Feliz 2010

Si alguien se acuerda de SuperLópez, éste es un auténtico CabezaCubo.

If someone deserves de name of BucketHead, this is the one.

Is this photo worth 10 euros?

Well, that´s what I paid for it. Or actually what I paid for being able to take it...

Two weeks ago my daughter was invited to a birthday party and, while I was waiting for her until the pick up time, I went for a walk. I found this fire station in a side street of Kastanienallee. And I thought, pity I do not have my camera with me!

But, you see, on the following weekend my daughter was invited to yet another birthday party not too far away. So this time I brought all my gear and after leaving her at her friend´s, I headed for this location. The fact that it was snowing for the first time this winter did not deter me, nor the 20 minute walk in the chilly conditions. And as a bonus, I was going to make it at the blue hour, timing could not have been any better. So I got in position, set my tripod and camera and clicked. And what do I get? A no CF card message!! I had forgotten my memory card at home. An the same for the back up card. Go tell my frozen fingers all of this was for nothing...

So I figured out that somewhere in Prenzlauerberg, there must be a place where you can buy a CF card. As it happens, the first two stores I tried did have memory cards, just the wrong type for me (why can not 400D´s use plain SD cards like everyone else??). So I got further and further away and by the time I found the card, the question was, is it worth going back again? The blue hour was gone, I was pretty tired and cold by then, and, what the hell, it is just a photo and I am not a pro. But then, I wanted to take this photo.

So as you can imagine, I paid ten euros for the cheapest card I could find (2GB no name card, if you want the details) and headed back to the fire station. This time in somewhat of a hurry, as the time to pick up my daughter was drawing nearer. The good news is that I got to walk for two hours, which I don´t do often enough these days, killing most of the waiting time that way. The bad news is that I do not need an extra card.

So, never mind this photo (although I would like to hear your comments for a change if you made it this far in this rant), the photos I took later at the birthday party of my daughter dancing with a flamenco skirt were simply priceless, rephrasing a famous ad campaign of, ironically, another type of card.

NHM II

Decir que había mucha gente es quedarse corto. Mereció la pena, sí, pero con un par de miles menos de personas habría sido más tranquilo. Y más fácil si tenemos en cuenta que íbamos con un carrito.

There were thousands of people pretty much everywhere. The only quiet place we found was, oddly enough, the cafeteria downstairs, in sharp contrast with the long queues at the snack bar.

Long Walk

Es una pena que me comiera un trozo al tomar esta serie de fotos para hacer una panorámica. El Long Walk hace honor a su nombre. Lo que se intuye al fondo (pinchar para ver la foto más grande) es el castillo de Windsor.

I screwed up taking this series of shots for the pano of the Long Walk. But I still like it. Really lucky with the weather, it was unbelievably mild for end of Oct. and beg. of November. If you click on the photo for a bigger size, you can almost see Windsor Castle.

Fotos, die jeder machen kann

Del cinco de abril al quince de mayo expondré veintipico fotos en la biblioteca local. Todavía no tengo decidido que fotos expondré. Al principio pensé en centrarme en Berlín, pero ahora me apetece más hacer una mezcla para mostrar que hoy en día cualquiera puede hacer fotos medio decentes, y de ahí el título: "Fotos que cualquiera puede hacer".

From April 5th to May 15th I will be exhibiting some twenty odd of my photos in the local library. The final selection is still open (as everything else). Initially I thought of picking up Berlin as a theme for the exhibition, which is not very original since I live here and most photos are postcard-style photos. Now that I know it will actually happen, I am considering a selection of photos that show that these days, with the advent of digital photography, any amateur can take reasonable photos, hence the title: "Photos that anybody can take".

Natural History Museum - London

Una opción perfecta para un día lluvioso en Londres. Lo que más nos gustó fue el Attenborough Studio, incluído el comentario de un niño que celebraba su cumpleaños ese día y cuando el presentador le preguntó su edad, él contestó: cuatro y medio!

