spring2life take2

Octoberfest generally is an easy place for candids, but in terms of speed, especially focusing speed with longer focal lengths, it can be demanding. But the people usually don’t object being photographed. Only inside the beer halls the breweries now imposed quite strict regulations to stop the publication of images showing drunk or half-naked customers.

I am more interested in small details like those gingerbread hearts. Last year I photographed them in the food stalls where the color is really overwhelming, especially at night when the lack of light makes it easy to direct the views. The small collection of Octoberfest posts you can find here.

Rarely I have seen such determination as in the posture of this man, wandering to the beer halls of the Octoberfest here in Munich. Prost!

During our holidays in Krk I bought a bracelet and matching armlet from a local artist. The ‘Galerija Dagmar’ is located at the main plaza of Krk and is the showroom of a family of artists. The water colour paintings shown there carry a wonderful reflection of the mediterranean light, and the silver works have a strong unique and dedicated style.

Stowing away and hiding these gems for my wife’s birthday, I decided to use them as subjects for some photography. Confronting them with rock as in the leading image as well as seeing them on a plant as backdrop both seem to me valid interpretations of the jewellers work. The image on the stone received some desaturation as well as local contrast enhancement, whilst the picture with the plant underwent a careful orton effect treatment.

So we had general elections today in Germany, and whilst it will take some hours until we see the official results, it is obvious that the majority of the voters preferred a coalition of parties that told them oh-so-good-to-believe lies: The main messages of the to-be ruling parties is that they will lower the taxes. Good – everybody loves to have more money in his/her pocket. The bad thing only is, there is no money left to be distributed after that crisis. Furtheron that agreement on abandoning atomic energy is at risk, to say the least, in spite of the now accessible proof that in research for an ultimate disposal place truth was the first victim. Fine.

But it seems that nobody cares about this. Better than facing reality is an illusion like in today’s picture: behind the reflection of middle-class houses wait the mercedes-benz cars for everybody.

After a greyish morning the weather became really fine in the afternoon, with warm and slightly golden sunlight, a fine match for the leaves that have not yet started their descent from summer’s green into autumn yellow and brown.

In the city, where the temperatures yet don’t become really low at night, the geranium plants in the flower flower boxes still show their full colors. Geranium are traditional adornment for the houses here in Bavaria. They require however daily care in form of removing the old leaves and dry blossoms, otherwise the start to degrade only too fast, blaming their owners as careless.

Today, garden excursions continued – working on the fascination of the fading colors, trying to emphasize this by not compensation the exposure to the right in postprocessing, instead working with the bright colors and playing with the depth-of-field.

By underexposing half a stop, it would have been easy to reproduce the colors in a more saturated way, changing the yellow and the greens in a way that would more suggest springtime than anything else. And the white, overcast sky helped to retain that autumn feeling, too.

The days are still warm, but the leaves here start to loose their fresh green. Not all of them of course, but brown and yellow now mixes in between the still saturated deep greens. And the air in the evenings doesn’t have that summer’s crispness any more, some high altitude fog makes the sunlight look a bit foul and the color looses it’s blue and assumes instead a more greenish cast

And in the street suddenly the light has no dynamic any more, it’s lack of direction and that ‘foul’ color optically sucks all power out of the streets – dirt looks dirtier now, the trees look tired and the plaster passive. Well, autumn is coming, even if he distracts us with some more blue days. Now is the time of regreding, saving the power and becoming quieter to retain energies up to next spring.

As long as I can think back, my father has been planting his garden. With great sense of style he arranges plants, stones and some decorative objects that please the eye and give a sense of harmony. Combining elements from japanese gardening with traditional as well as foreign plants in pots and flower beds there are many places in the garden that are worth more than one look.

Yesterday I spent some time at twilight out there, mainly occupied with checking a camera body for signs of focusing errors, and one of the targets in the garden were those stones. The raw file needed only little attention, mainly darkening to compensate the expose-to-the-right effect and gave a small, simple but (for me) impressive rendering of the blue hour.

