Photo Fever

Sydney inspires us, infects us with Photo Fever.  We arrive in the afternoon, and head out around 4pm to the Royal Botanical Gardens.  The views are amazing---and yes, the Sydney Opera House really exists!  The same feeling that I had when I first saw Big Ben in London or the Eifel Tower in Paris.  Tremendous harbor area leads out to the opera house with its fantastic seashell architecture, and beyond a famous bridge spanning across the bay.  We enter the gardens and take photos of Everything.

The sounds in the gardens reach an eerie crescendo in early evening—bats, hundreds maybe thousands, heads as large as a softball, wings as wide as a baseball bat, hang from the upper trees and soar through the sky.  Screeching and caw-ing, along with large white gulls and other birds, it is one noisy skyfull of jabber. 

After taking photos of the harbor, the landscape, close-ups of flowers and trees, of birds and pedestrians (great people watching here), we walk around past an outdoor Monday night cinema (showing the film 2012 later at dusk) and make our way to Mrs Macquarie’s chair out on a point for more gorgeous views of the city skyline and opera house.

It feels a lot like San Francisco, with the bridge and buildings and people strolling along.  Even more so the next day after a trip to the Torango Zoo and a fun late afternoon meal at The Rocks café.

A pair of musicians, slim women in white playing an electric cello and native-American looking guy in black tee shirt playing various pan flutes, entertain with movie-scores (later learn their name is The Cherokee Spirit) including one from Kill Bill that Zach knows.  Perfect way to relax and enjoy the harbor after another busy day—Zach has a gadget that counts our steps, and today was “only” 13,000 steps—not even near our record 22,000 yesterday!  Perhaps the numbers are somehow inflated, but we are definitely on the go most of the day.

The zoo had everything you might expect, as good as the Philadelphia Zoo, plus Koalas!  And plenty of fun shows included—seals, elephants, etc.  Our frenzy of photos produced some great shots—we’ll probably be posting elsewhere and linking to them later.

One thing I’ve noticed is that blogging takes time!  We decided to chill out here in the early evening so finally getting caught up a bit.  Zach has taken some great “HDR” shots—he shoots photos at a range of exposures, and then Photoshop puts them all together in one full-range image, with darks and lights all in balance in the same photo, maybe a 5-exposure-stop view….pretty cool!