G+ Anniversary Adelaide PhotoWalk Pt 1

Well, today I wanted to talk a little bit about another part of my life... one that you most probably could have guessed (no... nothing too dramatic... it's just plain boring old me after all). What I was going to talk about was my alter-ego (+Ben Adelaide) on Google Plus (or just G+ if you don't mind). Now G+ is Google's very own flavour of social media... primed to be it's centre-piece of an identity lead marketing bonanza - but which also happens to be home to many photographers across a broad spectrum of skill levels and interests.

And on the 30th of June 2012... G+ became 1 year old!


(An aside - as are the way of things, with a new shiny toy, Google have let the ball slip with Blogger, and I can't now edit the HTML in my code... for some bizarre reason... hence the white background on some of this post which I can't remove!!!!!)

So how does one celebrate a birthday on G+... by organising a photowalk of course. And that's exactly what happened...across more than 100 cities across the world G+ers (pluskins, plussers, or just G-Friends) came together, with their cameras, to take some photos, meet some people and have a good time. +Paul Clarke organised the local Adelaide walk... with a brave 14-15 people turning up... Thanks to Troy Pudney for this group photo.

I say brave as the forecast for the 9am start was for a few showers, possible small hail and thunderstorms later in the morning. By the time I left home at 8:40am, it was still raining... but I was not to be deterred (as I'd already missed the first photowalk earlier in the year when C-chan was born). The photowalk started in Hindmarsh Square and aimed to meander through Rundle Mall, and down to the Botanic Gardens before making it's way to Rymill Park for a BBQ (Paul is a true optimist, or just able to forecast better than the Met Bureau).

View Google+ One Year Anniversary Photowalk, Adelaide in a larger map

Now I'm not really much of a photographer... but anyone that reads my blog (all 0.75 of you) would realise that I do love to take the camera out for a stroll every now and again. I like photography, but not religiously though (hey, I'm still using my basic Canon Kiss X3, with 95% of my processing done on Google's Picasa... so I'm no camera-junky). But photography for me is about getting out, and enjoying looking at the world. And sometimes you get to take some photos that turn out at least so-so, or sometimes better.

So the following set of photos I'll let speak for themselves... mostly. If anyone has any questions about them, just leave a comment... but because this was a long walk, and let's just say I have a happy shutter-finger, there'll be quite a few posts from this walk. So strap yourself in...

I have to say this sculpture has been in the Rundle Mall for a very long time... and it always sort of freaked me out as a child... especially as it used to be positioned outside the Bible Society shop (or something like that). I always wondered why they would have put a statue to a horned demon in the middle of some wanton display in that location (or any location for that matter).... the truth was so much less interesting....

One of the staples of the Mall photography... the fountain. Thankfully devoid of it's urinal-like froth today!

Reminders of the fickle weather were never far away.

Construction sites... Adelaide-style.

Adelaide's retro past is never far away.

I couldn't help put a selfie in here somewhere... though you would think I was being impaled on a very large spike such is my pained expression. I never said I found photography easy!

A familiar sight approaches... The Malls Balls.

From ground zero.

Despite it being around 9:30am on a Saturday, the Mall had an almost deserted - inhabited by ghosts feel to it. The weather had kept away more than the G+ers.

Finally... some colour!

The theme for me, that evolved very quickly, was reflection and water. This one kinda had it all, and then some.

One of the now infamous "features" of the Mall is the Pigs sculpture - actually it's called 'A Day Out' by Marguerite Derricourt, and are usually the place to get yourself photographed riding on, under, around a number of bronze statues as they scavenge through the bins. An interesting sculpture, but +Louise Bagger showed me how a little bit of post-processing can really bring out a different personality.

And finally a few photos that really shouldn't need any explanation... Adelaide's cityscape in close-up and greys!

And that's the end of the first phase of the photowalk... down Rundle Mall. Actually, it should perhaps have taken 15 mins, but such was everyone's excitement (or perhaps nervousness about straying too far away from cover) we all spent way too much time in the Mall... but before you knew it, everyone was sort of off doing their own thing. Hmmm... sometimes there's a limit to how social, social media is in real life.... but then again, today was all about the photographs!

Anstey Hill... Adeventures Of A Dinsosaur Hunter

Today was a beautiful Winter's Day in Adelaide... though it only reached 15 degrees (or thereabouts). It was fine, and not even a breeze. Well, as we'd all been cooped up inside for too long, we decided to go out for the afternoon. And to my surprise, L-kun wanted to go bush-walking.  I decided we'd have a look at Anstey Hill Recreation Park, one that we'd not been to before. So off we went... looking for adventure.

The park itself can be found at the end of Lower North East Road and Grand Junction Roads, in the foothills of the North East suburbs, about 18km from the city centre.

View Larger Map

There are a number of lookouts, and the view towards the city is good... though from this vantage point you might actually suspect that Adelaide was a city of trees, with the city centre perched far into the distance.

Now, whilst you can grab information from the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (see link above), there's not much of a map that goes with it. The Park is about 380 hectares, and much of it used to be either quarry or (of all things) a nursery, as well as semi-rural land. It's been turned into a Recreation Park to ensure that it doesn't get developed and eventually returns to something like it's natural state. Not having been to the park before, I though the "Geological Hike" sounded interesting for L-kun... even though it was rated as a moderate bush walk... this can be reached from Gate 9 on the SW corner of the park.

Scanned imaged from Department of Environment and Natural Resources

The Park itself is quite nice, though quite different from the other parks in/around Adelaide. It has a feel of a slowly evolving rural landscape... and is a good mix of open land, and bushland, with a range of hills and valleys.

And even though the Winter's been wet, and the drought an increasingly distant memory, every where there are signs of it.

