nanjing shopping street

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i came to china open eyed - ok only partly after that long trip - and open minded, and up to now my astonishment is a positive one, in all respect except the fog. i do hope it's just natural fog and not heavy air pollution, because if so, it must have killer qualities. the people i met were friendly, the food is just gorgeous and the visual treatments abundant. i need more time to process my images, so this is just a treat for the images to come. stay tuned - internet is slow here, so commenting will be difficult, but at least i can upload and blog.

and before i forget: high iso with the a700 is just great and indispensable here, as fog means low light already at 04:00 pm. the picture above is just a normal bibble pro/noise ninja registered conversion. If you want to se where it is, just follow this link to google maps. the coordinates were taken with a small i-blue bt747 gps logger.

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batticaloa fishermen or the rewards of procrastination

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finding a time to go for a photowalk to the beach at sunrise was difficult during the last mission - jet lag, early appointments, changes of the venue and so on. in the end, i had to take the last morning - and ended up without visible sunrise due to the clouds.

not wanting to return without any picture, i overcame my shyness and asked the fishermen by gesture if they would allow me to take their pictures. and indeed this was not a problem, but the display of the camera broke the ice and we all had fun time.

so what did i learn from this morning: procrastination is not necessarily evil, but will demand more flexibility. to overcome shyness is not that difficult but also a question of self-esteem. having decided to bring an album with the portraits for my next visit makes the whole thing a much less one-sided affair.

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inviting for a rest

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kind of a retro mood for soft and unobtrusive colors caught me today. maybe one of the reasons are paul butzi's post what makes you a photographer and paul lester's the beauty of the everyday. for a balanced, full life, savouring the very moment without peering for the abnormal, extraordinary is a warranty for success. and to cherish these feelings, to appreciate those unspectacular moments, one of the best things to do that i know is taking a walk in the pre-alpine hills. even 15 minutes can suffice like in sunday's visit to the hospital, where the nanny of our daughters is recovering after serious heart problems.

the light was soft, but i wanted to have an even softer impression so i carefully desaturated the reds of the roofs and only very minimally intensified the foreground grass a little bit. the picture meets the mood of this walk very well.

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stairs in technical town hall, munich

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tuesday they ordered me to exchange my business mobile. not worth mentioning normally, but this gave the opportunity to see munich's new steel/glass constructed technical town hall. in my eyes a well designed and crafted construction, though i don't know if the workers here are happy with it.

at least i was, optically, and the light was sufficient in spite of the completely overcast sky to shoot hand-held. again in-body-stabilisation is a key factor for success here. glad that the sony has it.

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cedar woods, krk

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this was aroma therapee without the possibility to escape: sun drenched cedar woods on the west coast of krk island. you could walk for hours in a strong scent of cedar resin dissolved in the hot and salty coastal air. in a spa you would pay quite some money for this experience and the healing effect it is supposed to have on your bronchia

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(not) talkin' about the revolution

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2008 memories of the '46 revolution on the balkans: a small standpost fountain, no water running any more, instead a lump of cement in the basin. the red so faded that it deserved to be upped during postprocessing. this all seems to be a sign of normalisation after 50 years of more or less strict socialist/communist government and strictly divided power blocks. now in croatia whoever can enjoys slowly growing prosperity, but there is quite a number who cannot. in terms of exchange, of seeing each other with less prejudice, that development i think for sure was a win.

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the heat is on

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another take on minimalism and a fond remembrance of the holidays. here in bavaria the mornings are already cold with 12° C, but there are good chances for a nice indian summer. the good habit of getting up early and do some photography i have kept alive, but in the moment the 'creative juices' are not flowing that well. but there is sufficient work on the raw files left, and sometimes the one or other image with potential turns up.

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philemon and baucis, baska version

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the little town of baska at the south end of the krk island, croatia, provided some surprises. a small settlement in the shadow of krk city, it has a lively history as a spa, beginning with the attraction of tchech tourists very early in the last century. now the new part with the resorts and the old center with its narrow alleys are well separate, and the view from this old part out into the bay is magnificient. But even more magnificient is the old cemetery on the mountain, where i found this double cross headstone with the double portrait on it.

the overview from the cemetery shows the bay of baska, impressive with those steep mountains on the surrounding islands. the port lost its importance as a protected bay for sailing vessels with the arrivals of the steamers that only headed for krk on krk. now tourism is the major source of income here, after the vineyards have been devastated during the socialist regime.

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red ship detail II

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my hometown seems to be a colorless, pale place in comparisons with the colors i see here in krk, croatia - or is it my eyes that suddenly open to see more then they use to do at home? george barr already had a go on this topic here and from what i know from fellow photographers, this seems to be a quite common problem.

at least here i seem to have overcome it, and so the days are - besides having fun with the kids - full of new things, images among them. vacancies at it's best, that is.

