a blue bike for andreas

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over at his blog andreas manessinger showcases his one-image-a-day post number one-thousand! my heartfelt congratulations for the many excellent images he showed, his extraordinary perseverance, and not least his communicative skills.

andreas' blog was the first blog i followed regularly when i started blogging myself. and in the beginning it were largely his encouraging and challenging comments that made me intensify my work and speed up my posting frequency. i didn't forget his comment "can we have more of that please? three images in november? c'mooon :)" - andreas, thank you very much for this!

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weariness in vision and written

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as always commuting into the city confronts me with urban sceneries very different from what i would prefer to have as my surroundings. but in contradiction to the gut feeling i know that this tension presumably keeps my senses active and vigilant. but that morning i found the weather as grey as my mood, matching my weariness. and suddenly the bike fragments in the frame seemed to match, too. and just as a note on the margin: these white on black letters on the right side read 'gegenwind', head wind, the natural adversary of each bike rider, and a major factor for weariness.

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up-and-coming cyclists

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trying to get at a new 'airiness' as well as combining photography with family undertakings, i had to resort to some shots without framing. of course the reject rate was a bit more than marginally higher, however one shot came out as good as expected: those armstrongs-to-be had the road for themselves on a sunny sunday in april, when all cars were banned round attersee in austria. and whilst some made a race out of it, dressed like top performers of the giro, others had their fun and aching muscles the next day.

and not being pressed (on the contrary, slowed down by the daughters) i had time enough to have a look over the lake to the shore we had passed some hours ago. early spring is a wonderful season, cautious, almost retained sometimes but already full of promises. what a wonderful time.

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hard ride

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probably something for andreas manessinger, who is quite often posting bicycle pictures. i started to travel regularly to sri lanka in 2003, and since then a lot has changed regarding bikes. while you still find a lot of bikes like this - they are just means of transport, and when income is lacking, nobody bothers with repairing - recently leisure biking has started: on sunday morning you find young people on the road on modern bikes, seemingly unaffected of sri lanka motorized traffic endangerment: suicide can be painless here, roadrunning is only for the really tough ones.

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won't brake anyway

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i am on my way again, back to colombo. if things go well we'll have a stopover in sigiriya, which i think i well deserve after 7 full days of working/traveling/working. this bicycle i discovered on the beach in batticaloa. it would be never considered roadworthy in europe, but here is an undisputed means of transport for man and loads.

those traces i discovered on the beach recently - rarely have seen such a strict evidence of encounter and afterwards going it's way.

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icycle

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another pre-written post. should give me some time to go shooting and enjoy myself ;)

and the contrast of the hoarfrost and the 30°+ in colombo is just too nice to think of.

this icycle was well locked to the handrail of a culvert, but obviously not in use for quite some time, as there was still snow on the saddle after more than a week without any precipitation.

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wave of bikers

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even with all those 8-lane roads in nanjing, very often nicely framed by newly planted sycamore trees, the bicycle remains the major means of individual transport. bike lanes are broad here, adapted to the masses that use them. astonishing for me is the number of electric bicycles which are a good example of eco-friendly and environment-friendly individual mobility.

air quality however is deplorable as you can guess from this shot. some bicycle riders use masks covering nose and mouth, but those of course will filter only the largest particles. as long as the factories and power plants around are emitting unfiltered, the air quality will not improve.

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tsunami ruins with bike and crow

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nice pat on the back yesterday: in my flickr account i found a mail from a journalist of tamilweek.com, notifying that they had - in accordance with the creative commons license i put on my pictures and blog - taken my blog entries and compiled them to a news feature named portraits from kalmunai. What I found appealing and a positive experience is the fact that they did not clandestinely copy and paste, which is something that so many authors experience nowadays, but behaved like high-standard journalists from the good old days in the midst of the snake pit internet.

content-wise i made my rants about the political situation there heard, now i just wait for the miracle that this has some effect.

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