I like this building and looking at the main hall, I cannot help thinking of Harry Potter...

A must for anyone spending any amount of time in London. If time allows, make sure you also visit the Attenborough Studio. The other item that is impressive is the full scale blue whale, in a way even more impressive than the one at New York (didn´t make it into the set of NY photos though).

Windsor Castle I

En las tres semanas que estuvimos en Windsor, mi familia tuvo tiempo de ver no sólo el castillo varias veces, sino también a la familia real!.

You can pay once and visit the castle as many times as you want during a year, which proved to be great value for my family, since we stayed three weeks in Windsor.

New York Sammlung

Con esto acabo las fotos de Nueva York. También se pueden ver aquí. Ahora toca Inglaterra. Estuve tres semanas trabajando aquí entre octubre y noviembre y apenas tuve tiempo de hacer fotos. Pero alguna he hecho.

And this is it for New York. The photos can be seen here. And from the next post, I will show some of the (very few) photos I took in England. I was here working for three weeks between mid October and beginning of November. Felt like coming back home. I had a lovely ride to the office along the Thames, but never the time to take a photo.

View from my hotel

Empire State Building

Rockefeller Center

Ground Zero

Brooklyn Bridge

Miss Liberty

Una de las cosas pendientes, montarme el ferry, que encima es gratis.

Maybe next time I will have time to take a ride on the ferry (weather permitting).

Central Park

Panorama desde el Top of the Rock mirando hacia el norte.

Pano from the GE building looking north

Grand Central

Éste es el resultado de juntas treinta y pico fotos (a falta de gran angular...)

I stitched thirty something photos to get this one panorama (thanks, Autostitch)

Times Square

I took this one on the day of arrival, so it must have been around 4 AM for me

Chrysler Building

El próximo més y medio habrá una entrada cada cinco días con fotos de Nueva York (por si a alguno no le gustan, que se evite la molestia de mirar el blog hasta mediados o finales de noviembre)

For info, for the next month and a half there will be just photos from New York (squeezing out the most out of a couple of days walking up and down). They will show up every five days. It is just well known buildings and landmarks, no creative photos I am afraid.

Manhattan

Como bien señalaban en los comentarios de la entrada anterior, de hecho hice más de dos fotos en Nueva York.

OK, I admittely took more than a couple of photos while in New York... This is view from the top of the GE building looking south.

New York

Aprovechando un viaje de trabajo, pasé un día y medio en Nueva York hace unas semanas. Ni que decir tiene que aproveché para hacer un par de fotos.

A few weeks ago I travelled to the USA for business reasons. Usually there is no time for anything but work, but this time I managed to squeeze in one a half days in New York before travelling to my destination. And once there, I took the opportunity to shoot a couple of photos, like every other tourist. The only thing I don´t have is a photo of myself in New York.

Rosa

Otra rosa, también regalada. / Another rose, also a gift.

Rosas

Mientras que esperaba a que terminara la copia de seguridad del disco duro (que ya tocaba), he sacado tiempo para hacer unas fotos de las rosas que nos han regalado nuestros vecinos. Eso sí, mañana estaré muerto de sueño...

The one good thing about back-ups is that you have loads of time for something else, for example, taking a couple of shots of the roses that our neighbours gave us yesterday.

Neptuno

Un día quedamos con unos amigos para tomar un café. Después dimos un paseo y pasamos por delante de esta estatua. Él y yo nos quedamos mirándola y sonreímos y su mujer nos dijo "Los tíos siempre estáis pensando en lo mismo!"

Some time ago we met some friends and went past this statue. He and I looked at it with a smile in our face, to the point that his wife snorted " You guys, just thinking about sex!" But quite honestly, who could blame us looking at this one?

Felicidad

No sé si se le podrá hacer una foto a la felicidad. Ni me importa.

Not sure if it is possible to take a photo of happyness. Not that it matters anyway.

Relevo de pósters

De cuando en cuando cambio los pósters del pasillo. Ahora que me ha dado por hacer fotos, todos son de fotos mías, excepto uno. Hasta ahora.

