Now in it’s 22nd year, the Abbey Medieval Festival is considered the largest festival of its type in the southern hemisphere, attracting tens of thousands of fans and interested onlookers (like me) each year. The week-long festival kicks off with a huge Medieval Banquet and culminates in a grand, two day “Abbey Medieval Tournament” held over a weekend in Winter each year.

Located at the “Abbey Museum of Art and Archaeology”, this spectacular event is held in a large, gum tree littered field about 4km off the Bruce Highway along the Bribie Island road, 40 minutes or so north of Brisbane.

To be honest, I’d only heard about the event for the first time a few days ago and really had no idea what to expect. I was a tad worried I was going to find a bunch of pimply teens and twenty-something geeks sitting around in a tent playing Dungeons and Dragons (you can play that in a tent, right?), but I was pleasantly surprised with the spectacle that was presented to me and the many thousands that also showed up today.

After being greeted by a fair maiden at the front gate and parting with 25 gold pieces (a reasonable $25 entrance fee for adults, for you non-medieval speaking folk), I stepped into what literally felt like another world filled with castles and encampments buzzing with activity from ye days of old.

There were knights and crusaders, jesters and gypsies, vikings, nomads, nobles and more, together representing medieval times ranging from 600 to 1600 AD. Seemingly accurately attired participants stepped into the roles of those from the Dark Ages, High Middle Ages and Byzantine warriors, German landsknechts (mercenaries), Turkish Janissaries and exquisite Renaissance swordsmen, putting on a succession of shows and mini-performances that thrilled young and old alike under perfect blue skies.

I was able to visit the encampments of various groups who were set up to display the arts, crafts and ways of life of those from their given time period, as well as observe historical combats, jousting, dance, Turkish oil wrestling, archery, full scale battles, street performers and take some time to relax, put my feet up and sip on a mug of suds, while listening to some medieval music on stage at “Friar’s Folly Tavern”.

Seriously though, while I still think some of the people out there today were a tad beyond “total geek” when it came to their obsession with all things medieval, I really enjoyed the day out and would gladly do it again next year with friends.

To prove that all that I have written above isn’t a lie, I shot about 1,500 frames throughout the day, from which I can present the following gallery. I hope you enjoy it!

Held at the Gaythorne Community War Memorial in Sid Loder Park, the march and hour or so long service was participated in by surviving diggers, their families, soldiers, community groups and school children, ensuring that the ANZAC legend rightfully lives on across multiple generations.

Once again, I’m proud to have been able to attend the service and hope that the images I snapped (below) give you a bit of an idea of what the ceremony was like.

Lest we forget.

Coinciding with the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics 1 year anniversary celebrations, the colourful, vibrant event this year consisted of 18 locations featuring an array of light art installations and interactive displays on view for the past two nights.

With $500 worth of prizes up for grabs in an associated Flickr photography contest, I battled the less than desirable weather conditions to come up with the following shots of what I considered to be the best of the displays. I’m undecided at this point as to whether or not I’m going to enter any of them into the contest, but I’ve got until March 6th to decide.

Data Queue

By Nathan Whitford & Konstantinos Mavromichalis – Lines of LEDs that can respond to their environment and the presence of people. This installation translates the movement of people into colourful animated light patterns. Standing in line has never been so much fun.

Light Cosmos

By Victor S. Quezada – This installation creates a fusion of light and materials.

Revolv-a-lution

A group collaboration with general direction by Benjamin Feagin Jr. – Scheduled live artistic performances, interactive components and new media art works will dazzle and amaze.

Twitterfall Wall

By Bradley Shende – Interactive real time tagged discussion – projected as cascading tweets onto a three story brick wall.

Louver Towers

By Philip W. Guhl – Video wall of stunning visual effects using bitmapped artwork and music.

Flexi-Flex

By Philip W. Guhl – A flexible, translucent, modular LED panel providing full motion video and lighting capabilities both indoors and outdoors.

Fiction Facades

By Nathan Whitford & Konstantinos Mavromichalis – Never judge a building by its facade; a building projection that explores the relationship between the facade of a building and its interior. This installation reveals and creates stories.

Kinetic Floating Pixels

By Shaun Mavronicolas & Miles Thorogood – This interactive, kinetic light installation made up of an array of moving helium balloons merge the physical and virtual worlds in a fun and playful installation. Become the avatar and create you own experience.