Since the weekend, parts of Munich are in a state of emergency, as the Octoberfest has started. For reasons almost completely opaque to me, within 16 days up to 7 millions of national and international visitors drink approx. 5 million litres of beer in temporary beer halls while listening to to dem-idiotic music that is so loud that municipal engineers have to check that it is at least not immediately damaging the sense of hearing.

But even for the locals here the Octoberfest is still attractive and a reason to wear traditional bavarian clothing (or what designers decide to deviate from it). The lady in the image above I met in one of the attractive, now completely gentrified quarters of Munich in front of an old house, probably dating back to the 2nd half of the 19th century. The colors and cut of her dress, ‘Dirndl’, are quite traditional, without visible ingratiation on fake cottage style.

Graphically appealing as it is, my heart does still not beat for streets like this. Fearing the small town’s tight social control, the lack of variety, the sometimes hardly tolerable stubbornness and/or naivite in the countryside, I still do not feel at home strolling through the city where I have spent my youth. So I live from week to week with the balance and tension of these antipoles and learn to enjoy the fine balance, trying to visually embrace all the interesting sceneries here and there.

Nice new blog, isnt’t it? I got several thumbs-up comments and was happy – sleek new design, not too distracting and all. But – those comments came from those who could comment. And with ‘could’ I don’t want to hint to their ability to write, but to the sheer technical possibility to get their comment posted. Those who couldn’t comment were very well knowledgable and able to click the submit button – alas, that fine fusion theme does not play nicely with older browsers like firefox 2.0 or internet explorer 6. If there would be only some optical quirks or marginal display deviations, I would not care too much because browsers do have their own idea what is correct, and sometimes they don’t, but in this case probably the jquery javascript library had its issues with the way it was used here. And in the end this blog is about photographic content, not web 2.0 javascript gimmicks without real value. Locking out users because of the version of the browser deems me to be outright stupid.

Thanks to Carl Weese from Working Pictures and also WPII Pictures in Public and also Oren Grad from Things seen  I was able to track things down. After some testing I decided to go with a new theme, which needs of course some modding to make it fit for my needs, so don’t be surprised if the look of the pages undergoes some further changes. But for a while, I think I will use the ‘minimalism’ theme. Keep it simple, stupid!

Those lichens have gotten a political importance here in Germany, as their disappearance was discovered to be an indicator for high air pollution. I do well remember that probably 12 years back we did a map of lichens in the city of munich to document the air pollution. As the consolidated efforts of european, state level and municipal administrations were successful, the lichens are back in the city now. And now we are waiting what will be a noticable indicator plant  for the climate change.

You see, the billboard vs. car top is fascinating me. More than in the countryside or a small town, the city still has the flair of unlimited possibilities, and in this context advertisements seem to sit in a much more suitable habitat than in a town of let’s say 15.000 inhabitants. What would be just a reason for laughter there looks like a real possibility when proposed in the glamourous environment of the city: you just need the right shoes and your posterieror will magically reshape…

I am not always fond of small town / countryside life, but its more down-to-earth attitude is very sympathetic.

Office rooms on the ground floor with at least partial possibility to peek in from outside are rare. Therefore I was a bit astonished when I saw that Chagall poster on the wall and, after a while, noticing the head of the employee, motionless, either on the phone or using a computer in a very concentrated manner.

The posts and wires that form the shadows on the office walls come from a side arm of the multitude of railway tracks that lead to Munich terminus. Turning around by 180°  and walking some 20 meters, the scenery was as such:

Moving to the new wordpress blog still has some issues. Notifications are coming in that commenting does not work, the feed does not show images, load times are too long, the blogroll is not sorted correctly and so on. Even with 2 computers at hand it is difficult to find out the culprits, and it is time consuming.

