spring2life take2

not that the impression comes up that ranting about the present situation in sri lanka is my one and only preoccupation. whenever possible i try to find beauty, and so i did here in this ruins of the emperors of a kingdom long forgotten. on the top of a monolitic, magmatic rock, to be reached only by really steep chairs, there was once a palace, inhabitated by emperors – unfortunately entrapped in politics, power, murder. it seems i can’t flee this topic…

as they are dead and gone now, now it can be quite peaceful up there. with the sinking sun however the ak-47 of sri lankan soldiers dominate the climate for the night again.

my colleage in batticaloa told me this about his life (he’s only 37). roughly 30 years this conflict between ltte and the sinhalese majority now scars the life, public as well as private. when he was 17 he had to flee his village, living 3 months in the jungle, because his life was in danger both from government and ltte – a potential terrorist or a forced recruit don’t face a really high expectancy of life.

so you can only speculate what life awaits those boys.

i stand corrected. while my blog entry had claimed that 4 had been killed by a bomb explosion in batticaloa, it were in fact two, a bystanding riksha driver one of them. it doesn’t make the act less atrocious, to be explained only through a completele contorted logic inherent to terrorism. terrorism has been means of fight of the ‘liberation tigers of tamil eelam’, ltte, for decades. the war they fought stemmed from the deliberate discrimination of their ethnic minority. this fact however is no justification for acts of terror.

it is only that especially the present sri lanka government, at the moment winning the war against the ltte on the battlefield, has no plan for piece, no idea of how to reconcile the minorities in the country. instead it relies on war aggrandizing propaganda, whilst big parts of the country submerge under acts of violence, corruption, vengeance.

the acts of torture reported to me are utterly barbarous, similarly the behaviour of the gangs of the former war lords who are now in regional politics. the principle of legal certainty is widely absent in this country, instead abductions, the usage of masked squealers, violence against members of the press are present in everyday life. this is the country that many people chose to go to for holidays.

Update: Thomas in his comment was kind enough to avoid any mentioning of photographic merits of the pictures shown. And there are simply none. they are simple snaps of what presented itself to the eye, the first even taken inside the car through the windshield. getting out and taking the picture in presence of the police posts nearby was regarded as too dangerous. in sri lanka you can get arrested for less, and even if the danger for a foreigner is probably smal, my local colleagues have to fear at least questioning, getting into the files of the government and its organs for suspicious behavior. and you can vanish for less there.

two more from the beach. the waves are so high at the moment that the traditional paddled outrigger fishery from the beach has to pause. no fishery means no income, so some of the men take their hand net and throw it from the shore. catch is low however.

the day i met them they merely got two handful of fish in the morning, definitely not sufficient to nourish a family. poverty in the city is often combining an acceptable income with bad living conditions, but here in the villages the lack of incomes is what hurts the people the most, and this is the situation where sometimes the children have to add to the family income instead of attending school.

i am on my way again, back to colombo. if things go well we’ll have a stopover in sigiriya, which i think i well deserve after 7 full days of working/traveling/working. this bicycle i discovered on the beach in batticaloa. it would be never considered roadworthy in europe, but here is an undisputed means of transport for man and loads.

those traces i discovered on the beach recently – rarely have seen such a strict evidence of encounter and afterwards going it’s way.

^*in kalmunai, on the east coast of sri lanka. the lady is a newly trained gis specialist and is holding a mobile phone as one symbol for her bridging traditions and the “modern” world. kalmunai is a town where islam values are held very high – in general it is a really patriarchal society. having managed to aquire above average education and balancing it with her life of a mother is what i admire in her.

^* gis is shorthand notation for geographical information system

peaceful, isn’t it? unfortunately the morning wasn’t. a claymore mine exploded next to the police station in batticaloa, killed 4 and injured a dozen, 4 school students among them. on the beach we only heard a muted ‘booff’. what a discrepancy between those sceneries.

Update: just replaced the lead image with a lightzone version. the much i like bibble for its speed, lightzone is incredible in its possibility to enhance low contrast structures. even in the thumbnail you can easily spot the difference.

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 is why am here. it is good to know that the support we try to bring really reaches the people in need. and when content meets form, out of beauty happiness can rise. sorry for being pathetic, this is an unstaged shot right out of today morning’s site visit, and maybe the jet lag also has its effect.

ok, kids pics always go to the heart, but i can’t help to like it. we can talk about the lighting situation, backlight/striplight in both situations, reduced color sets also which almost leave out a part of the spectrum, so a lot of my ingredients for a good picture are there.

colombo does nothing for me. it is too chaotic, too loud and too depressing, the numerous checkpoints with young ak-47 equipped soldiers not really adding to a comfortable feeling. the galle face hotel in a certain way is a resort from reality, incompletely (and that is good) reviving colonial spirit. were it not for official appointments and meeting friends, i would not bother to come to colombo. the title of the blog entry is a quote from an overjoyous guest.

in a way beeing there is like this empty cup of espresso of the lead shot: convincing at the very moment, slowly disappearing in its apparition, inviting to be repeated in reasonable intervals. i am already longing for the east coast.

the headline is a quote of sadruddin aga khan after his visit to the galle face hotel.

one of the best sources for beer in munich actually is outside of munich: freising not only hosts the oldest brewery of the world, but for sure one of the smallest. the ‘airbräu’ inn at the airport of munich brews the beer in front of all guests in the bar parlor. the beer is convincing, the optical impression of the fittings even more.

reason enough to start my journey with a visit of the airbräu – no beer also, as it was early morning – and then let the etihad plane bring me to abu dhabi. no beer there, just too tired and not wanting to miss the connecting flight.

