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 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.