31.03 Christchurch & The Port Hills

Our first few days in Christchurch were spent getting ourselves orientated and settled in, along with looking after Mog!

After a bit of a late arrival, Joanna relaxes down and is joined by Mog, the house cat!

Surprise! Surprise! Nathan having a cup and a TRAM in the background!

Looking back over Christchurch and the Canterbury Plains, from then Sign of the Kiwi.

The view from the Summit Road looking over Rapaki Bay!

Christchurch & the Plains!

20.02 Tramcar Restaurant

Joanna organised a birthday treat for the both of us that combined my love of trams and Joanna's love of food! It was a trip on the Tramcar Restaurant that allows you to eat your way around Melbourne! We enjoyed a delicious five course meal and a couple(?!) of glasses of something!


I plan to get some exterior shots of the Tramcar Restaurant over the next few days...

11.08 Screenprinting - The Future?

I have been promising this post for such a long time, and I finally took some shots the other day of my work. I took an adult education class in the city because I had always fancied doing some some proper t-shirt printing. Having organised artwork for screenprinting while working at bellingham + stanley, I was really looking forward to the photographic stuff.

The first couple of weeks were spent using stencils & block outs to get an idea of laying the images. These are just a couple of the first attempts. I'm not a fine artist & trying to come up with something spontaneously was pretty difficult, even though we live in a city with loads going on around us!! As you can see Bolte Bridge featured a couple of times!

This is one of the photos I used, taken on one of those days between jobs - might have had a few of those!?!

The colour image was taken & then converted to pure black & white and the image was cleaned up - logo's removed and some of the fore/background was also removed.

The final pictures are test prints of exposed image. The logo artwork was generated from scratch, and applied to the edited images too.

The process of taking the image, converting & editing it was repeated for the all the photos used. Incorporated on to this picture was the text taken from a tram ticket. All these test prints were done on a day that the negative didn't take to the screen very well, as you can see from the logo!

The finished product! A LazyVee tram print on a t-shirt!!

The first LazyVee.com t-shirt! You'll have to watch the website for any further developments! There were/are plans to perhaps investigate t-shirt printing further. It would be nice to be able to source the t-shirts, printing, etc from a centralised source. Unfortunately I don't have the space to print the t-shirts myself. I have though found a t-shirt manufacturer who use australian grown organic cotton, and who manufacture & print here too. All in the aim of trying to be fair trade & limiting the amount of clothing miles (we've all heard of food miles!).

23.04 Tram Spotter

It was only a matter of time before a post like this would appear! Fortunately I left my bobble hat and notebook at the apartment so I could blend in with the tourists!!

We recently rode on a Combo tram celebrating 100 Years of the Electric Tram in Melbourne. The tram contained a number of info-banners, each with the key stages of tram development. So I thought that I’d do a blog version of it. And the thing is we probably take this mode of transport for granted!

The oldest trams you are likely to see are the SW6 Class Tram. These run on the City Circle, these are free and as the name suggests do a loop of the city. There are also a small number of green ones (possibly W Class), but you have to pay to use those!

The Z5 Tram is probably one of the oldest modern looking trams, my research suggest these come from the ‘70s. It’s not really a tram you can trust as its eyes (lights) are too close together! You’ll get some nice wood effect ‘living in the 70s’ panelling in these!! Very comfortable seats though!

Continuing the theme, is the Z Class. This hauls the Z5 Tram into, what was then, the present. Lights were in a similar position, but were rectangular instead of round & incorporated indicators.

The B Class is perhaps the most common around the city. We regularly pick these up from Docklands. Exterior changes includes the lights being mounted slightly wider, a much wider destination sign, including the route number.

The most modern trams are the Combo (long wheelbase version) and the Citadis (short wheelbase version). These are contemporary looking and address accessibility issues of the other designs with low level flooring.

There is a very rare beast that travels the tracks of Melbourne, and that is the newest tram of the breed. Pictures will come soon…

You’ll notice that all the trams have bumpers, these aren’t to protect them from bumping into cars, it’s so the tram recovery vehicle can push them out of the way! Picture of this vehicle is also coming soon too…

Don’t take my word for any of this, use your own notebook (if you have one) and visit the website

www.100yearstrams.com.au for everything that you ever wanted to know. I’m bored of this now!

Jo xx