Sydney

I know it shouldn’t be shocking, but it turns out that Sydney Uni is a hotbed of left wing sentiment. With the upcoming election and a few recent tea times thick with political gossip have cemented this cliché in my mind.

Unrelated: a little research on the interwebs and I’ve finally figured out how I’m going to vote in my first Australian federal election.

Many people hate having their photographs taken. They don’t like how they are going to come up and as a result, they tense up insuring that they look uncomfortable, thus making the photograph of them look even worse than the real thing. Being a good portrait photographer is as much about making people feel comfortable as it as about knowing f-stops and shutter speeds. I am not particularly good at it, my solution to this used to be to concentrate on (semi-)candid photography, not giving people time to make themselves feel uncomfortable.

I don’t like having my picture taken, because I hate how they come out, but I’ve realized the above and so I just sort of let photographs happen and as a result they come out a little less bad. Ironically, this meant that when I took that lighting class at Dutchess, everyone thought that I loved having my picture taken (we generally used each other for models in that class). I explained this approach to a friend of mine also taking the class, but (unsurprisingly I suppose) it made it even worse for her.

Today I went to Sydney Uni to take pictures of staff and equipment for the website that I am putting together for the Structural Biology Group (MMB). Obviously I had the usual cross section of ease-in-front-of-the-camera-ish-ness. The most photogenic people were, naturally enough, the ones that didn’t really care that their picture was being taken. Every once and a while I would get someone who hated having their picture to feel natural for just long enough (a second or two) to take a nice picture of them.

Today I climbed a tree in order to rescue Tristan's frisbee. It was a lot of fun, and felt like quite an accomplishment. It reminded me of two people I know who like to climb trees: Amber and Brad. It's fun to act young.

(more random thoughts that have collected over the easter weekend)

more pictures here

(and some more)

Australia is treating me well for the most part. I have a job at the Uni putting computers together, and I have discovered a region of Sydney that reminds me a little bit of Beacon (in terms of renewal, and location relative to transport). I still have to find a specific place to live, however.

My grandma went into hospital yesterday to have her hip replaced. Mum and I went up to Gosford to see her when she came out of surgery. She looked pretty well. Hopefully it will help her walk better. I wrote a note on the flowers that we gave her that mum composed:

Get hopping so we can go shopping!!!

My iPod is getting senile. A few weeks ago it lost its database and couldn't find any music, despite the fact that all the mp3s were stored on the drive and could easily be found using tcsh. I had to reboot it twice in the last hour. It's only a year old, it should really be more reliable. Last year I had to send it back to apple twice before they would fix something completely unrelated.