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Even on a cloudy day, Sydney is a great place.
Here's a shot of that iconic building from The Rocks.
La grande salle du célèbre Opéra Garnier.
Opéra National de Paris - France - Décembre 2010
All my images are copyrighted, feel free to contact me before using it. Thank you for your comments.
the National Theater (Narodni Divadlo) in Prague
I love theaters (opera theater the most) and wanted to take a shot from this position since ever but I never had the chance to do so.
This time was different: our lady guide was very nice and, differently from other guided tour of theaters I visited before (where visitors were secluded in a lateral viewing position) we could sit right in the middle of the parterre seating area
I took the last seat, aimed up, and here it is...
enjoy
Location : Oslo , Norway
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Lens : Nikon 14mm
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This building once housed Swampland Opera in Toomsboro, Georgia.
"In 1975 Joe Boone, a former Georgia House of Representatives clerk and member of the prominent local Boone family of lawyers, politicians, and newspapermen who owned much of Toomsboro, cleaned up an old store in the middle of town as a place where he and his friends could gather and play country and gospel music. Mills sat in on piano on opening night. Boone called it the Swampland Opera House, and within weeks people were coming from nearby counties to have a steak at the restaurant next door and set up folding chairs at the theater for Saturday performances. Admission was anything you cared to put in the hat. An annual Syrup Festival, named after the local sorghum syrup mill, grew around the music venue in the 1980s and 1990s. Even after Joe Boone died in 1996, a group of locals formed a nonprofit to keep the show onstage."
"But by the end of the century, the vacant properties were too expensive to maintain, and the remaining Boones, now living in Tennessee, were ready to divest their holdings. In November 2000, the opera house, the hotel, the restaurant, the train depot, the syrup mill, the cotton warehouse, the bank, and several other buildings all went up for auction." From Atlanta Magazine Article found at www.atlantamagazine.com/news-culture-articles/toomsboro-f....
A quote about opera from the Terry Pratchett book Maskerade. The quote is not exact to what's in the book, as I only listen to the book on tape and got this quote online and couldn't check it against the original text.
blogged: workthatneedle.blogspot.com/2011/07/apologies-for-absence...
Every opera house is haunted by ghosts: victims of exposure, murder, suicide, drowning, a broken heart, curses, martyrdom, an avalanche (1), and just plain bad luck. Kings, queens, clerics, artists, philosophers, peasants, gypsies, heroes, heroines -- none are spared.
I thought I would point my new camera at my favourite subject. I must confess I quite like the result.
View with B l a c k M a g i c
German postcard. Photo: Asta Nielsen and Hugo Flink in Die Kinder des Generals/The General's Children (Urban Gad, 1912).
Danish silent film actress Asta Nielsen (1881-1972), was one of the most popular leading ladies of the 1910s and one of the first international film stars. Of her 74 films between 1910 and 1932, seventy were made in Germany where she was known simply as 'Die Asta'. Noted for her large dark eyes, mask-like face, and boyish figure, Nielsen most often portrayed strong-willed passionate women trapped by tragic consequences.
Asta Sofie Amalie Nielsen was born in the Copenhagen suburb of Vesterbro, Denmark, in 1881. She was the daughter of an often unemployed blacksmith and a washerwoman. Nielsen's family moved several times during her childhood while her father sought employment. When she was fourteen years old, her father died. Asta's stage debut came as a child in the chorus of the Kongelige Teater's production of Boito's opera 'Mephistopheles'. At the age of eighteen, Nielsen was accepted into the drama school of the Royal Danish Theatre. During her time there, she studied with the Royal Danish actor Peter Jerndorff. In 1901, twenty years old, she became pregnant and gave birth to her daughter, Jesta. Nielsen never revealed the identity of the father, and chose to raise her child alone with the help of her mother and older sister. In 1902, she graduated from drama school. For the next three years, she worked at the Dagmar Theatre, then toured in Norway and Sweden from 1905 to 1907 with De Otte and the Peter Fjelstrup companies. Returning to Denmark, she was employed at Det Ny Theater (The New Theatre) from 1907 to 1910. Although she worked steadily as a stage actress, her performances remained unremarkable. Danish historian Robert Neiiedam wrote that Nielsen's unique physical attraction, which was of great value on the screen, was limited on stage by her deep and uneven speaking voice.
In 1909, set designer and director Urban Gad encouraged Asta Nielsen to become a film actress and she starred in his Danish silent film Afgrunden/The Abyss (Urban Gad, 1910). Gary Morris observes in Bright Lights Film Journal: "this film established from the beginning key components of her legend: scandalous eroticism and a uniquely minimalist acting style." Asta plays a music teacher lured away from her stolid fiancee (Robert Dinesen) by a sexy but faithless circus cowboy (Poul Reumert). In a startling sequence of sexual intensity, she lassos her boyfriend and does a lewd dance, bumping and grinding against him. Morris: "This vulgar ‘gaucho-dance’ was what most viewers remembered, but critics of the time also applauded Asta's naturalistic acting." The film was a huge success so she was encouraged to continue. The following year Balletdanserinden/The Ballet Dancer (August Blom, 1911) proved to be another success. Nielsen and Gad soon married. A German distributor, Paul Davidson, invited Nielsen to Germany, where he was building a new studio. Eventually, this would become Europe's largest film studio - the Universum Film Union A.-G. (or Ufa). Asta signed a contract for $80,000 a year, then the highest salary for a film actress. In 1911, she moved to Berlin with Urban Gad. In a Russian popularity poll of that year, she was voted world's top female film star, behind French comedian Max Linder and ahead of her Danish compatriot Valdemar Psilander.
