those singers traditionally woke up the people during ramadam, early in the morning to allow a good breakfast as the basis for a whole day of fasting. now this custom is forgotten in most places, but still the singers are invited for some festivities. the high iso possibilities of my sony a700 are always reason…
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kalmunai catch
for me as living in the european alps, beeing at the seaside and watching the fishermen means alway a bounty of photographic opportunities. golden early morning light made those fishes an interesting pattern of metallic glistening hydrodynamically highly efficients bodies the outrigger boats are a fascinosum by themselves. while the shape is a classical dugout…
landing the leviathan
the recitations of the muezzin woke me up after a short night, but i was grateful for this invitation to start the new day early. my hotel was next to the beach – the tsunami at that time had not done much damage as the structure was new and sturdy concrete – so after 10…
yellow fin thuna, batticaloa
before the winter monsoon rains start, the usual catch for the outrigger boats is small. bigger boats with outboard motors then are the only ones that bring home what they catch by long lines. even then the catch is small. only 5 small thunas for one early morning of fishing is barely sufficient, given that…
batticaloa fishermen or the rewards of procrastination
finding a time to go for a photowalk to the beach at sunrise was difficult during the last mission – jet lag, early appointments, changes of the venue and so on. in the end, i had to take the last morning – and ended up without visible sunrise due to the clouds. not wanting to…
growing old in kalmunai
62 years, sick, shaking with probably fever, unhcr provided temporary shelter even almost 4 years after the tsunami, because there is no money to rebuild the house. living on approx. 60 US$ a month which is not much with fuel prices comparable to europe. health care is provided for free, but that also means that…
education on water hygienics, batticaloa, sri lanka
out of our project work: our ngo partner emas, which has 25 years of experience in running well drilling schools in bolivia, has created an awareness programme for students in batticaloa about ways to improve drinking water quality by simple means, among them solar desinfection. trainers went to more than 40 schools with 2000+ students.
internally displaced person, sri lanka
another euphemism: idp. in the case of this man (and up to 200.000 others only in the eastern region of sri lanka) the government had decided that in order to have a free firing range against the tamil insurgents, everybody had to leave their villages. so they were living in corrugated tin sheet buildings while…
blog action day: poverty
the non-availability of clean drinking water clearly is one indicator of poverty. in this area of batticaloa, sri lanka, the soil does not provide drinking water from wells through the whole year. as the next permanent well is 5 km away, the typical wedding present for a couple residing in this area consists of a…
offloaded
thanks to the help of the unhcr, these civil war refugees are offloaded again next to the remainders of their village that they had to leave 2 years ago when the sri lanka government had decided to “liberate” the east coast. aah, it’s so easy: the government decides to displace, and the international community does…
batticaloa fishermen, again
martin doonan posted some days ago about blog action day and this years topic of global poverty. as poverty is what i am constantly confronted with when on mission in sri lanka – and what guides my actions, too – i gladly took up his reminder and registered. so you will see in the following…
martyrs day: one euphemism more
the local heroes in sri lanka are a sad affair: that ‘martyrs day’ poster is from eprlf, eelam people’s revolutionary liberation front. this group now fights together with the sri lanka government against the ltte, liberation tigers of tamil eelam. and doleful heroes they (and many of the others) are: yesterday 3 young tamil men…
on the plane again
flying on a project monitoring mission to sri lanka again, woke up at probably 4:00 am local time over the indian ocean and saw this wonderful light. even after 30 or more long flights from germany to sri lanka i still am fascinated by the quality of light at sunrise, seen from a plane. i…
octoberfest gingerbread heart attack
octoberfest with the camera was fun, and i was lucky to have company in person of a colleague who protected me from drunkards pivoting one liter glasses of beer (the famous “Maßkrug”) in front of my lens. The beer halls were too noisy for me – you have to drink in there, talking slows down…
minus 17% – do legst di nida*
octoberfest alone is a reason for quite a “Rausch” (inebriation). but bavaria’s all time governing party has just lost landslide-like 17%, and their strongest supporters have been and still are the “Trachtler”, men and women wearing traditional clothes and quite often of a conservative mindset. so probably this disaster was one more reason for those…
making a flower necklace
i was waiting quite a while for good, warm october weather – we had to have it now, especially as an economic factor for the benefits of the octoberfest and the poor landlords there, who are always on the brink of bankruptcy if there is not a new record in the number of sold hectolitres…
japanese landscape, bavaria
japanese layered mountains were my immediate association when i saw the clouds moving up on mt. predigtstuhl, seen from the middle of my hometown bad reichenhall. in fact this shot was quite extreme with a 450mme tele lens, so i had to massage the raw file quite a bit in lightzone to bring out those…
octoberfest: starfly
high tech flowers at the octoberfest: the successor of the chairoplane lifts the visitors 50m above the ground. at dusk, it looks like a giant flower in front of the sky. the haunted house could be a synonym for the whole thing: shrieking noise to no end, flashy colors, the whole bandwidth of agreeable and…
inviting for a rest
kind of a retro mood for soft and unobtrusive colors caught me today. maybe one of the reasons are paul butzi’s post what makes you a photographer and paul lester’s the beauty of the everyday. for a balanced, full life, savouring the very moment without peering for the abnormal, extraordinary is a warranty for success.…
stairs in technical town hall, munich
tuesday they ordered me to exchange my business mobile. not worth mentioning normally, but this gave the opportunity to see munich’s new steel/glass constructed technical town hall. in my eyes a well designed and crafted construction, though i don’t know if the workers here are happy with it. at least i was, optically, and the…
public transport crossing
commuting once a week to the office by public transport offers photographic opportunities (it is a burden, too – 2 hours in early morning buses/trains, well, some of you will know). carrying the camera with me every week did not really pay out, in spite of all efforts. this week i got this picture when…
cedar woods, krk
this was aroma therapee without the possibility to escape: sun drenched cedar woods on the west coast of krk island. you could walk for hours in a strong scent of cedar resin dissolved in the hot and salty coastal air. in a spa you would pay quite some money for this experience and the healing…
solar electric mantis
in krk, the mantis can be met not only in human incarnations next to discos (as i was told) but also in insect form in the woods, on stone walls etc. the only specimen i found was on a wall in the middle of krk town, albeit a capital example.
(not) talkin’ about the revolution
2008 memories of the ’46 revolution on the balkans: a small standpost fountain, no water running any more, instead a lump of cement in the basin. the red so faded that it deserved to be upped during postprocessing. this all seems to be a sign of normalisation after 50 years of more or less strict…
the heat is on
another take on minimalism and a fond remembrance of the holidays. here in bavaria the mornings are already cold with 12° C, but there are good chances for a nice indian summer. the good habit of getting up early and do some photography i have kept alive, but in the moment the ‘creative juices’ are…