Craftypics's Blog

The Fringe Street parade and Opening night is a great place for taking photos and there were lots of Photographers out and about. I met up with a few near Rundle Mall about 5:30pm but quickly lost them in the crowd as we checked out the Pod stages on Rundle St. Photos from the Street Performers and Opening Parade

The Street parade started at about 8pm and there were plenty of colourfull floats and performers.

Next up was to check out the “Fire Organ” – WOW.. that was awesome and I intend on going back and checking it out again one night I was so impressed.

A quick visit to the Garden of Unearthly Delights for a quick feed and a beer and then headed off to the catch the last 2 acts of the Free Concert.

I got there for Fire Santa Rosa Fire and TZU. Both bands went off and I managed some great photos

If you live in Adelaide one thing that I think everyone knows is that Lance Armstrong ( 7 times Tour De France winner ) in in Adelaide and out of retirement to race in this years Tour Down under.  The Race itself runs for 6 days from Tuesday 20th Jan up till Sunday 25th January.

on Sunday 18th January a preliminary event was held with all the Riders competing which was a street circuit around Adelaides Rymil Park . The weather was fine/hot and the Crowds were Huge ( estimated by the media at 130,000 ).

Lance Armstrong ended up in the middle of the pack finishing around 60th, with Australian Robbie McEwen winning the event ( Cancer Council Classic ). The event was also aimed at promoting Cancer Awareness which is one of Lance Armstrongs passions given his own fight with Cancer.

All the photos can be found in this gallery

Well the Christmas holidays are over, but it’s been pretty busy so far.

Having Adelaide Zoo Membership means frequent trips primarily to Adelaide zoo. We hadnt travelled down to Monarto Zoo ( about an hour out of Adelaide ) for about 4 months and we had a day with great weather so headed out of Adelaide.

Monarto is an open range zoo on a large expanse of land. There is a guided tour by Bus that takes you to see all the animals from the Bus, and then there is some options to stop off on a shuttle or walk to some of the viewing platforms. We saw some the New baby Girrafe that had been born there only a few weeks ago

We were especially intersted in getting to the African Painted dog / Lion viewing platform which only recently opened, so made sure we got there in time for the Feeding. The lions werent being Fed today unfortunately ( was their Off day ) but the African Hunting dogs were. Seeing a Pack of 40 of them running towards us when released from the other end of the paddock was a sight and sound experience.  One of the Alpha males had died a month or so back so the dogs were still fighting for domimance even though the food was plentiful

The Full Gallery including the African Painted Dogs is located in this gallery

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