In the next six years, Asta Nielsen played every conceivable kind of character in both tragedies and comedies. In Die Suffragette/The Militant Suffragette (Urban Gad, 1913), she is an English female liberationist whose beliefs force her to become violent, placing a bomb in Parliament. In Zapatas Bande/Zapata's Gang (Urban Gad, 1916), she plays a highway robber. In the comedy Das Liebes-ABC/The ABCs of Love (Magnus Stifter, 1916), she pretends to be a man and takes her wimpy boyfriend out on the town in order to "bring out the man in him." Nielsen was so famous that the name Asta became a trademark for cigarettes and perfumes. In the Dutch city The Hague, a cinema was named after her. Her beauty was praised by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire as "the drunkard's vision and the lonely man's dream". One of Asta's most interesting productions was Hamlet (Sven Gade, Heinz Schall, 1921). Gary Morris: "Asta brings a subtle twist to her version not by playing a man, but by playing a woman disguised as a man, adding another level of gender complexity. Hamlet was based less on William Shakespeare than on a popular book of the time that said Hamlet was actually a girl forcibly raised as a boy in order to provide an heir to the Danish throne. At first, the effect is more puzzling than effective, but the actress's strategy becomes evident in sexually charged scenes between Asta/Hamlet and Horatio, who caress and coddle each other in what surely appeared to viewers of the time (as it does to modern audiences) as a gay tryst. Asta brilliantly imparts the gender-unstable nature of the character in these scenes with Horatio and others with Fortinbras, whose encounters with Hamlet are also clearly coded as gay. The actress's effortless creation of these subtle, sympathetic homosexual tableaux gives a tremendous vitality to this production. The fact that the film was truly hers — being the first film she made with her own production company — shows just how daring and modern she was."
Nowadays Asta Nielsen is best known for Die Freudlose Gasse/The Joyless Street (G.W. Pabst, 1925). Asta plays in this film an impoverished woman who resorts to prostitution and murder. In the original prints there were two equal-time female leads: Nielsen and a young actress from Sweden, Greta Garbo. Ruthlessly cut for American release, the film suddenly became a Garbo vehicle. Fortunately, the print has been restored recently and Asta triumphs in it as the increasingly unbalanced Marie. Nielsen continued to be a screen legend in Germany, and appeared in films like Dirnentragödie/Tragedy of the Street (Bruno Rahn, 1927) and in her only sound film Unmögliche Liebe/Crown of Thorns (Erich Waschneck, 1932). After the Nazis came to power she was rumoured to be offered her own studio by propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. Understanding the implications well, she left Germany for good in 1936, settling in Denmark where she returned to stage acting and became a private figure. In her later years, Asta Nielsen wrote articles on art and politics and a two-volume autobiography, 'Den tiende Muse' (The Silent Muse) in 1946. She also became an acclaimed collage artist. In 1964, Nielsen had to come to terms with the most severe blow of her life: her daughter Jesta committed suicide following the death of her husband. At 86, Asta directed her first film. Luise F. Pusch writes in FemBio: "After a film about her life did not meet with her approval, she set to work on the project herself. The result was a work of art." At 88, Asta Nielsen married her third husband, Christian Theede, an art dealer 18 years her junior and the great love of her life. The two enjoyed their travels together so much that they decided to leave their fortune to a foundation to fund trips for the elderly. In 1972, Asta Nielsen died in Copenhagen after a leg fracture. She was 90.
NB according to Danish Nielsen expert Ib Monty, in 1915, during a trip to South America, Nielsen met Freddy Wingårdh, Swedish fleet lieutenant and son of a shipbuilder. They soon fell in love. In the same year Nielsen separated from Urban Gad and in 1918 they officially divorced. Nielsen married Wingardh in 1919, but divorced him again in 1923. Apparently, during WWI, Wingardh made several photos of Nielsen, which were used for postcards issued by the German Photochemie company in Berlin. Wingårdh would also act in one of Nielsen's films: Das Eskimobaby ( Walter Schmidthässler, 1918). Together with Wingårdh, Nielsen founded the company Art-Film , with which she would produce three films: Hamlet, Fräulein Julie, and Der Absturz. In the latter film played with Russian actor Grigori Chmara, who became her film partner for some seven films, and from 1923 also her partner in private life.
Sources: Gary Morris (Bright Lights Film Journal), Luise F. Pusch (FemBio), Jim Beaver (IMDb), Wikipedia, and IMDb.
And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.
The Opéra de Nice is the principal opera venue in Nice, France, which houses the Ballet Nice Méditerrannée and the Nice Philharmonic Orchestra. It offers three types of performances: operas, ballets and classical music concerts
It has been a year and half since my wife and I took our last vacation! This time our moto was "go big or go home" and as the stars aligned for vacation times and work schedules we found ourselves shooting for a January vacation. We weighed the options and Australia, being their summer, seemed like a great choice. We planned, saved, and dreamed and months later, on a hot summer morning in January at 6am I found myself in front of the opera house in awe! I was realizing what seemed liked a totally crazy idea months before had really come true. I was in front of the opera house and it was beautiful!
The city was just starting to wakeup, and people were out for their daily runs and doing boxing workouts in the park! It was wonderful to see the city start to come alive! I tried so hard to take it all in. The smells, the sounds, and the feeling of the wind coming off the water. It was a moment I'll never forget!
How it was done:
Canon 5d mkII, 16-35mm II
35mm, F11, ISO 50, 196 sec (3min 15sec)
This photo was achieved use a Lee Big Stopper Filter, with a modified Coken Zpro Filter Holder. Only basic adjustments in Lightroom after import to achieve final look.