another pre-written post. should give me some time to go shooting and enjoy myself

and the contrast of the hoarfrost and the 30°+ in colombo is just too nice to think of.

this icycle was well locked to the handrail of a culvert, but obviously not in use for quite some time, as there was still snow on the saddle after more than a week without any precipitation.

post-dated publishing is nice-to-have. when you get to see this icicle from frozen bavaria, i am supposed to be in abu dhabi, bound for sri lanka.

there should be internet connection in the hotel, so there hopefully will be no break in posting.

this building was re-built after the 1834′s blaze of bad reichenhall, that destroyed most of the city, by an architect of one of the kings of bavaria. the reason for this royal care was simple: over times the saline of bad reichenhall had earned up to 30% of the bavarian state’s total income.

nowadays its importance is barely above minimal: creating salt by boiling sole of course is energy intensive and expensive, and salt ressources are almost abundant.

still, both of them have individual optical merits.

two days after full moon i finally managed to go out together with a handful of photographer friends to try some night shots of our hometown. the intensity of the moonlight was so high (and my lens protection filter probably not clean enough) that i got lens reflections – i never thought this could happen from moonlight.

“padinger alm” is a popular inn over the valley of bad reichenhall, just on the shoulder of mt. staufen, which you see in the background. image quality turns out to be less then optimal when pixel peeping, but the time was short and the purpose of the shots a slide show, so i didn’t bother to always resort to the lowest iso.

thanks god the eeg showed that everything is ok now. our youngest daughter suffered from a concussion after a sleigh riding collision on new years eve. today we went for the 2nd eeg as the first one was not to the full contentment of the neurologist, and now there are no signs of an adverse effect on the brain any more.

and again i learnt in what a happy environment we live: fully equipped hospital with motivated, skilled, and not exhausted staff. and then the pictures from the hospital in batticaloa come back to my mind, and the stories i had to learn there: about all the shortages everybody from the cleaners up to the director have to live with, the arbitrariness of government decisions and the discrimination of tamil institutions – i could go on for quite a while. on wednesday i will leave again for sri lanka for a project mission. give god that the fighting will come to and end and there will be peace between all groups of population. it’s only that all signs are against this…

(pun? what pun?) sometimes the pictures come at you when you just lift your eyes to search for your way. i tried variations of this, some with a small roadside cross as foreground, but in the end the tightly framed plain shadow on the facade was the most convincing shot for me. well – kill the clutter is one of the few advices i try to follow…

it was today. -12°c make you very grateful for your gloves and very ungrateful towards camera ‘engineers’ creating itsy-bitsy-teenie-weenie rubber knobs on the remote control of your camera, which refuse to be operated with gloves.

i had found a small streambed just below a seamill, which sported besides the usual icicles also this wonderful transparent ice sheets between the rocks. well worth freezing off my fingers for one hour…

after yesterdays cold colored post, here is something warmer. i need it, as we have temperatures well below 0°c for several days now, with the side effect of blue sky and wonderful sunlight especially in the afternoon.

taking a walk, it was just a natural decision to stay on the warm, sunny side of the river for quite a while, and instead of icicles i found seeds and last years fruits.

the very last day of my holidays. spelled ‘relief’ when all my ladies were gone to school. spent a hell of a time with doctors and administration. finally went out shooting and found my private, yet cold, bonanza. lightzone helped me to show what i saw.

strolling through my hometown, i learned that the last local heroes seem to live right in the mezzanine.

from the ‘instead of eating burgers’ series. the tripod at home for sure is pretty useless. on the other hand, that overlay of noise on the fine structures in a certain way matches my eyesight degrading with upcoming twilight, so there is not much to complain. temperatures were cold, and color temperatures as well.

in these pictures i actually had to turn down the saturation in bibble in order to better meet the mood of the situation.

i have developed a certain preference for landscape shots without sky, that is one of the reasons why i do prefer here the lead shot.

from the ‘instead of eating burgers’ series.

there is something to learn from this shot: either don’t touch basic settings you rely on, or do a thorough checking at the beginning of each shooting session.

of course i did not, and so the first frames, this one among them, were shot as jpeg only, in small size…

my daughters were invited by a classmate for a birthday party in salzburg airport center’s burger king, and i did prefer not to stay. hence the title (which is an adaption of moscow art trio’s “instead of making children”, a worthy recommendation for you jazz fans out there), and my mood then was comparable to today’s when i did my tax declaration.

in spite of low light and a not so pleasant surrounding – at least i had managed to flee, but came out in the floodplain forest of river saalach, just next to the sewerage treatment plant – i cooled down (literally) and made the best out of it: pictures. and even if they are all but drop-dead-gorgeous, i had a fine hour just concentrating on seeing and creating.

done with the china series, carl weese’s blog example as well as paul butzi’s current statement motivated me (again) to record what i see.

in this fire ladder a crafted blacksmith commissioned by an art-inclined houseowner have created a functional item with aesthetic value. in winter time, the iron leaves are there alone, whereas in summer they mix with their natural counterparts.

where this is? here, thanks to my gps.

probably. reason enough he would have with all those headlines on war, injustice, hunger, epidemies. you haven’t noticed? ah, they are not soo big today, nothing special, just the normal daily dose.

this is a wooden statue in my hometown’s spa garden. often i’ve tried to make a picture out of it, and now again it’s just a bland, central-composition. it just has gotten a meaning. for me, that is.

writing this in the last hour of 2008, there is not much left but wishing all of you a happy new year 2009. may there be peace around you and in your hearts.