Whether anyone believes me or not, I had a funny feeling that we were going to be in for a great sunset and it’s always been a dream/bucket list item to be up on Grouse overlooking Vancouver’s downtown as the sun set at the distant reaches of English Bay. I’ve heard people rave about the spectacle, some going as far as saying it’s a truly unique experience that everyone should have the chance to take in before they die. I, for one, didn’t need anymore motivation to get up there!

The 45min or so journey from my apartment to the Grouse Mountain chalet is less than an hour despite covering three modes of public transport (Skytrain, Seabus & Bus). Sounds unbelievable to have a hill the quality of Grouse so close to home, but Vancouverites are well aware of the fortunate position they find themselves in.

Heading across Burrard Inlet on the Seabus, the ski fields (see image below) beckon in the distance not all that far away from my workplace (approx. 17 minutes by Bus). Crazy, I know!

Once at the top, I strapped in, got a few runs on “The Cut” under my belt before heading straight for the Quicksilver Terrain Park to see if there were any gun boarders and skiers around, flipping and contorting in the air. The following are a a few shots I captured of some pretty talented kids.

Leaving the terrain park, it was up to “The Peak” and the highest vantage point possible from which to catch the pending sunset.

The whole idea was to get a few quality runs in as the sun dropped behind the horizon and give the sky a chance to be drenched in colour, ready for me to snap the shot I have been wanting to take for almost 6 years now. Here’s what I ended up with.

What do you think? It’ll do, eh? – haha! Good enough to make it into my project365 as day #3 anyway.

I can’t recommend a Grouse Mountain winter sunset viewing enough. Whether on ski, board, snowshoe or foot, it’s a spectacle I’ll certainly remember for a long time and I hope others who have not known about it get the chance to experience too after reading this entry.

From a personal perspective, I hope to improve, through this project, a number of areas of my own photographic skills including more quality images from less shots, improved portraits and also just applying the sort of discipline required to keep up with this kind of project.

Where can you view the shots?

Of course, I’m going to share the daily shots with you all in a couple of different ways:

1. My project365 blog page

If you’re a regular visitor to my site, this is perhaps the easiest place to check on a daily basis. Just click on the project365 menu item at the top of the page and you can scroll through all the shots that have been posted since January 1.

Bookmark the page and it will be even easier to find each day!

2. My project365 Flickr set

I have created a project365 set on my Flickr account which is where I will be posting the daily shots. If you’d like to leave a comment on any of the pics, this will be the place to do it.

You can also subscribe to the RSS feed for this set. Add the feed to your feed reader and you’ll have the photo releases as they happen!

3. My tumblr blog “Masey’s Minor Musings”

The Flickr feed mentioned above is automatically pulled into my tumblr blog “Masey’s Minor Musings”. In amongst all the random videos, images, quotes and other bits and pieces I post each day, each project365 image will apear. Cool!

4. On the www.mostly365.com website

This last gem is actually something I literally stumbled across while writing this post. The lovely Lisa Bettany (MostlyLisa) and “tap tap tap”, the makers of the awesome iPhone camera app “Camera+” have come up with a new website where you can share your daily photos with the world with one tweet. All I do is add the hashtag #mostly365 to my daily tweets when a new project365 shot is published and it pops up in the gallery for the given day on the mostly365.com site.

Check the site out for yourself when you get some spare time and check out all of the photos that people are taking as part of their own 365 photography projects.

If it’s at all possible, front man Dougie and his band consisting of Jonathon, Toby & Lorenzo put on a far more polished performance than what I witnessed back in June. And if you read my glowing post from that concert, you’d be forgiven for wondering how it could get any better??

The defining factor for me last night was the crowd. Heavily littered with adoring Aussie fans, I think the mood of the place was probably best described by my compadre for the night, Katie, who screamed at one point, “Wow, this crowd is AMPED!” She wasn’t kidding, there was an energy in the place that really set the tone for a great performance and the boys seemed to feed off it.

The setlist didn’t seem to vary greatly from the show back in June (I’ll post it once I can find an accurately prepared and verified version), but that didn’t matter one iota. As Katie (@kat_trains) tweeted during the performance:

How amazing does it feel when the crowd knows EVERY word of EVERY song? Happening right now at The Commodore. #Vancouver CC: @TheTemperTrap

To give you a bit of a taste of the amazing night, here’s a video of the band’s extended performance of their hit “Sweet Disposition”, that was posted on YouTube by “The Georgia Straight” a popular Vancouver Street newspaper.

Following are a quick series of shots I snapped last night. Wasn’t the best of nights behind the camera for me (I was having FAR too much fun to be taking pics), but they should give you an idea of how it all played out nonetheless!