Some more photos from May 2003
Once upon a time, green bags weren’t actually green:
Signage in High Street… not a great job done there with the relative placement of the No Left Turn and Tram Stop signs:
The then-new multi-storey carpark at Elsternwick station:
Who says you can’t take home bulky goods on public transport, if you have your friends to help? One weekend I observed this:
More of my photos from ten years ago: May 2003
This might become a regular series. Following my posting of old photos from when I first got my digital camera, here’s a batch from early and mid-May 2003.
This building next to the Orica building in Nicholson Street (near the corner of Lonsdale) looks like it’s two-dimensional, at least from some angles. Worth a look in person if you’re around that area.
Outside the Exhibition Buildings (or was it the new Museum?) were these bits of old buildings from elsewhere in Melbourne. Are they still there? These pieces looked like Lego.
Around this time, Yarra Trams were removing large numbers of seats from B-class trams. In this photo for the PTUA’s “BYO Seat” campaign, John checks the time of the next tram, seat at the ready.
Speaking of trams, here a tram still in Met colours (though without any logo; this was almost 4 years after privatisation mind you) pulls into the old Federation Square tram stop.
Remember Swanston Street when it was supposedly, but not actually, “car free”? (Even today, errant cars never seem to attract police attention.)
Sadly this is still about the limit of tram priority in Melbourne (though a trial of actual traffic light priority for trams is underway on route 96).
Murrumbeena station one night. Yes, this panel still had a Met logo.
Finally, here is my desk at work, back in 2003. Probably tidier than today. To the right you can see my old organiser/diary. These days I tend to put my appointments into Google Calendar, and sync them to my phone.
I first got a digital camera 10 years ago. Here are some of my first photos.
Ten years ago this week I got my first digital camera: a Canon A70. I’d held on until the price seemed right and they did a half-decent job of video recording (as my old Video-8 video camera had given up the ghost a couple of years before).
I assume I only started with a fairly small memory card, as it looks like I deleted my first ever digital picture — and the second (what we now know as a “selfie“) was at low (640×480, or about a third of a megapixel) resolution.
The second batch of photos that I still have are from a party from then-flatmates Josh and Catherine’s place in St Kilda. Or was it Elwood? At some point I let Josh play with the camera, and he took a bunch of photos of people I don’t know, and don’t recognise.
Some better/more interesting photos from later on in April (when I’d got a memory card and started using the camera’s full mighty THREE megapixels) include these from an expedition around Melbourne with my friend Danielle when she visited from Sydney:
The Espy — back before tall buildings loomed over it
St Kilda Pier
MV John Batman — note the Cadbury building in the background, which has recently lost its “eyes”
Starfish on St Kilda Pier
“That one sweet promenade” — St Kilda Esplanade
St Paul’s Cathedral, under renovation
Live from the BBC (and a few other pics from this week)
Live from the BBC!
I’m no big fan of motor vehicles, but that is a fine looking machine.
Advert for Myki top-up at 7-11 talks up the fact that it’s instant, without the delay of online top-up.
And finally, from a friend’s kids’ party last weekend… this castle had a high quotient of princesses in towers. Razing it was a lot easier than in medieval times:
End of the week pics
Pretty funny: Southern Cross Station has departure signs sponsored by Red Rooster. In part because they show less information, they actually have fewer errors than the official signs — but beware — it appears they don’t show trains departing in less than 10 minutes (because they want you to think there’s time to go and buy a snack from them).
(More on these signs at Marcus Wong’s blog)
Interesting… ummm… tree watchamacallit in Footscray:
Last of my birthday gifts was last night (thank you M): superb tickets to Bill Bailey. Very funny stuff — go see him if you get the chance. Row AA was about four rows from the front. Fantastic.
Hamer Hall is very impressive… we made sure to go in early to admire the new renovation.
Here’s what happens when you try and run a red light, but don’t make it across.
Is it just me who finds these fake birds at Bunnings a bit creepy when viewed en masse?
A photo of mine reused by the Myki Customer Experience Panel (but I don’t mind)
Yesterday I was taking a look at the Myki Customer Experience Panel web site — that’s the set up where they ask a cross-section of Myki users about the system; get them to answer questions about what they’ve seen and how things are working for them. While some may moan about the extra cost, it’s tiny compared to the total budget for the system, and it’s the very type of consultation we need more of, I think.
Anyway, I was clicking around and looked at the Polls page:
…and I thought hello, that photo of all the Metcards looks familiar.
Ah. Yes indeed. Very familiar:
It’s my hand, my photo, snapped in 2010, and originally used in this blog post comparing different fare options for regular PT users.
It’s not the first time one of my pics has shown up elsewhere. In 2009 one of mine showed up in a London Daily News story about UK trains. In 2008 two of my photos got morphed together on Channel 9 news.
I don’t actually mind my photos being re-published. I deliberately put a Creative Commons licence on most of what I upload to Flickr. I’m more than happy happy if someone re-using a photo of a PT problem that I’ve snapped helps get a stronger message across.
But I do actually specify my photos as “Attribution, Noncommercial, Share Alike”…
I haven’t found it yet, but perhaps the Myki Customer Experience Panel’s fine print somewhere hidden away on the site includes the attribution credit?
Update Friday: Here’s another case, from Green Left Weekly:
Stubbly me
There are times when a random snap turns out to be quite a good photo — without any cropping or editing. Jeremy snapped this on the way back from camping a couple of weeks ago. I like it.
New camera
After much procrastination, I got a new camera. It’s a Canon IXUS 115, to replace the old Canon A70 I got way back in 2003. The old one still just about works (with minor problems), so I figured Canon was deserving of my loyalty. (My 4-ish year old Canon MP610 printer/scanner is going strong too.)
At the time I bought it, I thought the A70 was small. This is much smaller — about as small as I’d want. I did consider getting an SLR (the EOS1100 with lens is only about $500 now through Kogan), but decided I wanted portability over super-dooper features. And the IXUS 115 has quite a few features anyway, including slow-motion movie recording, which already the kids and I have been having fun with.
Back when I bought the A70, it was at JB Hifi through a friend of a friend who worked there. Coincidentally I did this again — at a different JB Hifi, through different friends. Said friend of friend admitted that Canon’s build quality isn’t as good as it once was — the race to cost-cut makes this inevitable I suppose — but at a third of the price of the old camera, and demonstrably better photos (well, eight years later, it’d have to be, wouldn’t it) I’m still happy with it so far. Will be interesting to see if it lasts as long.
Here’s a selection of photos taken at lunchtime yesterday, all using the Auto setting — haven’t figured out all the controls yet.
(Zoom) — This one was at maximum optical zoom, cropped, sharpened and darkened a tad.
(Zoom) — Just a crop and slight sharpen on this one.
(Zoom) — Just cropped.
By the way, what a shame Flickr isn’t a bit more flexible with its embedding. The 640 pixels across size is great for me using this blog template, but it has problems with it if the photo is taller than it is wide (as two of these are) — then it gives you the choice by height instead, so you only get 640 pixels across if the photo height is 1.6 times the width (eg you’re choosing 1024 pixels high).
