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As I'm shutting down oliverfluck.blogspot.com, you will find my new RSS feed under: http://www.oliverfluck.com/blog/feed/

Happy new year!

Migrated to Wordpress

Happy new year!
I migrated my blog from Blogger.com to Wordpress. If you don't get automatically redirected, you may follow this link.

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!