Sydney Day 3

Our general plan for the day was to walk through the Botanical Gardens to the Art Gallery of New South Wales and have a look at their new exhibition called “The Photograph and Australia”. Maybe it’s the thought of looking at some old photographs that prompts me to challenge myself to spend the day shooting in black and white. I set my camera to raw+jpeg with the jpeg set to monochrome. That gives me the best of both worlds. I can see my shots instantly in B&W but I also have all my data in the raw file so I can do my own B&W conversions in software (that tip was given to me by our ‘Creative Photography’ course instructor, thanks John!).

We set off to walk down to the quay and on to the Botanical Gardens. We’re used to seeing the Opera House and Bridge coming into view as we walk down from the Youth Hostel but as we neared the quay this morning both those structures were dwarfed by something significantly larger. The Queen Mary 2 cruise ship had docked during the night. She looked enormous. I tried to take some shots that showed just how large and imposing she looked. This is one of them. The Opera House looks like a little model of itself beside the large stern of the ship.

We spent longer on the quay than we planned. By the time we had finished taking shots of the ship from all possible angles it was time for a coffee break. We eventually arrived at the gallery and headed straight for the exhibition. It was amazing. Photographs of Australia going back to the very beginning of photography and the very beginning of Australia were on display. The exhibition charted the history of Victoria and Southern Australia while at the same time charting the history of photography. Very clever!! 

We had lunch and talked about what we’d seen then went to have a quick look at the rest of the gallery. The quick look took us at least another two hours. We finally left at about 3:30. We’d spent over four hours in there. At the beginning of the day we thought we’d have time to do something else after the gallery, maybe go up Sydney Tower but we only had time for ice cream and tea and the long walk back to the hostel (I think Igor was secretly pleased about not going up the tower).

As I write the Queen Mary is still in port. It turns out we can see the upper deck from our room, we just hadn’t spotted it this morning. There are lots of passengers milling around so I’m guessing she’ll be off sometime soon.