Storytelling Door Handle

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Today I am on a short trip to Croatia again, helping my sister to clear up the caravan and prepare it for hibernation in a local garage. Travelling alone, I could afford to stop in Bakar, a former important harbour in the bay of Rijeka in Croatia. It once hosted one of the croatian navigation schools and was the home of a number of captains.

Now the street from Rijeka to Krk passes far away from Bakar - you see the audacious construction high over the roofs, and Bakar is mainly visited by little numbers of locals. The door handle in the main street tells this story very precisely.

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see the details

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with only 3000 permanent inhabitants, the city of krk on the island of krk in croatia is really a small place. but wandering with open eyes again and again reveals beautiful details, those door handles among them, found on the church of sv. kvirin, the patron of krk.

and i never before found such a convincing example of form following function as this one.

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barrel door

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a matching door for the fence blinds shown yesterday, this door is one of the rare cases where the recycling/upgrading path left the original structure well visible and self-contingent, not mixing in or adding other components.

the fence, too, is a case of recycling: the net was beyond repair and unsuitable to catch fishes any more. it still is, however, fit to keep the hen in the garden. together with the pine twigs and the cones optically it makes up for a fine structure.

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entrance door, kirchberg castle

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the castle of the bad reichenhall district 'kirchberg', in the vernacular dialect lovingly called 'schlössl', is the cradle of the spa activities of my hometown. dating back to 1130, it originally served as an estate. changing owners led to various utilisations, and in 1723 it got rebuilt in the now visible baroque form.

in the recent past it served as an upper class restaurant for a while and now is in private property. not the most prudent caretaking for such a historical building, as you can easily see from the lock in the door, which was inserted without only the minimum care for a historic place

but the painting and the forms still are widely intact, and the weatheredness of the color makes up for interesting details. sometimes it is really rewarding to explore the photographic possibilities nearby, especially regarding the lighting situation. here i didn't have to take it at first chance but could come back when the light was a suitable, cloud dampened backlight.

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door of maria büchel

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this wooden ornament decorates the door to maria bühel, a pilgrimage church dating back to the 17th century. located not far away from the holy-night-chapel in oberndorf, austria, it is a quiet place, not getting that tourist attention as the former one.

the architecture and the baroque paintings in the inside are marvellous, and i have decided to go there again early in the morning, by foot from the river salzach, following the path of the raftsmen for whom this church was built 4 centuries ago. and hopefully i will find the sacristan then to open the barrier and allow an unrestricted view of the paintings and statues.

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entrance door detail, maria gern

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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cast-iron doorhandle, Bad Reichenhall

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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