In the time warp ... Adelaide, of course!

Click here to view at 1000 pixels wide.

Architecture fascinates me, with the way it pretends to be anywhere but where it is, and in any time period but our own. And nowhere in the world is more of an architectural time warp than the North Terrace area of Adelaide, South Australia. In five hundred meters, you can see 1970s modernism, Romanesque frontages, nineteenth century colonial Australian, eighteenth or nineteenth century British India ... and then you get along to Adelaide University, and -- dang! This one is pretending to be a fifteenth century castle. It's absolutely magnificent. These are the hallowed 'halls of learning,' of which students and visitors can tell you a few rare stories! The image was easy to capture, just a question of getting close enough to put the sun just behind the roof there. This threw the building into silhouette and burned out the sky, of course, but this was easy to fix at the software level later. I might have stuck around and done the perfect manual exposure, but to get this shot at all was a question of patience: taxis backing in and out, students by the thousand trooping by. Eventually, you grab what you can and enhance it later. Thank heavens for digital photography! Photo by Mel, 2009.