Ese uno era un recuerdo de mis tiempos de becario "Rafael Calvo Rodés" en el INTA. Ahora todo el mundo está acostumbrado al Google Earth, pero esto era a principios de 1998. Por cierto que esto no tenía nada que ver con mi proyecto, que era un intérprete para poder pasar la geometría desde CADDS a KIVA, un código de simulación de motores de combustión interna.

El reemplazo luce ya en el pasillo y esta tarde cuando he ido a recogerlo de la tienda, el hombre que estaba esperando detrás ha echado un vistazo y ha dicho "Cool!"...

From time to time I change the photos in the corridor at home. They are photos that I took myself, mostly family photos, except one. That is, till now.

This is from my times as a student. I got a much sought-after "Rafael Calvo Rodés" scholarhip at INTA. By the way, this had nothing to do with my project at the time, which was programming a code to translate CADDS geometry files so that they could be used by KIVA, an internal combustion engine simulation code, but it´s been with me ever after. And I´m talking 1998, long before everyone was used to satellite imagery with the likes of Google Earth.

The photo which is taking its place was shot this weekend and when I went to pick up the poster to the shop, the guy behind in the queue could not help exclaiming "Cool!", which is kind of nice.

Tic, Tac

todavía no, pero ya queda poco. Si ahora no tengo tiempo de hacer fotos para el blog, cómo será después?

It should be any time now. Just waiting for it to happen...

La crisis

La semana pasada tuve que volar de Madrid a París para una reunión. En el asiento de delante había un hombre que aprovechó el vuelo para responder emails. Uno de los mensajes le proponía una nueva oportunidad de negocio y acaba preguntando que tal iba todo.

El hombre empezó a escribir:
Todo bien...

lo borró, reflexionó y empezó de nuevo:
En general seguimos dentro de lo planes previstos, aunque no podremos conseguir todas las metas propuesta con anterioridad...

lo volvió a borrar, pensó otro rato más, y finalmente escribió:
La situación actual nos está afectando pero seguimos peleando por mantenernos a flote...

Y yo pensé: La crisis.

Por cierto, lo único que vi de París fue el aeropuerto y el hotel. Por no ver, no vi ni la torre Eiffel de lejos. Si por lo menos mi habitación hubiera dado hacia el otro lado, para una vez que estoy en la planta 15 en París...


Last week I had to fly from Madrid to Paris for a work related meeting. There was a guy in the seat in front replying to some emails during the flight. One of them was proposing some sort of new business and was asking how were things going.

The guy started with:
Everything is going fine...

after a second or two he deleted it and started again:
We are generally within the plans, although we may not be able to meet all the targets that we had committed to...

Stopped to think again and finally wrote:
The current state of the economy is having a great impact on us, but we keep fighting to stay afloat...

And then I thought: This is the crisis everyone talks about.

By the way, I didn´t get a chance to see absolutely anything in Paris. The view from the window was not bad, it was just facing the wrong side, so I could not even see the Eiffel Tower from the distance.

Off topic

Este blog lo miran entre cinco y diez personas al día, pero ayer alguien de Talavera de la Reina estuvo un par de horas mirándolo a altas horas de la madrugada. Quizás alguien en el turno de noche, o alguien con insomnio, o alguien preparando un viaje a Berlín, quien sabe. Vio unas cien entradas de un tirón, no dejó ningún mensaje (de lo cual francamente me alegro porque soy bastante malo respondiendo) y se fue.

I guess it is fair to say that this is a minority blog, with an average of 5 to 10 visits per day. However, from time to time it happens that somebody spends a bit of time browsing the blog. This happened yesterday, when somebody went through about one hundred posts in a couple of hours. He/She left without leaving any comments, and who knows what led him/her to this blog, maybe it was lack of sleep, a boring night shift or getting ready for a trip to Berlin.

