End of the volleyball season

volleyball,
originally uploaded by bernd ploderer.

Last weekend marked the end of the indoor volleyball season. This year I've been playing with the Division 2 team of the Melbourne University Renegades. We dominated this division at the beginning, but lost all our games at the end of the season because half of the team was on holidays. So we landed in fourth position, which was slightly disappointing given the players we had.

After my team was out, I had the opportunity to play the semi-finals and finals with the Division 1 team. Unfortunately, we lost the final against Monash University in 5 sets. Nevertheless, it was fun to play with this team, especially in front of the large crowd in the final.
More images of the finals are on http://www.renegades.com.au/

2.33

13/08/09 at 12:35 PM,
originally uploaded by 2.33.

Shawn and I have started taking photos from our office (2.33) to make use of our amazing view of the city and to experiment with our camera. For each day of the week we post a photo on http://flickriver.com/photos/41420945@N03/

Whale watching

watching,
originally uploaded by bernd ploderer.

Last weekend, Lisa and I drove to Warrnambool to watch whales. The bay in Warrnambool attracts Southern Right Whales, in particular whale mothers who raise their young (while the father hangs out somewhere in the ocean). For me this was the first time I had the chance to see such gigantic and fascinating animals. It was amazing just to see their fins, to watch them play with their tails or even seeing them jump out of the water.

Trying to take good photos

the risks of cycling,
originally uploaded by bernd ploderer.

I bought a new camera recently and try to develop my photographic skills, basically from scratch. Until now I generally took photos of interesting objects and landscapes during holidays or snapshots of friends using automatic setting. Now I'm trying to take photos of seemingly mundane things like a cyclist on the street. Trying to create an appealing photo teaches me the difficulty and complexity involved in photography once you go beyond automatic settings. The more photos I take, the closer I look at other people's photos, the more I learn to appreciate the skills and hard work involved in creating a good photo. I'll keep trying and will continue to post my photos on Flickr, and I'd appreciate any thoughts you may have.

Video & photography

video crew,
originally uploaded by bernd ploderer.

I'm attending an introductory course on documentary video production at RMIT together with Shawn and Emy in order to work on my filming skills (actually, in order to develop those skills from scratch :) It's been an interesting experience to see how much work it is and how difficult it is to produce something that looks good and is interesting. The photo was taken at the end of a film shoot at the farmer's market and shows our group.

The next thing will be that I want to get more into photography, which will be the context of my final study for my PhD. I'm planning to get a new camera (my old one broke) - the question is Canon Powershot G10 or Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3? Hopefully I'll have more recent updates to present on here then.

Volleyball again

Lloy Ball,
originally uploaded by nataliebehring.com.

I'm back in action on the volleyball court with the Melbourne Renegades. I've already played in the second and first team over the last 2 years. Now I'm in the third team, because I want to focus more on my studies and I can't commit to the amount of training required for the first two teams. It's fun though to play in the third team, which is led by my house mate Jared. All players know how to play and put a lot of effort into their game; we've got a good team spirit, and we easily won all games so far.

PS: the photo is obviously neither me setting nor my photo, because my camera is broken. But I'm planning to get a new one soon and I hope to deliver more photo impressions from the court, from uni, and my life in Melbourne soon.

Congratulations to a colleague and very close friend

with Shawn and Bernd,
originally uploaded by leongtuckwah.

Tuck submitted his PhD thesis last Monday and received his balloon at the School of Graduate Studies (If you see someone with such a balloon on campus, you can assume this person has just handed in his or her thesis - or it's open day at Melbourne Uni ;) His supervisors, Shawn and I were fortunate to be with him at this big moment.

Tuck has worked extremely hard over the last few years and created a more than outstanding piece of research. His supervisors highly praise his work and I'm sure it will be the thesis against which all other theses in the near future will be compared with (including mine :-O ) Tuck has also managed to get a post-doc position at an outstanding university in Europe, and that during times where funding and jobs are generally short.
He will leave us soon and Shawn and I will miss the conversations with him over a cup of coffee about research, life and everything else.

All the best Tuck!! ... and time for me to get some work done ;)