Before The Coffee » Photography

In a word, awesome. It’s a beautiful, modern, high-end town that’s very clean and I’d love to visit again. I checked in with a real estate dude and the Saudis are buying up the top floors of the most expensive condos. I guess with the recent rise in gas prices they have a few billion laying around. Prices are from 300K to 3mill for a unit.

The first shot is the tall Q1 building in the morning. The other shots are shots taken from the Q1 that night.

You can see the Sydney Tower in the distance, it looks like a stick and a King’s crown on top. Also, two views of the city once you take the non-stop elevator to the top.

Australia beaches are similar to US beaches along the east coast. This is Coff’s Harbor and looks much like a typical US beach south of New Jersey. The white sand is fine and the beach shelf is wide enough to lay in the same spot all day. The self pic was made by setting the camera on 10 sec timer and running at olympic speeds to the fence post at the end.

I just returned from 3 weeks in Australia. What a fabulous trip that began in Sydney and ended about 1500 miles away in Cairns. It was chilly as it’s their coldest month but it made for some great skies and cool crisp mornings. During the first week my battery charger for the D2X fell victim to the 220 volt current and I was faced with dying batteries and not one camera store that stocked the charger. In a total fluke, I walked into Camera House in Taree NSW and Alan the manager happened to have a used one there. Alan gave me the tour of his personal shots which were excellent – very Jay Maisel. David also pitched in and helped with selling me the charger. Really cool – thanks guys I REALLY appreciate it. 

It was a great experience. Will I go back? Probably not the flight is long, long, long. The people I met along the way were so friendly. Everyone was in a great mood and willing to chat on just about anything. They like Americans but not our government so much, but that makes two of us. Their food is not so good, it kinda lacks taste or richness – it’s actually healthier that way but sometimes healthy doesn’t cut it. The beaches are beautiful, towns are really clean and people seem to move with a bounce in their step. In the heart of Sydney with tons of cars moving in every direction you rarely hear a horn blow. It’s a graceful ballet of flow interupted by the weird sounds from the “walk” signs. People seem to have patience and more tolerance for each other. Maybe it’s because 90% of them live near the beach and the balmy weather lends itself to happy thoughts.

Nope, I didn’t see Nicole Kidman, Russel Crowe or Keith Urban but I wasn’t looking. However, I was told that Nicole frequents the harbor where this pic was taken. G’day mate.