Newtown in the Duststorm

The dust storm that swept through Sydney on Wednesday also left its mark on Newtown. I woke up at 6am, and noticing a strange glow outside, jumped on his bike to take a few snaps. King Street was surprisingly busy considering how early it was, but the combination of the dust and lights created quite an atmosphere.

King Street almost empty.

Even the lights were orange !

I headed to Sydney Park, hoping to capture the CBD surrounded by haze. Fat chance of course, as visibility was about 200m, but Sydney Park itself still provided some great photo opportunities.

Can't blame the chimneys for the haze !

Erskineville Oval

The view from Erskineville Bridge

See and download the full gallery on posterous

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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Just got the new Peter Temple

I just bought Truth - the latest book by Peter Temple, and sequel to the brilliant Broken Shore. Now the trick is how to avoid reading it in one sitting.

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Photo Rendering in Posterous

There's seems to be quite a difference in the photo rendering on Posterous and other sites. I've been playing around with Posterous today with photos from the Sydney Dust storm, and there's a noticable rendering effect in the Sydney Park photos in particular, that is quite pronounced here but not nearly as much so on Fotki  or Facebook. Even the large versions (e.g of Chimleys) have the swirly effect that just isn't there in the originals or on other sites. Hmmm.

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Sydney Park in the storm

Approaching

Taking photos from a moving bike ...

 

Rolling

 

Chimleys !

 

Sydney CBD is over there somewhere

 

View South

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Puzzle Time

I decided I'd make my niece her 8th birthday present this year, rather than buy something. She loves animals and puzzles, so after seeing this idea from PhotoJojo, I decided that animal photo blocks using my own photos would be the go. The idea was to go from this:



... to this:




(I've used the Fotki Stacks feature, which I blogged about here, to illustrate the transformation from the originals to the solved puzzles. Just click on the photos to navigate through them.)

It seemed pretty easy; in essence the instructions were buy blocks, print photos, stick photos, cut photos. Repeat the last three steps to do more than one side. Of course, it was not quite so easy ! For a start there were no blocks to be found so I decided to make them out of balsa wood. I had no idea how difficult it would be to create accurate cubes - luckily my mate Angus was there to give a guiding hand. We're at the opposite spectrum when it comes to attention to detail; sometimes it's too easy for me to say close enough is good enough, whereas Gus's tendency to perfectionism borders on extreme. In this case perfectionism was required as the blocks really needed to be perfect cubes for the photo stick and cut to work.


Gus's brainwave in this case was to tape the blocks together so that the rough edges were top and bottom (above); then sanding all the rough edges flat together. However this could only be done once the blocks had gone through a painstaking measure cut and first sand basis.

Production Line

Once the blocks were done, it was a matter of choosing and cropping the photos (to 15cm square, 3 lots of 5cm sided cubes), printing them on photo paper, then pasting them to the blank sides of the blocks.

Ready for the chop

After than, a painstaking cut with a stanley knife to separate the blocks; tricky the first time and even harder for the latter sides as it was important to avoid scratching the existing sides when cutting.

Shiraz Workbench

The final step was to apply multiple layers of lacquer to protect the puzzles, about 9 coats in all, outside and with an hour's drying time !


And then create a box lid with a Picasa mosaic (which created the first photo at the top of the post) and instructions and labels on the inside (below):


Great fun, but certainly not an exercise of one or two hours - lucky I started a week before the birthday. Below are the original animal photos I chose.

Toucan from Iguazu, Argentina

Chicken from Sacred Valley in Peru

Monkey from Pushkar India

Peacock from Jaipur City Palace India

Cow from Pushkar India

Llama from Salta Argentina

Sydney Film Festival 2009 Highlights

So it's all over for another year - being the shy and retiring type I didn't go to the closing night party (and film - An Education) and instead finished the festival with the 5 hour Che epic. As usual, my reviewing is running well behind viewing, so to make sure I don't forget anything there's a quick summary of the films I've seen here, and I'm going to write up my overall festival impressions while it's all still fresh ! Individual film comments may or may not follow.

Overall it was probably the most consistent film festival I've been to. While there were no absolute killer films, there were, for the first time in memory, no duds either; the closest being a mere let-down (The Girlfriend Experience) that really didn't live up to it's promise or director's reputation. I believe I promised I wouldn't mention the website and ticketing problems again - so I won't !

