eagle downs galore

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in the course of the festivities of the 850th anniversary of bad reichenhall as a city (it was a camp already at roman times) today we had the "gaufest" of the traditional mountain costumes association. the started at 6:00 in the morning with silver salute, which was resumed for probably 45 minutes after church had ended and the groups were assembling for the procession through the city.

from the numerous optical attractions today i show you a small selection of ladies with eagle feathers on their hats. in former times those eagle feathers were given as a present by the respective admirers, who collected them from the eagles nest risking their lives in the hope that this act of daringness would help them to win the heart of the adored one.

in the alpine region the traditional costumes association are still important groups in the villages and small towns where their festivals of 'fahnenweihe' (flag blessing ceremony) and the beer festivals form annual highlights

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worldwide photowalk in bad reichenhall

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our photowalk was a wet affair, but spirits were high. after 2 hours in all sorts of rain from drizzle to downpour the small group met in a local inn for hot drinks and a first review. in spite of the unfriendly weather we all had lots of fun, photographing or watching.

the saalach river, full with water from the rainfalls of the last days, provided a more dramatic scenery than the quiet grey and green landscape or the not-so-populated alleys.

an improvised slideshow immediately after collecting most of the images was the final part of an excursion that all of the participants want to repeat the nextx year

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2nd worldwide photowalk

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tomorrow is the second annual world wide photo walk. i do highly regard such events as opportunities to meet and see different styles of photographing, different styles of seeing and getting new ideas. as there was no photowalk organised in or near my hometown, i decided to lead one myself. it will be a small group tomorrow, but given decent weather, maybe clouds mixed with sunshine, we should have sufficient opportunities to see and make good images.

the lead image from today is a door handle from stift nonnreit in salzburg, widely known as one of the sets of the film "the sound of music".

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sofobomo 'batticaloa fishermen' as blurb book

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yesterday i received the printed version of my sofobomo book from print. i had been really curious about the quality, especially the rendering of the difficult, so i thought, darker regions. in this respect there is hardly a fault to find. problems however arise in two other aspects: colors, especially red and blue, come out definitely more vivid than on my calibrated monitor, and fine structures like sand on the beach or a fishing net suffer from the printing resolution. sometimes even in fine nuanced bright areas it seems that compression artifacts become visible. now i stop nitpicking, because i know only too well that i can definitely not expect steidl quality for a print-on-demand book in that price class. we always get what we pay for.

the positive experience of the first self-made book, where i did not resort to the pre-fabricated layouts of photobook making software, is simply unbeatable. and in this sense i have learned a lot in this year's sofobomo, and i guess i'll be in next year again. the image above was taken on the beach of batticaloa and is the back title of my book.

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climb aboard, please

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this photo i took already in june, but only now, reading hans-michael koetzle's "photo icons" and the chapter about louis jacques mandé daguerre's image "boulevard du temple" (1838) i noticed the stunning similarity in the poses. you can find a reproduction of this image on the website of timm starl.

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