Pensamientos

Por alguna razón que se me escapa, estas flores se llaman en alemán Stiefmütterchens, que traducido viene a ser madrastrillas. Pero el diccionario dice que en español estas flores se llaman pensamientos. Yo no soy el experto en botánica de la familia, y sólo sé que lucen muy bien en el balcón.

For one reason or another, these flowers are called Stiefmütterchens en German (meaning "step-mothers") and pensamientos in Spanish (meaning "thoughts"). What I know though is that they look great in our balcony.

Leipzig

No me gusta retocar las fotos, en parte por vaguería pero también porque tampoco sé hacerlo, para que nos vamos a engañar. Pero esta vez no he podido reprimirme. La de la izqda es la foto verdadera, y la de la dcha es la foto que a mí me habría gustado hacer.

Por qué no puede la gente llevarse la basura a casa?.

I don´t like retouching photos, partly because I am way too lazy for it and, on top of this, I do not know how to do it properly anyway. But this time I could not resist using the Picasa retouch option to delete all the litter. The left photo is the real one, but the one I would have liked to take is the one in the right.

Why can people not take their rubbish with them?

Poesía y Música

Ni es el primero que mi madre ha escrito y publicado ni será el último que escriba, pero es el primero que he editado yo y ayudado a publicar en un servicio de impresión bajo demanda.

Por si alguien está interesado, y aunque no es el motivo principal de hacerlo, se puede adquirir aquí.

Learning curve

I learned something very important this weekend related to photography. Gadgets can get in your way of taking the best available photos in that they make you think in a predefined path, which may not be the most appropriate, or just plainly wrong.

I have been trying different things with off camera flashes and wireless triggers for the last few months and somehow got fixed with the idea that flashes belong to the tripod (one lame excuse being that until very recently I did not have a flash I could use on my camera as they were not specific for Canon).

But I am pretty much convinced that yesterday´s shots would have come out way better just with the flash mounted on the hot shoe. Hopefully I learned the lesson.

Osterhase

I just recently got acquainted with the concept of negative space, but I have to admit I was not thinking about it at all when doing the shot, rather trying to please my family after they had finished this master piece. What would you write in the empty space?

DRK en primavera

This one is made out of almost 50 photos. I was thinking of redoing it so that the stitches can not be seen, but I actually like the effect plus the black border. This is how this looked like in winter

Esta foto está hecha a partir de otras 50. El efecto de los "cosidos" me gusta, así que creo que la voy a dejar tal cual. En invierno esto tenía esta pinta

Photo made with a demo version of Autostitch.

Reichstag (ii)

Éste es el restaurante que está en la azotea del Reichstag.

This is a shot of the restaurant on the roof of the Reichstag (open to the public), next to the dome.

Tea Time

The assignment was to photograph one or more kitchen utensils. I opened a drawer and found this to prepare tea, so there you are.

About the light, I just used one flash at 1/4 power through a self made box made out of translucid Ikea box lids with printer paper fixed on the walls.

Al final de la segunda lección hay que hacer una foto con algún utensilio de la cocina. Abrí el primer cajón y me encontré con el cacharro de hacer té (cómo se llama esto??) y el termómetro.

Un flash a un cuarto de potencia a través de una caja hecha a base de las tapas de plástico de unas cajas de Ikea (creo) con papel de impresora pegado a las paredes.

Süsser See

Dulce no sé si estaría el lago, pero helado desde luego que sí. Tomada en un alto en el camino desde aquí.

Not sure if this lake is as sweet as the name, but it was frozen for sure. Shot taken from here.

Panorama stitched with a demo version of Autostitch

Lighting 102

I have (more or less) followed Strobist for quite some time and recently I bought an ebay trigger, which basically means I can start trying off-camera lighting once I have a decent flash. While that arrives (they don´t come cheap) I have bought a ten-euro flash and start playing with it and the new possibilities it offers.

But that doesn´t mean much, because the real limiting factor is not photo gear but time itself. And that you cannot buy anywhere, and I guess the same goes for creativity...

But enough of moaning, the above is a quick try after reading the first lesson.