My favourite documentary was the The Cove - for being everything a good documentary should be - but a special mention here to Big River Man, the story of an overweight alcoholic 52 year old Slovenian who decides to swim the entire length of the Amazon, which came very close, telling a remarkable story at once personal and global; with a much smaller budget and none of the rich and powerful connections that the makers of The Cove enjoyed.

The Beaches of Agnes was a delightfully unexpected treasure and beat out Che Part 1 for favourite bio-pic (really I just created the category so I could mention it). Understanding the history, character and motivations of Agnes Varda also added enormously to my appreciation of Cleo from 5 to 7 the next day - I just love seeing those old 'new wave' black and whites on the big screen.

The winner for best big budget Chinese propaganda piece (in the face of terrific competition) was Red Cliff - and what a pleasure to see John Woo in person - so humble and proud of his work.

And finally, my overall favourite was probably Wake in Fright - despite (or because) of it being nearly 40 years old. The back story added to the enjoyment, of course, but the film absolutely stood on its own as an unflinching look at part of the Australian psyche. I'm really hoping a lot of people will go and see this when it gets its cinema run soon.


PS The full set of my 2009 Film Festival entries are collected here; and those for past years here - starting to build up quite a collection now, definitely helpful in remembering what I've seen !

SFF 2009 Films Seen Still to be Reviewed

Below are films that I've seen but not yet written up. Really just notes for me at this stage but feel free to take a peek ! It may well be that they get no further.

Disgrace - loved it, haven't read the book, maybe in about 6 months. Brilliantly done, it will be interesting to see how the South Africans react to Australians making a South African story - and compare it to how Australians reacted to Wake in Fright (Canadian director) all those years ago (it lasted 7 days in cinemas in Sydney - compared to months in France !

The Beaches of Agnes - best bio-pic I've ever seen. Unexpectedly delightful, original approach and her character really shines.
Cleo from 5 to 7 - from Agnes Varda above, 'cute' new wage film from the early 60s; original and fun.

Parque Via - slow but lingers, the second 'Latin American live in help' film of the festival after The Maid. Not as immediately appealing as The Maid.
The Missing Person - interesting take on film noir. Stylish even if the plot was light.

The Missing Water - ambitious and lots of admiration; the 'gimmick' didn't work for me, as much as I wanted to like the film. There was a lot of good will in the State Theatre for the young director and many loved it. A great achievement at any rate.

Red Cliff - fantastic John Woo fun, big Chinese propaganda push !
Big River Man - magic story, worked as a film as well. Highlight was the standing ovation the Big River man himself got when he surprised us after the film (last we saw of him was in an alcoholic stupor on his couch in Slovenia - a few months after completing an extra-ordinary swim the length of the Amazon that took him and his team to the mental edge.

The Girlfriend Experience was pretty ordinary - didn't say anything really. Probably only disappointment of the festival.
Wake in Fright - absolutely brilliant, powerful and spectacular, deserved the hype.

Che Part 1 was a great telling of the story. I've forgiven Soderbergh for the blah-ness of The Girlfriend Experience.
Che Part 2 - works as a stand alone film but not I'm convinced the same impact couldn't have been had with an extra 15 minutes on part 1. Still completely watchable though; but given there had to be two films why not more on the trials of establishing a government in Cuba directly post revolution ?

Mercury Rising

Two quite different 'environmental' films share this review.

The Cove is what great documentary making is all about. Passionate, exciting and revealing, the Cove both exposes the shameful annual dolphin massacre in the Japanese town of Taijii, and tells the exciting story of the work of dedicated activists over the years (including Ric O'Barry, the (human) face of Flipper) to expose this story to the wider public. Also check out the official website for more background on the campaign to save the dolphins, and inform the world of increasing problem of mercury poisoning in fish (and therefore humans).

Altiplano takes another path altogether. Superficially the movie tells the story (based on true events) of a traditional Peruvian village suffering mercury poisoning from a new mine in the area, with a side story of a Belgian couple whose lives become caught up in the conflict. However the film-makers have a greater ambition, which is to draw attention to the problem (in their eyes) of the decline of the spiriual in modern western lives. Maybe it's my rational side, but for me, the film worked best at the more mundane level. Three quarters of the way through I was loving it - beautifully filmed, interesting and important story, opening us up to a new world. However the last quarter (or so - it seemed longer) the self-indulgent mystical pieces over-took the film, unfortunately losing some of the impact of the rest of the film.

Judge for yourslves though - either by seeing the film (which I still recommend - especially anyone interested in South America) or by exploring the official website which spells out better than I have the film-makers philosophy.