On Saturday Mike and I met up for another round of photography. Our second, in whats turning out to be a monthly event. We'd agreed on a 7:45am start, but I didn't get there until just after 8am. I put the blame squarely on horrible, horrible winter currently gripping Melbourne. Both me and the car aren't big fans of sub-Antartic temperatures.

When not grumbling about the weather, I managed to take a good amount of photos. I easily cleared 200, a feat easily done considering we spent almost six hours on the job. For the most part we roamed the city streets, but a quick suggestion by Mike saw us wander down to Southbank. Of course no photoshoot of Melbourne would be complete without a visit to the ferris wheel (Mike's words, not mine), so we followed the Yarra River upstream to Birrung Marr.

As it was my second time out with the new 50mm lens I wanted to see what I could get out of it. Although Ange wasn't taken by any of the pre-process photos I'd taken, I have a few favourites. I've put three of the better ones on Flickr, but more will come.

Today marks the end of year one for Innocent Bystander.

In that time I've moved house, competed in a diet competition, learned how to use WordPress, ate at some quality (and not so quality) restaurants in Melbourne, attending weddings, taken a lot of photos, laughed, cried, flown interstate, ran, played, made a todo list and begun ticking things off said todo list.

Here's some more fun site facts for those of a statistical nature:

• 89 posts
• 18 categories.
• 137 comments.
• 6,943 spam comments.

Bring on year two I say!

Ange and I headed out to the & Wine Show" href="http://www.goodfoodshow.com.au/">Good Food & Wine Show over the weekend. As with last year, the ticket price included a seat at a 30-minutes cooking show. Unfortunately unlike last year there wasn't any one host who immediately caught my eye, so we defaulted on Donna Hay. We've got a few of her books and I quite like the simplicity of the recipes in them. While she was a decent enough host she didn't come anywhere near the ever-smiling Bill Granger (our host last year).

You'd think that a once a year food celebration would feature large amounts of food, and it did, it's just that the portions of food were restricted to samples only. One stall in particular, Boscastle Pastries, had a perfect opportunity to sell their pies and sausage rolls and other pastries to hungry patrons. They had a pie warmer in the back of the stall, turned on and warmed up, yet they refused to sell individual pies. Crazy.

Then there was the hot dog stand, complete with line that snaked halfway round the floorspace. We were four places from the front of the line when we spotted a small sign informing us they were selling the hot dogs at a princely sum of $8.50 a pop! A ridiculous price. We walked away in disgust and ended up buying lunch from the slightly less overpriced (but only just!) kiosk in the back wall.
On that topic the Boscastle Pastries stall had a pie warmer and yet they still refused to sell individual pies. It was six pies or nothing. An old lady standing in front of the stall was all too happy to hand us a small cracker with a smear of pie filling though. Judging by the amount of people wandering around the hall, they missed a great opportunity to make a lot of sales.

Of course then there's the wine. I was after one wine in particular: a Durif from Buller & Sons in Rutherglen. I'd had it last year and was blown away by it. Everything thing else I tried was just a bonus. Speaking of bonuses, the $2 fee levied against wine glasses last year was gone, which made me happy.

While this post might come across a bit negative we did actually enjoy ourselves. The six bags of goodies, seven bottles of wine and copy of a wine/photography book: Good Wine Bad Language Great Vineyards are testament to this.

We'll be going next year for sure, but I do hope they make a few changes to the format before then.