spring2life take2

October’s wallpapers match the current (German) season: Grey drizzle, foliage not yet colored. The autumn weather was strange this year. Due to moderate temperatures and enough humidity the dying of the leaves is somewhat postponed. But as I am not chasing postcard-suitable subjects this is not a drawback at all, on the contrary.

It seems that commuting problems become a root of photographic endeavours: The “Batticaloa Fences” gallery finally was realized due to a delay, several of my commuting images resulted of unplanned stops, and today’s mini gallery of the “Dust Bikes” resulted from me leaving too late for the station and missing the train for just seconds…
I’ll have to explore the kind of mysterious connection that exists between those two unrelated kinds of events.

Anyhow, here you find a small gallery of “Dust Bikes” that grabbed my attention in a dirty garage under a office building. Beyond the incredibly soft surface I found the idea of such a powdered bike fascinating: This coating is the result of probably monthes of standstill, the plain opposite of the movement a bicycle is meant for.

Leaving the subway on a steep escalator, I was greeted by skywards reaching facades, and felt really relieved having finally reached the inner courtyard, planted with trees. Only after a while I recognized that those trees were not all of the same kind.

For a given reason I made several visits to this hospital. Whilst the medical treatment without doubt is first class – many families from the near east oil dynasties travel here – the space made a somewhat depressing impression on me. The only minuscule changes between the images certainly speak of a leaden time.

October September 26h, 1980: Thousands of visitors are entering the Octoberfest in Munich through the main entrance. Suddenly a detonation shreds the constant flow of people: A right-wing extremist had detonated a bomb inmidst the crowd, killing 13 and wounding hundreds. The attacker, too, got killed in the explosion.

At that time Germany was still in a state of fear of terrorist attacks – from the left side. And in that climate a right wing bomber did not fit in. The ruling conservative party in the state of Bavaria very fast came to the conclusion that this had to be a single perpetrator, and the state attorneys after a while agreed. As the culprit was dead, this of course was the most convenient solution. Already in 1982 all court exhibits were destroyed, long before DNA analyis for example could have helped to identify the contacts of the attacker.

Today, as every year, the Lord Mayor of Munich laid down flowers in a small commemorative event. There are multiple wishes, supported from his side, to take up the investigations again, yet the Bavarian State Government (still the same conservative party does rule) up to now does block.

The image shows the memorial for the victims of this crime, with an innocent, typically masqueraded Octoberfest visitor, probably using the memorial as a meeting point.

Update: Steve notified me that I had given the wrong date of the bomb blast in the original post. Thanks!

Since quite some time I had planned to revisit older images. Yesterday’s train delay, that made me spend a very uncomfortable time in an even more uncomfortable train station at night, finally gave me the opportunity to do this. Besides some tagging in bibble5 (which is not yet as comfortable as I’d wish it to be), I drew out the images for the new gallery “Batticaloa Fences”, which you find here.

And while going through them, I again felt my affection for the place and the images, still strong after the year+ that has passed since then. Regarding the photographs it is based on the strong graphics and textures that some of them have, but also on the content, the situation you must live in to protect your property with flattened oil barrels or fragments of asbestos sheets .

Sometimes the small iuxtapositions grab the view – with sparse colors, like here, and just an antagonism in their basic shapes: rectangle vs. circle.

The office building currently gets heavily renovated, and while most of the basement garage driveway was taken down, that small part – the former doorman’s office – was marked to remain.

The administration of the City of Munich is distributed over many buildings, and commuting to and from meetings is mandatorily done via public transport (the Lord Mayor and a handful of Heads of Department being the only exception). And me, I carried a camera when meeting colleagues of the survey department, so I could document this unexpected encounter with an octopus in the heart of the city.

For platform furnishing only the most robust plants are suitable. Here a Pine tree, a Box bush and Olibanum (?) have to suffer for the assumed desideratum of the passengers to see some green.

First part of this early morning commuting trip was a walk in the rain, and against my usual habit I had enough time when reaching the station. Well, meanwhile it’s still dark when I leave, but the wet plaster made up for nice reflections to frame those poor, forlorn-looking small box bushes. It will take a decade until they get the figure appropriate for this setting.

No words for today.

Astonishing enought, they don’t forbid cameras in the Salzburg Museum of Modern Art – given you don’t try to take pictures of the artwork. Anyhow, the environment sometimes provides food for frames as well.

The title for this image came up as a sudden association, but when searching for it, it turned out that I must have heard of or seen the masterpiece and originator of that title: Hokusai’s woodblock print of the series “Thirty-Six Views of Mt. Fuji”, and the later adaption by Jeff Wall. Just see them here on the website of Tate Modern.

So the title is not original, but it’s matching well the image, which I enjoy very much because of its impromptu character, where small details like the carpet corners support that feeling of a sudden and irrevocable departure. And I chose this image to close the Krk series for this year. Expect to find now images from European sceneries of late summer and autumn here in this blog.

Oh yes, and the blog got a new feature: In the menu below the title you’ll now find a link to the “Image Mosaic”: Spread over 12+ pages there is just a compendium of most of the images published on spring2life. The singular images can be enlarged – as all images here – and the new Highslide-Javascript not only adapts to the screen size but also allows to play a slideshow. Enjoy.

Same harbour, different day, different direction of view. What is a nice and harmless (and not so enthusiasting) scenery nonetheless permanently photographed on other days, gets a nice twist when the weather threatens with a storm front.

I am still not sure if this is part of the official vocabulary or just an individual extension.

This is in a certain way a sentimental post: The Renault 4, or R4 as it was commonly called, was our first car, back in 1983. A robust vehicle with plenty of room for frequently moving students, a moderate appetite for the always expensive gasoline, and plenty of old fashioned technique that allowed (and needed) do-it-yourself repairs. The R4 was a successful vehicle with almost 10 millions sold, and production was stopped only after more than 30 years, with the last factories in Europe destroyed in the war on the Balkans. But in the former Yugoslavian states there are still a number of this cars earning their daily gas, appreciated for pretty much the same virtues that German students sought after, 30 years ago.

That this is a HDR image, converted under Linux with a lot of black magic, scripts, command line and all that, is certainly not visible. But I do like it exactly for this reason.

Another wrapped car on the camping site in Krk.

The corrosive qualities of the permanent and salty winds is reason for a number of car owners to wrap their most precious asset in protective foils. Of course the brand – reason for the pride of ownership – should remain visible

<p>Low morning sun and a narrow alley constitute pretty good ingredients for interesting sights. Sometimes all I need is a bit of leasure time and (after a morning cappuccino) just an alert eye.</p>

I just wanted to give you some more time to guess what it is .

Have a good start into the new week!

The subdued colors attracted me here, and the contrast of the old walls and the new Daimler. The barred windows belong to the Franziskan Monastery in Krk.

A second take on the shore plants in Krk. For both images I used the Sony 70-300G lens, the first one was taken with the maximum focal length and widest open f-stop of 5.6. The soft rendering of the out-of-focus areas combined with the perfect maximum sharpness I love very much in this lens.

Other than that my relationship with it is somewhat plurivalent: Since my first steps in photography I am in love with the compressed perspective of tele lenses, and the first lens I always got with every SLR was a tele or tele zoom. But since going digital I find myself to use it less and less, having discovered the possibilities (and challenges) of wideangles at or below 24 mme. So I carry the 70-300 less often, therefore use it less often. But when I do, I am very often astonished about the fine image that it allows me to capture.

I tried this subject with different light situations until I was happy with morning striplight that left the rocks in the shadows and deepened the black of the cracks.

The September wallpapers are available for downlad from here.