shopping and wildlife photography

shell wildlife photograph of the year entriesThe joys of Saturday shopping...

Actually I ended up getting quite a bit more stuff than normal... or at least it feels that way... and my kitchen counter seems to reflect that... lots of bottles and packets and tins that are going to need to be crammed in amongst everything else that's already crammed in there... I really need to reorganise my cupboards yet again I think...

Other than that, not really much to report on the Land of the Shopping Adventure... we came, we saw, we shopped, we came home again...

While I was flicking through the paper after I'd put all the stuff away (well, "away" as in out of the way... since the back counter is still full of crap) and there was a whole story about the dance company Pilobolus coming to Adelaide... which is pretty freakin exciting... as is the fact that Ma and I might end up going to see them *fingers crossed*...

Anyway, I remembered that I'd seen an ad about the current Shell Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition (which we went to see last year), and since we wanted to go into town anyway, we figured it was a good way to spend a couple of hours.

We did do a bit of wandering around first... went looking for the book Bridge to Terabithia after Ma managed to find an ex-rental version of the DVD last week, and it never fails to amuse me that it can sometimes depend on what version of the book you buy as to how much it ends up costing... the "movie tie-in" version was about $17, but we ended up finding a (I think) Puffin Classics version that was about $14... same thing happened with the copy of I Am Legend I got for Christmas... there were about four or five different versions of the book, ranging from about $16 to nearly $25... just weird...

So after some random browsing and a quick trip to Starbucks for a bite to eat (as a side note... I love me some chaise longue action... they have this kind of short stubby one in Starbucks, and I love stretching out full length on it, waggling my feet in the window... if I ever end up replacing my little red curvy sofa, I'm going to have to track down some sort of scarlet chaise longue!), then we toddled off to the Museum...

Like last year, the Photographs in the exhibition were just stunning... although you do end up thinking "yes, if I could afford all the camera gear you have, and trips to the Antarctic or Africa, then I could take photos just like that"... and that goes double for the Under 18 sets...

I also found myself looking at a couple of the somewhat abstract shots, or ones that had very shallow depths of field, or whatever... and I wondered how the ancient and deluded judges from the Camera Club would have judged some of those shots... there was a couple in particular, one of a frog eating a worm and the other one of an elephant's foot that really made me think that the judges would have panned them.

Ma and I also ended up doing the same thing we did last year... we started off together... then I ended up moving faster than her, and let her go at her own pace while I went off at mine... then afterwards we went back and looked at everything quickly and compared notes on what we liked and didn't like.

As with last year, they also crammed the ANZANG Competition in with the Wildlife Photos... which, to be honest, really doesn't do the ANZANG photos justice... you go around looking at the ones from all over the world, then look at the more local shots and just go "yawn!"...

Interestingly (to me anyway) all of the shots in one of the categories were printed on that fancy shmancy "metallic" photography paper... which just makes everything POP... I'm sure it's horrifically expensive to have stuff printed on it though...

But all in all, it's not a bad way to not only spend a couple of hours (once you've read all the little tags and looked at all the photos), and pretty good value for money for $5 admission.

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