Trudging to work. 8:00-9:00 Pyrmont Bridge

Posted by nitin&carissa on May 25, 2012
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I owe, I owe. So off to work I go

The Pyrmont Bridge was first constructed in 1858 to make it easier for Pyrmont residents to get to the city and vice versa. Today the bridge serves pretty much the same purpose though neither horses and buggies nor vehicles are allowed onto it anymore. It’s now a shared zone between pedestrians, cyclists and the endangered monorail rider species.

Scores of Sydneysiders commute both ways to work. Residents of Pyrmont off to the banks and businesses in the city; residents of the rest of Sydney off to the media outlets, tech companies and casino gaming tables headquartered in Pyrmont.

It’s a beautiful and serene walk across, particularly during the morning commute. Despite the high volume of traffic, all you hear is silence. It’s a solitary walk. You see people getting themselves into the zone and psyching themselves up for the long day ahead.

I walked across this bridge almost every day for over a year and it always struck me that the bridge would be a great place to film a silent movie. There’d be no need to silence the camera because all of us little ants were already marching wordlessly to work.

For more photos from Pyrmont Bridge, click here

To watch the 13 videos so far back to back, click here

Getting Fresh. 10:00-11:00 At the Pyrmont Growers’ Market

Posted by cgdizon on May 16, 2012
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In general, we are not creatures of habit. But on the first Saturday of each month, you will find us at the Pyrmont Growers’ Market at Pyrmont Bay Park. We’ve gone to the market every month since we’ve been in Sydney, for as long as we’ve been in town.

We both only really learned to cook and to enjoy cooking after we moved to Sydney. Surrounded by amazing produce and seafood plus a daily dose of Masterchef and Donna Hay’s simple dinners, we had no choice but to get in to the food craze.

Lucky for us, the Pyrmont Growers’ Market is just around the corner from our place. With over 80 stalls offering everything from tropical fruit to bacon and egg rolls and smoked ocean trout, what’s not to love about this market? Not only do you meet the people who actually grow the produce and make the jams, you get to do it all in a beautiful park fronting the harbour.

Over the years, we’ve bought crisp and tasty veggies, just-off-the-oven bread, fresh-cut flowers, truffles in season…the list goes on. We’ve also had some great breakfasts at the market, from chorizo rolls to pulled pork sandwiches downed with coffee or freshly squeezed juice.

While the items on offer are reason enough to wake up early on a Saturday, the shoppers that show up make it a treat.  Parents and their mini-me’s, little old ladies with their shopping trollies or wicker baskets, grandpas with their obligatory sun hats, DINKs with their dressed-up dogs…all make for an entertaining way to start the weekend.

For more photos from the market, click here.

For the Project 24 playlist on YouTube, click here.

Come rain or shine. 11:00-12:00 Surf’s up at Manly

Posted by nitin&carissa on May 8, 2012
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Manly, Sydney’s 2nd most famous beach, was named by Capt Arthur Phillip (founder of the settlement that became Sydney and first governer of New South Wales) after the indigenous people who lived there and their ”confidence and manly behaviour” (his words, not ours!).

Carissa took the photo here to prove that the men at Manly are still, well, manly.

Manly is very popular with the tourists and locals alike – the 30 minute ferry ride from Circular Quay is absolutely stunning, it has fantastic cafes, bars and restaurants lining its wide main promenade, but most importantly, it offers great surfing – for the novices doing dry drills on the beach to the seasoned pros.

One of the first questions our friends from outside Australia always ask us is whether we’ve tried surfing. We did – and let’s just say that it’s not as easy as they make it look. Carissa was better at it than me, but I just have a higher centre of gravity (that’s my excuse anyway).

For more photos from Manly, click here.

For the Project 24 playlist on YouTube, click here.

Circular Quay. 16:00-17:00 Ferry-go-round

Posted by nitin&carissa on April 30, 2012
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A visit to Sydney is not complete without a visit to Circular Quay (formerly called Semi-Circular Quay – true story!).

Sandwiched in between the Rocks and the Opera House, it is a transit point for tourists going in either direction who are looking for views (Opera House! Harbour Bridge!), buskers (That’s how a didgeridoo is played?) or a piece of history (The landing site and first settlement!).