Aunque sigue sin sobrarme el tiempo, recientemente he adquirido un disparador inalámbrico y un flash para poder explorar otro tipo de fotografía bastante distinta de las que había hecho ahora.

La foto de arriba es el resultado después de leer la primera lección de Lighting 102, del archiconocido blog Strobist.

Reichstag

We had visitors over the weekend and went on Sat. night for a very short tour of downtown Berlin. We ended up in the Reichstag and I took the chance to make a panorama photo inside the dome made out of thirteen shots. Hardly a creative photo, I know, more like the typical tourist shot. But there is still one more to come at some point...

El sábado estuve con una visita en el centro de Berlín y subimos a la cúpula del Reichstag y aproveché para hacer la panorámica de arriba, que está hecha a partir de 13 fotos.

Panorama made with a demo version of Autostitch

Relax

La semana pasada estuvimos unos días en el parque nacional de Harz. La atmósfera del hotel era ya de por sí relajante y con muchos detalles, que es lo que intenté transmitir en las fotos.

We spent a couple of days last week relaxing in the snow in the Harz region. The atmosphere of the hotel was particularly attractive, so I tried to take some photos that would convey this feeling of relaxation...

DRK Kliniken Berlin - Westend

This is one of the hospitals we are considering for the birth of our second child. We were there some weeks ago and I made a mental note to come back during the blue hour of a day with snow, which was last Sunday. It was quite cold so I left after as little as ten minutes.


Hace unas semanas fuimos a una sesión informativa en este hospital y me dije que tenía que volver a hacer una foto en la hora azul con nieve. Si finalmente nuestro segundo hijo/a nace aquí, seguramente haré otra foto similar en verano, y entonces espero que no se me hielen los dedos después de diez minutos.

One Day in Berlin

He creado una ruta en Google Maps con una posible visita turística por el centro de Berlín, viendo las cosas típicas. Es bastante ambiciosa y un poco en plan machaca pero creo que puede hacerse en un día, al menos si no te paras mucho o tienes que esperar colas. Cuando vengan los próximos invitados probaremos a ver hasta donde llegamos (si les apetece, claro).

We have some guests coming in a couple of weeks and I was thinking of what would they like to see if they only have one or two days. I thought I´d put it on google maps as a typical Berlin tourist tour, as it may be also useful for other people.

Wörterbuch

Mecánica de Fluídos

Día de Reyes...

El Día de Reyes hay que verlo a través de la ilusión contagiosa de los niños pequeños...

Unpacking the seasonal holiday presents is something truly amazing when you do it surrounded by children...

Barajas

Por si alguien se pregunta como es posible que se pierdan o se estropeen las maletas en un aeropuerto...

Just in case somebody is wondering how come suicases get lost or damaged in airports...

Around the corner

Around the corner I have a friend,
In this great city that has no end,
Yet the days go by and weeks rush on,
And before I know it, a year is gone

And I never see my old friends face,
For life is a swift and terrible race,
He knows I like him just as well,
As in the days when I rang his bell,

And he rang mine.

We were younger then,
And now we are busy, tired men.
Tired of playing a foolish game,
Tired of trying to make a name.

"Tomorrow" I say "I will call on Jim"
"Just to show that I'm thinking of him."
But tomorrow comes and tomorrow goes,
And distance between us grows and grows.

Around the corner!- Yet miles away,
"Here's a telegram sir-"
"Jim died today."

And that’s what we get and deserve in the end.
Around the corner, a vanished friend...

by Charles Hanson Towne

Feliz Año Nuevo

Este blog recibe bastantes visitas de gente desde muchos sitios. La intención es continuar haciendo fotos en el 2009 (como la de arriba, tomada hoy mismo) y ojalá que alguna sea interesante para los que entrais aquí. Para todos, Feliz Año Nuevo!

According to Google, there are quite a few visits to this blog from people around the world. I intend to continue posting photos as I go along 2009 (the one above was taken today) and I hope you will find some of them interesting. Happy New Year!