spring2life take2

Munich, Bavaria

Bolzano, Italy

On a short visit to Bolzano for a meeting on Open-Source GIS software, I (again) had the camera at hand when walking to the venue. Many of my images get created on such occasions, and I constantly improve the mechanisms of self-conditioning to see instead of just walk. Just sometimes the camera becomes heavy, so I have (re-)pondered the question if a M4/3 or Sony-E would justify the expenditure by equal or better image quality coming out of half the weight. But I (again) came to no decision, and one reason is that I don’t want to give up the 24-120mm zoom range of my Zeiss lens, the wide end being especially handy when creating square images, which narrows down the angle of view quite a bit. And 24mm-e lenses for M4/3 are rare – I know only of the 7-14mm Oly zoom (Update: and the Oly 2.0/12mm), which has a hefty price point. But then, only half the weight – sounds really convincing.

Westend, Munich

Not taking the tramway for the way home from office, my path led through the smaller streets – less car traffic and more bikers. The Munich administration engages in many activities to make cycling through the city more attractive. Diverting the car traffic into the main roads by selective speed limits in residential streets as well as the limited (and therefore expensive) parking space helped to convince quite a number of citizens to complement the main family car with a bike instead of the 2nd and 3rd car, and even to use the bike instead of the car. So when you walk home through Westend, chance is you wouldn’t get overrun by a SUV, but more likely to be met by the agressive ringing of a bike’s bell when leaving the sidewalk without proper caution.

Bad Reichenhall, Bavaria

Piding, Bavaria

This time of the year is the tradition-enriched return of livestock from high alpine summer pastures, where it had spent the summer. As traditions tend to get transferred (and modified in that process), outside of the Berchtesgaden valley, this probably newly acquired tractor truck was decorated like the lead cow on occasion of the livestock return mentioned above.

This image, too, was made with a prime, albeit some weeks earlier. The old Minolta 1.4/50mm, borrowed from a friend, is optically very nice. The narrow angle of field presented not a problem here, as I stood far enough back to be able to include that biker in the frame. But this was probably more luck (or gut feeling) than mindful preparation.

Salzburg, Austria

The wallpapers for August 2011 are available for download as usual from here. This scene mix of modern, sober walls and an almost pastoral idyll was recorded in the University of Salzburg, where I attended a conference on Geografic Information Systems.

Found in the alleys of Krk: The ingredients of this image come from a long stretch of time. The oldest for sure are the cobblestones, next comes the fountain, now deprived of the red communist star (visible here or here), and the youngest is probably the ATB. And me? I do enjoy the moment and the light.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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…

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.

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.

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.

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.