One Night in Sydney
Posted on July 27, 2008
Filed Under Development, Travel | Leave a Comment
I’m now back safe in Brisbane after two days in Sydney last week for a workshop on iPhone Web Development.
I had a 6am flight from Brisbane down to Sydney, aided by a coffee from Aromas, which went perfectly except for the fact that I had trouble using Optus’ WiFi hotspot at the Brisbane airport. They offered free WiFi in their hotspots, which I’m yet to actually be able to use, but that’s a different topic.
I got to Sydney at 7:30am and found my way to the train station below the airport. I paid my $10 for a ticket into the city (I know, rip off) and had absolutely no trouble at all finding my way to Circular Quay station.
My next step was to find my bearings. I spent a few minutes finding my way through the quieter of the city streets to George St. and then found the building I was looking for. It turned out I was still ridiculously early, so I was off to McDonalds for some breakfast. I later found a Starbucks, grabbed another coffee then headed off to the Cliftons building to start the day.
We spent our first day covering Apple’s new inclusions to Mobile Safari WebKit. They’ve done a nice job of building simple transformations, transitions and animations into CSS and JavaScript. Unfortunately these new features only exist inside WebKit, and some only exist inside Mobile Safari’s implementation of WebKit, but they’re still quite impressive. It was a good day spent on orientating myself to this new web platform.
After a long day of training, I made it to the new Apple Store on George St. in the Sydney CBD. Gareth, who is running the workshop is here to see the Genius Bar and I’m buying an iPhone Universal Dock Adapter, or 3…
From there I went back to my hotel to check in. I stayed at the Holiday Inn at Darling Harbour, just over the road from the Sydney Convention Centre. I started following a monorail track to get there, as I say a monorail track in the picture of the building on their website, but it turned out to be the wrong track. Fast forward 10 minutes and I found the building and checked in.
I then headed back into the CBD to meet up with some people from the workshop and headed out for dinner and a few drinks. We met at the top of Martin Place, typed “beer” into Google Maps and found our way to the Bavarian Bier Cafe. 3 hours, 1 Chicken Schnitzel and 1.5L of Löwenbräu beer later (aren’t Stein’s great?), I made my way back to my hotel for the night.
The following morning I made my way back into the city, ducking for cover from the rain wherever I could find it. After breakfast and a coffee, I made it to the workshop for Day 2.
We spent the day learning about Javascript Client Databases and built a client-side, caching blog application pretty much purely out of JavaScript. This was the prompt for me to actively start learning JavaScript, which I am now looking at.
At the end of the day, we all departed and I went off with Birgit from USQ up north to go geocaching! She explained the concept to me as we made our way to our first waypoint at a park on Margaret St. It turned out that Birgit had a few extra clues up her sleeve from a friend who had already found the cache, so we were able to find it within a few minutes.
Next stop was another cache over at Circular Quay. Again, Birgit had insider knowledge, and we didn’t have much trouble finding this next drop. By then it was time to head back to the airport, unaware that my flight would be delayed an hour and a half. I killed time editing some overdue photos from a previous Strobist meet and watching some vodcasts on my iPhone.
I finally got back into Brisbane just after 11pm and went straight home. It was great to finally see Sydney, having only ever been previously to change flights or go on a cruise. I met some great people at the workshop and enjoyed my time down there. I’ll be back in August!
Mushroom Cloud
Posted on January 25, 2008
Filed Under Photography | Leave a Comment
Photography is essentially the capture of moments, or in this case, simply a burning lightbulb filament.
This is a project that I had wanted to try for a while now, but could never find the motivation. That changed when the Whirlpool Photography Competition turned to the theme of “Hot!” one month. With all bets off, I dived in and tackled this experiment head on.
First, I needed the materials. I visited my local Bunnings and picked up 12x 60W lightbulbs and a lamp base.
The hardest step was the second: expose the filaments. I used Occam’s razor (”All other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best”) and decided to place the bulbs in plastic bags and break them with a hammer. Unfortunately, I didn’t plan for the case of the hammer following through the outer casing and breaking the fragile filament held therein. Unfortunately, this was the case 6 times out of the 12 bulbs that I had bought.
Using my perfect 20/20 hindsight, I now realise that a more ideal solution to my problem would have been to use pliers (or a similar instrument) to squeeze the glass at the base of the neck. Maybe another time.
Now that I had 6 exposed bulbs to work with, I went about setting up. I screwed each bulb into the lamp base and positioned it either in front of a black piece of paper or far enough away from a wall that it won’t be seen in the dark.
Due to the lack of light when actually shooting the images, I found it easiest to setup my camera on a tripod such that I was happy with the framing, and get an Auto Focus (AF) lock while the lights were still on. Once I did this, I was able to set the lens to Manual Focus (MF) so that the camera wouldn’t have a fit at not being able to focus on anything in the dark, and hunt for an AF lock while the filament burned away.
Settings wise, I was able to take some base settings from another photographer I had seen attempt this shot, which worked well for me. In the case of this photo, I shot at 70mm, f/4 aperture, 1/800 sec shutter speed on ISO 100. These settings worked well for me with a 60W bulb. If you change any of the elements of exposure, obviously you will need to change something else to compensate and ensure you expose correctly.
From there, it is simply a matter of turning off the lights and then flicking the switches for both the lamp and my camera at the same time, and then sitting back and feeling proud of yourself. Personally, I used a remote shutter release cable so I didn’t accidentally knock my camera, but this isn’t imperative.
I feel obliged to put a disclaimer here that this is a potentially dangerous project, but I’m sure you’ll be fine.
Photography Project - A Burning Light Bulb
LeggNet’s Digital Capture - Spontaneous Combustion
Pouring Johnno’s Coke
Posted on January 7, 2008
Filed Under Photography | 1 Comment
I met up on Saturday with Xenedis, David de Groot and Cyron from Flickr for a Brisbane Meet.
After lunch at the Breakfast Creek Hotel, we left our slightly overcooked steaks with the aim of picking up Xenedis’ tripod from his hotel room at the Stamford Plaza and then heading to the Kangaroo Point Cliffs for an afternoon and sunset shoot. I followed David’s truck which lead to the Stamford Plaza and then to Milton. I figured Xenedis was giving directions and, being the import from Sydney, got us all lost, but in fact it turned out that Cyron had missed his afternoon coffee at lunch and needed one urgently.
We made our way to La Dolce Vita at Park Road in Milton before ordering our coffee. We spent an interesting few hours at the quaint little coffee shop, which included the obligatory camera duels often seen at Flickr meets. Given that there were four males present, the dueling soon turned to a pissing match to see who had the biggest lens, and was promptly won by Xenedis and his Canon EF 70-200 f/2.8 IS USM.
After shooting Xenedis pouring his coke, as seen above, we realised the sun would be setting within the hour and hence made our way to the Kangaroo Point cliffs where we were soon met by Rob Ferris. After finding a good angle for the CBD and the setting sun, we took our time setting up to make sure that our tripods weren’t present in each other’s wide angle shots before shooting like mad until the “good light” left us, which occurred at 7:30pm.
Xenedis and David headed off to find dinner and probably some caffeine pills to keep them up until they left for a pre-dawn shoot at Dicky Beach up towards Caloundra. From what I heard from the sleep-deprived pair, they made it and got some great shots.