Bremen, Germany. A view over an inner-city lake (Werdersee) towards the inner center of the city. Nice light, nice combination of old and new, trees and buildings.

Thomas

Are you still spending time in photo forums? Which ones?

My reason for asking: I have just been browsing through my bookmarks (yeah, I guess I really haven’t had anything better to do….). And I discovered that I have quite a few links to photo-forums in which I was rather active for a while. For some reason I let that lapse, and I’m wondering why. Some of the forums are just too technical (i.e. only gear, but nothing else), so I guess that’s an easy explanation why I lost interest after a while. But there are others that were more rewarding, and still…

Maybe I should make a conscious effort and take stock which ones are (still) out there and which ones could be interesting… So, any good suggestions?

And, yes, it’s back. Wnter I mean. After a couple of warmer day, with a lot of snow melt, we’re back to some decent degrees below freezing point. But you can already feel that the days are really getting longer.

And, despite all the wide-screen monitors, I still haven’t found a decent way to put very-landscapish photos online in a decent way. Ah, whatever…

Thomas

Although I really enjoy this year’s winter – time for some off-season colors!

Have a good start into the week!
Thomas

Ok, the weather has been absolutely stunning over the last couple of days, with bright sunshine and temperatures just below freezing point. Time to shed the excuses, re-locate those running shoes and… get going again.

First impressions: Much more fun than any indoor-activity. Not only body-related fitness, but also a lot of mental benefits. But it took a while to convince my body that he has been doing that before. Not so long ago, actually.

And I thought it was time again for an abstract shot. Some photoshopping, of course. Hope I didn’t overcook the picture.

Thomas

And another impression from a calm and cold coast.

Thomas

Thomas

Thomas

Average day temperatures around -10 °C (10 °F) and night tempertures often approaching -20 °C (-4 °F)… That really needs getting used to. So does the view of a frozen sea. It’s been a while since I’ve seen that and it actually poses a real photographic problem for me: how do you capture that frozen, wide, clean emptiness? Hm.

Thomas

PS.: Oh, by the way: record for this winter in Sweden for this winter: -40 °C (-40 °F). In view of such temperatures, I guess, one could say that we have a streak of cozy weather right now…

Phew, I can only hope that the rest of 2010 is not going to be as hectic as its first weeks. Only the usual catastrophes and some urgent deadlines to survive. Nothing really problematic – but I’m already starting to feel a bit wrung out.

So I needed a calm, soothing photo for now. And still lifes in snow always work perfectly in that respect. Together with a square frame.

Thomas

Thomas

Well, I just came across 1x.com, which in my mind is a multi-author photography site and forum that really stands out from the crowd. I just discovered it a couple of days ago, but the quality of the photos on the site is really, really high.

The forum of the site seems to be still rather small, but it seems to be a place to keep an eye on. Check here the top ten things to look for in landscape photography. Mostly the plain old rules, but its nice to be reminded in a short summary – in order to know when to break them. But again, just take a look at the photos that are linked from the text. Wonderful. My major complaint: I don’t like the visual look and feel of the forum. Too dark, too cramped, not easy enough on the eye.

But the photos are certainly worth more than just one visit. Just wanted to let you know – in case you have some time that you would like to invest in “passive photography”…

Thomas

Another photo from the building of Germany’s Environmental Agency. What you see on the roof are solar panels that are used for driving the air condition in summer. I really like that jujitsu-type of approach: even if its hot outside – we’ll use that energy for making it comfortable for us. Neat… a step away from stoneage technology (aka burning some kind of carbon-based fuel). Actually, the building – which hosts around 500 offices – uses roughly 30% less energy than an average office building.

Oh, by the way, have you followed the recent discussion on the emails that were stolen from the main server from one of UKs climate research groups? I can’t really tell you how disgusting and insane I find it.

I mean, independent on whether those guys whose emails were stolen behaved properly (and evidence suggest, they did not, at least not completely) – the intellectual level of the current discussion is below sea level. Hordes of people who can’t even write a post in their mother tongue without more grammar and spelling errors than a 5-year old child and a scientific background that a medieval farmer would have found disgusting. But an absolutely certain knowledge that climate change is of course not at all caused by humans. A religious conviction that any fanatic would be proud of.

Don’t get me wrong, I really like the logic behind the argumentation. It’s like saying “Hey, they said somebody faked money. I didn’t bother to check, but Santa Claus told me. So, money’s worthless then, isn’t it? No, sorry, then I don’t want to be paid for my work any more!”

