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.

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

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!

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