La Tour Eiffel

For a 'project' related to the approaching Christmas, I'm going through some old pictures. And due to a lack of new ones, I will post some of these old ones in the next weeks, starting with a picture of the Eiffel tower, taken during Ioanna's and mine first trip together - April in Paris ... As with the picture from Chile that I posted some weeks ago, it's interesting to go back to these old pictures and sometimes find something in them that I hadn't found or seen back then.

Dalí meets Escher in Potsdam

During the weekend we went to Potsdam. And even though I've know the parks and castles all my life, there's almost always something new and unexpected to find.

Autumn collection

Because it was so much fun before, we made a new modelling session for the Zara "People"-project.

Atacama ... 5 years later

Recently I went through some of the pictures I took almost five years ago during my amazing trip to Chile. Surprisingly, I found some very nice pictures that I hadn't included in any gallery and that I didn't even remember, such as this slightly surrealistic picture of three head-less flamingos or the picture of geysers or the amazing colors of the Atacama.

Image restoration

Last week Ioanna's mother showed me a wedding photograph of Ioanna's great-grandparents which was partly damaged and asked me whether I can try to fix it. So I took a picture of it and back at home did my first attempt at image restoration. It turned out that with some cool Photoshop features (most notabely the "content-aware" fill option) even a novice like me can get some pretty amazing results without much effort (although you do need a bit of patience ;). Move your mouse over the picture to see how it looked before the restoration.

Great events are often foreshadowed

This will be my last entry ... as a free man.
Fittingly, I use it to post another image from the trip that symbolically ended my bachelorship.
I also uploaded even more images from the Scotland trip to galleries over at colors · and · contrasts.

The three sisters

We went as far as Scotland, but here they were already waiting for us: the three greek sisters!

Faces of scottland

Two weeks ago today, I was sitting with Phil and Michael in a pub in the middle of Scottland eating burgers and drinking ale - we had been talking and dreaming of such a trip for a long time. My expected transition into a married man was a welcome reason to finally do this trip. Among other things (see below ;), we admired the beautiful nature of scotland, which is enriched by the dramatic and rapid changes in weather. The three pictures below were taken within two minutes looking into different directions from the same spot. I don't know whether this will help to bring the sun-craving greek ladies here eventually, but I can always dream ;)

Scottish light and scottish tree

Nosings

As you might have guessed, we didn't only come to scotland for the nature ... We didn't miss the opportunity to visit some destilleries and to sip one or two whiskies during our trip. We had a particularly great evening in a small room belonging to a restaurant in Dufftown. The room contained only a bar, one table, three chairs (what a coincidence!), hundreds of whiskies and a bar man who could tell story after story about all things whisky.
Three happy bachelors nosing, tasting and discussing a rather substantial fraction of the bar! Thanks for the great trip, guys!

Rainy summer holidays

This year we decided - for the first time - to stay in Germany for summer holidays. I guess this won't happen again any time soon ...
Despite the bad weather, we spent some nice days in Potsdam, Berlin and Rheinsberg. Rheinsberg has a small castle and park with open-air opera performances during summer. As you can guess from the dark clouds on the day of our visit, the performance was not-so-open-air for us.

Sparrows

While feeding some ducks and swans in a small lake in the Potsdam's park Sans-souci, a group of sparrows, attracted by the bread crumbs, provided some interesting motives for pictures.

Sunday lunch

I haven't posted in a while, partly because we are rather busy recently ;)
Not to have too long a break here a picture of today's lunch. It's our first attempt at cooking kleftiko, which is essentially lamb in the oven. What made this recipe interesting was a layer of dough covering the lamb. It made it look rather pretty but also tasted very good ;)

Flying back to Athens

While I still remember the excitment during my first flights, it doesn't happen very often anymore that I'm getting really excited by the view from an airplane. However, when flying back from Santorini to Athens, we witnessed an amazing sunset, which bathed the islands on the way as well as Athens in a beautiful light. I couldn't choose between two pictures, so I'm gonna post them both.

Santorini gallery is online

I just uploaded the gallery from out recent trip to Santorini to colors · and · contrasts. Here an image pf the 'indian face' rock, taken from the lighthouse at the south tip of the island. Can you spot the face?

More Santorini

What makes Santorini particularly picturesque is the combination of the unique landscape and its beautiful villages. There are so many corners and views which look just like in a picture book, it's hard to stop taking photographs. What makes the architecture particularly interesting is its rather strict and abstract geometry, which produces a great contrast to the natural shapes of the island. This combined with the exquisite locations of balconies, pools and terraces produces some spectacular views.

