BLACK AND WHITE IN VICTORIA PARK

A couple of shots inside Victoria Park, Ballarat. Canopy love.

10 YEARS! HOLY JEEBUS

So this blog is actually 10 years old today, who knew I would still be blogging 10 years later. I can't believe I've had that much crap to talk about. I just had a look at the first few posts, you can see them here, oh man how this blog has changed over the years. I guess it was truly find your feet time in that first year. So I'd like to thank... no I wouldn't, nothing worse than a blog post blowing it's own trumpet about it's own blog posts. So I'll just post some stupid birthday photos (vintage of course) and get back to doing what I was doing before I got the reminder to post something deep and meaningful on the anniversary. I think this is deep enough don't you. Although... thanks for the comments and the follows and the chats we've had over the past decade. Onward to 2025 then, let's make it 20 if we can.

THESE FILMS I WILL WATCH YES

I've just been perusing a bunch of trailers from some Sci-Fi and Fantasy genre films that I'm looking forward to this year. Natch the next Star Wars offering is on my list, but also these, some of which you may not have seen yet...

The Fantastic 4 reboot looks uber interesting and a tad dark.

Jupiter Rising looks both awesome and a bit I'm not so sure. But that wont stop me

Tomorrowland is a Disney movie and I can't help but note the connection with the same titled land in their park. Fortunately I'm a huge Disneyland fan, have been twice 10/10 would go again, but I'm hoping this isn't too linked to the actual Tomorrowland if you get what I mean. I smell a merchandise opportunity here so fingers crossed it's more than that.

Mad Max: Fury Road. No need for words really, just hurry up and get here already

Okay Kingsman: The Secret Service is being touted as the Kick Ass of spy movies. Stellar cast and it looks like stellar fun

Chappie has 3 things that are awesome 

1. It's a film by Neill Blomkamp (District 9 and Elysium) 
2. It has Die Antwoord in the cast and if you don't know who Die Antwoord are then what have you been doing with your life?
3. It has Hugh Jackman with a mullet

Be warned though, I think this trailer gives most of the movie away

Ex Machina looks intense

He said he's be back. Terminator Genisys, it doesn't have Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor but I'm hoping Khaleesi is a good substitute. This looks like fun and I haven't not liked a Terminator movie yet, well okay Rise of the Machines was a bit sucky.

Deadpool, this is just test footage and not an actual trailer but wow it looks good

And of course The Avengers: Age of Ultron

Honourable mentions go to Day of the Triffids, along with Ant Man (I'm just not sure how that's gonna work) and then there's H. It's being touted as a film to keep an eye out for. Here's the trailer, and you can read a bit about it here. I'm not so sure myself but to be fair the trailer tells you very little 

THE HOOD # 304

Jeebus, 303 "The Hood" posts up till now. In case you haven't been following closely I mostly title street art posts on here under The Hood. Three hundred and three is a whole lot of street art and for the most part it's been Perth stuff. Well natch that has to now change being as I now reside in Ballarat. I'll be honest, it's been much harder finding stuff here, the scene is no where near as prolific as it is in Perth... but it does exist. You just have to look harder. So without any further ado I give you episode 304, aka the first ever Ballarat The Hood experience...

Okay so it's feature artist time and this round goes to a local artist who goes by the nick Cax One. For full disclosure I should state up front that I am related to Cax, he's my partners brother. So yeah I'm possibly gonna favour him ever so slightly cos of that, but to be fair, it's because he does some fine craft...

This piece in particular, it's a year or so old now and has some wear and tear but man this is the business. Wu Tang Clan

You might recognise Cax's style as I've posted his stuff on here before. Hit the Cax One tag below for previous offers 

This is part of a larger collab wall with Bide and Vanoe

TEMPLES OF BAALBEK

I stumbled across some pictures of these temples recently, the Temple of Jupiter and the Temple of Bacchus. They are two of the three temples that once made up the temple complex of Baalbeck. You can read about them here so I wont go into too much detail. The thing that really struck me though was the size of the base stones, they are colossal. Estimates put some in the vicinity of 1,000 tons in weight. That they were able to move these is astonishing, there's a theory on how that was done in the link above. The Romans simply knew how to build...

