0205 - in the spotlight

setup: canon eos 400d with efs 18-55mm | 27mm | f4.0 | ISO1600 | 1/50 | aperture priority | raw files cropped, aligned and processed in lightroom 4

... for tina is today, that her night duty proceeds as relaxed as it had begun. i just surprised her with a thermos bottle filled with hot mcdonalds cappuccino.

afterwards she showed me the stark mood of an abandoned hospital at night.

marginal note:
during the last days i have bothered about my blog and its keynote. in my opinion there are enough 365 days projects that have no quality. it's all right as long as a pic is published every day. the quality of these blogs' images suffers for example from the lack of adequate scenes. that is not what i want. that's why i have declared some rules for me and my project:

- the photo is the central element on the blog.

- the most important thing is not the equipment (although i'm looking forward to my birthday and hopefully a nice present), the important thing is you by yourself. the idea, the composition, the implementation, the processing, nothing else matters. nevertheless i'm going to milk the capabilities of the nex as good as possible.

- like the blog name explains i'll publish (minimum) one photo a day, but the blog isn't a dedicated 365 days / one year project, it's simply a day by day photography website. why shall i commit myself to only one year? is the aim of shooting a pic a day so nerving that you long for the end of the project already at the beginning of it?

- if there is nothing to tell on a given day, no posting will be published. instead of wasting my and your time with struggling about the bad quality of an enforced shot on an uninspired day i'll have a good time fiddling with my bunch of other hobbies. stress and restrictions are ever-present in the daily life, i don't want to get worked up over by this project someday.

- but: my cam will accompany me every day and night to every location. i'm very disciplined, you can expect that certainly more than 300 pics will be shot and published during the next year.

for this reasons i hereby declare my project as already on-going. only the tools will change in a few days, but that's why i don't expect real improvements in the overall picture quality by itself. at first i have to hone my skills.

cu, trshptr

3004 - s-curve

setup: canon eos 400d with efs 18-55mm | 18mm | f5.6 | ISO100 | 1/640 | aperture priority | raw files cropped, aligned and processed in lightroom 4

today and tomorrow are fortunately still non-working days, at least for me. tina had to work today because diseases aren't directed by the calendar. so i had decided already at the weekend that today should be a bicycle day for me.

while my excursion i was cycling through three countries: of course germany with its regions baden and wuerrtemberg, austria with the vorarlberger land and finally the switzerland. at romanshorn i took the ferry back to friedrichshafen. at the end of my tour i had driven 120km by bike. not that bad, besides my butt i feel fine. you can comprehend the whole route here [click].

one special thing attracted my attention: after the very modest, peaceful and contemplative holidays in sardinia i was really shocked by the prosperity tourism and the conceited high society that i had to see today. it was a scenery like a disney land for pensioner. huge mercedes benz with gold decorated ladies inside were parking in front of showy golf and yacht clubs. barf!

cleanliness, perfection and wealth - these things were hard to take for me today. fortunately the surroundings were getting more authentic in the switzerland. i saw construction zones, suburbs and eventual more normal people than tourists. finally i found the gangplank shown in the pic above near rohrschach, where ornithologists had arranged themselves for the observation. moody chill out area.

cu, trshptr

2904 - green lungs

setup: canon eos 400d with efs 18-55mm | 18mm | f9.0 | ISO800 | 1/125 | aperture priority | raw files cropped, aligned and processed in lightroom 4

again at last the first night in my own bed after the return of two weeks of travel. once i had ended the first session of post-processing of the accrued pictures at 0130am and my subsequent sleep at 0900am i considered the next big bunch of pics that i had shot in sardinia. unfortunately i'm still not half-done. cheer up, the way is the goal. learning by doing, that's what it is all about.

at 0300pm tina took me out to an excursion to a keep-fit-trail in the middle of the forest of the hill gehrenberg. we really had a lot of fun while we were running through the course. 13 sporty stages had to be done.

the 14th one was called breath. always keep breathing.

cu, trshptr

2104 - nothing but energy

setup: canon eos 400d with efs 18-55mm | 28mm | f8.0 | ISO200 | 1/800 | aperture priority | raw files cropped, aligned and processed in lightroom 4 

i'm back from my holiday trip to sardinia, italy. what a great island! sincere persons, delicious food, beautiful mountain villages and not least an impressive shore. the picture above was shot on last saturday at a beach south of bosa.

