Craftypics's Blog

Well since the last post it’s been hectic with the holiday silly season. I’ve been taking lots of photos but hadn’t been updating this blog.

Time to get back on track – First up I had a number of visits down to the city with my camera.

The first outing was to the “Stop the Clean Feed” protest. The Australian Government want to restrict “free speech”  and block/filter Internet access to certain sites that they deem to be offensive.

I’m all up for protecting our kids from some of the objectionable material on the Internet but they way they are going about it is absurd and just won’t work. It will give parents a false sense of security.

Some photos from the protest can be found here

Whilst in Town I took in some street photography as well, primarily in the Rundle Mall area.

I headed back into town a week later to meet up with another photographer that hangs out on the OCAU forums early one Sunday morning and captured some images around the CBD

2008 marks the 2nd year that the Guitar Festival is being held in Adelaide. I managed to get photography access to 2 shows for fasterlouder.com.au

Saturday night I caught a classcial Guitar concert featuring Slava and Leonard Gregoryan accompanying the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. We only had front of stage access for 5 minutes and it was a tough 5 minutes as the music they were playing was very quiet and delicate so the sound of a camera shutting opening broke through the silence like a Bomb going off. I ended up waiting for periods in the 5 minutes where the volume was a lot quiter with the string section firing up to cover the shutter sound.

There were 3 photographers present and we were allowed to continue to photograph from the rear of the festival theatre. Lucky I had my trusty 70-200mm F/2.8 with me

Wednesday night I was back at the festival theatre again for a performance called “bending the Blues”

First up on the bill was Fiona Boyes and her band. Hadn’t heard of Fiona before but it was a solid set of mainly original songs. Second up was the Backsliders who tonight had 3 members – Guitar , Drummer and Harp player. The Drummer is one of my favourite drummers from my younger days ( Rob Hirst from Midnight Oil ). The Backsliders played some pretty grungy Blues which I thoroughly enjoyed.

The highlight of the show was a set by Derek Trucks band. Derek is certainly not pretencious and most of his playing was back towards the rear of the stage and occasionally even out of the spotlight. He is a fine Slide guitar player though and really makes his guitar Sing. The band was very competitant also with Drummer, Bass and Percussion player from Fiji along with a vocalist and a keyboard player that also played the Flute for a few tracks

Headed down to Windy point today for the final Special stage of the Classic Adelaide car rally. Weather was fantastic and it was a perfect way to spend a Sunday afternoon

Shot in RAW for 90% of the day so those 4 gig memory cards filled up fairly quickly

http://www.craftypics.com/gallery/6628715_3PuoU

Braved the elements on Friday Night and headed down to Gouger St with the camera. Got totally drenched walking/running between shelters.

Some photos of the Static Car displays up here

http://www.craftypics.com/gallery/6612875_hwSLv

Today I headed to the Ironbank Stage of the Classic. Conditions for photography were tricky to say the least. Sun / Cloud/ Sun /cloud/ rain / Sun / Shade / Full sun.  I shot in Manual mode as normally this works best Ive found but today was exceptionally tricky.

http://www.craftypics.com/gallery/6619562_xzgvt

Nearing the end of 2008 and whilst I have toyed around with some other Blog sites, I’ve decided to try and stick with one and try to keep it updated. Easier said than done !!