2003 - courtyard with bakehouse

courtyard with bakehouse and pigsty

setup: canon eos 400d with efs 18-55mm | 27mm | f9.0 | ISO100 | 1/100 | aperture priority | jpg file cropped, aligned and processed in gimp 2.6

After a great long night - had slept from 11pm to 7am - the shiny morning sun bid me welcome back to life. it is always a better start of the day if outside is at least a tiny little more brightness than in your unlighted sleeping room. so understandably todays breakfast especially hit the spot.

completely satisfied i entered our courtyard, as usual the camera stored in my bag waiting for daily surprises. tina and i live in a more than 300 years old timber-framed house which was the home for many nuns in the 18th and 19th century. the building is an absolute eye candy - the former workmen used beams that are anything but straight, unique bricks and natural tiles. we were lucky that the sanitation was completely modernized before our moving in, the building itself had already been restored in the 1990´s.

it´s a kind of magic to spend time in that wonderful piece of history. you´ll participate in my experiences during the following year(s) - i´ve got many ideas how photographies of details or whole parts of this house can revive this blog. hopefully living beeings will play their role, too.

by reason of the dwarfs only suitable ceiling height photos of our flat won´t come up before my equipment supports high iso capturing. but that doesn´t mean that our environment couldn´t be a part of my day by day blog shooting yet: right on your doorstep there follows a huge courtyard with an enormous lime in its middle. at the northern end you can find a small single family living house that in former times had been used by the nuns as a bakehouse and in front of it a tiny small pigsty that acts as a storage shed today. our groudskeeper seems to like the colour orange - me too.

regardless i decided to develop this photography in a cold and hard style without much colour because the summer is still far away and the temperatures don´t yet allow to put the winter coat away. furthermore in my opinion this kind of image processing perfectly shows the compromise between the sensitivity and the resistivity of buildings like that - they really don´t have a new look but come back in 10 years and they will appear like today.

don´t be afraid again: it will not be my focus to process my images, their natural characters are most important for me. so welcome to our nearest neighbourhood. have a peep, but be discreet.

cu, trshptr

1903 - power failure

power failure

setup: canon eos 400d with efs 18-55mm | 30mm | f4.0 | ISO800 | 1/6 | aperture priority | cropped, aligned and processed in rawtherapee

on the way home from todays work i stopped at an old factory that i had discovered some days ago. i love architecture, i love nature, but both in compound i love most. thatswhy old collapsed buildings marked by the laws of nature fascinate me.

Afterwards i parked my car not far away from the building at a small street i had to chop through some fields of apple trees to reach the factory. the provisional fence was no problem for me.
unfortunately today the light was not nearly as bright as yesterday. So my good old - temorarily used - canon reached its high iso limits already at iso800. even if i usually require a little more support of my equipment today in the evening some suitable photos appeared.

i found this old destroyed fuse box in an almost complete collapsed outbuilding. indeed the image noise cannot be overlooked the overall quality is not that bad. nevertheless i´m happily looking forward my birthday when this project blog finally and officially will be activated with the purchase of a sony nex x. x={5N,7}.

enjoy electricity free time without any fuses after reading that posting.

cu, trshptr

1803 - looking down and up

looking down and up

setup: canon eos 400d with efs 18-55mm | 48mm | f6.3 | ISO100 | 1/640 | aperture priority | cropped, aligned and processed in rawtherapee

later in the day we again recognized why the area around lake constance is famous for its grey days: within minutes the very intense micro climate caused by the lake by itself and the alps produced heavily fog that melted the sky and the horizon to a milky, grey mixture.

an old man looking down and feeding the ducks gave me a perfect contrast to the upwardly directed field glasses. i like the minimalistic character of this image, its huge grey areas realistically reproduce the drop of temperature and change of mood caused by the rapid weather turn.

cu, trshptr

1703 - yo soy

looking for something

setup: canon eos 400d with efs 18-55mm | 55mm | f5.6 | ISO100 | 1/200 | aperture priority | cropped and processed in rawtherapee

today the weather was beautiful. so it was our decision to chill a little bit at the lake, drink a bunch of coffee and capture some photos. slightly inciting that tina shot two photos which are at least as coherent as the best of mine.

so now it is a pleasure for me to publish a partial image of my own with the first serious photography that was taken by my wife.

cu, trshptr

1603 - street art london

Street Art II

setup: canon eos 400d with efs 18-55mm | 18mm | f8 | shot 3 pics in aperture priority | mounted on gorilla pod | exposure values -2, 0, +2 | hdr composed in picturenaut

at the beginning of february 2012 my wife tina, one of my best friends martin, his girlfriend jule and i flew to london for a chill and party weekend.
we walked around most of the time and looked for any kind of interesting location to absorb the atmosphere and learn about the finenesses of london.

as far as i can see eyery city has its own flavor - in 2011 we visited many european cities with great characteristics including bilbao, edinburgh, zurich, glasgow, porto, stuttgart, munich and so on. not any of this has the cosmopolitan flair of london, neither my favorit city hamburg where my wife and i spent four years of our lifes. in return central london can´t afford that real english image - its core is a melting pot like new york, berlin, paris and maybe milan.
So for me the most interesting areas could be found in the suburbs and minor roads.

in one of this "second class roads" next to the waterloo station the city government established an official graffiti area where already banksy had left his marks. i developed this realistic hdr photography for my friend martin because he is such a big fan of street art. on his birthday in the middle of february i gave him a printed book with the best shots from our london trip as a present, the photo above was included.

1503 - introduction

trshptr, t.r.s.h.p.t.r or trashpater, that´s it. not really.

offstage there hides a (much more than only) photography interested nobody (named Alex), born in 1984, whose decision to upgrade from smartphone snapshoting to serious digital imaging arrived in summer of 2011.

with this tiny little webpage i´d like to document my personal progress of learning photography techniques and developing an eye for moments and details.

if you participate in this blog you´ll accompany me on my way through germany and europe, through public and private issues.

in my opinion in real world photography the photo itself should not gain center stage. what is your achievement if you missed the situation?
that´s why my future camera has to be compact and inconspicuously - sony nex, ready for competition?
currently i work with the canon eos 400d of my mother-in-law, but an upgrade is abundant.

coming trips will lead my wife and me in the next three months to manchester (uk), sardinia (it) and algarve (pt). my stamping ground is the area around lake constance in the south of germany.

it is my intention to get this blog to work in the coming weeks publishing some "old" shots from the eos 400d until i give the nex - probably the 5n - myself as a present in may 2012.
after that i hope to hang on to publish a photo every day , in consequence of dead zones in the middle of nowhere a delay of few days has to be accepted.
http://366nex.blogspot.com served as a model for this blog, i recommend luca´s blog to everybody who´s interested in superior photography and plastic and straight real world stories told by one simple image a day.

my challenge for march and april is to determine which lenses i should buy as a basic package.
at the moment my favorites are the sel 50f1.8 (already ordered), the kit lens (increases the price of the cam only about 180€ - must-have) and maybe the sel 55-210.
furthermore i observe ebay to purchase a secondhand sel 16f2.8 pancake. in the distant future my view will focus on manual lenses but therefor i need a bunch of more experience. time will tell.

don´t worry, the blog design will receive an update soon.

cu, trshptr