Snow Storm Street Scene

Because of popular demand, I'll keep posting snow storm pictures from New York, but what I actually wanted to do is wishing you a good start into 2011! Anybody has cool and inspiring resolutions? I don't have one. I just returned back home to Germany after almost eight years in the states. I guess that's change enough. Any resolution would be pretty redundant at this point.

It's really cool to be at home. I'm taking it slow. My hometown is somewhat slow paced anyway, and also pretty much snowed in. I'm spending New Year's at home with my grandpa who is now 93 years old. Even at this age, he is still the one fixing and repairing all kinds of things around the house. My family is pretty (re)productive, so he happens to also have a couple more grand children, five grand-grand-sons, two grand-grand-daughters, as well as a grand-grand-grand-daughter and a grand-grand-grand-son. Some of these newer family members barely know me as I obviously haven't been around much. They probably just see me as this weird uncle from America :)

Anyway, wishing you a great start into 2011!!!

Rushing Through the Snow

I get headaches when I think of the Flatiron Building. How do you photograph this thing? This might be my best try so far. I remember standing in front of it several times scratching my head.

Lederhosen

This is what New York City looked like yesterday after only a couple of hours of snowing. Isn't it crazy what's going on with the weather right now? I escaped the flooding in Southern California. Last week I stayed away from Europe because of the icy chaos that is going on over there. Between those two places I felt like on a safe island here in New York. Today I'm trying to fly again and suddenly the city looks like this. But I must admit that I don't mind. It's beautiful.

Passing Face

From a walk through Centro Habana.

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

I hope you are having a wonderful time with your families. Does this time of the year make you also wonder a little? I mostly wonder how much money is kind of wasted by people buying each other nicely wrapped random items they don't really appreciate. Last night I walked through Midtown Manhattan at around 1 AM and the streets were crowded with last-minute Christmas shoppers. I feel like Christmas presents are a great thing to make children happy. However, grown-ups instead of buying each other stuff, could maybe do some more mature and helpful things during "the most wonderful time of the year".
I was in a store the other day noticing how busy, dense and hectic it was. Everybody was so determined while all those Christmas songs were playing. It immediately reminded me of some sort of lab experiment where the store is like a box full of little mice that get very hectic under the influence of supposedly calming songs.

Crooked

One of the main fun things to do in Havana for me was silently setting up the camera in stairways like this one. You usually hear a mix of voices and music. Some further, some close. Some approaching, some others fading away.

Taxi Hailing

A loong time ago I promised someone to take a picture that would look like the painting you see below. Last night when I was walking some New York City streets I passed by this spot and remembered my overdue assignment. This girl happened to pass by, willing to pose for a few minutes.

Terra Monochromia 5

I managed to not post for a whole week. Main reason was all the overhead involved with leaving California and moving back to Germany. It's too fresh to conclude my California year, but I can safely state that it has been very nice - I made some great friends. I'm staying in New York City now for one more week before I say bye bye to the USA.

Havana Balconies

In Cuba it is very common to paint walls completely turquoise and use bright neon lamps to light the rooms. The turquoise light shining through the windows gives a really cool touch to night images. There is lots of detail in this one. I think you will much more enjoy this image when you look at the larger version.

Little Boy Hiding

When I was that little, such wheelbarrows were part of my daily life as well. During that time, my parents together with my grandpa were building our house in west-central Germany. That was 30 years ago. I'm wondering if the Havana of 2040 is going to look much different from now. Who knows, maybe it won't change. Visiting this place then would be an even more incredible experience than it is nowadays already.

Going for a Walk

I thought this picture goes well with this one: Deep in Thoughts

Rainy Night

A rainy night in Havana.

Scott London
I have an interesting link for you today. Ivan just left a comment on my latest Burning Man image with a link to the website of a philosophical journalist named Scott London. Scott shows 100 great images from the last BM, but also 100 images from 2009, 08, 07, all the way to 2005. What I found interesting, he also photographed Salton Sea - maybe you remember my posts from this place. I only have scratched the surface of the page so far, but it seems to be intellectually very stimulating Here is the link for you.

Thunderdome

I thought I would give you and me a break after the first four images from Cuba. I still have lots of images from other trips and I also think that the blog stays most interesting when switching between different topics.

The Thunderdome did kind of stick out a little compared to other things I saw at Burning Man. This seemed to be the place to go for some serious adrenalin rush. Obviously, the folks you are seeing on top of the dome are spectators. What you cannot see (because of motion blur) is that down inside fighters/volunteers with harnesses were hanging on very tall swings. Two fighters per match, swinging toward each other beating each other like crazy with pool noodles. Pretty weird, huh?
I think those fights were only going on at nights. Once I passed by the Thunderdome during the day and saw an army of french maids climbing and posing on top of the dome. I leave the view to your imagination, it looked interesting to say the least.

