Lines, shapes, colours

It’s very rare for me to be in a photogenic foreign city…with my camera…with a day at leisure… So today, with Melbourne being VERY photogenic, I think I probably got a bit carried away; I ended up taking almost 300 shots!

This is one of those (rare!) days when I find myself spoiled for choice, and cursing the central “one a day” idea of blip.

I took pictures of the towers of the Central Business District in grey pre-dawn light, their tops vanishing into low cloud. Eerie monochrome reflections in the Yarra River. Lots of flowers at the Royal Botanic Gardens (though the prettiest I got were on a piece of wasteland near the railway tracks :)) A humorous (to me, at least! :) shot of a seagull standing in a perfectly still puddle, staring down at its reflection with a worried look on its face.

But if there’s one thing that defines Melbourne for me, it’s its architecture. You find grand Victorian theatres next to extraordinary modern construction. The modern buildings – and there are many – are bold and striking. The city planners have scattered modern art installations and sculpture among them, and the effect is a real feast for the eye.

So I’ve gone with something architectural, modern and bold – and where the “art” is very much part of the building.

This is at Federation Square, and I’ve managed to include two parts of the complex: the dark lines are the bars that make up the “skin” of the Atrium, and I’m looking through that to the wall of the Australian Centre for the Moving Image.

What’s maddening is tomorrow I know I’ll be really pushed for time – and will probably end up with an emergency blip, despite all the goodies I saw and snapped today :( If anyone would like to see some of the other Melbourne shots I took today, I've put them here