It’s official. I suck at Oktoberfest.
I came to this conclusion on Saturday night, some time around 11, when I retired to my hostel bed stone cold sober having just waded through the debris of a Munich on the final weekend of the beer festival. That’s not to say I didn’t have my fair share of litre steins earlier in the day, but at some point my sensible switch kicked in and I decided to hit the cokes instead, I even had a coffee at 10:30!! Worst. Party animal. Ever.
In cruel twist of fate I actually picked up some sort of bug which has rendered me housebound today, I was in a bad way before the drugs kicked in, I even shed a few tears when Flower (head meerkat) was killed by a cobra on Meerkat Manor this morning (and then I announced this fact to the world on my blog – this fever is brutal).
There were 13 of us who made the trip over, most of whom arrived late Friday night, but my flatmate Dave and I arrived early Friday afternoon.
(As a sidenote if you’re intestered in the back story to our trip which was named – codename Operation Beardvaria – you can check out this post on Dave’s blog.) My initial plan was to leave the SLR at home, I mean, a big camera is pretty much the last thing you want to have to worry about in a beer fueled environment, but when I thought about it I realised I’d have Friday afternoon and Sunday morning to take photos, so in went the 40D and Sigma 18-200 (not an amazing lens optically, but it’s super handy for traveling and capable of some pretty decent results). We spent Friday afternoon cruising round trying to capture the spirit of Oktoberfest with our cameras, for you Adelaideans out there imagine the Royal Show only with bigger and better rides, and instead of halls selling showbags they have halls filled with people drinking steins of beer, instead of the animals they have tents of people drinking beer, and instead of car demonstrations they have, well, you get the idea.
I wanted to practice a technique knowns as shooting from the hip, which, as the name suggests, involves holding the camera by your waist and shooting people who aren’t aware they’re having their photo taken. It’s obviously pretty hit and miss, but I love the results you can get with a bit of luck.
And then there was the chaos of Saturday…
I had a bit of time to explore Munich along on Sunday, my flight was mid afternoon while Dave was off at the crack of dawn to get his flight (quite the valiant effort after a disrupted sleep night before). I was here 2 years ago so it was interesting to see familiar sights. The morning light was glorious and after spending a bit of time shooting downtown I decided to see if surf was up at the stationary wave. It was.
I’ll leave you with my favourite image of the weekend, enjoy!
Oh, by the way, I’m still on the lookout for some Paris models, come on people, get on board!
