LeeAnn's Adventures Down Under: The Opera House

Sorry I don't have a clever title.

Anyway, as I wrote previously, I am now a working girl, Tuesday through Friday. I forget how much I wrote before, so I apologize if I repeat anything. Basically, my boss, Tim, works in a studio in St. Leonard doing commercial photography (some staff photos, some product pictures for ads...). This other photographer, Brett, also works in the studio, and my friend Justina is his intern. Brett does mostly food photography for magazines and such. It's funny how different their styles of working, and just about everything, are, though they get along great. Just as a disclaimer, since this is actual work I don't think I can give all the detail, so I might just leave out the names of what we're working for.
This week, I actually spent 2 days with Tim and 2 days with Brett, since Tim's daughter got married yesterday, so he had a pretty crazy week. Tim taught me more about lighting and showed me a few things in Photoshop. With Brett, I went to shoot interior design at two really nice apartments, actually pretty close to where the Jewish community I've been staying with lives. That day was a lot of fun. The woman we worked with was great, and the apartments were beautiful with amazing views. We helped set up the computer program that keeps track of the pictures we take, and named them as we went. We also set up the lighting, covering windows (I climbed up a window sill to clip a sheet over the window and Brett was going to get a picture of me on my camera but it was too far into my bag and he didn't want to fish through), and holding scrims wherever they were needed. (Scrims are things that can reflect or disperse light depending on the material and color). I know I said I'm going to try to cut back on talking about food, but this might be hard in this post. The woman we worked with bought us all lunch with this amazing dessert (sort of like rice pudding but it wasn't rice...) her shout (aka on her). I think actually only 1 of the 3 days I ate the lunch I brought with me. I did, however, say that I was vegetarian so as to avoid issues, but now Brett keeps saying how he can't imagine how I don't eat meat (especially since I'll drink beer. I'm not positive what one had to do with the other though), so I probably should have just explained instead of feeling silly since I DO eat meat.
Ok, sorry for getting side tracked. Friday with Tim we shot a BBQ spread, which we thought was weird until we remembered that we're coming into summer here. It was a lot of fun, though we got ash all over the studio despite trying to keep it outside with a fan. Shooting fire is tough, trying to make it just right and setting it and hoping for the perfect shot with smoke and a bit of red but not crazy out of control flame... I got to do some editing and again held some scrims to fix the lighting. I enjoyed feeling useful.
It's really cool meeting everyone involved and seeing all the different personalities in the industry and seeing just how particular everyone has to be about the shots. In the apartment shoot we had a whole discussion about exactly how the pillows should be placed since they kept looking awkward, and with the BBQ how the guy's sleeve was with his hands in the picture and which way to move. Things we say sound absolutely ridiculous.
Tim also gave Justina and me a project for any time we have nothing to do, where we go through his old film and get rid of a bunch of copies and just keep one copy of each picture and make an album of them. It's fun to look at the old stuff and see the differences of how things are shot today. For example, it used to be really popular to have the food tilted, and that's gone out of style. He told us it's tedious, boring work, but we're actually enjoying it.
Anyway, I'd say it was a good first week.

In class we went to see Killing Them Softly (other than one character I'm not sure what's Australian about the film so I'll assume it was the director). I personally thought it was a pretty interesting movie. Not at all what I expected as it wasn't actually very scary, only tense in one or two scenes, but I didn't mind the slowness. I was a bit thrown off by the politics that were the background of the movie, as it was hard to pay attention to both that and the plot so I was slightly confused. I didn't mind it being a slow movie though.
We also watched Mad Max 2 with Mel Gibson which was actually pretty funny and bizarre.

Thursday night after class I went with Hanna, Rachel, and Alex to the noodle market in Hyde Park since it's food month. There were a bunch of food trucks set up, and some music, and nice lights on the trees. The noodles I ended up getting tasted like coleslaw so it wasn't what I was expected and I didn't really like it all that much, but the scallion pancakes were great and the churros were amazing! Good way to end our night there.

Friday I went straight from work to stay with another family for Shabbat. To tell the truth, I got pretty lost on the way, since my directions were slightly incorrect. But finally some nice people helped me figure out where to go. They're actually an American family who came in June and are staying for three years. I saw the family I usually stay with in shul, which was nice, and another American family with 9 kids (only 5 of whom I met) came to lunch. It's fun getting to know so many people. Saturday afternoon I played catch with the youngest boys, which was fun since I haven't been around many little kids lately. Then Rachel and Michael (the parents where I was staying) and Etan (the son) and I went to another friend's house where we played Mahjong which was a lot of fun. I think I'm actually understanding the game now so maybe next time I play with my cousins I might do a little better. I even won the first game we played.

Saturday night I came back into the city for a food truck market on George Street, one of the main streets around here. It was smaller than I expected, only about a block, but on one end they had Ratatouille the movie playing, and on the other was a band so it was cute. I finally went out to King's Cross last night with Belinda, Justina, Jessica, Hanna, and Alex. It's a kind of crazy area and I think I prefer going out other places, but it was fun.

Yesterday, I went with Chris, Brianna, Lindsay, and Rachel to Merrickville, where they had a street fair. It was a pretty typical street fair, though sort of with a hipster vibe. It was fun seeing a suburb we've never been to, and there were cute stands and food that looked delicious, though we didn't end up getting any. I ended up just getting a cheap smoothie from Subway, but similar to the milkshakes here, it was pretty much just liquid. There was some pretty good live music which was nice. We also saw someone demonstrating some sort of martial arts and almost kicked a kid who was watching in the face... that's not such good advertising.

Then, get ready for it, tonight I went to the Sydney Opera House to see a comedy show for free! These are the perks of having a roommate whose internship is there (yay Hanna!). There are staff rush tickets and she got four! So we went with Alex and Justina. We saw this guy named Ed Byrne (which if you switch around letters is Be Nerdy). I was impressed he was actually quite funny.