But also of the new life returning to the landscape.

For reasons I'll explain shortly, it was difficult to take photos today, and the wild-flowers hadn't really appeared in all their glory yet.

But it was still a very pleasant environment, and not at all like the thick scrub we would often walk through.

The great thing about the Geological Hike is the fact that there's a mix of views of the city, the old "gun emplacement" and the quarries to walk through. The rocks in the quarry are old - as they say - as the Hills. About 450million years ago the sands were turned into a mountain... and the park also spans the Eden-Burnside fault line which marks the transition from Adelaide Plains to Mt Lofty Ranges.

And the quarries are fun to walk around, observing through the cut in the mountainside, the history of Adelaide through a geologists eyes.

Actually, one of the unexpected things that happened during the day was that L-kun decided that he'd go Dinosaur Bone hunting/ I think he'd taken to heart a dinosaur show he'd seen on tv a while back, and all of a sudden everything he saw on the ground was a dinosaur bone. And I mean everything!

As for myself, I got into the act.... but you can also see that this wasn't the only thing that I was concerned about. I was the official baby carrier for our bushwalk adventure, and this was the first time we'd tried out the baby carrier with C-chan. So I wasn't really able to enjoy the freedom to photograph as I would like, but I like to think that it was a shared compromise, and a shared moment of peaceful togetherness. Especially as C-chan fell asleep through most of it.

We had a great time - and L-kun brought back a bag (yes, I mean a big bag) of "dinosaur bones". I don't have the heart to tell him that they were just rocks, but I figure, what do I know... somewhere in that bag was the remains of our deep deep past. Whether it was bones of long-gone animals or the bones of our world. Either way, I loved that he was so excited about it, and it certainly made for a more interesting walk.

Sukiyaki Recipe... A Great Treat Winter or Summer

Well, here's a good Japanese recipe.... Sukiyaki. This is a variant of a the hotpot cooking style, known collectively as nabemono. Once again, this style is based on the idea of communal cooking at the table. Sukiyaki is a favourite of ours...even though it's been a long time since we had it.

Now many people would associate "Sukiyaki"with the 1960's song by Kyu Sakamoto, which actually has absolutely nothing to do with the food sukiyaki... and is actually a completely fictitious English translation of the original song title "Ue o Muite Arukō" (which means, I shall walk looking up)...

Let's quickly run through the ingredients :

• Beef, thinly sliced
• Chinese cabbage
• Chrysanthemum garland / crown daisy (shungiku)
• Onion
• Enoki mushrooms
• Shitake mushrooms (missed this time around)
• Fish cake (chikuwa)
• Carrots (a little western addition we do)
• Shirataki (konnyaku noodle)
• Fu (a gluten-based flour bread)
• Tofu (firm)
• Udon noodles
• 1 Egg per person (in a separate dish, lightly beaten)
• Medium-grain rice, cooked and served separate

Basic sauce (dashi) Ingredients:

• Soy sauce (100 cc)
• Sake (60cc)
• Sugar (80-100cc)
• Mirin is also used sometimes- we don't use it in our recipe, and some put water in as well.

Note: The sauce is up to your particular taste, but we use the broad ratio of about 10 : 6 : 8 for the soy, sake and sugar respectively by volume. We often tune the taste during the cooking by adding more sauce ingredients as we go.

Now for those that don't cook much Japanese/asian foods, chikuwa is a delicious fish cake made in the form of a hollow tube, not unlike a bamboo stalk. The shungiku is a bit strange at first... and yes, it looks just like the stalks/leaves of the same chrysanthemum flowers you'd use on Mother's Day - indeed it's from the same family of plants. So I wouldn't suggest you go out and just re-use your gift flowers... buy the ones sold as food!)

Now the beef used is the same very thin beef used in many different hotpots and steamboats in Chinese cooking, so you can normally find this easily in your local chinatown grocers.

Now the shirataki are very low carbohydrate Japanese noodles made from the yam, known as konnyaku. Konnyaku is often served as a jelly-like ingredient, cut into large slices. Indeed it can be added into sukiyaki in this form as well. T-chan's family often put the udon noodles in at the end of the meal, and cook in the residual sauce... yummy.

The thing that makes sukiyaki distinct is that the cooked ingredients are coated in raw egg and beaten  (toki tamago). Make sure your eggs are fresh... and we always use free-range. You only need to beat lightly, just enough to break the yoke.

L-kun loves breaking eggs and beating them.... and that means that the cooking is about to begin!

Now the order of cooking is pretty simple... the one important implement is the table gas cooker (camp cooker is perfectly ok). As always, be careful with hot plates etc, especially when children are around. We use a specific sukiyaki pan, but I'd imagine any heavy iron/stainless steel pan would suffice. Normally you'd use beef fat to coat the pan as it heats up, then add the sauce (dashi) bring the sauce to the boil and melt the sugar and keep the temperature reasonably high then add in the cabbage, carrots, mushrooms, onion... and of course beef.. actually you can pretty well throw it all in at this stage and start cooking.

After the ingredients have started to cook (fairly quick). Add in the shungiko (chrysanthemum) last, as they will cook down very quickly.

Now, you're ready to eat. Just grab the cooked ingredients (meat and vegetables) and dip into the egg - and in your mouth. Simple and delicious. And also very healthy.

One of the great Japanese dishes! We also use the left-overs (we tend to over-stock ingredients) for sukiyaki-don, i.e. sukiyaki on the rice... just heat up the cooked sukiyaki up on the stove, and add the beaten egg over the top (cooking just a little) before serving on top of a bowl of rice.

It may be especially good to warm the stomach on a cold winter's night, but it's equally good all the year round.