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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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?

Washed Out

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

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!

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.

Skógafoss

This beast is 200 feet (60 meters) high.

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!

La Jolla Photo Walk - Oct. 17

Anyone going to come out and join my photo walk on Sunday? Photographers of all levels are welcome.

Here is the plan: We are going to explore beautiful La Jolla - that's the northern part of San Diego. I thought about it for a while and figured out that this is the very best place for a nice walk. It has a very pretty downtown-ish area and a few steps from there is the ocean front. At the beach we have rocks and cliffs with wildlife including seals, so you might wanna bring your telephoto lens. However, as my mother has proven to me recently, you can also take great pictures there with a pocket camera.
We will meet up at the Living Room Cafe at 4:30, stroll around, and will seek out good positions to shoot the sunset over the ocean at 6:30. I'm looking forward to meeting you and help out in case you have any photography questions.

Who: Photographers of all levels.
When: Sunday, October 17, 4:30 pm
Meetup at: the Living Room Cafe, 1010 Prospect Street La Jolla, CA 92037

I also created a Facebook event for that. Yay!

Now Leasing

Steffi and I were on the fishing pier in Ocean Beach yesterday. There are so many people with huge fishing rods, it makes it easily to keep a low profile when walking with a fully extended tripod.

Foggy San Diego Morning

You don't get such a sky here often, however, on Wednesday night we had in fact a thunderstorm - which is pretty weird. The morning after I had to drop my family to the airport which led to the rare event of me seeing the sun rise.

Now in case this picture confuses you, let me tell you that San Diego is full of little hills with nice homes spread all over the landscape. It allows you to photograph the city in many interesting perspectives. All you need to know is where to go. This one was taken from Mount Soledad.

San Diego Photo Tour?
Because San Diego has so much beauty and so many facets, I'm thinking of offering a photo tour across the city showing you some exciting spots. That would basically be a free event for photographers of all levels to enjoy and photograph the city together. I'm just not sure if anybody who is up for it is reading this. Let me know if you are interested.

The Mysterious Shoe Tree

If you like standing around inside dust storms scratching your head, I know a place for you to go.

Beach Rock

Another spontaneous midnight shooting.

Along the Water

Hey everybody, I wanted to take the chance and thank you all for stopping by and enjoying my photography. I'm getting an increasing number of emails, tweets, Facebook messages, Flattr comments, etc. Every day there is something coming from you guys that surprises me and makes my day.

THANK YOU for being here!