Window Tomcat

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The holidays ended yesterday with a night drive back to Bavaria, and the first day working of course meant searching through a pile of emails and sorting and organising... Still the memories of Krk are vivid, and a number of raw files wait to be evaluated and developed. This self-confident tomcat was one of the rare Krk locals that did not avoid meeting hundreds of tourists that went by his window - the people usally do, and I can fully understand this: in the summer the population in Krk just triples, meaning that there is not too much left the way it is over the quiet off-season.

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Evening Sky, Krk

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In the narrow alleys of Krk the shadows of the houses make shure that it does not get unbearable hot (though unbearable is relative, today we had 37°C). However it gets dark pretty soon in the evening down there, and only the windows of the upper floors still catch some daylight or reflect it when seen in the proper angle.

The warmth of the day still lives in the colors of the picture to the right. In spite of the prevalent shadows, all areas still breathe warmth.

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Hiroshima Day

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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.

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bokeh locomotive

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these images, created while commuting in the rain, might have also fit martin storz' always-take-the-weather project on his blog 'the public eye', but i decided to show them here as part of my bokeh mini-series. and for martin i will try to create a sunny weather image, given that we get such a thing in the next days.

for me these airy disks are something genuinely photographic, along with shallow dof, which can not be reasonably reproduced in painting or other arts and crafts. maybe this is the reason why i get so fascinated by those two phenomena.

and as always: click on the images to see them large in a javascript lightbox.

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le figaro

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the way home from office in munich invariably leads my steps along a hairdresser's shop on one of the main roads, and the light and reflections as well as the colors are always interesting. this window was already subject matter for this post, but this time i caught the barber in action.

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through a glass

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trees and windows are some constantly recurring subjects in my photography, so here is a new combination of both topics. shot during a wedding celebration in dachau palace (beeing not photographer-in-charge those deviations were allowed), i tried to make best use of that soft twilight shortly before sunset.

taken some minutes earlier than the lead shot, the shadows of the trees outside formed beautiful patterns on the facade of the old palace. generally i do love those soft, non-vivid and not at all gaudy colors up to monochromacity in color, but here the contrast between that strong, warm yellow and the (bavarian) blue sky is really pleasing to my eye.

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dachau palace window

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weddings can be a challenge photographically, but most definitely they are a challenge for the stomach. to prepare for the refill at dinner, we had an opportunity to wander through dachau palace. this is a small palace, built 1546 and heavily renovated in the 18th century. the vicinity to the church of dachau is astonishing - at those times secular and ecclesiastic powers were really close - and this is what attracted my attention here.

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window over beijing

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40 taxi minutes away from the center of beijing, my hotel offered a great view over the suburb houses - 21st floor is a kind of vantage point. plus, i had a better impression of beijings smog - not that i did care too much for this. looking down was quite spectacular, photographing was more difficult as the window did open just enough to hold the camera outside.

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it's raining again

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ok, so what do you expect from april. but this weather definitely has its photographic merits, too.

technically i feel a bit suspended in mid-air at the moment. my favourite raw editor, lightzone is available for linux only as a time limited public beta at the moment. only 5 days left and still no official announcement from the company. i do enjoy the smoothness of this application so much that i am without hesitation willing to pay the full price for a license, in spite of the availability of other good raw converters. lightzone has such a tremendous ease of use and blatant similarity to wet darkroom techniques, that it became my favorite 'developer' in almost no time. so please, lightcrafts inc., go ahead with a linux version, either fully company supported-full price licensed or for (almost) free as a community support version.

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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...

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statue of St. Florian in Hallstatt, Austria

the seafront of a hotel in Hallstatt, Austria, is decorated with this statue of St. Florian under a window with a romanesque double arc.

on mother's day 2007 Hallstatt was really quiet and definitely worth the visit with the whole family.

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