Tag Archives: Sheffield

The Wheel of Sheffield

The Wheel of Sheffield
Photo-A-Day #1615

Today was my first full day in England. I stayed at the Hilton in Sheffield. Sheffield is a pretty cool city. After demonstrations today we drove back into the city and to the hotel. I went outside on the balcony/deck/outdoor eating area and it overlooked a river area with lots of long boats. I guess you can take rides in the boats and hop on and off to pubs that are along the way. The boats only go 6 miles and hour up through the locks so if you wanted to see the city that way and liked to take it leisurely you could do that. I went and set up my mini tripod and the Panamatic to take this little panoramic shot. I used the timer and jumped into the shoot too.

Hilton Sheffield

And I shot my rig setup to show you what I was using..

The Panamatic in Action

After that we hung out in the bar for a while and I worked online making my panorama and checking in on e-mails and seeing what was happening online. I did this for a while and then Jessica (my friend and sales consultant for our company) and I went down into town for dinner. We had dinner outside in the open air at Strado. We were the only people hanging outside at that place but the area where the restaurant was located had many restaurants and one had some really nice music. We had a great dinner and conversation. We walked through town and it was really nice. The place has such old world architecture and it is really cool to look up and see the spires and turrets and the coolness of the place. I love old buildings with character. Going to places like this makes me appreciate what my home town has for history as well. I’ve taken photo walks around the town looking up at the buildings and seeing the names of the buildings, no one looks up anymore.

Speaking of looking up, when we drove into town from the demonstration we both saw this huge Ferris wheel in the middle of the city. We certainly missed that last night was we drove in but that was well after it had shut down for the night. So the Ferris Wheel, called the Wheel of Sheffield is a huge wheel. It is towering above us (almost 60 metres high (197 feet)) and it has gondola like compartments for passengers to ride within. There is even a VIP compartment with champagne and a DVD player. DVD player? Why would you pay to go up in this thing only to watch some sort of DVD? That makes no sense to me. These VIP ones also have glass floors. I would be pretty nervous riding in one.

Today is also 9/9/09 and it is the day where the Beatles entire catalog was released digitally remastered and also the Beatles Rock Band game came out. I saw it in the window of one of the shops on the way back to the hotel, it looked pretty sweet!

The Beatles 9/9/09

Tomorrow I’ll be going to take more photos and hope to get some more panoramic stuff too.

Bounce ‘cross the Pond

Reading @chrisbrogan at Logan.
Photo-A-Day #1614

Today I was up and on my way to London… Early. I flew out of Logan at 9:00am. Got to England at 8:25pm. Got out of Customs at 10:30pm and then drove to hotel in Sheffield 3 hours away from Heathrow. Now it is 2:30am in Sheffield, England and I’m deciding whether I stay up and practice my demo until I have to give it tomorrow or go to bed and practice when I get up. Part of me says go to bed and start fresh in what will pass for morning in my mind. Another part of me says I should be checking on everything right now before sleep and yet another part of me wonders why I am blogging rather than practicing in the first place.

The flight was pretty uneventful, I watched The Transporter on my iPod and then read and finished Chris Brogan & Julien Smith’s Trust Agents and then began it again to really digest it and take it all in. My intent was to read it the whole way but I wasn’t feeling into the book thing on the flight and that is why I have many forms of entertainment to bring with me on flights like podcasts, books, movies and music. Oh and I should have been looking over my demo, which I did… once.

Well, time to fish or cut bait, to sleep perchance to dream (probably about my demo) or to practice and then to sleep and dream about the demo, that is my question tonight. Tomorrow, demos and maybe a chance to photograph something English.