Probably the web 2.0 functionality of the fusion wordpress theme with its usage of the jquery library has some compatibility issues with certain browsers, and maybe wordpress needs another plugin to pep up the feeds. A lot of things to explore, but the weather forecast for the weekend predicts rain, so there are probably some time slots to tune the blog.

Today’s fine weather seduced me to make a detour on my way home, leading to unknown places along the main railroad track into Munich terminus. I had left the office building for maximum 2 minutes until my mind had switched completeley to photography and recreation. Great.

The image to the right is probably in danger of being kitschy. Still, the city has its quiet corners and some of them offer remnants of wilderness contrasting with machinery. And since several years, the ecological value of those niches is accepted and measures are taken to ensure that those stepping stone biotops don’t get degraded by accident. New development plans do take into account the biospherical qualities of those areas and respect lifelines for some rare species inhabiting such places.

Revolutions without fighting, bloodshed and destruction do have their merits, even 90+ years later: When the monarchy in Bavaria was abolished in 1918, the palaces, castles, gardens etc. became public property and in the course of the years became almost completely fully accessible for the public. Some of the most beautiful gardens now serve the promenaders and joggers and attract a huge crowd of visitors throughout the year. Buildings inside the parks are now transformed into restaurants where everybod
y enjoys the fine royal ambiente.

Last week my parents celebrated their golden wedding and invited family and friends into the Nymphenburg park’s restaurant in the former orangery. Busy with my camera I followed my family and got the opportunity to photograph them in a really royal scene
ry.

Finally I did switch from Blogger to WordPress on a shared server. The reasons I will explain in a later post, for the time being I am glad that the import of the old posts and even 95% of the comments went without any problems. Most of the widgets are in a useful state now, the RSS feed is working and a lot of the functionality I always wanted is here, too. Not to mention the galleries – with those I started my wordpress adventure as I wanted more than a blog but with a maximum of integration to keep the workload low.

Now it’s time for you, dear readers, to adjust the bookmark or feed. If anything doesn’t work as expected, please do inform me. Thanks.

For 1.5 days now I have changed the computer keyboard (and the camera) for a power drill, circular saw, cordless screwdriver and so on. Reason was that the pellets storage room for the central heating needed an improved floor to ensure that the material is gravitation-driven moved to the conveyor screw. The old, already angled floor was not steep enough so that huge piles of pellets never got transported to the oven.

My father in law as house-owner was chief engineer while I worked as saw-servant and screw driver. The whole thing was made complicated by the existing floor that was already angled in two directions, so all metering had to take into account those non-horizontals and verticals. Furtheron leading the pellets to a circular transport area required sophisticated bended forms of the new flooring in order not to waste storage room.

Today we finished the bigger and more complicated half, tomorrow we’ll do the rest so that the pellets can be filled into the room this week just in time for the arriving cooler weather. And having warmth out of a renewable energy source is a double comfy feeling.

Here in Germany nobody uses the term ‘daylight saving time’. It was introduced decades back under the pretense that it would support energy saving, but there are serious doubts: in the end everybody makes best use of the longer evenings, and many activities are connected with energy consumption. We use the term ‘summertime’ here, and that’s the reason for the title.

I found it a quite creative way of tackling the DST problem in a zero-emission-clock, but of course nobody is allowed to be really picky about precision here.

Bakar is a place of narrow alleys – no vehicle traffic possible there – and one of those you see to the right. Of course there are several rings of motor traffic enabled streets, so it’s only a small number of houses that cannot be reached by cars. To live there is not as comfortable as we would like it, but it certainly gives a good impression of a town that was built some centuries back and left in central parts untouched since then.

Over at The Public Eye Martin Storz yesterday celebrated his post no. 1000. This is definitely a sign of perseverance, even more so as photoblogging in Germany (and in German) rarely leads to frequent commenting and lively discussions that can be seen in the English speaking net world. But even if you can’t read German, his blog is worth regular visits – after all photographs are not that language dependent, and Martin’s projects like ‘Always take the weather’ bring together different photographers and styles.

