my thanks go to athine. of course you don’t know who athine is, so i will tell you. for the current world urban forum in nanjing, the chinese organizers recruited more than 2000 volunteers, mainly students with a major in english. athine is one of them, and she accompagnied our bus from the airport to…
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nanjing shopping street
i came to china open eyed – ok only partly after that long trip – and open minded, and up to now my astonishment is a positive one, in all respect except the fog. i do hope it’s just natural fog and not heavy air pollution, because if so, it must have killer qualities. the…
traveling…
i had planned to post this before leaving to nanjing, china, for the world urban forum. but as quite so often the workload plus time for the kids and my wife consumed all reserves i had calculated and now i am in nanjing, after 28 hours traveling. so for today be it this shot, it…
kalmunai students iv
before you are afraid that this turns into a monothematic blog of kid pics – these are the last ones i’d like to show from kalmunai. sri lanka again experiences a wave of violence, and the east coast i visited 3 weeks ago is now more or less a no-go-area for foreigners. those kids have…
kalmunai transport unit
whilst i am from a technical point of view not fully content with the picture above – the aspired sharpness is missing, probable due to improper focusing – the scenery is still captivating even in the review. doing it again however i would take care to include all the foreleg of the brown ox. i…
kalmunai students
early morning hours are my most prolific time of the day. the fishermen, the outrigger boat, all these picture were created from 6 to 8 am. the light is soft at that time but does not have that orange cast of the sunset hours. and the public is definitely different – only at that time…
bawa singers, kalmunai
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…
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.…