I had a dream to take photos of beautiful Vienna at night, but having no tripod and being lazy of going out in subzero temperature had delayed it for a while. However, after reading Mei Sin's blog and her wonderful photos about Vienna's street lights, I decided not to hesitate any more. It's time now to buy a tripod and go out to hunt photos before it's too late.

It was 7 p.m., dark but not so cold. I started with tram J and suddenly realized that it was Josephstädter straße, 5 minutes away from my room, that I can see all the blue balls blinking. Why didn't I realized it before? May be I was too in a hurry to look around after getting off the tram, just concentrating on going back to my room. If I didn't go out last night and take the photos, I would have regretted so much. But I did go out and enjoy the views. "Wonderful!", I must say.

I planned to go until 9 p.m., then go back to relax a little bit before meeting up with my friends in Stephansplatz at 10:30 p.m., but it took more time than I thought to move around and take photos. The waiting time for trams and metros at night is longer, and especially, having a good photo at night is not easy. In average, I had to take more than 10 photos to get an acceptable one (according to my standard). And here are the bests after resizing and cropping:

It was getting colder and colder. I was walking through streets, taking photos until my numb fingers and feet noticed me about the time. It was 10 p.m. already and I had to go back to warm myself up. So I couldn't meet my friends. Sorry guys, we will see each other soon next year.

Back to my room for an hour, I decided not to go to Stephansplatz again because there might not be any metro after New Year's Eve. I still remember last year, Ilham and I had to walk for around 2 hours from Cacilhas to the residence after watching fireworks in Lisbon. I didn't want to walk that much this year, plus I had enough walking in the afternoon looking for the tripod. That's why I chose Rathaus to celebrate New Year's Eve. There were many people here, talking, drinking and dancing. It's also necessary to mention some bastards who were playing with firecrackers and throwing them into the crowd. I missed some good scenes of fireworks because of those bad guys.

I managed to take some photos of fireworks. The firework didn't satisfy me; or may be I chose the wrong position to place my camera. Actually I didn't have many choices since the square was already crowded at that time. I expected lots of fireworks at the same time, lighting up the City Hall, but what happened were just uncontinuous fireworks flashing in the sky. However, among around 100 clicks, I got some nice photos here:

Having the tripod really helped. You can see that the City Hall's positions is the same in each column. We can use an Image Processing Software to put more fireworks to embellish the City Hall, but I want to stick with the original ones :-)

Happy New Year 2008 to everyone, and wish you all the bests!