Christmas at the Domain

I have never seen so many people in one place with Santa's hat before. Domain (Sydney, NSW) was packed last Saturday during the christmas carol celebration.

Food stalls were expensive as usual, but it didn't stop people from coming and spending the day with the family on the grass.

Using my big 70-200mm lens, I excuse myself to walk on the isles of the sea of picnic rugs to get closer to the stage and take a few snapshot.

I like this photo. I think the telstra red candle light holder does give a nice ambiance to the celebration. The kid is adorable!

Asian couple looking romantic. I think they know their picture was taken. Hard to take candid metal protruding 30 cm out from your face!

The music and the dancing gets even better when The Wiggles came on stage! Ah yes, they are Macquarie University graduates.

Finally, I will leave you with this artsy photo. Taken with longish exposures and moving the camera randomly. Kinda cool, I like it.

Baby Shower

Last week (or was it the week before?) my housemate held a baby shower party. She is expecting a baby boy by end of December! Exciting!

So I hop along in the social fun games. She came up with loads of entertaining games and the international mix of friends were very supportive.

One of the games is tying shoe laces with blue balloon underneath our shirt as a pretend belly (1st picture here). It turns out to be not as easy! Lesson learned: wear lace-less shoes during pregnancy!

Another the game of guessing the perimeter of the belly with toilet papers. Each guest have to guess how many squares, and in the end we tried it on her belly. I over-guessed by 5 squares!

Then the classic put the pacifier on baby mouth blind folded, followed by Pictionary! The hardest game was about guessing popular songs played in baby lullaby style with xylophone. You'd never guessed some are songs by Cure.

It really was a fun afternoon, Thank you Agny & Koko! We are looking forward to a healthy baby boy soon!

The rest of the pictures are available here.

Outdoor Bondi Beach Milonga

Good tango music, dance, and the beach is an absolute winning combination. Held outside the Bondi Beach Pavillion, this milonga provides the opportunity for Sophia and Pedro Alvarez from Patio de Tango to introduce tango dance to the public. And of course for us, dancers, to show our skillz of giros, enrosques, and boleos.

It was especially good to see the dance in a totally different background: the beach!

It was great for me, because I do not need to worry about shutter speed and aperture to give enough light for the photos. On the other hand, having a big metal thing stuck in front of your face doesn't encourage guys to ask me to dance! I got a good tanda. I was happy.

I had the enjoyment of being their Sophia and Pedro's level 4 student since I came to Sydney. I've been trying to catch Sophia in one of my pic, because she said she haven't had a really good picture of her doing Tango. It's not easy! She moves fast!

Lastly I think I will leave you with a slightly different photo style. The original (and the rest of other pictures) are in my picasa album here What do you think?

Sculpture by the Sea

Sculpture by the Sea is an annual event of sculpture exhibition along the Australian coasts. This year, I was lucky to had the opportunity to attend it on the last day. It was hot, high noon, certainly not the best condition to take pictures, but I tried my best for the sake of sharing it with you guys!

Bondi beach was packed that day. It's good to see families out together to enjoy the exhibition, and yet makes it more challenging to take photographs of the sculpture without making the result looks like an ordinary tourist photo.

The next two are a picture of the same sculpture. I love this curvy metallic one. It's Mitsuo Takeuchi's transfiguration "screw" IX. I love the way it gives different sense of feeling when viewed at different angle. And the shiny reflection, to top it off, Wow!

The winner of this year is actually this next photo of green leafy sculpture by Phil Price called Morpheus. The amazing thing about this, is that it is moving, changing shapes, rather like a chaotic pendulum. I think it portrays our current times, where things are slowly going back to the environment, yet not leaving the technology behind. I love it.

Paul Trefry, "little boy lost" is the next photo. I tried to take a picture from the front of the boy like everybody else, but in the end I decided to take the other angle. I wonder why the artist made a bigger size rather than the normal proportional size of a boy. Perhaps avoiding controversy? It would give a bit more impact were it to be the faithful size, especially taken from this angle.

The next one, a straw coming out of the ocean! This would have been a great picture were I to go with someone else who can pretend to suck the ocean! It's Big drink, by Justin Drape / Simone Brandse.