Woman in Door

No, she wasn't observing me. She was impatiently waiting for someone. Impatiently without moving even a bit.

The Joy of Being Photographed

Even without speaking the people's language, it was easy to put more joy onto the faces of my subjects whenever I wanted to. Simply by showing the first picture on the display, then take another one.

Green Beetle

Taken on a Sunday in the early morning. This was right after waking up in the city for the first time. The quiet streets gave me a chance to smoothly adjust to the environment. At this point I wasn't aware yet that Sunday mornings are an extreme exception from the rest of the week. Havana streets are very busy and loud.

Good Morning Havana

I'm back from Cuba with lots of pictures to show. The whole trip was generally very interesting, and photography-wise simply plain exciting. I made friends with a painter from Havana who accompanied me during some of my photo hikes through the city. He brought me to some friends' places who could provide nice views from their apartments. Along the way we discovered more and more interesting looking staircases, balconies and so on. Over all this city is full of playfully designed, yet decaying buildings. This is a well known fact, but you probably won't realize what a photo playground this really is until you are there.

Now the most difficult question is where to start showing pictures. I chose this one, symbolically opening the doors to my Cuba work. I hope you will enjoy the show.

San Francisco Street Scene

I will be gone for 10 days and hopefully back with fresh photographs from Cuba after that. See you later!

Terra Monochromia 4 - and lots of changes

Lots of changes coming up!

In 2011 a lot of my energy will probably go into the experiment of becoming a pro traveler/photographer, or starving artist - however you wanna put it. Right now I'm in the middle of completely redoing this website and I'm excited about this. So here is a little heads-up. There is not really much to show you yet, but this is what I think it is going to be:

Switch to Wordpress
Migrating from Blogger to self-hosted Wordpress will give me lots of freedom to do new things. I'm also changing my webhost.

.com URL
A .com URL in addition to my German .de one.

Option to switch to German language
I'm not sure yet till what degree this will be feasible, but I will put more thoughts into it.

New design
A new elegant design that will hopefully please your eye.

Order almost any image as print
From my new blog, you will be able to buy high quality prints immediately after I posted a new image.

Well organized portfolios to browse
Re-organization of my portfolio..again with the option for you to buy my work.

Make buyers donate to good causes by buying my work
I'm looking for good causes matching the categories in the portfolio. For example, a certain amount would be donated to a New York related charity when you buy a fine-art print of New York City, etc.

More Facebook integration?
How do you feel about connecting the commenting function with Facebook? This way you would have the option to use your "Facebook identity" for posting comments.


Videographer wanted!

I'm looking for a skilled videographer who would be interested in creating a video/slide-show for a group of HDR photographers. The video will have little movie components introducing each photographer. Each one will also have an own high resolution slideshow-part with music. The job would be to put all this together and mix the music nicely.
Even though there is no pay for anybody, I think this is an exciting opportunity for a videographer to get lots of exposure. The video is going to show the work of some of the best known HDR photographers out there.

Sounds interesting? You can reach me on
Facebook
Twitter
or shoot me an email

The Best Girls in Town

Even though San Francisco is a rather small city, it is a really fun place for street photography.

San Francisco Evening

Coincidentally, right after I took the picture, the couple got up and left. "Hey buddy, that's a million dollar picture, huh?" - I'm sure he had no idea that he was part of it.

In case you haven't read yesterday's post: clicking on the images makes more sense now. Try it!

The Northern Californian Coast

Made it to San Francisco last weekend and took this picture on the way back to San Diego. The coast in the northern part of California is much more dramatic compared to the southern one. I wish I could spend more time there and in San Francisco as well. This city seems to never lose its charm even when it's raining like it did yesterday. More pictures will follow.
Oh, one note about the pink looking sky in this picture. This is not due to my bad taste, it in fact looked like this.

Another note: When you click on an image you will from now on see the image with a width of 1400 instead of 1000 pixels. Once I find the time to edit the design template, I will also increase the thumbnail image size to a width of 900 instead of 680 pixels. I believe this is appreciated, let me know if not. Once I start tinkering on the layout like this, it's usually just a question of time until I do a complete makeover by switching to a new design.

Delta Royale

Sometimes things just fit together. Speaking of vintage cars..next week I'm going on a ten day trip to Cuba. I'm stocking up on memory right now.

Windansea

A colleague of mine told me to check out the beach area named Windansea. Even though it's just a few minutes drive from home, I haven't been there yet. Her description was pretty easy: hit the beach when you see the 7-eleven - and here we are.

Stardust

Something from New York for a change.

Got OINK?

Terra Monochromia 3

Baby sheep - or at least a hint of them. Not sure if this is a spring thing or if you can see this year around in Iceland. Probably just in spring, but then you can see them pretty much everywhere where you can find green grass. That's also the time when you for sure get attacked by birds when stepping into their breeding territory, but that's another story.

