a cold winter afternoon, and i was just checking skating opportunities with the family. my daughter had already cold feet so she was very impatiently waiting for me to stop taking pictures.
i already had this feeling of seeing a Brueghel like landscape (look at the return of the hunters) earlier in the Schönram bog resp. on the lake there, but the monastery of Höglwörth was necessary to add this certain mediaval touch to the picture.
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my best wishes for this our world and all people living here with us.
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walked the new camera yesterday, or better tried to sneak off from christmas shopping for some photo opportunities. weather was almost grey in grey with only some holes in the fog, bitter cold and the car a real homy place. and usable as a support too, for example for this shot with 300mme focal lenght which always is a defiance for my not too steady hands.
the new camera is as good as I hoped that id would be, the high resolution just amazing, but the faster and less condition-dependent autofocus the real plus for me. i hope that i can train it to take good pictures by itself as the 7D did, up to then i will try to do my best.
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this is the story of a flop, almost.
my camera made this picture... the olde Minolta 7D has a really slow low light autofocus performance? Anyhow, i pressed the shutter and nothing happened because the outoffocus-system didn't see the subject as sharp. when it did, the girl had turned around her head - and the picture was good!
sometimes a flop can be a success.
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St. Pankraz church is built on one of the oldest inhabitated places in the valley of Bad Reichenhall. Accessible through only a narrow footpath, this location was safe from attacks from below and must have been an old ritual place, too. One of my best christmas experiences is connected with this church: walking 1 hour through the snow, with a pitch-torch in the hand, and then attending midnight mass.
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these pre-winter mornings have a certain depressive quality.
cold but not really cold, old snow turned grey by pollution and simple dirt, low diffuse light and fog taking out a lot of the colors of the already de-coloured landscape. so i thought. but getting off sunday early morning and getting out from the warm air in the flat into the rain-cleaned moist air in the woods seemed to help clear my sight and vision. and so i found those lichen spots on the trees, forming an almost camouflage like pattern in the fog remainders.
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these fisherman lived in a village swept away by the tsunami. their resettlement area is 3km far away (plus crossing the lagoon by boat), but they still come to their old place to fish in the sea. knowing that their families are now safe from further waves is a great pacification for them.
the city of Munich's help tsunami help project built a stretch of road for them, so they can sell their catch now to remote markets (say: Colombo) for a sometimes better price.
This time i was accompanied by a co-worker who is a trained psychiatrist. she openened my eyes in explaining the fishermen's behaviour still so strongly influenced by the tsunami and their feeling of helplessness and ongoing feeling of guilt. the trauma still lives on in them and expresses itself in their eyes, their words, their gestures...
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the east coast of sri lanka is a wonderful place - now that the fighting has stopped for the moment. i spent way too little time there. the co-workers in our post-tsunami project have become friends over the time, and their hospitality ist still overwhelming. due to the workload it was only in the early morning that i could sneak out for an hour trying to take some pictures.
these wooden sustainers on a construction site carry the formwork for a concrete ceiling. the look so fragile compared with the woodwork they use for this purpose here in europe, but wood is an expensive commodity over here (no commercial woods) and, in the end, the mere number make them strong
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this was the last remembrance of summer we got this autumn. the light was in an astonishing way similar to springtime, coming through an already thin roof of leaves high above us. it's not very often that i dare to include the sun in a picture i take with my 11-18 mm zoom, as this lens is quite prone to flares. but here it worked out very nicely.
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Wappach is a really small creek flowing along a district road - nothing spectacular, and so it took me 12 years to find it and explore its photogenic qualities. the picture above is taken maybe 10m away from some private gardens in an almost empty streambed due to the autumnal low water situation.
i started the work with raw therapee and am astonished about the quality of raw conversion and the speed of the program, both a pleasant surprise after the debacle with lightzone. It still is not as feature-rich as lightzone, but in fast development. And not using lightzone any more is finally a matter of pride, too.
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always good for a postcard-quality picture, the church of maria gern is located on a very powerful place just over the street coming from berchtesgaden. evening is an excellent time to go there as it is almost abandoned then and the noise from the surroundings and the streets has pretty much died down. the mountains in the background - untersberg - are still and proud in their serenity and watch over the place.
sounds to much like a cliche? it just is as it is, maybe you have to experience it to believe.
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my daughter's school had an art project at the banks of our river: on saturday morning they created this beautiful stone snake. Andy Goldsworthy was definitely an inspiration for this. his film "rivers and tides" (4 min. clip on youtube) is surely worth to be seen (again).
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the sun was in the perfect direction and angle to highlight the iron nails and the lock as well as to shed some light on the the cast iron trellis with its golden coating
I had to change my raw converter as lightcrafts decided to drop the linux version of their lightzone raw converter. The really upsetting facet is that they use (legally, of course) a lot of free software in their product but resist to return something to the community. Pretty much the behavior of a leech, isn't it?
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a firewall in petting, a small village on the shore of lake waging. exposed to north west and getting sun only late in the afternoon, the virginia creeper showed all colors from deep green over blue to red and yellow.
postprocessing this image, i did not touch the saturation but only adjusted brightness and contrast and added a small amount of local contrast enhancement plus refocus sharpening in digikam.
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This is no b&w picture... The evening light was incredibly soft, showing only faint layers of the mountains in the slight fog. In the lower right corner you see Fraueninsel with the clocktower of the monastery's church. Taken from a public transport boat to Chieming on the east coast of Chiemsee.
The original contrast range was around 3 f-stops. I used lightzone for linux to restore the original impression of the situation.
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working through my archives i found this picture taken 2005 on a tsunami evaluation trip waiting in Colombo for the transfer to the east coast.
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found outside a soap shop in st. wolfgang, austria.
taken with the famous beercan (ofenrohr for german-speaking), and i had to learn holding it steady ;)
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suddenly summer is over. cold rain starts, and the snow suddenly is visible again not high above my hometown. strange feeling to operate the camera with wet, cold, unwilling fingers again.
used lightzone for linux to differentiate the sky and faint mountains.
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as there is no time to go out shooting, one last from the shenzen festival in nuremberg. The others are here, here and here.
i found their pose really striking in front of the black background.
raw file developed with lightzone for linux.
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abundant flowers (pelargonium) on this facade of an old house in St. Wolfgang, austria.
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it was quite dark in this church - 0.5s on a monopod is long, even with internal stabilization.
i love the scenery with that single woman adding scale to this big hall.
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if i would need to capture all of bavaria in on picture, that might come close: costume, music, beer, reflection helping to view the world not as it is...
bavaria is really special. a (in its majority) rural country thrown in the 21st century, still believing in conservative doctrines.
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another one from Bad Reichenhall: on an old deserted house I saw this wonderful door handle. lightzone again for postprocessing, but I had to burn/mask/blur to make the handle really stand out.
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took a walk yesterday through my hometown. one of the doors i often pass by stood open this time and formed a much more inviting picture than the times before. i had admired the marble doorframe quite often, but it never made a picture for me.
lightzone for linux helped in dodging the corridor so that the details became visible in the picture. finally gimp helped to rectify the lines as I had to take a non-centric point of view to include the chair in the corridor into the picture.
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