For the locals, Circular Quay is a key transport hub linking Sydney’s 600+ suburbs and connecting city office workers to their homes.  Multiple bus lines, the City Circle train route and all Sydney Harbour and Parrammatta River ferries converge at this one location.

For this particular shoot, we decided to capture the ferries going about their merry business. On any given day, the Sydney ferry commute is probably one of the most beautiful in the world — whether traveling north, west or east, the harbour is lined with amazing views from natural coves and inlets to man-made structures like the sails of the Opera House.

There’s something very romantic about being out on the water. For a lucky few, this is the everyday commute. And for some others, like the man sitting next to us who proposed to his girlfriend as we were passing Luna Park, it’s a once in a lifetime experience.

To view the rest of the photos from this shoot click here.

To view all 10 videos so far back to back, click here.

The Underbelly. 1:00-2:00 Shenanigans at the Cross

Posted by nitin&carissa on April 24, 2012
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This one was stressful. Now, for the uninitiated, Kings Cross (affectionately known as The Cross) is probably the most interesting suburb of Sydney – after hours. On a Friday or Saturday evening, you’ll find it all here – from DJs spinning their tunes  to drug-peddlers doing brisk business, the well-heeled and fashionable to the needing-to-be-wheeled and drunk and strip clubs to kebab shops. We spent a lot of time fending off drunks and trying to not get in trouble with the law, which made it a challenging but very rewarding hour.

As always, the Cross was full of interesting characters. Many people declined to be photographed, a few muttered that we shouldn’t be there, but there were a handful who made it all worth it… crazy guy on something illegal stumbling across the road in his hoodie and shorts and then insisting on being our muse, blue-haired dude who showed us the finger in the nicest possible way, Aussie with an American bald eagle t-shirt (that’s more unusual than you think) who blew us a kiss, drunk group poses and so on.

The Cross gets a terrible rap for violence, crime and prostitution – heck they even made a TV series about that, but in reality – it’s just a really loud, colourful and excessive part of town with more than it’s share of alcohol but also more than it’s share of good restaurants, bars and importantly – character.

At the Cross, life begins at 1am and you’ll have fun as long as you’re high (on life or otherwise).

Click here for all the photos.

Click here to view the playlist for all 9 hours so far.

The evening gets stitched up… 7pm-10pm

Posted by nitin&carissa on April 20, 2012
Posted in: Previews. Tagged: , , . 2 comments

Now that we’ve uploaded 8 hours of time-lapse photography and have shot the 9th (we’ll put that up over the weekend), we thought we’d stitch together some of the hours to start getting a sense of what the 24 hours will look like when it’s all done. We’ve stitched up 7pm-10pm in the video below. Let us know what you think.

 

Rise & Shine. 06:00-07:00 A Bondi Sunrise

Posted by nitin&carissa on April 16, 2012
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There’s no doubt about it, Bondi is an iconic beach. Say Bondi and images of white sands clear skies, surfer dudes, buff lifeguards and bikini-clad women come to mind. It’s the most popular beach in Sydney and the most famous of Australia’s top-notch beaches. The combination of natural beauty, great surf, beautiful people and accessibility has raised the beach’s profile over the years. Also its starring role on the hit TV show Bondi Rescue has forever immortalised it in popular culture.

We fell in love with Bondi the first time we visited as tourists, but we quickly wrote it off soon after we moved. The first beautiful summer day we went there to swim was a nightmare. No space to park the car. No place to lay the beach towel. People everywhere. Thus the early morning shoot at Bondi was a revelation.

In the breaking light of dawn, the beach was calm, peaceful and stunningly beautiful. Without the carpet of humanity, Bondi’s beauty was revealed in all its glory.

We didn’t have Bondi to ourselves for long though. Soon enough, the activity around the beach started to increase. A lone fisherman, a yoga practitioner, a fellow photographer, a couple out for a stroll then a smattering of runners, owners walking their dogs and of course the surfers…basically the locals busy doing their thing…

The experience of watching the sun rise behind the peninsula and witnessing the beach become a hive of activity was almost magical.

And so, we fell in love with Bondi all over again.

For more photos from Bondi & the rest of the project, click here. And to view all 8 videos completed so far back to back, click here.

Fish & Chips for lunch. 12:00-13:00 At the Sydney Fish Market

Posted by nitin&carissa on April 11, 2012
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The Sydney Fish Market is on every Sydney visitor’s must visit list. It claims to be the world’s second largest seafood market in terms of variety outside Japan and like many things in Australia, is the largest of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere.

