Each year the Queen Victoria Building installs what is, as far as is known, the world's largest indoor Christmas tree. (Doesn't look so big? I'm on the third level here, and it goes all the way down to street level. No way does it fit in one frame.) It has thousands of Swarovski crystals, and around 60,000 lights. The Swarovski star at the top has more than 144,000 crystals.

In fact it could be argued that it's almost too big. Not that I'm any great connoisseur of Christmas trees to start off with but I find it just tends to become part of the background since, at the lower levels at least, there's just too much bulk to put it into context. Still, the illuminated crystal "trunk" at the base seems to provide endless tourist happy snaps though I'm not sure how a point and shoot handles the dynamic range between the crystals and the person standing in front of it.

In this case as well, the Olympus wasn't as fast as I'd like which resulted in the crystals and lights being less than sharp. The f/2.8 Pancake lens might have worked better here, but then it may not have been wide enough and I would have lost the motion blur from the person walking past which, for some reason, I found appropriate for the shot. Can't have it all...