The two images shown today were made again when commuting. With the sun now setting earlier, twilight and night shots offer different moods. And the more I do live my photography, the easier it is to leave a bit the beaten tracks and take up not so populare approaches to picture making.

Living throughout the year in a small town in the alps, everything in a harbour is potentially interesting. At sunrise I found these reminders of a ‘HiFly’ windsurfer, turned into plastic trash over the years, hazardous waste if you would take it really correctly – but nobody does bother here.

The small series is visibly now on my gallery-website-to-be, still under a makeshift domain name here.

As soon as I have finished the works over there, I will shift the blog, too. But hardening the blog against attacks is serious work, and I don’t want to hurry this. Experience has taught me that amount of time necessery to clean up after a successful attack is a multitude of the amount to be invested before.

With such a foreground, it is probably hard for a small town to survive. This coal loading/unloading unit claims a similar amount as the whole city of Bakar. Up to the nineties it served a coke oven plan, which is not running any more. It has had a changeful history: Up to the first world war, the Austro-Hungarian navy had one of its most important bases here.

In spite of the advantageous natural situation of the bay, the Italian army managed to capture it in a surprise attack of only 30 soldiers coming on speedboats. It took a probably a long time to overcome this defeat.

Now the croatian flag is flying high again, but Bakar has lost its importance.

… make sure that you get some of the finest liquor made on the island. That it is presented so invitingly makes the purchase decision not easier as there are so many different flavours. And the opportunity to taste could easily lead to a purchase bigger than originally intended.

In my case it was different: I knew the taste from a purchase earlier this year and was commissioned to stock for birthdays and christmas. Christmas, yes, you got it right: In only four months christmas will already be well over. So it does make sense to already think of some presents to avoid that december rush.

Today I am on a short trip to Croatia again, helping my sister to clear up the caravan and prepare it for hibernation in a local garage. Travelling alone, I could afford to stop in Bakar, a former important harbour in the bay of Rijeka in Croatia. It once hosted one of the croatian navigation schools and was the home of a number of captains.

Now the street from Rijeka to Krk passes far away from Bakar – you see the audacious construction high over the roofs, and Bakar is mainly visited by little numbers of locals. The door handle in the main street tells this story very precisely.

It’s easy to guess from the headline that I am not smoking. Not smoking any more, that is.

But here I was more fascinated by the replicating leaning forms that manifested themselves in the viewfinder. To emphasize this a little bit I used bibble5′s layers for burning and a bit desaturating the borders. The more I play with this software, the more interesting it becomes despite its overly long beta status and still unresolved bugs. It is just the right tool for my way of handling the raw files, quite straightforward, no fancy effects, just carefully helping to show what’s already in the raw file. As a linux user, all that lightroom and photoshop is a non-option, so I am even more glad that bibble5 now fulfills such a great part of my processing wishes.

And despite all criticism in the forums about bibble’s slow development process, this definitely is not a case of ‘hopes to ashes’.

The triangle of blue colors grabbed my attention, and then the self-aware laziness of the pose on the billboard. The whole image speaks ‘night’, just the billboard seems out of any time context here.

It’s not an image I would try to print really large – it was too late at night and the wine was too good, making me forget to check the f-stop and shutter speed, so sharpness is probably insufficient. But then I just might rely on Cartier-Bresson and proving that I am no bourgeois…

Mornings can be hard; The unread paper in one hand, the camera in the other, eyes still tired, brain slow – the night was just too short. Only 1 minute left until the train leaves. Fumblin’ with numb fingers at the f-stop dial, knowing that some DoF is needed. 06:06 – just getting two shots.

They turned out to be the best of the day, a long working day. In the end well worth having carried the gear on the commuting trip to Munich. Didn’t touch the saturation slider, I swear.