Sunset over Oia

Some weeks ago, we went to Santorini for the first time. It was very beautiful indeed, with (relatively) few people and many flowers. Of course, when you go to Santorini you can't miss the sunset at the 'sunset-village' Oia, which is praised as the best sunset of Greece (... the Mediterranean ... the world?). In any case, it might be the only place where people applaud the sun night after night for its marvelous performance. (Click on the image for a much larger - yet still not full resolution - version.)

Zara II

We did some more photo-shooting for the Zara People-project. This time, we were not so lucky, unfortunately ....

Modelling

The retailer Zara is advertising its new collection by asking customers to upload pictures of themselves wearing clothes from this collection. Each week, some of them are selected and shown on Zara's webpage. Last weekend, we made a photo-shoot in our small garden ... and Wednesday, Ioanna got a mail informing her that a picture of her had been selected. Since you can find this picture already here, I post today our other entry (which was actually my favourite).

Tribute to Ansel Adams

I am currently reading the >Photography Series< books from Ansel Adams, the legendary american photographer. I really enjoy his dry writing style ("A view camera favors a far more contemplative approach, partly because it is slower to operate.") and there are many things to learn, both for the future use of my "new" Linhof, but also for photography in general. One of the amazing features of his photographs is his use of the dynamic range of the negative / print: Even deep shadows or bright highlights contain details for the viewer to "discover". To practice what I learned from the books so far and to honour the great Adams, today two pictures taken in the morning in our small garden.

Linhof I

Last friday, I bought something at an auction for the first time - not on eBay, but a real auction with real people and an actual 'once - twice - sold'. It was a lot of fun! I was lucky enough to buy a beautiful old large format camera to a more than reasonable price! It's an old Linhof Kardan with a 180 mm Schneider-Kreuznach lens. The camera is at the same time very simple and very versatile. It's possible to completely take it apart and, more importantly, to move both the objective and the film holder in virtually any position. The film holder can be moved up and down, as well as tilted along the horizontal and vertical axes. The objective can be moved and tilted both horizontally and vertically. This means one has complete freedom for selecting the orientation of the focal plane (see Linhof III below for an example).

Linhof II

With this kind of camera, you have a screen (the so-called ground glass) in the place of the film before you take the shot. This allows you to carefully set up the camera and compose your picture, with all the tilts and shifts that you might wanna use. It's actually very similar to a 'live-view' feature on a modern digital camera (apart from the fact that the image is not upside-down ;)! Then you have to take out the screen and put the film holder in its place. In this way, you make sure that the film will 'see' exactly what you have seen before. The image on the screen will usually be much darker than the surrounding light (I brightened it in the picture), which is the reason why photographers used to cover themselves and their cameras with large pieces of black cloth.

Linhof III

This is a close-up of the ground glass from the setting shown in the picture above. I strongly tilted the objective- and image planes, which results in a tilted focal plane. While the faces of the dolls are in focus, their feet, which are roughly in the same vertical plane, are out-of-focus. On the other hand, the metal arch in the garden and even the distant branches of the trees are in focus. This technique, which has been used for architectur and landscape photography for many decades, is becoming very popular today for creating the illusion of a miniaturized reality. It is used for both videos and stills and is today typically achieved with tilt-shift lenses (which are insanely expensive) on digital SLR cameras.

Thessaloniki II

During the same trip, we went to the sea side for some great food. Next to the taverna was a small port with a lot of yachts waiting for the spring to come.

Thessaloniki

During the weekend we went to Thessaloniki. We had great food and an even greater company with our friends Alexandra, Foteini and Phil. We visited the rotunda , a church-turned-mosk-turned-church, which is currently under reconstruction. However, at one spot of the church / mosk, there was a beautiful light from one of the windows, looking almost like a spotlight lighting a stage. Luckily I had four gifted actors at hand ...

The way to Miltenberg

Yesterday we went to a concert of >Quadro Nuevo< in Aschaffenburg and took the opportunity to visit this pretty town before the concert. As many cities in Germany at the moment, Aschaffenburg is affected by the high level of the german rivers, in this case the Main. Now some of the street signs can only help the birds in the Main to find their ways ...

Villy & Panagiotis

At the first day of the new year, Ioanna and I were invited to the wedding of our friends Villy and Panagiotis in Athens. We had a great time and of course I had my camera with me. Here is a small slide show of some of the pictures I took during my first greek wedding. (Loading might take a while initially ...)