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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Merchant of Venice

Venice Beach that is.

Taking a Picture

Venice Beach, 2010

King of Pop

New York City, 2010

New Series - Prison Chess

This new series is the first serious documentary project I dared doing.
All pictures were taken in 2008 and 2009 while accompanying Princeton University students to chess events in a maximum security prison in Trenton, New Jersey. What I tried to document was not the events. I focused on portraying the prisoners and their thoughts about the game. I hope you find it interesting.

Nose Manual - East Village Skate Park

Actually, I don't know if it's called East Village Skate Park, but it's a skate park in East Village.

Picture was taken with the lightweight and inexpensive Tamron 28-200mm lens. With this zoom range it will probably be my lens of choice for Burning Man - an upcoming event I'm starting to get excited about as the date gets closer.

I thought I would try something new: If you follow the link to the lens and end up buying it, I get a small percentage of the sales price. I'm wondering if you guys would appreciate occasional links like that. Thinking about it, there are so many online stores where one can buy photo gear: where do you shop? I believe Amazon.com is the most known and trusted one.