough to defend it, but the way i see it, there's no real difference him being one second in front to him being one second behind. he still has to watch the other guys exactly the same way, having the yellow now is irrelevant either way, it's all about managing the time until the final time trial really. let's hope that he keeps it up, and doesn't have any more of those strange crashes, and is standing on the podium with the yellow jersey in paris.
pic taken from the age site.
not really a synopsis, as the film doesn't really warrant one, i have to say, i don't remember seeing a film this bad at the cinemas for a while. will smith plays hancock, an alcoholic superhero that costs more money when making a rescue/saving the day than he saves by doing the deed. his antics don't sit well with the public, but when he saves the life of the character played by jason bateman (i can't remember his name), things start to turn around. jason bateman's character is a pr dude, and so decides he wants to help hancock improve his image. things seem to be going well (or at least reasonably) at this point, but then the story sort of falls apart when bateman's wife, played by charlize theron (and she can't save it) turns out to be a super woman.
all in all, it was a ridiculous concept, which might have worked had they not decided to go for the odd twist. but i guess they had to try and put some drama into it. one line that stood out for it's silliness, when charlize theron is explaining the history of her and will smith, she says something like it's not fate, it's physics, that totally confused me.
anyway, i didn't have any real expectations of the film, i just presumed it was another will smith money spinner (which it may be), but it was even worse than the zombie film, i can't believe i paid to watch that, they should pay me back with interest!!
pic taken from the wikipedia site.
tipped off by alf about this company (blurb booksmart) that takes your photos and prints them into a book, i've got another project to work on for my mexico photos. i'll probably wait to see what his (new zealand) book looks like before i order, but i would think that it will look pretty good. all the photos have to be converted to very square like dimensions (depending on the book you choose), or wide panoramas for two page spreads, but i should manage. the only problem is finding enough good photos (though i will have about 140 photos in my mexico gallery, nothing close to that amount are print-worthy). it may be a small book, but that's all right, if i'm paying, i should take quality over quantity. one good thing, alf mentioned that the booksmart app compresses your picture files before it uploads them to the server, meaning a potentially massive upload won't take as long as you'd think.
i've also pretty much decided to go with teds for my poster print, probably a 20"x32" printout of my holy light picture, that's a beast, i'll have to make sure that it looks good at that size before i go ahead (i know i pumped the brightness and contrast on that one), if not, i'll have to find another one or print smaller. i might ask about that soon, cos i want to have it hanging in my room soon. displaying photos online is cool and all, but sometimes you need some decorations for the real world.
pic taken from the blurb site.
finally, i've managed to set up my development environment for my site. so i can actually test stuff locally before uploading, instead of just uploading and hoping for the best. i'm not sure how effective it will be in reality though, as i don't really like to leave that computer on all the time, and not logged into the fedora os all the time as well, but i'll just have to be disciplined i guess. the problem i was having was that the apache install didn't have suexec configured properly, and i was trying to set it up to run similar to what i have on dreamhost. finally worked out that i needed to recompile apache and modify the suexec settings a bit to get it running. i still had to change a heap of other local settings, but hopefully i won't have to do it again, but i'll try to make notes of what i did in case i do.
this could very well mean that there will no longer be any bugs on this site . with this update, i will probably put off trying to install php on my macbook for a while (as it has not been a very productive exercise), and i will post a review of my mac next week probably.
pic stolen from the fedora project page, while i'm not using fedora 9, i am using fedora, so good enough (these projects all have such shit logos, although i shouldn't talk ).
just a minor update, have to do these since i've finished processing my photos (still forty-odd to upload at this point). nothing of any real note in terms of technical accomplishment, especially not anything new since the last update two days ago (or whatever it was). just wanted to post about my record month of june 2008, i smashed my previous record of unique visitors for a month (which was last month, may 2008) by over 200 uniques. ok, so the numbers may be underwhelming for anyone else, but it's quite amusing to me, especially some of the referrals i get from google.
windows live seems to get a fair number of referrals as well (as does yahoo), but the windows live keywords don't seem to be captured properly by awstats, they're all just single words that seemingly could get billions of results. anyway, with an extra day, and a lot more mexico photos to post, i think it's possible to break the record again in july, just as long as i keep posting content (quantity vs quality, we'll see ).
