How I experienced spring this year
Already some time ago, but that’s how I experienced spring this year, there have been so many lovely and colourful moods only waiting to be captured 😉
Some impressions to show you what I meant:
Long over-due update
It had been a long time since my last update. Unfortunately I’m really neglecting my blog in favour of social media networks which I almost use on a daily basis, but I want to change that, otherwise the idea of this blog doesn’t make sense anyhow, does it?
I even thought of uploading not only “portfolio” photos here in my blog, but also documentation style shots for the purpose of a brief trip reports.
So what happened in the last couple of months, well I’ve been on some trips which all contributed portfolio related shots I want to show in the next days and weeks here on my blog:
- April: Short trip to Salzburg, Austria
- July: hike to Butzensee, Austria with 3 fellow photographers
- August: Trip to Japan
- September: Trip to Iceland
I already updated the galleries with the following shots from a short trip with fellow photographers last winter. They’ve been all taken all in German alps region.
Visit to Frankfurt
Three weeks ago I’ve been to Frankfurt over the weekend to shoot the architecture of the only skyline of Germany! I once again teamed up with fellow photographers Alexander Otto and Jan Pusdrowski which I already met in south bavaria 4 months ago. They came with their friend Tino who was such a wonderful person to get to know 😉
After 3 days of extensive walking my feet started hurting, but it was well worth the effort.
On the first day we also met Jonas Piontek, a cool bloke which lives in the Frankfurt area. Thanks to him we were invited to see a live weather broadcast of hr (local TV channel) when we visited Main Tower for a couple of skyline shots from one of the highest vantage points in this city. I should also mention the fantastic burgers we had for dinner each day, man I never get tired of burgers wink emoticon
Thanx guys, this was such a lovely weekend!
I already started to process some shots and here they are:
Social Media B/W Challenge Result
Some weeks ago another one of these social network phenomena started out where you are being nominated and supposed to do something once or the course of several days, a challenge. I’m speaking of the 5 day b/w challenge where a photographer is supposed to post 5 b/w shots on 5 days in a row while nominating a new (befriended) photographer to to the same on each day. Actually I hoped that nobody will nominate me, because b/w photography is something I’m weak at, also I usually struggle to choose appropriate images for b/w processing. While noticing all the b/w works which has been posted due to this challenge I already thought that nobody will nominate me, but in the end I got nominated on facebook, from somebody I’d not expected to.
I haven’t done many b/w photos lately, but I was in the mood of processing some of my (normal) Dubai Shots from 2012 and 2013 in an extreme b/w fashion. Why is that? Recently I discovered the book project Dreaming of Dubai and after looking at all these nice pictures I instantly felt that desire to book another flight to experience this surreal place again.
It’s not like that this rather unauthentic and posh world is my thing, but still, that place attracts me a lot, because of the superlatives in modern architecture which simply creates a surreal world for me.
So I processed some of my Dubai shots 😉
The first one is a view over the the “Defence Roundabout”, the biggest crossing on Sheikh Zayed Road, intersecting Financial Centre Road.
The next picture shows the dynamics of a big crowd of tourists while enjoying the Dubai Mall Dancing Fountain in front of the majestic Burj Khalifa.
One of the most memorable memories of Dubai was the desert surrounding it. On my first trip I went on a dune bashing adventure which was close to my best roller-coaster experiences. On my second trip I went to the desert again to explore and try to portray it. When you come from a Central European country (in my case Germany) and if you have never experienced an arid landscape it’s an incredible feeling to get lost in a desert.
This one technically is not from Dubai, but it was part of my last visit to Dubai / the United Arabic Emirates. The picture shows the Sheikh Zayed Mosque in Abu Dhabi, which is the biggest mosque in the UAE and a very precious and impressive building.
My last shot in this UAE / Dubai series – which I used to contribute to the 5 day b/w challenge – is again about architecture and modern urban jungles. I’m afraid I couldn’t contribute more diverse themes.
Well, after finishing the series I was glad that I’ve been nominated to get some motivation to do more b/w processing. I’m even proud of the outcome, I haven’t ever thought of getting such lovely b/w shots after some long and serious b/w processing sessions. However I failed miserably in posting all 5 shots in 5 days, in the end it took me 7 days to finish the challenge, because I didn’t edit all shots in advance and just post one shot each day.
Early Morning Sunset Hike
I’ve been on a really early “morning hike” with fellow photographers and friends some weeks ago. We planned to start at 3am to be as close to the peak as possible for taking sunrise pictures.
It was really painful to hike during the night, especially when you notice your (only) headlamp batteries die after not even 30min.. Fortunately Stefan had a spare headlamp for me
Thanks mate!
Of course we couldn’t reach the peak before sunrise, so Felix and me stayed at a lower position, a meadow with interesting big rocks and friendly cows while Johannes and Stefan ascended even higher.
After fooling around with compositions with cows in the foreground I quickly went to some big rocks, but then I noticed that Felix will be in the picture, hence I chose my viewpoint so that Felix will be covered by the big rock which is nearly in the middle. I guess the composition could have been better, but as soon as I put my tripod on the ground the sun was coming up from behind the mountains and I had to hurry to mount filters and setting up my camera.
And here are some shots, “Fading Light” was taken the evening before.
