(Reminder to self; this gallery has been moved to Flickr. Do no further updates here.)

Yes, this gallery IS being uploaded in December of 2022. Although I processed the shots last week I waited until today to put them up, exactly 6,000 days after this flight occurred on 10 July 2006.

Six T h o u s a n d.

6,000 sunrises and sunsets. 6,000 breakfasts, lunches and dinners. 6,000 days on which news stories hit the headlines and vanished into fading memories, 6,000 nights' sleep, some good, some bad, some in between, houses moved, children grown, movies seen and forgotten, or sometimes remembered, places travelled to, or not, especially in the last 3 years...

6,000. Wrapping one's head around that is not an easy task.

But let us return to June of that year, over 16 years in the past. A colleague suggested that a friend of hers from Melbourne and I may wish to meet up. We both thought that it was a good idea, so she came to Sydney. We spent some time out in the Hawkesbury region (covered in my Hawkesbury gallery which includes shots of our stay at the then-Sebel), went for a trip up to the Blue Mountains (there may be some shots in that gallery someday too), came back to Sydney, went out to dinner and caught a movie about... penguins, I think it was? (it was more interesting than I make it sound) at Govindas, an Indian vegetarian restaurant in Darlinghurst which also has a movie cinema with a combination of seating, and couches on which you can stretch out to watch the movie.

And alla fine... I arranged for us to take a helicopter flight over Sydney. That, you see here.

Some important things to note. It had been only 2 years since I had bought my first DSLR, the Canon 300D. I had not been practicing my photography assiduously. Remember that these were the days when the Interwebz were still young, and the only places you could really learn photo skills was via books or courses, both of which I did... but both have limitations. In 2006 I shot on only 26 days out of the 365 in the year. In 2005, 13 days. In 2004, 8 days. Put another way, I barely had my training wheels off when it came to photography skills. So yes, the photo quality in this gallery is sub-standard; you ain't telling me anything that I don't know. There were too many mistakes, including not taking all of my memory cards with me (because I left my photo bag behind due to weight) and therefore ran out of shooting space long before the flight ended.

However... when I posted these there were plans for another flight in the foreseeable future, which would be a little different in style. And in fact, that was one of the reasons for putting this gallery when I did. We needed to decide when to do that. On the one hand it would be nice to have the flight in The Golden Hour. On the other, the flight schedule doesn't cover that time; the closest we could get is a late afternoon flight after we go off daylight saving... but most of our subjects will be to the west, which is where the sun will be.

There were decisions to be pondered. (Spoiler alert; we decided to go in the morning, about an hour after the golden hour but as close as we could get. That flight is covered in the Sydney From Above Flight 02 gallery. Some day I may even fill it with photos.)

But for the moment, let's look at all the things that went (photographically) wrong over a decade and a half ago (the flight itself was actually good, the photos less so), and as a bonus any foreign or interstate visitors can learn a bit about Sydney from above.