Sitting Surfer

During the period when I photographed New York City I sometimes got to hear requests to finally start photographing something else. Those voices got pretty quiet when I started photographing the beaches over here in California, but now it starts again from other sides: "enough with the beaches", etc. I guess you have to deal with it until I move to Europe. This will be in less than six weeks.

Some Kind of Burner Portrait

This is a portrait of a burner, however I didn't take this at the festival. The story is that my visit to Burning Man seems to have a much longer lasting effect then I would have expected. Because of my pictures, more and more burners get in touch with me. Now if you are not familiar with BM, you probably don't know what this means. I'm happy to share my impressions: the people you meet there are people of the most creative, kindest, and entrepreneurial kind - 50,000 of them. This has all been very interesting to me so far. The lady in the picture is a photography student. She contacted me on Facebook and then "booked" me for a 1-on-1 course to learn about my approach to picture-taking.

In the picture below you see Alex and Yanina. Alex and Yanina got married at Burning Man. I didn't know about them until their best friend Laurent contacted me to ask about the Bliss Dance photo. In a virtual way, I accompanied Laurent during his quest seeking for the best way to make a wedding present out of it. The result is a print on metallic paper behind 1/4 inch Plexiglas. Receiving this photo kind of made my day. Not sure how to explain this. I very much enjoy looking at the contrast between the day I took off to the dessert not knowing what to expect, and today, when looking at the positive ripple-effect it still has.

Terra Monochromia 2

Taken on a super stormy night at the southern coast of Iceland.

Terra Monochromia 1

This might be my new thing. Without HDR and turned into strong contrasty black & whites, many of my Iceland pictures start to look very exciting. At least to me. What do you think?

Sixth Ave

Was about to jump a fence for this one - until I saw the open gate.

Washed Out

Most important things to have for such pictures are a neutral density filter and a heater to dry your shoes later on.

Moonlight Delight

Saw the moon last night? Down here in San Diego the sky was so bright, it seemed like a never ending magic hour - or whatever you call the minutes right after sunset. The dark blue night sky made me walk through my neighborhood a little, and this is what I brought home. You might not expect it, but this picture is not an HDR. It's the combined light from the moon, passing cars, and street lamps. All captured within a single exposure that lasted 30 seconds.

Nuclear Winter

Sorry for the harsh title, I didn't mean to irritate you. But then again, there are a few possible outcomes everybody should be always aware of. In that sense, I think it's perfectly appropriate to make each other feel uncomfortable at times.

Now I'm Ready to Start

Now I'm Ready to Start
My mind is open wide
Now I'm Ready to Start
Not sure you'll open the door
To step out into the dark
Now I'm ready!


Find out which song these lines belong to and win a free spaceflight!

Burner Portrait IV

You can find more Burning Man images here.

Photo Walker

A picture from yesterday's photo walk in La Jolla. The weather wasn't typical California style which even made some people cancel. However the weather was perfect for HDR. I was pretty impressed how curious everybody was to learn the technique. It all ended in a Photoshop session where I showed my processing workflow to my most eager students. Lots of fun - thanks guys!

City in Fog

I'm getting ready for the photo walk tomorrow. I hope some of you are able to join.

My 2011 Wall Calendar is Here!

It's finally here - I'm excited about this. This is the New York City wall calendar for 2011 with 12 of my best New York images. All images are from the HDR series.

After going through various print-on-demand companies, I decided to go with RedBubble.com as I really like the quality and design they are offering. They also present themselves a bit more artsy and serious, but less gimmicky than most other companies that offer similar services.

In case you want one, you can order it right here, and I think you can pretty much get it from anywhere in the world. So far it got mostly ordered from people who work around my desk. I received it today and pretty much at the moment I took it out of the box I got the first buyers.

Once you are on RedBubble you can choose your currency.

- The US price for example is $27.17 per copy.
- If you order from Europe, you pay €18.59 per copy.

There are rebates for those who buy more than 2.
Note that the prices do not include shipping. The shipping costs vary depending on where you are.




Let me give you a quick tour (you can click on the photos to see more details):

The cover




The calendar is printed on beautifully thick 200gsm satin art paper. Colors come out very nicely.




The design is modern simplistic



I hope you'll enjoy it, and feel free to send me your feedback!

Skógafoss

This beast is 200 feet (60 meters) high.

Burner Portrait III

She was dancing into the sunrise to some chill electronic music.

The first two Burning Man portraits are here & here.

Midnight Diner

Diners...don't you love them? You guys have something like a favorite diner movie scene? Would love to read about it.

Icelandic Farmland

Not sure what to write to this picture, except maybe that I hope you're enjoying the rest of your weekend. See you next week!