Only slightly bent

As sort of hinted in the previous post, here are some night photos of the city. For any viewpoints higher up, there are two observation decks in the city’s skyscrapers; one at the tallest residential building in the world, Eureka Tower, and another at the Rialto Towers. Though at a lower level, the Rialto Tower is better for photographic purposes – not only does it have two outside observation decks instead of one, the outside decks also have wide enough fencing for a DSLR lens to fit through. The Eureka tower has a boring tight mesh that always intrudes into photos.

Anyhow, without further ado, some night photos (click on the photos to get a bigger version):

.. as opposed to Melbourne by night, which is coming up a bit later. Anyhow, I finally managed to gather a few shots of the city, so here goes the first rough batch. (click on the photos to view a bigger version)

The CBD – or the “city” – is a nice and compact area that is quite walkable; photography-wise, however, the skyscrapers are a bit dispersed and distributed on both sides of the river in three or four clusters. Therefore, getting comprehensive skyline photos is more challenging than it is in many other cities.

One thing that there are plenty of in Melbourne are cafes. And the cafe culture is starting to grow on me, too – to the great surprise of everyone, including myself. I have drank approximately 10 times more coffee over the past month than in my entire life before that. I kid you not.

There’s also lots of interesting architecture in Melbourne. Federation square, one of the happening places downtown, is one example:

Flinders Street station and the old city circle tram in the foreground represent a somewhat older style of the city; none less compelling, the sporadically preserved older architecture make a nice touch to the feeling of the city.

The Southern Cross railway station, on the other hand, is yet another example of cool modern architecture. It’s kind of like the Pasile station in Helsinki, only much nicer

There really isn’t a subway system in Melbourne as such, but there is a “city loop” with stations mostly underground via which some local area trains travel. The local trains are quite nice and the tram network is pretty extensive (even though we live outside of it), plus there are buses – overall the public transportation is quite good.

As far as shopping goes, it unfortunately seem Melbourne is a very good city to do some serious shopping. We’re (un)lucky enough to live within a 15-minute drive of the biggest shopping center in Australia, Chadstone. The place is positively huge with over 400 shops and it looks pretty nice, too:

While these don’t even scratch the surface of what’s worthy of taking a photo, I expect to get some pretty nice shots of all kinds of things as time goes by. There is no shortage of subjects for sure.