This technically counts as a “Random Day Out” so excuse me for using the “Random Nights Out” category…
Last weekend, after my Grandmother’s 80th birthday luncheon (which I’ll post about later), our forum held a mini-meet at The Rocks in the city because one of our members, Simon “Manta” Fallon, was in Sydney with his family for a little holiday.
And that’s always a perfect excuse for a quaint little mob of photographers to go out and shoot people.
With cameras.
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[i]Glen as he was walking towards us when he first arrived.[/i]
So we all started to meet at 4-ish or 4.30-ish… it was one of the 4-ishesnesses, I know that much.
So there we were, waiting for others, taking advantage of the nearby view of the Opera House with the Bridge Climbers above us doing their Bridge Climbing.
It wouldn’t be long before we’d start seeing others… Kris, Patrick, Andre (who was there before us), and Team Manta. I’m going to call them either Team Manta or The Manta’s for this post because, well, I didn’t get all of their names and only really know Simon’s, plus… you don’t care.
I mean seriously, you don’t. Unless of course you ARE The Manta’s, in which case I’m probably going to expect a semi-nasty little comment from whichever Manta reads this pointing out each of their names and why it’s important for me to know.
Well Team Manta, I apologise for not knowing your names. I sincerely apologise.
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[i]On the left is Kris (also known as “Macka” on our forums) and on the right is Team Manta’s older daughter…[/i]
Moving on…
We started heading down The Rocks Markets from the top of the markets since… well… that’s where we were and it was a bit chaotic, to tell the truth. This was to be expected, mind you, as one doesn’t exactly walk down a bustling and crowded marketplace crowded even more with a busy pub filled with people getting wasted on a relaxing Sunday afternoon.
I walked on ahead of everyone and, since I had my camera armed with a 300mm lens, got shots of people as they walked on down the road weaving in and out of the paths of other people.
At one point, we all just stood around trying to make contact with Matt K. & Philo, as well as Chi. This yielded some almost confronting results.
Not the Matt K, Philo or Chi bits. They were fine. Ya’ll are fine. I hope, anyway.
The waiting. You see, my Dad can be an aggressive sort of person. I have the opinion that my brother and my Dad are both aggressive-aggressive personalities, which is fine, and I’ve got nothing against that since I’m of the opinion that both myself and my Mum have passive-aggressive personalities, but with that in mind and my Dad’s aggressive-aggressive personality floating amongst the paragraph like the smog floats over Los Angeles (best I can come up with right now), my Dad can have words.
And that’s, where the drunk came in. No doubt a drunk who’d finished up drinking at the aforementioned pub in the bustling bit of the Markets, he wandered down to where we were waiting and stood around like he was part of the group. No problems. Great, good for you. You fit in like a gay monkey in a pack of homophobic monkey-eating tarantulas (yup, it sure is scary in this here brain of mine…) but you’re welcome to try and stay, provided you don’t be an ass.
Which you did do, Mr. Drunk, when you tried getting in the way of my Dad’s photos. Which pissed off my Dad. And words started to be exchanged. And Mr. Drunk thought he was still going to be an ass and still got in the way of my Dad trying to take an image.
And then it was Andre and I telling Dad to chill out. To leave it alone. To let it go because quite frankly, it wasn’t worth it. And it wasn’t. Mr Drunk didn’t seem all that bright and being drunk and aggressive wasn’t going to make him any better a person, but moreso get his arse arrested if need be.
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[i]Mick (Oscar) on the right shooting on his brand spankin’ new lens and the head of Team Manta — Simon — on the right.[/i]
And then we moved on. Down George St. a bit more and I would have a City Ranger (not quite a cop, but not quite a security guard… they do get a nice hat, though!) come and ask me what I’m taking pictures for… and pretty much the moment I answered just for myself, Dad intervenes and gets back into a somewhat huff and starts telling the guy “because we can” and “it doesn’t matter” and so on and so on.
Seriously, the guy was just doing his job and he didn’t care all that much that I had a long lens on. He just wanted to make sure others weren’t at risk. There is no reason to be a lobbyist for whatever cause on his time just because you feel like it. I just walked away and took a couple of shots of the guy on my camera.
So after that incident and hoping Dad was calming the fuck down, we headed across the road and began to wait for others outside one of the cottage… thingies… near the terminal where all those overpriced yuppie bars at The Quay.
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[i]Matt & Philo arrive in the right hand picture, while later on Matt takes a break in the left.[/i]
So we waited again. Most people talking and catching up, others taking random shots of even more random crap.