Pamela Lee Brenner / Emma Medwell's "step by step, inch by inch ... towards the precipice" is quite neat. I love the fact that most of the lady shoes are Tango shoes look alike! :)

Check out more photos in my picasa album directory.

Milonga Jungle

The ocho birthday of Patio de Tango was celebrated in Jungle style with plenty leopards, many zebras, a parrot, a dog, one yummy cake and a Dr. Doolittle. No tarzan though.

When I arrived, the show had begun. The fluorescent lights were on. Good, I thought at first, plenty light for the picture. But then on restrospective when I looked at the photos, I didn't like it so much. I did like the show though.
Fortunately after that, the milonga continued on with more of a moody lighting.

Plenty of tricks and lesson learned. The most important is do NOT photograph women on side step! It is really unflattering. Also, being an unofficial photographer does bring limitations. I didn't have the freedom nor the authority to ask people to pose, or to place myself at strategic places for important moments, so all of the photos are photo-journalistic style.

Finally, thank you to the City Rail trackwork, my arrival was delayed 2 hours. After the endless bus-train-bus-train-bus torture, I didn't feel like changing into my leafy skirt costume anymore. But I did came with my trusty Canon L lens and a flash. As always, took too many photos and spend too much time in photoshop (thus Copyright reserved, full resolution image can be made available upon request). Here are a few that I like, the rest can be viewed in my picasa album.

So I hope you guys enjoyed the photos.

Milonga El Cabeceo

One of the first reasons I bought my camera 2.5 years ago was to take picture of Tango. Back then I was still doing some oil painting, and when I look up on the web to find cool Tango pose to paint, I had difficulties. Most photos of Tango are point and shoot camera which makes the figures disproportioned.

Taking picture of dances aren't easy. First normally the lighting is dim, then you really have to know and anticipate the move. One lesson I learned is that the more advanced the dancers are, the more difficult it is to capture them. Simply because they move faster. Of course, unless they know the camera is there and pose it appropriately (see my Geraldine & Ezequiel Paludi photos).

So I lugged around my 50mm F1.4 to the milonga held by Patio de Tango (where I currently are taking my tango lessons too), and take some pictures. F1.4 is great, but they do give a rather soft appearances. So here they are. Obviously I picked a few that I like. If you happen to be the subject of the photos and really do mind having your pictures displayed here please email me and I will take them off. On the other hand, if you like the photo, feel free to link my blog / photo URL to your site, spread the word, and hire me for your next event photography!

PS: See if you can spot which one isn't tango!

Riverbeats, Parramatta

The Parramatta Riverbeats celebration (NSW) yesterday consists of percussion performance, chalk painting competition, food stalls and pyroworks.

I quite enjoyed the percussions. Three distinctively different group played in turn with one conductor, played some different rhythm. Funky. I took the picture of the aboriginal lady with the flower wratgh while they were practicing before the show.

The chalk painting competition bears the theme of climate change. Here are two of my favourites. or of cute penguins on melting ice, and the other painting on her prius. The rest of the painting, sad to say, was a bit too ordinary to my liking.




Food stalls were good. Except the fact that they're quite expensive for 'stalls standard'. Mostly around 8-10 dollars for a meal. Three thai food stalls made our choice difficult. In the end I and my housemate decided on tucker boxes that are slightly cheaper. They also have activity for kids: pretending to be chef. I thought it was cute.


Finally the celebration is topped with some pyroworks (or should I say flame torch play). First there were two alien and predator costumed men with torches, then a boat with a guy caricature and a dinosaur appeared. Nobody knows what these suppose to represent. First I thought it was some Alien, but then "The prime minister and the dinosaur" seems to be a more suitable name (see my full photo collection here for the close up and you will know what I'm talking about). Seriously, it was the most boring 30 minutes. The boat went up near to the stage, did nothing and return. Both my housemate and I think we need to smoke some weed to understand the message!

I think Australians still need to learn from Montrealers on how to conduct a proper festival. But I was happy, had some good snaps and walked away with full stomach.