Snapshot in the streets of SF.

Upright Citizen

Citizen of a box with an artificial sky. I'm pretty sure this fellow has never seen any birds in his life nor will he ever see one.
However, he spends half of his life staring at the ceiling of his box....just to make sure :-)

Nassau Hall, Princeton

Warder's Room

Building 64

Taken on Alcatraz Island.

Day 8

All right, my last day in the city is already two days in the past. However, I owe this blog a post about it.
This picture of the Golden Gate Bridge in the clouds is from an adventurous hike on the hills of Sausalito, Saturday morning.

Speaking of Painted Ladies

I ran into the San Francisco Twins the other day.

Days 6 & 7

Cagil asked for pictures of painted ladies so I went to the Alamo Square which has a famous postcard view, I will show that later.
What I actually wanted to say is, later on I walked from Alamo Square to the Hippie district, had some delicious grilled chicken at Burger Joint and walked up Haight Street. I passed a funny place that looked kinda empty and colorful. A girl was standing out front and smiling at me so I asked her what this is all about. She told me this is a healing place where people come for Yoga and Meditation. She told me that they also have a Sauna and a Jacuzzi in their garden and offered me to join her. Well, I love Sauna and Whirlpools and all those things that make you relax, so I had a closer look. Some people were around, busy with painting walls and creating business cards, they obviously just started this place. However, everybody seemed sane, so I decided to join in for some Sauna :-) It was really great.
I got to talk to the maker of a new Ambient radio station called Sleepbot. Didn't have time to listen to it yet, but it might be similar to Groove Salad - which is nice.
The garden was fantastic. For a while I was all by myself in the water just looking at the stars when I heard some rustling in the bushes. Guess what it was...a Raccoon family. They came very close and stared at me sitting in the water. I did the same. No moving, just starring. I'm good in that :) After a while they slowly but surely made their way back into the bushes...very cute.
So if anybody is interested in this place, here is some more information.

A picture from yesterday.

Day 5

San Francisco days are long. If I don't get up at totally insane times for sunrise shooting, I usually wake up by the noise of roommates or the cleaning lady. I'm an expert now. I found out that the sound of nail clipping works best for waking me up. After breakfast I do mostly nothing but walking. When the sun starts to go down I start photographing, mostly with tripod and exposure bracketing for HDR processing. Yesterday I switched a lot between different ISO settings in order to blend in moving objects (i.e. a cable car) into the images. Similar as I did with the bicyclist in the Frankfurt picture, which is still one of my favorite.
However, looking at the different exposures doesn't really tell me if I'll be happy with the final DRI. Yesterday night I was too tired to process the data, instead I watched Escape form Alcatraz to make the whole Alcatraz experience complete. Watching this movie I gradually got more and more into the mood for old SF movies. As next, I might watch Hitchcock's Vertigo, which happens to rank 35 among the best movies of all times according to IMDB.

Day 4

The number of my Japanese travel friends is increasing. We were four today, but our ways will part tomorrow.
I made it to Alcatraz for the first time. The audio tour is extremely good. I would actually love to watch "Escape from Alcatraz" right now...

Snapshots of the day

Coit Tower

The Germans

The third day already

This is my third day in San Francisco and the 63rd day since my very first arrival. However, I'm still excited like a 5 year old in Disney Land...how strange is that? I'm trying to figure out why this is, but didn't come to a real conclusion. There are two things I've found out so far. It might be that I'm still very much reminded of my first trip here as a 17 year old, which was a very positive and intense experience I guess. Second, everything just suits me here. The climate and the fresh air of the pacific, the relaxed pace of the people, all these contrasts, the architecture. A lot of deep breathing, a lot of smiling. Most people you cross way treat you like their neighbor anyway.
When traveling by myself, I always stay in hostels. It's much more fun. So yesterday, I met a Japanese roommate who asked me what I would do today. I told him that I wanted to photograph the Golden Gate Bridge in the early morning fog right after sunrise. Guess what, he woke me up at 5:30 am this morning and was ready to go. I couldn't belief it. So we did that and it was quite a hike and a fun thing to do. However, the fog didn't have the appearance I was hoping for.
Here are two photograph from yesterday.

The Bucket Man


Pug on Haight Street

I hope these pictures don't turn out too dark. The reason would be the "Ultrabright" display of my laptop. I have to by lucky to get the right results out of it.

Union Square

NYC, June 2007

Time for a break

If you don't count extended weekends, it's been about nine month now since I had some real vacation. More or less spontaneously I decided to go on another California trip to do pretty much nothing then photography for a whole week. I'm taking off for San Francisco in a few hours. I'll bring new gear and new skills and try my best capturing the beauty of this place. Let's see...

Solitude

Most of my recent posts were the results of some browsing through my hard drive and pick out something that looks worthy a post. This made this blog look random and I guess that's what it is right now, a stream of incoherent fractions. I'm basically just using this for this one single extroverted move after sitting in a narrow cubicle all day. I don't know, it just makes me feel better to send out signs of life and I'm always happy to get back the sign of another life out there.
Here is another one. Totally random and out of nothing:
During my last trip to Germany last winter, I made a train ride from my hometown to the city I used to study. This was exactly the same trip I used to do on a daily basis during my first year in College.
So back in the days I commuted back and forth every day, spending about two hours in a train that slowly made its way through the countryside. And when I say countryside, I'm really talking about small villages scattered between large fields. I used those train rides efficiently for sleeping and studying, but I really didn't like looking out of the window at this solitude. However, to make this story short: last winter, I was on this train again and I must admit that I got quite excited about all the things I saw. It seems like once you start to develop some kind of a photographic eye, things can look really different to you.
I left the train somewhere in the middle of nowhere and decided to go for a hike. I spent most of the day walking, taking pictures and totally enjoyed it. Just a little story about how photography is changing my perception of things around me.

Speaking of Bunnies

Funky Bunny