Yes, you can tell I have an obsession with the word “random”. It’s not really an obsession, per se. I like the word “random” a lot. It’s more of a word liking fetish. If you’d like to explore this randomly picked word liking fetish of mine, find a word that sounds really cool and has a nice ring to it whenever it rolls off of the top of your tongue and give me a buzz. We can talk more about that tongue thing in the same conversation.
Anyway, I was taking shots of strangers and members but not strangers’ members as that could be a bit awkward and then we had people like Matt & Philo, Chi (Onyx), Rod (Sandy Feet) Jeff (Trotkiller), and a soon-to-be-member Terrence come along.
And yet, then we went back up the Market and back to where we began… to have a drink, at which point Wendell met up with us.
I didn’t understand this whole “getting a drink” thing and like Matt, Philo, Glen, and Jeff, I wandered up the road to take more pictures and find somewhere to eat, showing Philo & Glen some of the animation tests I was doing so they could see the type of animation I was making for my project.
The “finding somewhere to eat” thing didn’t exactly eventuate and we just eventually came back to the pub where some of us ate a little bit there and talked and crap, before we were to head back down to the Quay for a night shoot.
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[i]Bridge Climbers do their whole bridge climbing thing…[/i]
A group of us wandered out while Dad & Rod stayed at the pub chilling when the “night shoot” bit of the meet was to begin. Rob, another new member (Shoot) came out with us as… well… he was there earlier on with Mick and since I didn’t really mention either of them previously… you know what, I thought I’d mention them in this paragraph.
Anyway, we started to get some shots at the top of The Rocks where the markets were being packed up because the light was gorgeous. It was an intense gold that just came right down and made everything it touched look just that much more vibrant against the looming dark clouds that were hovering over Sydney at the time.
Both the light and the clouds would pass not long after, mind you, and I find it important to get the shots which you don’t feel you’ll ever be able to shoot the same way again.
And since moments in life are like that, that’s practically every time you frame up a scene or composition in your viewfinder.
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Our group had begun to break up into two or three groups as we began to make our way down to the area of The Quay at the end of the high-priced-bars-that-were-previously-docks and the Hyatt… it was a hotel, I know that. It could’ve been the Hyatt. The area was in Project Gotham 2, I know that much.
There was a massive rainbow over parts of Sydney at the time which made for some good photos (but none I thought were all that interesting compositionally for me, probably because I’d shot them with the 300mm still on) and we could start getting some really nice shots of the Sydney icons like the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge.
[img]https://www.leighlo.com/uploads/random/2007/01-MantaMeet03.jpg[/img]
I’d already started to be a bit experimental with some of my shots and as we made our way to the area where we’d all setup tripods and start some long exposure shooting, I had the infrared filter itching for some action in my pocket.
It should be noted as a sort of side-bit to all of this that we quickly chatted to what looked like an American tourist with his family who was using a 30D and seemed like a nice guy and even saw some guy who we didn’t talk to who used a D200 (from the look of it) and looked sort of like Matt “Rokkstar” Bonnington… he even had the bald head and the red shirt on. Granted, his skull structure wasn’t the same, but from far away… he looked very similar. He could never replace the Hasslehoffian-legendary man that is Matt Bonnington, but it’s still worth noting.
Back to the topic at hand, while I didn’t mind shooting some long-exposure landscapes, I’m not exactly one for normality. Mediocrity, in my mind, seems a lot of the time destined for boredom… so I tried something different.
I’d never actually tried a long exposure in infrared (which is basically what most infrared is good for) and it looked good.
But I was itching for something a little bit different, so as Kris set herself up for her long exposure city shot, I took a photo of her in infrared taking the shot.
[img]https://www.leighlo.com/uploads/random/2007/01-MantaMeet02.jpg[/img]
I love the effect and I love the image, but I have no idea how I’m going to pull it off again. :)
After some more shots, we moved a bit further up and got some shots of everyone’s favourite coathanger, the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Complete with the coathanger in tow.
[img]https://www.leighlo.com/uploads/random/2007/01-MantaMeet01b.jpg[/img]
All in all, ’twas a good meet as I got to meet with old friends as well as making some new ones, helping some of my friends with their shooting, and taking some great photos too.
[url=https://www.leighlo.com/spore/index.php?gallery=./DSLR%20Users.com/2007-01-07-MantaMeet]The rest of the images from the shoot are here.[/url]