Artists impression of the complex layout

A stone left at the quarry

Base stones with humans for scale

Another shot of the stone still at the quarry

Temple of Jupiter : c. 1870-1885

Temple of Jupiter 1891

ABANDONED REDS

Found an excellent abandoned factory out in an old industrial area of Ballarat. Love the oranges and the reds and the textures and the whole thing really. It's for sale too, if only I had a use for an old factory, apart from photographing it...

a few extra photos along with some of these in a larger format over on YeLPanorama

INCIDENTS IN TIME

I finally discovered some street art in Ballarat. It's seriously slim pickings here. I think I may have to organise a street art festival to get my fix. But these are pretty awesome. They're from an installation called Incidents in Time by Jason Waterhouse. They were installed a few years ago in Time Lane and a few of them are damaged but most have weathered well...

RMB (which I'm guessing Royal Mail Ballarat)

Raft

Hole

Little Door With Cord

Liquid Assets

Silver Cloud Corp (missing the cloud)

Great Outdoors (sadly missing the caravan that sat on those wheels)

Travel By Cloud)

The Well Worn Path (upper section)

The Well Worn Path (lower section)

Time Lane

SO THIS WEEKEND I WENT ALL TOURIST

Seeing as I am currently living across the road from Sovereign Hill I figured it was time to check it out. So four of us headed in. I'll admit I wasn't expecting too much and thought it would be a bit crap to be honest. I'm happy to say I was proven completely wrong. This place is great fun. Very well done and worth the visit. It's kind of like it's one of the "Lands" at Disneyland. It's pretty much almost the same quality only no rides. But that's cool cos there's heaps of other stuff to do and see and let's be honest, a roller coaster just wouldn't look right in this authentically recreated old mining town would it?! If you go, make sure you buy the Raspberry drops.. oh my god, so good, they're like candy crack.

And we're in

A little jig on the main st

So that's what's under that tower I see from my place everyday

Old miners cottages, very well done ones too

Not sure the steam punk puppet show was truly authentic but it was a bit of fun

Even the Chinese speaking tour guides were dressed for the period

Dressing for another period entirely

And a little gold panning to finish the day

Wont be retiring just yet, Liana should have panned harder IMO

RANDOM PICS # 89

This shot comes from the Chicago race riot of 1919. Quite a violent and unhappy period for all concerned. There's two things that struck me about this photo. Firstly the discussion/stand off between the two soldiers. One is African American and the other White American. The guy on the left has rank whilst the guy on the right seems not to. However the guy on right has a rifle with a very long bayonet, so I wonder how much rank even counted at that moment. I'd be curious to see if an African American could outrank a white soldier back in 1919, gun or no gun, anyway.

Secondly, and I know you see him, check out the swagger on the lil guy on the far right. That dude knew the photo was being taken and made sure he had it goin on. Love it.

Edit: Okay I found out some more info, the dude with the rifle is possibly state militia and not regular army so question of rank is probably voided. I stand to be corrected

INVERNESS SCOTLAND

I'm utilising my current period of downtime (read not employed) to digitise my photo albums. Yeah exciting stuff huh?! But I've always been nervous of losing my photos and I figure digitising them will prevent that. Back in 88 I did my first ever trip overseas, to Europe and the UK. I think I'll start sharing some of the better photos on here, beginning with these. Prepare yourself for eighties quality film stock, although it does have a certain charm.

These are some shots of and around a B&B we stayed at near Inverness in Scotland. The owners told us it was once a hunting lodge on the estate of the Prince of Wales (the Queen Victoria version). They were a formidable red headed Scottish couple. He barely said a word, but he seemed busy all the time doing stuff like lifting tractors with his left hand and changing the tyres with the other. She was a serious piece of work. I barely understood her as her accent was so thick.

The colours of Scotland in winter are incredible

It was cold and snowing and a full cooked breakfast was in order. Out it came, the girls were given 1 x egg, 1 x sausage, 1 x kipper, 1 x bacon, 1 x grilled tomato etc etc and I was given 2 x everything. We sat there looking at each other trying not to laugh. No doubt the size of orders based on the sex of the individual was influenced by her husbands eating habits. Men needed more cos of all the wee tractors they had to lift.

Ben Nevis

A village near our lodge

Vicki, Nells, me and photo by Flora