Regatta Princesa Sofía

There was an added bonus to our Easter holidays in Mallorca, as we happened to stay on the same hotel as the Spanish Olympic sailing team. That was the week of the Regatta Princesa Sofía, and it seems pretty much every country was there in preparation of the Summer Olympic Games.


I got to talk quickly to the guy in the photo and he mentioned he was doing a time lapse. We exchanged addresses and I´m looking forward to receiving the link of the video when it is finished. If this is something to go by, it will be superb.

Otro patio

Hauptfeuerwache

Speck´s Hof

Seems like it does not matter how often I go to Leippzig, I keep finding fascinating places.

WGT 2012 Leipzig

The amount of effort, time and possibly money that people attending the Gotik Treffen in Leipzig invest on their outfits probably explains why they were also so willing to have photos taken from them. Many of them had cameras, which looked strangely out of place.

This is me!

This is the best photo from our holidays. It was taken by my daughter while I was setting the camera on the tripod to do some light painting.

View from the Opera

The University building (the one looking like a church to the right) is almost finished. I wonder what it will look like inside and if it will be open to the public in the future.

Puente

This is a good example of how new tools can give you additional possibilities. Some time ago I would not have taken this photo, since the contrast was too high for the range of my camera and I did not know how to deal with this within the simple tools I use (basically the Canon raw converter that came with the camera).


But now I am getting a feeling for which photos will be usable after running them through the demo version of Photomatix. I just need to tune my eye a bit more. And a higher usable ISO would definitely also help a lot.

Nikolaikirche Leipzig

Ayuntamiento de Leipzig

Ritterfest

El mes pasado estuvimos en un mercado medieval, donde además había un espectáculo con caballeros, princesas e incluso un dragón que echaba fuego de verdad por la boca. De hecho el dragón estaba tan bien conseguido que a mi hijo pequeño le entró miedo y me lo tuve que llevar un poco más lejos. Acabamos detrás del "castillo" donde los caballeros (y el dragón) se cambiaban al finalizar el espectáculo y pudimos ver de primera mano las impresionantes armaduras.

Fenster

Handwerker

Agrarmuseum Wandlitz

Como muy bien dicen en su página web, merece la pena visitar este museo. Nosotros lo hicimos prácticamente a solas porque llegamos justo cuando iban a abrir. Yo sinceramente no esperaba gran cosa y me fui encantado y sorprendido por la cantidad (y calidad) de objetos expuestos. Como curiosidad, de forma parecida a BMW (Bayerische Motoren Werke), en este museo hay tractores de la marca BTW (Brandenburger Traktorenwerke).

Buzón

Por alguna razón, sigo acumulando fotos de buzones, generalmente en un estado penoso de conservación. Hora de crear una nueva etiqueta.

DJH Wandlitz

Estela

Como le dije hace poco a una amiga que no creo que lea el blog, yo no me dedico a hacerle fotos a los pájaros. Pero bueno, por una vez me voy a permitir hacerlo para, de paso, romper las típicas reglas de composición. El pato está centrado verticalmente y con poco espacio hacia donde está avanzando (aunque horizontalmente sí que he tenido en cuenta la regla de los tercios).

(en realidad le hice una foto a la estela porque me recuerda las clases de aerodinámica!)

This is not Paris

Ku´damm with Leibnizstrasse

Some times I drive past one building almost every day and I keep thinking, I have to come back to take a photo of this one. But it can literally take years until I do it. OK, one less in that list.

Lámpara

Lobby at the Empire State Building

I did not go up, and I think it was so empty because it was too early. I did ask for permission before doing the shot, since there was no way of avoiding the concierge in the frame (not that I wanted to).

Chimeneas

Engrossed in drawing

I spotted this lady sitting barefoot on a bench and tried to take a photo from far away with the tripod, while pretending to take a photo of the mdr building (in the background, not to be seen in this shot). But then I thought it would be more polite to ask for permission (and actually much easier to frame her properly) and came with the camera to ask. I told her about the blog and the Serenity series, and she agreed, so I went back and took this shot while she was drawing some sort of angel. I know this because I wrote the address of this blog on her drawing pad. Hope she likes the photo.

Do you mind if I take a photo of you?

I spent recently a long weekend in Leipzig, where the annual Wave Gotik Treffen meeting took place. The city was literally flooded with people worth looking at. And most were more than willing to pose for anybody with a camera. But I guess that was not quite what I was looking for. However, some recent reading about street photography pointing out that asking goes a long way, took me to a first (for me), asking a complete stranger if I could take a photo of her while she was reading. And the answer was yes!


But the initial photo I took was not particularly good. As David duChemin mentions in one of his books, you need a great foreground and a great background, and the latter was not really what I wanted for this series (a group of fairly loud punks which eventually started a fight, hardly what you would have as a connecting thought for serenity). So after reviewing the photos I hanged around a bit longer until I came up with the shot above. For the sake of completeness, the initial shot is shown below. The good news, I actually got another one for this series later on from somebody else.

Composition

I take most of my photos while walking around, without much time to think for composition (shame on me, I know). In this case, however, I sort of knew what I wanted on my photo. I wanted the blurred S-Bahn train. And so I waited for five of ten minutes until the next train arrived.


And of course the evening light is a blessing for the chimneys and the bridge.

Sommerbad Wilmersdorf

This was the last photo of a bicycle photo tour with a friend earlier this year which, in the end, had more bicycle than photo content. 

Definitely worth 10 euros now

For people following this blog since quite a while, you will notice that this is an old photo, just with new post processing.


Reason for this photo to show up here again is that last weekend I was in a similar situation. On my way to Leipzig for the weekend I just remembered leaving the memory card forgotten in the computer at home. And the back up card was not in the pocket either (damn it!). So after arriving I headed for the local Saturn store in the Hauptbahnhof. To my surprise they only sell CF cards from San Disk and they were quite pricey, starting at 25 euros. I obliged and went back home thinking of a checklist (which to this date I have not done) that I have been needing for quite some time now.


Long story short, I found out that the camera actually had a memory card in, although with only 60 shots left from the previous long weekend. In my rush to get to the shop before lunch I had not even checked the camera! In the end I managed with whatever space I had left, decided not to take photos of all the Gothik costumes flooding the city center, and just found some time to go around taking some interesting shots that should be appearing here in a few days.

French Cathedral