1804 - time has stopped

setup: canon eos 400d with efs 18-55mm | 18mm | f8.0 | ISO100 | 1/160 | aperture priority | raw files cropped, aligned and processed in lightroom 4 

... in east germany. 

like i said yesterday we unfortunately had to give an immediate family member to tina's grandma. ria, as tina's grandmother is called, lives in thuringia close to the town zeulenroda with her husband guenther and her dog lea. because tina and i want to support zizou during her acclimatization here in thuringia, we'll stay at grandma's home until friday. besides fitful sleep this circumstance means that i'll have the opportunity to shoot some decay-tinted pics in the rustic area of the former gdr.

i've really turned the kind of today's photo over in my mind. should i publish a espacially brutal and negativ photo of a destroyed factory that you can find here at every turn? or shall i take a pic that shows the great boom of the last twenty years? i decided to pursue the middle course. on the pic above you can see an old disused building of the former government enterprise wema, what is a german abbreviation for tool machinery factory. as you know the german democratic republic was an almost complete closed economy. that's why a great many of companies had to be closed in the course of the german reunification, the so called turnaround in 1990. 

as part of the omission of the gdr four to five years after the turnaround the wema broke away, too. the clock on the front of the wema building seems to act out of spite - it has stopped years ago.

cu, trshptr

1504 - the wheel

setup: canon eos 400d with efs 18-55mm | 18mm | f8.0 | ISO800 | 8s | aperture priority | raw files cropped, aligned and processed in lightroom 4 

the day after. slightly headache, thirst and haven't slept very well. what's the point - you must finish what you start. therefor we had a huge breakfast with toasted ciabatta, cold cuts and what else belongs to it. in addition to that strengthening i had to get a breath of fresh air. 

after my weekly football match on sunday noon i carried out some tiny little tasks like to put some things away into the cellar. there i hit on the idea to make the basement of our marvellous house the subject of today's posting. like i said before our house is more than 300 years old. also its basement is a feast for the eyes. it was used as a wine cellar for many a long year. today every now and then we hold a cellar party for our friends. the illumination with candles is stunning. during the residual time the basement lies almost empty.

today i caught sight of a very moody scene of wheels. the sparsely light was inciding through an old wooden wheel. our new neighbors must have parked an ancient blue bicycle in the middle of the place where the light beam was impinging on the floor today. and the profile of the room is a semicircle itself. 

great atmosphere in an almost complete circular surrounding.

cu, trshptr

1104 - moonless night

setup: canon eos 400d with efs 18-55mm | 25mm | f8.0 | ISO100 | 15s | aperture priority | multiple triggered with android application dslrcontroller | raw files cropped, aligned and processed in lightroom 4

urban abandoned places at night have a great appeal with me. see that i had to cater anything for dinner this evening, an urban self-shot was obvious.

while i was driving around the town i was on the look-out for a moody place where i could capture a frozen long-time exposed, depressed shot of a small being in the middle of impressive architecture. really no easy statement of task in the middle of nowhere but i'm not going to lower my sights until i hit the wall. satisfaction implies stagnation.

in my opinion except a little light scattering in the lower middle the picture turned out very well. it shows the educational center of markdorf that was built in 1972. i love the architecture of the 70s with its straight lines, strict symmetry, the plain facades and the primary structures made of metal. it is simple and timeless. and if you put an outlined, shadowed person in the center of attention and illumination, your composition becomes clearer and more consistent. a picture turns into a story.

cu, trshptr

0904 - tickets, please

setup: canon eos 400d with efs 18-55mm | 53mm | f6.3 | ISO800 | 1/100 | aperture priority | raw files cropped, aligned and processed in lightroom 4

yesterday i waxed lyrical about this long weekend, today in the morning it came to an abrupt interruption: at 7am marv had to be taken to the railstation in ueberlingen where he got his lift to berlin. unfortunately i was not in a really good temper, probably i had slept lightly. no skiving, ok. but sometimes it has to be ok to rest easy.

while tina and marv were waiting for the arrival of the lift i took the eos and walked around at the place. ueberlingen´s rail station which was in a complete calm and abandoned state at this holiday´s morning is a deeply interesting example of infrastructure-architecture. into a subjacent platform with old brickwork and historical bridges bordering the terrain - i stood at one of this while capturing the picture above - new glazed and metallic elements like stairs, elevators and escalators were integrated.

the structural conditions combined with a fairly large quantity of doves, a very small quantity of human beings and the cold, clear air led on to the impression of a special mood. that made my day already at its early beginning.

dove, you tiny little train guard - have fun. hope you have a handle on the goings-on.

cu, trshptr