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ship detail in krk V

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krk harbour is a busy place. during the day dozens of leasure boats fill the air with their noise, the sound of alternatively diesel or 2-stroke fuel is abundant. but what a bonanza in reflections, color patches, harmonious forms it is, especially early in the morning. stay tuned - there is more of it to come.

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layered landscape

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finally in holidays in croatia on the island of krk. too tired after
almost 8 hours of driving to go out and make pictures of the evening
light, at least i got up early and captured that fine layered island
hills. beach life is not really for me - it bores after 2 hours - but
the old city and the harbour promise a lot of visually appealing
subjects. and as the campground sports wifi connectivity at the
reception, i hope to be able to keep posting.

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steinhögl sky on fire

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first monday of all months of the adult evening classes semester is a meeting of the local photography group. as it was raining that specific monday the month before, we decided to have another try for an excursion, this time to steinhögl, a 612 m high hill 20 driving minutes from our hometown. we left at overcast sky and rather dull light, but half an hour after our arrival the sun came out again and made us a present with a gorgeous sunset.

i was happy to have my new bought cokin nd grad filter with me as these contrasts make exposure difficult enough even without the nd grad. maybe a reverse nd grad would have been even better, but i found only one seller who is asking 'snake oil' (quote d. kilpatrick) prices. so the lightzone regions came in handy to extract that colorful clouds in the sky and create an image as i remember it, quite different from the raw file you see here.

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baroque altar of st. laurentius, ainring

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yesterdays visit to ainring provided some more photos. perhaps not so creative as it is just a picture of someone else's art but this maybe is more a question of amour propre. those statues to the left and right of the baroque altar had something overwhelming for me - when i saw them on the monitor.

the church itself was open, but visitors are restricted to a very small place at the entrance, separated from the room by a heavy cast iron grid. a reasonnable reaction to the many thefts of objects of art in the 60s and 70s of last century. therefore i needed the camera as an extension of the eye to fully percieve the details of the statues and the altar.

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batticaloa lighthouse

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less words this time. punctum - i have decided to get barthes' book to understand better what he tries to express.

above you have the black and white version of the batticaloa lighthouse picture. in my eyes it has a more detached quality than the color version here which is just so ...natural and vivid. maybe it's my mood that i savour more in the black and white version.

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vesak lanterns

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some days ago i discovered the landscapist blog. what an amount of food for thought, in a way almost intimidating. man & nature # 19 ~ reading a photograph grabbed my attention, and even my illiteracy regarding barthes' punctum thesis did not stop me from at least trying to follow.

later on, going through my pictures again, i was pondering this idea of the punctum again, trying to find a connection to my own body of work. the picture above maybe comes close - do you discover the punctum?

maybe i should read the original of this theorem. the landscapists interpretation at least seems to be flawed in the sense of ignoring the cultural roots of all our interpretational skills, and my image of the vesak lanterns is an example for this. from perceiving the subject, the odd combination of barbed wire and colorful lanterns, you don't get the point of the picture even if you know where it was taken and what vesak is - one of the most important buddhist holidays in sri lanka - and this point cannot be photographed or included by omission, but it has to do with some further knowledge.

the picture was taken on the east coast of sri lanka, in a region where tamil villages mix with muslim ones. without influence of racist politicians, all these ethnics and religions coexist with the buddhists, and those are the absolute minority in this region, almost non-existent outside of army and police. an army, which is at war since 30 years with the tamils who form the majority on the east coast. hence the barbed wire. punctum.

but maybe i got this whole idea wrong...

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burning thumsee

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the regular "der thumsee brennt" (burning lake thumsee) open air concert of the philharmonic orchestra met mixed weather yesterday. the concert itself had to be interrupted several times due to drizzling rain, but the fireworks went off into almost clear sky.

i had a vantage position a bit outside of the festival itself and so i could capture some foreground with the fireworks. shooting raw + jpeg this time, i was astonished about the a700's jpeg quality straight out-of-camera, but ended up again with hand-tweaked (or should i say lightzone-tweaked) pictures from the raw.

the workflow with lightzone is just so convincing: dodging, burning, masking, intensifying - these are all old darkroom techniques, achievable through a very logical interface. not that lightzone doesn't have its quirks - printing is a bit better than broken, it's a memory and processor hog (for that reason alone i wouldn't want a 24mpix camera) and the worst thing is the invisible support on the website together with the incomprehensive documentation. but it still has the for me most logical approach in developing raw files, and the results speak for themselves.

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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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long shadows on the beach

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batticaloa beach again - a real bonanza of photographic opportunities this has turned out to be. my first pictures dates back to 2004, still before the tsunami. at that time i had only 1.5 days there and was surprised about the peaceful place batticaloa was then. to my utmost luck my friends idea of going there with the families for christmas holidays did not materialize. 2nd day of christmas 2004 the tsunami struck.

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