On any given day, tourist buses disgorge hordes of hungry tourists out into the open parking lot. The tourists move together, not unlike a school of fish, to forage for lunch in the main building — oysters from Christie’s, sashimi from Peter’s and grilled and fried goodness from the café.

With fresh seafood, lemon wedges and chips in hand, they head out to the open air dining area to enjoy their lunch and fend off the hovering gulls all at once.

The fish market is a tourist-y place, but is also a haven for local home cooks, chefs and wannabe Masterchefs looking for fresh seafood and produce. Visiting the fish market has become a routine for us. It is our local fishmonger because we’re lucky enough to live in the same postcode. Every other week we visit the same store and stock up on whatever strikes our fancy. The trick is to get there early, before the tourist hordes, to get the freshest catch…and a car park.

We keep going back though not only because it’s the best place to buy seafood in the city, but also because the Fish Market is much more than a fish market. There’s a nice little deli that sells the best spicy chorizo we’ve had in Sydney and a fruit and veg market with some great produce. There’s also a little bakery where we buy our breakfast loaf.

Wake Up Sydney. 05:00-06:00 Sunrise behind the Opera House

Posted by nitin&carissa on April 1, 2012
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This sunrise hour will be the opener for the video… and boy did it make us work hard for it!

After waking up at 4am on a Saturday morning and braving the early morning chill, we ended up with a shoot we weren’t entirely happy with. So we did it again the following Saturday and this is what we got… (hit play to watch the video)

We thought it would be appropriate to open this homage to Sydney with its most iconic landmark – The Opera House – in its most glorious hour – sunrise.

Even though we’ve been in Sydney for two and a half years, we haven’t seen the sun rise too many times (neither of us is a compulsive early riser). Now we feel like we need to do this more often! The light spreading out behind the opera house, the harbour bridge turning into an arch of gold , the city buildings gradually becoming illuminated – a new day full of possibilities born.

And as it turns out – a lot of interesting things happen at this hour around the harbour. First, there are the left-over party-goers. The kind who, in a few hours, will swear never to drink again but then in a few more hours – will. It’ll be Saturday night after all. Then there are the big burly bouncer-at-the-local-pub looking men fishing. Not sure that’s entirely legal in this part of the harbour. Further, we’re not sure we’d even want to eat fish caught in this area so frequented by boats, but there they were fishing and smoking. And there are the runners/joggers/cyclists who, one might think, have the sole purpose of making you feel unfit for not having your runners on. After that are the wanderers soaking in the morning. Like this film-maker I met (the second Saturday when Carissa opted to sleep in!) who said he was going to accompany me to a late night shoot at Kings Cross (Rommel, do get in touch if you’re reading this!). And last, but not least, there were the other snap-happy photographers like us taking in the stunning sunrise behind the opera house.

And there was another lucky break in all of this – the cruise ship!

The Chinatown hustle. 20:00-21:00 in Chinatown.

Posted by nitin&carissa on March 26, 2012
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What good is a city without it’s very own Chinatown! In Sydney, Chinatown is a loose term. It could just as well be Taiwantown (politically some Chinese might say that’s the same thing, but that’s a whole different discussion), Koreatown, Malaytown and so on. We’ll stick to Chinatown for the moment though. Check out the video:

The size of Sydney’s Asian population gives Chinatown here it’s extra dollop of vibrancy. When everything else is closed, you can count on Dixon Street to be buzzing. Especially on Friday nights.

As a staple, you’ll see stalls with fried goodness (albeit unappetizing in appearance to some), dumplings, satay sticks and sweet puffs people line up for.

And there are people selling stuff you didn’t know existed but suddenly somehow have to have. Case in point: we found this guy doing brisk business on bear capes for $28.

We thoroughly enjoyed the people watching scene — as you can see from the video, it was packed with students in their finest enjoying the breezy weather. Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to sample the food or shop at the market. After a tiresome evening protecting the camera from the hordes, we stopped for dinner off the main drag and ended our meal with the requisite fortune cookies you find in Chinese restaurants everywhere but in China.

Carissa’s is on the left and Nitin’s is on the right. :)

For the rest of the photos, click here.