top court

click image to enlarge

today was city festival here in bad reichenhall, so a lot of people went around even in areas that are normally not open for the public - a good occasion for a seeing wanderer. on my ways i came to see the outside facilities of one of the oldest and most renowned hotels here, the axelmannstein (which now belongs to the radisson group). on the fence to their tennis court, unused probably for years now as i never heard the typical plop-plop, i found this sign, informing about the siesta hours. stunning for me was the typography: a font that was used around the time of the 2nd world war, but probably not much later. this is the first sign i found with a seemingly eternal life.

-

this photo on flickr

Some rights reserved.

barrel door

click image to enlarge

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.

this photo on flickr

Some rights reserved.

metal structures, batticaloa, sri lanka

click image to enlarge

click image to enlarge

click image to enlarge

in sri lanka, plots are usually at least fenced with barbed wire. only the wealthy ones can afford real walls, often topped with bottle bottom fragments. To protect the owners from the curious views of the bypassers, the street side of the fences is usually equipped with blinds.

traditionally they were made from palmyrah leaves, but these degenerate within some years, and now people use metal sheets, rarely new. even old oil barrels, cut and bent straight, are used for this purpose. these materials now offer a wide variety of textures and colors.

this photo on flickr

Some rights reserved.

no diamonds, just rust

click image to enlarge

one of the rare occasions i could break out of that usual mission cycle of visiting one rainwater harvesting tank or well or toilet after the other, and just take 7 minutes on the road, for a moment concentrating only on shape, graphics structure. not that i would take this monitoring not seriously, it is just that my attention is suddenly grabbed by some details.

and i had to learn the hard way that procrastinating means loss. i cannot come back there for reasons of time and transport - i do have the position thanks to a small gps logger i always have in my pocket - so i try to snap whatever is interesting immediately and without too much fiddling.

the harvest then only begins after returning home, and fighting the jet lag through staying up until late gives the opportunity to go through the collections. diamonds i rarely find, but even rust can be rewarding.

what you see here are fence blinds, attached to the fence posts to give a little privacy on the 250m² plots, where a big part of the life happens in the garden.

this photo on flickr

Some rights reserved.

fence abstract

click image to enlarge

getting up early and trying to meet again the fishermen i had portrayed in an earlier visit, i found the beach empty, with a force 5 wind making all beach based fishery impossible. so i resorted to collecting small details, of which this fence part is one.

the fact that is a piece of asbestos sheet is interesting in this context, as the sri lanka government still sticks to the opinion that this material does no harm to humans. probably a case of successfull lobby policy.

this photo on flickr

Some rights reserved.

snow and fence

click image to enlarge

a lesson in 'learning to see'. i had a bland image on my monitor, taken when i was quite tired at the end of an excursion with the family. i remembered that i had taken it because of the beautiful curve of the fence posts and the shadow curves of the fence's wire, but there was too much optical garbage clobbering the real subject. so out of a 12.7 MB file i cropped 1.5 MB, the resolution of a 2 year old mobile phone camera...

this photo on flickr.

Some rights reserved.