In the climate change discussion Santa could be depicted by a number of people, Glenn Beck from Foxnews would for example work nicely.

Despite all its brilliance, unfortunately, climate won’t bother to obey to that type of argumentation.

And to make matters worse, I started to browse some of the websites that people linked to during the discussion. I’ll spare you the details, but this one here won my personal award for the most disgusting site ever: prisonplant.com. Quote from this article:

Hitler-admiring Governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger is having to resort to his wobbly acting skills in a desperate effort to rescue the crumbling edifice of the global warming fraud – by recycling debunked alarmist propaganda about rising sea levels

Boy, am I pissed off!

Thomas

The building of the German Federal Environmental Agency – built in Dessau and opened for buisiness in 2005. I was genuinely impressed. It’s an administrative building after all – and they tend to be a bit dull and boring. But this one is really beautiful. It is located in Dessau, a small town in the eastern part of Germany (roughly 50 km south-east of Berlin to be precise), which was also the location of the famous Bauhaus school of architecture. I guess that was a bit of an obligation as well as an inspiration.

On a historical note: One of the teachers at the Bauhaus school was Lyonel Feininger, father to Andreas Feininger. You might have heard of him…

Thomas

Thomas

Link to the complete gallery

Link to the complete gallery

I’m just back from a nice workshop. Photo-workshop, for a change. Up to the Highlands of Scotland. Wonderful.

Ok, that’s the short version. To make it a bit longer: I went up to the small town of Glencoe, which is located in the western parts of the Scottish highlands, in order to participate in a workshop run by Ian Cameron (see his website here and his PBase collection here). I had been enjoying his photos for quite a while and I couldn’t resist the temptation of being taught a thing or two by him – in an absolutely gorgeous area, in which I already had been hiking before.

I  underestimated a bit how long it might take took to actually go up there – roughly 14 hours door-to-door, starting at 4.30 in the morning, with a tram. Then another tram, a bus, first flight, second flight, overland bus, local bus. Yawn…The hotel that Ian selected was nice and cozy, close to some nice scenery and the food was good. Although I will never understand how people can cope with bacon, baked beans, blood pudding and kipper in the morning!.

Major problem during the workshop itself: the weather. Don’t get me wrong, I’m used to Swedish autumns (wet!) – but handling a lot of gear is somewhat problematic in a constant downpour or hailstorm. I actually managed to have a brand new B&W polarizer ruined  by a passing lorry (sprayed with a nice mixture of water, gravel and diesel). Thanks for that. And my super-high tech wipes for my lenses didn’t cope. Mpf.

The area itself is simply wonderful: wide open, moors and hills. A landscape that takes some time of getting used to. But then: absolutely wonderful.

Getting to know Ian and his approach to photography was really a rewarding experience that I enjoyed a lot. He is approaching photography from a very goal-oriented perspective: carefully selected, highly specialized and completed set of gear (build around the Pentax 6×7) . And no time wasted on any unimportant side-tracks, such as regularly buying new cameras or lenses. Instead investing the time to do photography. Just take a look at his sites – his strategy certainly seems to work.

We were six people participating in the workshop, which I first thought as a comparatively small group. But during the course of the workshop I realized that it is actually somewhere near the upper limit. Maybe I’ll go for a 1-2-1 tuition next time. We’ll see.

Photos. Oh yes, I managed to get some. Please find the whole gallery over at SmugMug. And of course the head image of this post was also taken during the workshop.

View photos at SmugMug

The idea was in general to keep the layout and design of the site as simple as possible by all means. It was actually quite hard to find a template for Wordpress that works along those lines – you find hundreds of templates with a gazillion of gadgets, animations, space for banners, silly background graphics and those things. But I wanted exactly the opposite. Finally, I settled to start with olipo, a theme designed by Andrea Mignolo and I’m going to work my way from there. Let’s see where I end up.

I decided to make tabula rasa and not import my old posts, comments and photos. To be honest, that was a quite hard decision – roughly a hundred posts, nearly 300 comments and about 120 photos went up in a puff of (virtual) smoke – although everything is of course safe and sound stored in an archive on my harddrive. Which I guess will be starting to collect dust rather soon. I’m also going to outsource my photos and galleries, as I realized that doing that myself is too much of a hassle. More on that soon.

See you around!

Thomas