Diesel Night

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The triangle of blue colors grabbed my attention, and then the self-aware laziness of the pose on the billboard. The whole image speaks 'night', just the billboard seems out of any time context here.

It's not an image I would try to print really large - it was too late at night and the wine was too good, making me forget to check the f-stop and shutter speed, so sharpness is probably insufficient. But then I just might rely on Cartier-Bresson and proving that I am no bourgeois...

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The call has ended

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Open for interpretations, maybe even inviting to it - I found this empty phone booth on a very late walk back home when the bus hadn't come, rain was setting, I was tired and all that. No "saturation to the max", I swear it. The magenta of the handset is like that (this is the brand color of German Telekom), and what is ok in this context can hurt your eyes when you see it on larger installations in historical places.

In case you haven't found and followed it on Joerg Colberg's Conscientious, writer/photographer Matt Mendelsohn's piece The Lessons of Lindsay is highly recommended 'though tough. And if you are at it, do read a Q & A with Matt about this story here: http://www.sportsshooter.com/news/2267. That this story was published in sportsshooter is a revelating thing in itself - more fitting papers had declined to bring it. Highly recommended.

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Street Flowers

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Westend again. Some of last weeks images (Westend Strip Light, City Life) originate from there, and the streets are always worth a deviation from the shortest way to work. Today I indulged in my bokeh passion again, this time with the long zoom on the camera. A conscious decision for a certain lens influences my way of seeing, and while I was a fan of very long tele lenses earlier, this passion has somewhat subsided. But in this image I see a good combination of sharp detail and blurred shapes of the street and its inventory, f5.6 seemed to have been just right.

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square architecture, munich

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Strolling through the city last week seemed to get my optical receptors going. Both images were shot on the way to/from work. For an unknown reason it is much easier for me to set aside some 20 minutes from the way to the office, knowing that I have to stay longer, then to get up early on a saturday morning.

After 8 hours staring at a screen most of the time, I have to take a deliberate decision to switch on (photo-)graphic seeing. Preparing the camera, checking battery and available memory is part of a small ritual. And the sometimes the muses kiss, sometimes they don't.

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city bokeh, munich

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since i bought my first dslr in 2005 i am lusting for a 1.4/85mm lens just to indulge in my passion for shallow dof and fine bokeh. for the minolta a-mount, taken over by sony without modifications, this lens is available in zeiss brand for a zeiss price and used in a variety of minolta makes for less then half the price, but still hefty. just recently i've got permission from my departement of finances, but since then not a single reasonable priced specimen showed up on *bay. the strange thing now is that am not too shure anymore that i really need it. and i learned to get my airy discs by using the existing lenses, which means that i do not have to carry an additional piece of glass, which is not too bad either.

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city life

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if you think 'what a antagonism, yesterday traditional costumes and today such a urban scenery' then you are right. but life in bavaria can be like this. my hometown with 18.000 inhabitants is just 2 train hours away from munich with its 1.3 millions, of which 30% have a migration background.

and whilst i do enjoy to live in the middle of such opposing lifestyles, it is also true that i belong neither here nor there: in the city miss the smell of the clean countryside air, but there i feel sometimes oppressed by a certain know-it-all and we-don't-need-all-this attitude. so teleworking and commuting at the moment gives me the best of both worlds.

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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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genie in a postbox

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and now for something completely different...

commuting to the city twice a week certainly helps changing perspectives. and if i can convince myself to get up really early and get to the office a little bit later, then opportunities like this show up, just by strolling 2 stops instead of taking the tramway. and in terms of dynamics of the lines as well as making optically use of what is there, i did learn a lot from this graffito.

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spring in the city II

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yesterday was commuting day. spring in the city is so different and, at least for me, partially depressing when the songs of the birds mingle with the traffic noise. but optically it has it's merits, translating trees into patterns, creating trompe l'oeil like bird silhouettes, bending straight lines, mixing coating colors of the glass with the most wonderful blue of the sky (bavaria, you may know, is very proud of its skies)

and 'stary, stary night' is seen differently here in the city too. not inspiring in the romantic sense, but more so in the business, prestige, non-sustainability sense.

unfortunately. especially for my kids.

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jammed streets - jammed sky

strolled through the city and found it jammed. ok, that's pretty normal. but yesterday even the sky was jammed! At least it made up for a pretty picture

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