Next Series

I just decided that I will prepare a series of black & white street photographs soon.

Loretta Lux & Andrzej Dragan

Have you heard about Loretta Lux? She does extraordinary digital photography with children. I noticed her about a year ago at the fotocommunity website. I was astonished by those weird looking images, but didn't keep her name in mind for some reason. When I visited the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco last winter, I surprisingly found myself in front of some of her pictures again. Since then I'm aware of that name and took the chance to see more of her pictures last Saturday at the Yossi Milo Gallery.
Speaking of fascinating digital portraiture, I don't wanna miss referring you to Andrej Dragan's website. These pictures simply freak me out every time I visit his page. He invented the technique called "retouch of light" he processes his pictures with. As a Photoshop newbie, I simply emailed him and asked for a hint about how this works. He offered me a tutorial for (I think it was) 300 Euros. I don't doubt that it's worth the money, but I know that those images are not only processed in a great way. The actual photographs are of high quality, too. Not speaking of the challenge of directing a person to look a certain way. My conclusion: There are so many things one can experiment with and it's all for free, let's first dedicate our little spare time to that.

Here are the links. Enjoy!
Loretta Lux
Andrzej Dragan

Halloween Press Passes

New York is a crazy place and so are the New Yorkers. What happens when these people walk in a Halloween parade, you can see every year in October. The NYC Halloween Parade is a lot of fun with two million spectators and thousands of participants. Last year I squeezed myself into the crowd to take pictures from the side line. I gave the results to the organizers as a contribution to their official website and taataaa! yesterday they assured me a press pass for this year. This will allow me to be inside the parade and move freely, which should improve the quality of my work significantly. Here are two of my last year's pictures. The NYC Halloween Parade is listed in the book "100 Things to Do Before You Die". Don't miss it!

I Wish I had a Time Machine

I met my old fellow Stefan and we figured out that we both started to have the same hobby, even our equipment is pretty similar. So Stefan came up with the idea to go on a little afternoon photo safari and shoot whatever is available in our area. We decided to go for a medieval ruin which is a five minute drive away from the place I grew up. Now I have this nice little castle in my blog and you can be sure not to see something like that here again in the near future - I'm back to the new world.

Not the Way I Left It

The long awaited arrival of the summer and this great soccer world cup turned Germany into a huge party place. Due to historical reasons, waving a German flag was considered something weird to do since a long time (I personally never had a flag in my hands). Now it seems like the time has come and especially the younger generations got back some self confidence. Black, Red and Gold are the colors of the season and a hearty celebration goes through the country. It's nice to be at home.

Bearding the Lion in His Den

What El Arenal is for the Germans is Palmanova for the English. The funny thing is that these places are on the same little island (Mallorca), but if you go and check both out, you might notice that it feels like visiting two different countries, due to the straightly separated "populations". So here I am. Palmanova, Saturday June 10th, 3pm, England vs. Paraguay on a large screen and a hungry British mob in front of it. It was a good event for some freaky head shots, but at the same time the ugliest (not "the most ugly") mission of my young Photography "career". My camera drank some beer and I lost some blood*. However, we both survived.

*Finding first aid can be challenging sometimes :-)

Still Waters Run Deep

I was advised not to ask too many questions to my readers. So this one is without :-)
I'm finally visiting my hometown Limburg in Germany. Limburg is a cute town on the Lahn river almost exactly between Cologne and Frankfurt. Here I had the chance to hang out at a little freestyle session of "Stille Wasser" last night. You cannot miss these guys, if you are living in that area and you like Rap music. The MCs are very energetic and the DJs have a good hand for beats. At least I liked the choice very much. Here are my favorite photographs of that night.

A Saturday Night in London

Have you ever walked around in Central London on a Saturday night? If not, please do so and let me know what your impression was. I was pretty convinced that the whole city is drunk and Big Ben and I are the only sober guys around. Don't get me wrong, I was highly entertained by that. However, I walked around there and my mission was to catch some beauty with my little camera. Yes, it feels like it sounds, it's just like hunting. Different from all the other people around me, I didn't numb my visual perception, which apparently lowers the chance of being satisfied with your catch. But I scored. I stared at Big Ben for about ten minutes, and I think I stared so hard, that I caused the lights to turn off just by looking at it. The fact that I just did that, made me stare like a meerkat for a while without moving. It took me another ten minutes and then I was fine with the idea of having supernatural powers. I had a big question mark hovering over my head, wondering if the other tourists next to me realized that I did that and started to feel a bit uncomfortable in the role of the spoiler. You can imagine what that looks like: My head is still staring up, while my eyes are rolling carefully from one side to the other observing disappointed tourists.
Okay, let's come to the point. Here is the beauty I was talking about. I felt very attracted by the wasted look of these lanterns in front of the cloudy London sky. Of course there were plenty of wasted looking people around I could put in front of the sky instead, but the lanterns seem much more mystic to me. What happened to them? Do the people shoot at them? Or are there other supernatural beings around who are more into damaging small lanterns than turning off big lights? If yes, thank you guys, it looks just great!