The obvious title here is some ‘Stairway to Heaven’ reference, however I’ve already done that on a previous post. But that’s cool, every phlog needs a ‘Stairway to Heaven’ shot. I’ll just have to be a bit more conventional in this title. Conventional, geddit? Because this was at the Convention Centre! You DID know this was at the Convention Centre, right? Otherwise it’s not funny. Jeeze, you’re a tough crowd.

In other news, today is my lil sisters birthday. Happy burfday C! Oh, and my Oma too. Happy burfday Oma!

On my late-night photo wander the other week I noticed the Convention Centre was all prettied up with some lights. It can be a good building to photograph anyway, so you add some lights and I’m there!

I found this bug in the bathroom the other day. It was alive and seemed happy to stay still for a bit so I thought it might be ideal for some macro shots. Course, soon as I popped it into the light-tent the little blighter got all camera shy and started slowly scuttling around! Gah! Never work with kids and animals. They got that right.

I have no idea what bug it is, but I think it’s a beetle of some sort. J, any ideas?

M wanted to be ‘in’ with the cool crowd and was very excited when he got an iPod – unfortunately no one told him to take it out of the box first*.

(*Not a true story.)

New Years celebrations are always a bit of an anticlimax. One second it’s this year, the next, a new year. A cataclysmic event it is not.

What it is, is a bloody good excuse to down a few beers, get crazy, and party the night away with friends! Like A here, I mean, look at him GO! Nice one bruvaaahhh!

In other news, I thought it might be more user-friendly to post two months of Detour calendars at a time (current and following month) so January and February are ready for your downloading pleasure. Gimme a shout in the comments if you think three months would be even betterer.

The end of another year means it’s time to reflect on all that was. 2008 was a good year for me, I successfully jumped employment ship twice, with increasingly better results. I partied with friends, got a wicked macro lens, celebrated six years with H and my 1,000th Detour post (the three year Detour anniversary got lost somewhere). I travelled, watched friends get married, I drank too much, worked too hard and danced too little. Yeah that sounds trite but what matters is that 2008 was a good year, and for that I’m really thankful.

And so on to my best of 2008. This year I found it a lot harder to pick out my favourite shot for each month so I asked H to weigh in too. But I had the deciding vote so I flipped a couple round at the end! All in all I’m pretty happy with my shots this year, both the ones above and all the rest – I think my photography is becoming darker in tone and I’m liking that, so here’s to 2009.

Just to round things off I thought I’d point out some notable things from this year:

• Favourite shot of the year: Eddie 21
• Most hated shot of the year: ACC
• Best written blurb of the year: Pale Ale
• Best foul-mouthed post of the year: Cunt
• Most commented posts: Josieye, 8 comments, Deep Blue & I’m a cat person 6 comments. (excludes my responses and repeat commenters)
• Total number of comments for the year: 436 (approx.)
• Busiest traffic day of the year: 8 January, 1,326 unique visitors (I got StumbleUpon’d)
• Unique visitors for the year: 21,392

And with that I’ll shut the hell up. Thanks for visiting folks, stay tuned and I wish you a good 2009.

A

(Oh, and I’ll update the downloadable Detour calendar tomorrow.) Done.

I finally dropped off the wedding photos I took of C&A (12 months late) and M&K (six months late) today, so that’s one more monkey off my back – only 999 more to go. But anyway, it got me checking back on some of the old shots and I re-came across this one from M&K’s wedding, which was actually shot by my friend J_2, making this the third guest post on Detour in three years. Good work dude, you’re part of a very select group. Your ‘Detour Certified’ certificate will be in the mail shortly.

You know, sometimes I really break the mold when it comes to witty titles. This, is not one of those times.

Another shot from the pub crawl. Such a good night I have no idea where this was shot.

No, that’s a lie, I remember, but saying I don’t is more in keeping with the night don’t you think?

Continuing on from yesterdays shot, in our travels around the city we stopped off in the park lands (I think I needed to water a tree) and had a bit of a wander. When I’m that pissed I’m a bit of a shutterbug, so here’s us, three good friends out on the town. Good times!

Some friends (G&J) and I went on a bit of a pub crawl last night. Conveniently we had J, who is preggers, along so we had a designated driver! This was shot out the back window of their pick up truck which has a hard tonneau cover that reflected the street lights quite nicely. Not bad for a drunken 15 second shot is it?!

I was really undecided on which shot to post for my annual krapmas day tree image, but at 4 in the morning I was seriously struggling with everything and ended up going with the more obvious krapmas tree image. The other choice, and the one I actually preferred, was this one. At the time I was worried it didn’t present as recognisable an image – which in hindsight is why I should have gone with it! It would have been more in-keeping with the ‘non-traditional’ I was aiming for. And that choice has been buggin me all day. So while I usually try to not post two similar images on consecutive days, if I delay this my usual (self-imposed) one month after similar shot it’ll be late January before it sees the light of day, and then it’ll just look like I’m desperate for some shit to post!

So what’s your vote people? This one for the abstract, or yesterdays for the obvious? Come on, weigh in with a comment. Don’t be shy.

Oh, and it seems great minds think alike. I did a defocused shot for krapmas, as did Wasted Photos and Light and Dark. We’re trendsetters we are!

With this years krapmas tree picture I thought I’d break away from the usual and obvious tree shots, so I came up with the idea of this defocussed shot. Only took me an hour plus and 175 photos to get what I wanted!

I haven’t been out for a decent night-time photo wander in quite a while, but with the holidays finally here I can enjoy a late night out and about without having to get up at the crack of dawn the next day. It was nice this evening, the streets were pretty quiet because of krapmas so there weren’t many drunken idiots stumbling around town buggin me.

Anyway, this is another one of the bridges I’ve run under countless times (day and night) and always thought that I should come back to photograph it. Another one checked off my list. Next!

I could legitimately call this part of a ’study’ of a large sculpture that’s been on my list to photograph. But if I use the language of honesty rather than artsy, it’s actually from a failed trip to shoot said sculpture. Guess it’s all in how you want to present the intention versus result.