The Sydney Opera House

The opera house exceeded our expectations.  The outside clam-shell architecture was done by a Dutchman, who quit the job out of frustration with the government.  The inside architecture was done by an Australian.  There are two main auditoriums, the symphony hall and the opera theater, and two smaller auditoriums for plays and such.  There are productions in most auditoriums every evening.  We only toured two of the four theaters since there were rehersals going on.
The symphony hall is impressive!  All wood interior, except for the carpet and the seat cushions. The pipe organ is huge, with pipes everywhere.  It took 7 years for its creator to install and tune.  The organist sits above the rest of the orchestra on the front wall, with his/her back to the audience and conductor, and watches the conductor in a mirror.


These two views are from "The Rocks" side, across a small inlet (Circular Quay?).  The second shot was taken about sunset.  The shadow is from the Sidney harbor bridge base.
The following two shots are from the symphony hall lobby.  The lobby windows are at the far left in the above picture (the black area). We were only alowed to take pictures in the lobbies, not in the halls.  The symphony hall lobby is often used for parties and wedding receptions.  The architecture and colors are amazing.

wedding

A view out from the lobby windows to the bay bridge.  I'm particularly happy with this shot!  Check out how the glass distorts the image as you look from the right to the left.  The above picture with the bridge shadow on the Opera House is taken near the left hand base of the bridge (not in this picture).

FLAME ON... Pay no attention to the small hole in the picture just to the right of the window seam, by the reflection.  Never take your film to Sam's club.  Believe it or not, Fuji runs their Phoenix wide photo processing.  I guess there is a difference between Fuji and Kodak.  The Fuji lab damaged nearly every role of the 13 roles of film they processed for us.  Damaged varied from dirt dried into the emulsion to major, long gouges dug into the emulsion.  Their film processing machine must have got some gunk built up in the film track, which proceeded to dig a trench through the entire role of film.  Well, they didn't ruin just one role of film before finding the problem, they ran all of our film!  Many of the shots were salvageable, while many were heart breaking.  Our compensation?  I asked for a replacement 4-week trip to New Zealand and Australia.  I settled for no charge for the processing an printing and a $25 credit at Sam's/Walmart.  Bummer.  Flame off.