Luminous Sydney

There is a great festival going on in Sydney right now called Luminous Sydney. According the website, it’s “a festival of music, ideas, light and performance.”  The most obvious and dramatic aspect of the festival is the Lighting of the Sails. Each night from 5:30 to late -  both sides of the Opera House shells (or sails as they are sometimes called) are illuminated with colorful projections of light.  It’s pretty cool.  When i run home from work each night (yeah, i’ve been reduced to a run-commuter now), i run through Circular Quay (main ferry terminal adjacent to opera house) and around the Botanical Gardens with great views of the Opera House the whole time.  It’s really fun to see a different color pattern projected each night.

This weekend we joined our friends Jen and Michael to go to one of the shows of the Festival – Reggie Watts from Seattle.  I knew nothing of Reggie Watts before sitting down for the show… and he blew me away.  He is a one-man show creatively weaving together music, spoken word, and stand up improvisation.  He uses a little electronic mixer to record his own voice in real time to form multiple layers of a song – i.e bass and percussion – and then sings/raps over the top of it.  Really creative stuff.

Here are a few pics of the Lighting of the Sails and the Reggie Watts show.  Some of the pics were taken with our new camera.  I’ve had my eye on this one since December, but no camera shop in Australia could keep it in stock long enough to buy it.  I finally tracked one down and nabbed it – Panasonic LX3 with a brilliant Leica lense.  It rocks.