Hiroshima Day

click image to enlarge

A unhappy anniversary is this 6th of August since the year 1945 - in microseconds only the world had achieved a new quality of danger, the danger of total extinction by the press of a button. When I was a teenager, my mother gave me Robert Jungk's book "Children of the Ashes" as a birthday present, and I do vividly remember a scene of this book where a young man has to watch how a glass fragment, hurled through the air by the blast wave, pierces and kills a young lady in a Hiroshima office.

So this is my 'punctum' in today's image.

Amazon US sells used copies of this book for amazing prices (in Germany used copies sell for small change), but if you want to strengthen eventual pacifist inclinations, it is definitely worth reading.

The image above was *not* taken with a fisheye lens, instead I used the Sean M. Pucket's "percy" plugin for bibble 4, which offers not only to reproject fisheye images to rectilinear projection, but also the projection to a equisolid model.

this photo on flickr

Some rights reserved.

waiting for the spectacle

click image to enlarge

it seems that i start to enjoy turning down saturation more and more. the weather was grey, daytime was busy, no fresh shots but still some old ones deserving to be evaluated and worked upon. in my eyes it's not a disadvantage of shooting raw that i have to re-judge my images again when deciding which one to convert and edit, it's a bit like old-fashioned black and white darkroom work: it made and makes no sense to mechanically convert/develop because the results were and are average at best.

additionally to toning down saturation i found that adding a bit of vignetting is good for some images. even if it's only a small, barely visible amount, it seems to center the view quite a bit. it is a bit a contradiction to my own infuriation about the vignetting my standard lens adds now and then, but the latter is beyond my control and not predictable for me, and probably that is what annoys me so much.

this photo on flickr

Some rights reserved.

expo moon

click image to enlarge

participating in a trade fair late in the year, the scenery above is what you usally get at the end of the day. no daylight, little photography - not only because of the light but the feet and the eyes are sore and the nee for a shower and some food is just overwhelming.

chinese representative architecture is first of all BIG. architectonically at least not completely boring, the expo halls in nanjing however had no distinctive chinese elements. it was more smoothened international, global and therefore exchangeable steel and glass style.

this photo on flickr

Some rights reserved.

city lights - go yellow

click image to enlarge

I had looked at this facade quite often during day- and nighttimes as the offer a rich play of effects - just see onion spire, reloaded

Whilst the moving body parts in the gym windows of the first floor don't really lend themselves for a (static) photograph, the reflections do so quite well.

this photo on flickr.

Some rights reserved.

onion spire, reloaded

this is an emblematic picture for the governing period of the still-in-charge bavarian premier e. stoiber. he was harvesting the fruits of an ongoing change since the end of ww2 in bavaria from a rural and somewhat backward country to a modern habitat for hi-tec companies.

the onion spire on the clocktower was almost a badge for bavarian villages, and now the antennas for mobile services are the new hallmarks.

brave new world...

this photo on flickr.

Some rights reserved.