and yes, i will be posting a macbook review soon, but i'm having some issues that i want to sort out one way or another before i say anything on that front, possibly sometime in the next week.
so it's been out for a couple of weeks, and i've been playing with it since the beta releases for a couple of months now, i thought i'd post some of my thoughts on it. having used it on mac, windows, but not linux (there's some kind of big furore going on there, so that's best left at ff2 for now), i haven't used all the new stuff, but i've definitely liked a few of the obvious changes.
the url search thingie, where you just type into the address (awesome) bar and it starts showing results from your history and bookmarks, very nice. at first i wasn't too sure about it, but now, i don't even need to remember url's anymore . the simple but effective changes for remembering passwords, etc, not using a modal window was a welcome change.
the default gui looks much nicer too, i haven't even bothered finding a new theme, it looks fine to me. one annoying thing on mac though, you can't right (or middle) click anything in the application menu, it just treats them like left clicks.
of course, the main reason anyone uses firefox, the extensions are all still there. although firebug (the version i'm using anyway 1.2b) is more buggy (dynamically changing css and that kind of stuff), it is beta after all i guess, but stick to 1.0 if you can. web developer toolbar works about the same (though i don't have to use it as much anymore), but definitely no issues there.
apparently it's a lot faster and less of a memory hog now, i haven't really noticed, which is probably a good thing, it does feel very snappy and clean though. so i just want to say that i've been advocate of firefox for a very long time, well before it was even called firefox, even before it was called firebird, back in the old phoenix days of 0.4b, it's always good to bring up how long i've been using the coolest browser on the block, just to prove how with it i am .
recommended!!
also, picture stolen from mozillalinks.org.
decided to finally work on the multiple categories for news items this morning, and have got it working to some degree, i'm sure there will be many bugs and errors, but it is in some working order at the moment. i will need to polish it up a bit, but now something that is related to travel and photography no longer has to sit in only one category. i've made some other backend changes that are probably not noticeable to the end user, though there should be more caching on the client side, meaning less data transfer, and faster loading times (as long as you look at something again). i still need to fix that up properly too, as the cached files don't seem to last more than a session.
on another bright note, i've already broken my record for unique visitors for a month with a few days left. i'll post again with the full numbers once the month is over, i'm such a marketing genius . i've also finished processing my photos (unless on review i notice glitches that need to be fixed), that's why i had so much time to do some of these site updates. back to taking more photos i guess, i definitely need to learn how to use my flash, i was taking pictures the other day and had absolutely no idea what was wrong, but the pictures were way too dark.
that's it for now, no photo with this post, i haven't got nothing (no tengo nada), gotta love spanish.
[update]didn't take long, the categories weren't showing up in the rss, d'oh.
went out to a farm in the gippsland region of victoria, just a bit north of wilson's prom for the weekend, didn't take a lot of pictures, but here are a few that i did take. many thanks for the great hospitality too .
this will include plants and animals, but only wild and free plants and animals, nothing tame, or caged up, non-macro bugs and plants will fit in here too. i wouldn't expect this gallery to expand very quickly, as wildlife is definitely not one of my specialities.
just going to post all my macro photos in this gallery from now on. that includes all types of bugs, plants, animals, inanimate objects, etc. i'm almost certain all pictures put in here will be taken using my dfa100mm lens, so i could also call it that gallery .
my favourite pictures taken when i went to mexico in april-may 2008. we started in mexico city, then headed north to papantla, el tajin, and xalapa, then back down to puebla, then further east to oaxaca, and chiapas (including san cristobal de las casas and palenque). we then went north east to calakmul near the guatemalan border, and the yucatan peninsula, including tulum, valladolid, chichen itza, merida, and uxmal. we finished by flying west to guadalajara and tequila. hopefully the pictures will take you on a journey through the beautiful country of mexico, and you will be inspired to visit mexico yourself one day (i know i want to go back ).
lorne - australia day weekend 2008
got an invite from ozzy to held down the coast to cumberland river, just past lorne, where his parents had booked a site at the camp ground. it's a busy time around asutralia day, and the beaches down there were pretty packed. most of the pictures i took were around the cumberland river area, which is just a bit past lorne towards apollo bay.
