I’m about to get all geeky and fanboyish for a moment, so if that’s not your thing you might want to come back another day.

I haven’t been excited about the release of a gaming console since perhaps the Saturn, and I definitely haven’t intended on buying one as soon as I can since the SNES — which I did buy and still have. In fact it has the price tag in it; it’s dated 3rd July 1992 and was priced at $299.00.

However, I’m totally geeked-out and excited about the possibilities of Nintendo’s new system, the Wii. If I haven’t already told you about it (and I’m almost certain I will have), it’s an interesting experiment in trying a totally new kind of control. Instead of using a joystick you move the entire motion-sensitive controller. Great idea but massive room for failure.

Anyway, tonight I put some money down to pre-order myself a Wii on December 7th when it comes out, and also pre-ordered the new Zelda game. Now, I rarely pre-order anything. In fact, I’ve pre-ordered exactly once, for the previous Zelda game because of a bonus for pre-ordering which ended up not being a pre-ordering bonus. Such is the gravity of my excitement for a piece of consumer electronics which carries the stigma of only being “for kids”. I think I need to say pre-order or a variation thereof again, so: pre-order.

I’ll be at my local gaming store at midnight of December 6th/7th with ready to part with money so I can geek-out all night long. Sad? Maybe. Fun? Definitely.

Yesterday morning, I joined Richard (3×5), Hamish (hnmoffatt) and Tim (tahpee) and another guy who’s name I forget (sorry!) for a walk around the CBD taking photos. The other four had started from 5:45am at the Shrine; I’d intended on joining them, but when my alarm went off at 5:00am it was bucketing down outside, so I turned the alarm off, rolled over and went to sleep.

I joined up with the guys at around 9:15am and for the next two and a bit hours we wandered through the Victoria Market, Lonsdale St and Swanston St, as well as a few other places.

Disappointingly, my 2GB memory card didn’t arrive on Friday (it arrived this morning) so I had to be a touch frugal with my shooting, but I still managed to get what I consider to be some good shots.

As usual, I shot a lot of great shots nearer the end of the photo shoot/walk. I don’t really know what it is, but it must be that my brain starts to get “in gear” and the shots I produce are possibly less thought-about (or maybe they’re more thought-about). Either way, the ones nearer the end of my shoots are almost always the better ones.

Looking forward to doing it again.

Yesterday, Justine and I made our way up to the Tesselaar Tulip Festival in Silvan (or Monbulk, somewhere) to see tulips, clog dancing, poffertjes, cheese racing and don’t forget the tulips.

After driving up and down through the Dandenongs, we arrived at the tulip farm. While looking for a parking spot, an area with old farm machinery caught my eye; I decided to head back there a bit later and shoot a few shots.

We paid our thirty bucks to get in, and after not receiving a tulip, we walked up and down the rows of tulips a couple of times; the whole while I tried to shoot interesting photos that didn’t contain a person — no easy feat since there were literally hordes of people standing in the rows having their photo taken.

The line for the poffertjes was at least 10 minutes long, and they were overpriced anyway, so we didn’t bother. We watched a couple of minutes of clog dancing before beginning to tire of the dancing. We made our way back to the car and Justine and I parted ways; she went to the car while I spent about 10 minutes shooting the farm machinery I mentioned earlier.

I’m glad I ordered a new 2GB CompactFlash card the other day since I have filled my existing 1GB card no less than three times in the last few weeks.

The only problem is going through all the photos I’ve been taking!

After going out early-ish Saturday morning with Damien, I went out Sunday evening with Trav to shoot around Port Melbourne. Since it was a bit rainy, we stayed for about an hour and didn’t shoot much except for the beach and the Spirit of Tasmania II which was docked.

I took about 65 shots, which seems to be right on my one-a-minute average recently when out shooting. It’s not a bad average but I think I need to concentrate more on getting the settings right.

Once upon a time I knew all about proper shutter speeds and f-stops, but it’s fallen out of my brain. I’ve been trying to shoot with the camera in manual mode (if the subject is stationary) to try and help me, but I’m not totally convinced it’s doing so yet. Maybe a little bit more time is needed for me to get to grips with shooting in this way again.

I really wish I had a much faster lens too, at 200mm my lens is “only” f/6.3 which can be rather annoying at times — I would really like an f/2.8 at 200mm (as I’m sure most photographers would!) but I suppose it’ll have to be put on the back-burner for now.

Yesterday morning, I drove down to Damien’s place early (well, not too early, around 9am) and we went on down to Mornington to spend a couple of hours shooting there.

I never actually realised how many bathing boxes were at Mornington until yesterday, and it’s also interesting to see that they are allowed to be decorated in any manner the owner pleases, which is stark contrast to the Brighton boxes that I visited a couple of months ago.

We also visited the pier — I guess it’s the “main” one — at Mornington and took a few photos there. I took around 130 shots in all during the couple of hours we were there.

Later in the evening, Justine and I made our way down to Rickett’s Point to take in the brilliant sunset that we had last night. I took another 130 shots just of the sunset, which disappeared in a frighteningly short amount of time.