salem

2305 - castle of dreams

castle of dreams

setup: sony nex 7 with sel 50 f1.8 | 50mm | f8.0 | ISO100 | 1/80 | lightroom 4

after three years of permanent, weekly travels because of my job i really don't want to be lonely anymore. for this reasons night duty days of tina sometimes put me into a slightly depressive mood. there it was a heaven-sent opportunity that my evening mountain bike tour led me into the well-lit forest where i finally was acting on my feelings. and fortunately on my way to nowhere i almost accidentally came by the castle of salem.

we live at the lake constance for three years now but during this time we have never been at the castle, even less its inner yard or garden. i did not know how great the whole grounds actually are. moreover today evening an enchanted atmosphere was dominating. the pic above expresses this hogwart like mood very well - no, i'm not a harry potter fan, i had to google the name of his school - although i applied only a little bit of post processing to the raw file, excluded the black and white conversion. i will definitely come back to this magnificent area to accurately inspect the total and its details and to tell you more about its history.

previously two more nice pics of today evening can be found on my flickr stream.

cu, trshptr

1805 - illuminated

illuminated

setup: canon eos 400d with efs 18-55mm | 55mm | f5.6 | ISO800 | 1/50 | lightroom 4

for our today's excursion we visited the monkey hill in salem. round about 200 barbary apes live in a mostly species-appropriate husbandry on an area of approximately 12 hectare in the forest in the middle of nowhere.

it was very interesting to observe the social structure of their hierarchy. the 200 monkeys are separated into three groups of 50 to 80 animals. each group has one male and one female chief. furthermore the whole population has a overall chief of each gender. at monkey hill the most important rule is to avoid any contact with the current babies. every monkey would protect these little newborns against any - in his opinion - negative influences. to sum up i can say that in many aspects barbary apes are very similar to human beings.

however evident similarities between yesterday's and today's subject are quite accidentally. ;-)

cu, trshptr