Melbourne in Pictures

I've been poking around town lately with my camera enjoying the warm and clear weather and grabbing some photos around town.  I've also been playing around with HDR photography and different exposures.  Here are a few shots that I've taken lately:

Melbourne Skyline from Abbotsford (standard exposure, no HDR, taken on Feb 13)

Melbourne skyline from St. Kilda pier (HDR shot taken today)

Sunset behind the city with the Abbotsford convent in the foreground (HDR shot taken on Feb 17)

St. Kilda Pavillion on St. Kilda Pier (standard exposure, no HDR taken today)

I'm still honing my skills, so I'll post some more photos soon.  Next up will be extra long exposure and timelapse videos after I purchase a timer remote.

Melbourne Sunset

This past Sunday, Lydia and I went to one of our favorite spots overlooking the city to watch the sunset and enjoy dinner and a bottle of wine.  I brought my camera along to get some sunset photos, and ended up shooting a quick clip of the flying foxes as they make their way towards the city for dinner:



The bats are pretty incredible, and surprisingly large, not to mention great in number.

From Wikipedia: Characteristically, all species of flying foxes only feed on nectar, blossom, pollen, and fruit, which explains their limited tropical distribution. They do not possess echolocation, a feature which helps the other suborder of bats, the microbats, locate and catch prey such as insects in mid-air. Instead, smell and eyesight are very well-developed in flying foxes.

It was a picturesque Melbourne summer evening!

5 Minutes or Less: I'll be home for...Software?

Courtesy of abc.net.au

News.com.au is reporting that it would be cheaper to pay for a round-trip ticket to fly from Australia to the States to buy Adobe software than it would be to purchase the software here in Australia.  From the article:

The Creative Suite Master 6 Collection in Australia costs $4,334. The same software carries a price of $2599 in the US, Gizmodo reported. That's a $1,735 price difference.... A return flight to Los Angeles costs $1147.58 on Virgin Australia.

Talk about lessons in arbitrage. Pretty incredible, although you have to ignore the social costs, including negative externalities of CO₂ emissions of the flight, the lost work product of time spent travelling to and from, and the additional costs borne on US and Australian immigration.

Is it really that surprising to software vendors that software piracy is so rampant? Why not save the cost of the ticket and the cost of the software and just use bittorrents?