Archive for the ‘bicycle’ Category

a blue bike for andreas

Friday, July 10th, 2009
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over at his blog andreas manessinger showcases his one-image-a-day post number one-thousand! my heartfelt congratulations for the many excellent images he showed, his extraordinary perseverance, and not least his communicative skills.

andreas’ blog was the first blog i followed regularly when i started blogging myself. and in the beginning it were largely his encouraging and challenging comments that made me intensify my work and speed up my posting frequency. i didn’t forget his comment “can we have more of that please? three images in november? c’mooon :) ” – andreas, thank you very much for this!

Posted in bicycle, blue, shadow | 1 Comment »

weariness in vision and written

Thursday, July 2nd, 2009
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as always commuting into the city confronts me with urban sceneries very different from what i would prefer to have as my surroundings. but in contradiction to the gut feeling i know that this tension presumably keeps my senses active and vigilant. but that morning i found the weather as grey as my mood, matching my weariness. and suddenly the bike fragments in the frame seemed to match, too. and just as a note on the margin: these white on black letters on the right side read ‘gegenwind’, head wind, the natural adversary of each bike rider, and a major factor for weariness.

Tags:grey, weariness
Posted in bicycle | 3 Comments »

up-and-coming cyclists

Thursday, May 14th, 2009
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trying to get at a new ‘airiness’ as well as combining photography with family undertakings, i had to resort to some shots without framing. of course the reject rate was a bit more than marginally higher, however one shot came out as good as expected: those armstrongs-to-be had the road for themselves on a sunny sunday in april, when all cars were banned round attersee in austria. and whilst some made a race out of it, dressed like top performers of the giro, others had their fun and aching muscles the next day.

/home/springm/Bilder/2009/2009-04/Radln_am_Attersee/./dsc12865s.jpg and not being pressed (on the contrary, slowed down by the daughters) i had time enough to have a look over the lake to the shore we had passed some hours ago. early spring is a wonderful season, cautious, almost retained sometimes but already full of promises. what a wonderful time.

Tags:bicycle, car free day
Posted in Attersee, bicycle | 2 Comments »

hard ride

Wednesday, February 4th, 2009
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probably something for andreas manessinger, who is quite often posting bicycle pictures. i started to travel regularly to sri lanka in 2003, and since then a lot has changed regarding bikes. while you still find a lot of bikes like this – they are just means of transport, and when income is lacking, nobody bothers with repairing – recently leisure biking has started: on sunday morning you find young people on the road on modern bikes, seemingly unaffected of sri lanka motorized traffic endangerment: suicide can be painless here, roadrunning is only for the really tough ones.

Tags:rust
Posted in bicycle | 3 Comments »

won’t brake anyway

Saturday, January 24th, 2009
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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.

3216683009_30a99a34c1_b_d those traces i discovered on the beach recently – rarely have seen such a strict evidence of encounter and afterwards going it’s way.

Posted in Batticaloa, bicycle | 1 Comment »

icycle

Friday, January 16th, 2009
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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.

3197203309_7b052a8f6a_b_d 3198032160_9175062560_b_d 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.

Tags:hoarfroast
Posted in bicycle | 1 Comment »

bike sea

Wednesday, November 26th, 2008
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backyards in nanjing are not meant for foreigners. just 150m away from the main road i found this parking lot, chinese style. trying to work out the best way of visualising the sheer abundance of bicycles, after 5 minutes i heard somebody speaking in my back. lucky enough i did not turn around immediately but shot some more frames, this one among them. a short break on my side was used by the voice to approach me. it turned out to be a policeman, who friendly (thou shall not annoy the foreigners…) but firmly insisted by gestures that i had to leave this place. my guess was that there is nothing like a right to photograph in china…

3059310751_a12b9d639b_b_d backyards are very rarely enjoyable sights (there is a reason why they are backyards anyhow) but they usually offer good insight how people are living. in the present case the officials probably regarded it as disrespectful if this normal side of life of their citizens gets photographed and published.

Tags:backyard, bicycles, china, nanjing, parking, sony a700
Posted in bicycle | 5 Comments »

wave of bikers

Thursday, November 6th, 2008

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even with all those 8-lane roads in nanjing, very often nicely framed by newly planted sycamore trees, the bicycle remains the major means of individual transport. bike lanes are broad here, adapted to the masses that use them. astonishing for me is the number of electric bicycles which are a good example of eco-friendly and environment-friendly individual mobility.

3007263270_46b8bbdb33_b_d air quality however is deplorable as you can guess from this shot. some bicycle riders use masks covering nose and mouth, but those of course will filter only the largest particles. as long as the factories and power plants around are emitting unfiltered, the air quality will not improve.

Tags:bicycle, bikers, china, nanjing, smog, sony a700
Posted in bicycle | 3 Comments »

tsunami ruins with bike and crow

Friday, July 18th, 2008
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nice pat on the back yesterday: in my flickr account i found a mail from a journalist of tamilweek.com, notifying that they had – in accordance with the creative commons license i put on my pictures and blog – taken my blog entries and compiled them to a news feature named portraits from kalmunai. What I found appealing and a positive experience is the fact that they did not clandestinely copy and paste, which is something that so many authors experience nowadays, but behaved like high-standard journalists from the good old days in the midst of the snake pit internet.

content-wise i made my rants about the political situation there heard, now i just wait for the miracle that this has some effect.

Tags:crow, ruins, tsunami
Posted in Kalmunai, bicycle | 2 Comments »

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