mount loch - mount hotham december 2007
with only half a day to do something, we decided to just take the short hike to mount loch. the starting point is a short drive from the lodge, and then a four km hike to the summit of mount loch. though it was short, carrying my heavy camera bag (at the altitude) certainly got me panting. the summit is 1860m, the hike starts at 1800m, but is up and down, so no real respite. there are nice 360 degree views from the summit, unfortunately, it was a bit hazy when we were there.
the lodge - mount hotham december 2007
a variety of pictures taken in and around the lodge where we stayed (austen bhp). it was a pretty nice situation, beds, kitchen, bathroom, lounge, heating, etc. there are seven rooms, and cos there were only six of us, we got one each (usually four to a room).
after a couple weeks of playing with my macro lens, i've managed to squeeze in some sample pics with the lens. they're pretty ordinary, but they do show the tiny dof, and some tiny/small things big . i think it's pretty obvious that i need a flash, but for now, i'll make do with bright daylight shots. also, for things that are really small, a tripod is absolutely vital, and you still need luck, wind is bad .
herald sun tour 2007 time trial
went to watch the herald sun tour individual time trial, and work on my action photography. they averaged about 45km/h, and being pretty close to the action, it was tough getting decent motion blur shots.
a selection of pics of some of the beers that me and alf sampled while in new zealand. a few of them were local brews from the south, while a couple were probably famous new zealand beers. these were taken with my f30, no flash, but it's not too hard to hold still on the table.
time to come home, so here are a couple of pictures on our last day, as we cleaned up the hotel room, and dropped the car off at the airport, on our way back to melbourne.
i had hoped to do the nevis highwire bungy the whole time we were planning this trip. finally, on our second last day, we got a place, i don't have any special photos, just a few that i should post anyway. my personal bungy video is also on youtube.
there are several jetboat companies working in and around queenstown, the first one we saw was the kawarau jetboat, which runs through lake wakatipu and the kawarau river. it leaves the pier every hour on the hour, so i got a few snaps of it. the one we actually rode was the shotover jetboat, i took those pictures with my f30. these pictures were taken over two days using both my cameras.
we planned to go to milford sound since before we left for new zealand, but weren't sure whether it would be worth it, but after asking some chick on a chairlift, alf was convinced . we stopped briefly at lake te anau on the way, and stopped for some sunset photos just past five rivers.
after four straight days of snow boarding, it was time to rest, and put the camera's to work. when we saw the view from treble cone, we decided that it would be good to drive around the area and take some photos of the surrounds. it was quite a successful day, although we probably mis-timed our arrival at lake wanaka though, having to wait around for a bit, we could've spent a bit longer at homestead bay.
these pictures are over a few days, the first few are taken by lake wakatipu, the second batch are up the gondola at the skyline complex, and the last couple at the lake side again, a bit further down than the first time. a couple are shorter exposures, but i also tried some longer exposures.
on our first full day in queenstown, we went to the snow, and cos we had to get our gear and stuff, we decided to just go to the nearest mountain. it was an overcast day, and even snowed a bit later in the day. the next day, we went to the next closest mountain range, the remarkables, it snowed a bit there too. then we went to the next closest, at cardrona, that was my favourite run. finally, we headed to the picturesque treble cone. all pictures here were taken with my fuji f30, there are some ca's, and over exposures, but what do you expect?
on our way to queenstown, we decided to stop at lake tekapo, which was near mt. cook. it had some nice views, and probably would've made a nice spot for a sunset (had we had more time), i wish i had stopped down a bit more, but i think the pictures (that i have posted) turned out ok.
we drove from christchurch to queenstown, with the exception of the stop at lake tekapo, this is the best of my selection of pics from that journey. a bunch were from inside the car, but we also mde stops at lake coleridge, raikuku gorge, lake pukaki, omarama, and one just by the side of the road. it was supposed to be a six hour drive, we managed to go for eleven .
we arrived in christchurch in the afternoon, and wandered toward the city centre to see what it was like. it's a pretty small city (compared to melbourne) and even at peak hour, not that busy on a wednesday.