Drew pointed out that I never posted about the rest of my Australia trip (oops!), so here goes. My next and final stop after Ayers Rock was Sydney.

I didn’t post about Sydney right away because I wasn’t very happy with many of my first photos there. My camera had by that time acquired a lot of debris among the various parts, putting in a lot of blurry black squiggly marks on the actual photos themselves. I didn’t even notice it the day I took them until I reviewed the photos later on the LCD display and saw the worst of them. Most of them were too subtle to see on the small screen.

The photo above is one of the relatively clean ones. I took it at Darling Harbour, which was just across the street from my hotel. The next one below is also from there, but I had to clone out some of the blurry dust from the sky.

When I did start to notice the debris, I cursed a blue streak and went back to my hotel to clean my camera … because even blowing on the lens or on the mirror apparatus inside the camera body wasn’t clearing out the dust and hairs.

This is the way back to my hotel from Darling Harbour:

If you look closely, you can see “Crowne Plaza” on the left.

I swear. I tried, and I tried to clean the darn thing with my cleaning tools—the little brush thing with the air pump, the swabs, the special tissue paper for lenses. Nothing helped. So I knew that even though pro shops would never recommend it, I needed to get myself a can of compressed air somehow. And since H.E. sent me on a mission to back up the photos on my now full 2GB chip, I decided to hit two birds with one stone and try to get both things done at some photo shop.

Here’s where I went:

Unfortunately, they didn’t have any compressed air cans, but at least I got the photos on my 2GB chip backed up to two DVDs. In fact, this photo was the last taken on that chip. Hereafter, I was on the smaller 1GB chip for the rest of my trip. I had to get the air can at another shop, where I also finally bought myself a circular polarizer.

So the photos taken the next day were much better.

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