Lantern Festival 2015

It's Chinese New Year and here in Auckland there is certainly a large Chinese community!

And it's great since we get a cool festival like the Lantern Festival.

Rob, Mark and I popped along last night to the lantern only part of the festival (so no stage shows, food stalls etc) as it's generally a little quieter... or so we thought! Turns out the awesome weather attracted a rather large crowd... still, lots of good photo op's.

As for the lanterns... some pretty cool ones, some so so, many from last year, but a few new ones hidden around the place :)

I had taken my tripod, but didn't really need to. Most of my photographs were taken hand held with a very small f-stop and ISO on auto. Pretty happy with the results. Next time, I think I'll leave the tripod at home.

Here's the results....

I did try one with the tripod by the big dragons to get some ghosting effects... ended up with a lot of ghosts! Kinda shows how busy is was..

There was quite a good display of some birds/roses in the trees, but unfortunately the light was a little bright in one of the birds so I couldn't get the shot quite right...

And finally.... the weirdest one of all.... as far as I can tell it is banana's fighting shrimps with some turtles!?! I'm sure there must a good story here...

Hope you enjoyed. Thanks for havin a look :)

Howick Military Tattoo

Today was a bit of a quiet day as a number of the guys had other events on.

But, luckily for me the annual Howick Military Tattoo was on today. I popped along for a couple of hours to watch some of the events and have a wander around.

The WW1 re-enactors were setting up just as I arrived and their short battle commenced. I snapped off  a few shots and figured I tried converting some to black & white since I haven't done that for a while :)

The Germans advanced from their "trench" first followed by the Kiwi's counterattacking from their "trench". Neither side gets far....

In between the re-enactments were the Highland Games. I missed the first 2 games, but managed to catch the very last caber toss and the remaining 2 events...

Caber toss...

Stone lifting...

From what I could gather, the contestants had 1min to try and lift 5 stones onto a barrel. The lightest stone was 80kg and the last was 155kg!

And this guy completed it.... this is him lifting a 155kg rock...

The final event.... a farmers carry. Each pipe is 100kg and it had to be carried 50m in 1min....

I think I'll stick with my Crossfit WOD's... they're hard enough thanks :)

The other re-enactors I saw were a group of Norse vs. Celts and a small gladiator battle, but apparently the slaves the gladiators were tasked with killing knew what they were doing and won!?

Some of the static displays/re-enactment camps...

Oh and some lucky kids got to fire a couple of the cool guns! Sadly, I was not one of them....

Not as good as some of the other events we've been too. Still, a good way to spend a Sunday afternoon close to home. A couple of hours was more than enough I think.

Right... where's my beer...