Yesterday I went again to Köln and I took some pictures of the cathedral ( “Der Kölner Dom” ). Impressive architecture and extremely detailed. The construction of the cathedral took, on and off, 600 years or so. It was also one of the few tall building which wasn’t flattened during the war, even though it took multiple bomb hits.
Each image takes you to the Deviantart page, where you can click for a big and detailed version.
Clicking the image takes you to its Deviantart page. There you can see the full view or hit the Download link for a big version.
Daily stuff, Pictures | Stefan | 
7 March 2010 5:02 PM | 
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I know, the title is a bit confusing and slightly dumb at first sight. But wait! I can explain.
So this week I am again in the .. uh, lovely village of Rheinbach. I am doing early shift which means I am usually out around 15:30 or so. Which means it’s still light outside. The weather was not exactly warm but there was quite a bit of sun so I decided to go on some photo trips. But where should I go ? Well, Google to the rescue, of course.
So first day Google reveals some ancient ruins from the time of .. well, somebody ancient, no doubt. These are the same ruins, I realize, that I often see from the hotel window on top of some distant hill. It turns out it’s a short drive away, to the next village. You can’t drive right up to the ruins themselves, there is a nice rustic parking and then you walk. And walk, and walk. And then walk some more. Because why should you make a path which goes directly to the ruins when you can make the same path go ALL around the damn hill, before going up.
But ok, it was good exercise, the sun was up, blue skies, very nice. It’s kinda late in the afternoon, in a workday, which means not many people are around. Which is perfectly fine with me. So I get up there and the ruins turn out to be just a single ruin. Actually half of a watch tower of sorts. It also turns out this must be a gathering place of some kind for the local young punks because there are graffiti on the wall. Pity, it looked rather cool.
But I really wanted to make some kind of pictures (I didn’t just climb all the way up there for nothing!) so I take out my tripod and set it up. At which point I notice that the sky is suddenly dark with storm clouds and it stairs raining. Perfect. As the first raindrops were falling, I manage to snap couple of shots. Later, after deleting most of the crap, I came up with this:
It’s a HDR image, which I decided to make black&white in post processing. It might come as a shock to you, but dead trees, dark rocks and ruin walls don’t have a lot of color under gray skies. To be honest I kinda like the way it looks now.
Since it really started to rain, I just grabbed my stuff and headed down the hill, towards the parking. When I got to the end of the path, the rain stopped, the clouds ran away dubiously quick and all of a sudden it was sunny and nice again. Typical. So on my way back to the car I snapped couple more shots:
The forest looked nice. I wish there would’ve been more green though.
And that was it for that day. Next day I remembered that I wanted since sometime to take some pictures at dusk of the new buildings on the Rhein river in Köln. So I went there and after some driving around, I found a place on the river side with some nice views. What was not nice was the cold and the wind. I didn’t quite plan for that so in a short while I was frozen like an ice cube. But I still managed to make some pictures. I have not processed all of them, but most look like those:
I eventually just gave up and left. Then next day, a guy from work told me about this really big radio telescope which is supposed to be nearby. Telescope ? Astronomy ? Space ? Science Fiction ? Messages from aliens ? Sign me up! I looked the thing up and it turns out this is one of the biggest radio telescopes in the world. It was actually the biggest one for 29 years, until 2000, when the americans built a slightly bigger one. This thing has a 100m dish and together with the supporting structure, it’s huge. Not much science fiction going on there though, just science. And no aliens.
It was only a 25 minute drive through the contryside and I was there soon enough. The telescope is practically in the middle of nowhere, next to a really tiny village, hidden in between some hills in order to avoid radio interference. The whole thing is really impressive, it completely dwarfs every structure on the ground but only when I saw a tiny human worker at its base I realized the immensity of it. The telescope is remotely controlled and operated from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn. The telescope is almost always in operation and while I was there the main dish changed position couple of times. When you see that huge structure move in order to receive some more electromagnetic waves from galaxies millions of light years away, it makes you feel small and insignificant:
They even have a webcam overlooking the telescope, with semi realtime images (one every 30 seconds): Telescope Webcam. But all good things come to an end so when it started to get dark, I just took my small and insignificant self and went back to the car.
And I guess that’s it for this week’s interesting things 
Tags: hdr, köln, photo, radio telescope, river, ruins
Daily stuff, Pictures | Stefan | 4 March 2010 6:47 AM | Comments (4)
We wanted since a while to go out and eat some romanian food but until recently we didn’t get to it somehow. We don’t usually go to restaurants, most of the food you get there is worse than what we make at home so it makes no sense. But there are things you can’t easily cook at hime, like chinese and so on.
As it turns out, it’s not so easy to find a romanian restaurant around Stuttgart. Most of the things I found on the internet either had a non-existent website, or the numbers were wrong, or the information was old. I did find a place in Ludwigsburg eventually, “Restaurant Zum Rad” they call it, so we went there on Sunday.
The food was really good. Since I haven’t ate this in a really long time, I had some meatball soup and then some stuffed cabbage rolls with polenta, which is typical romanian food. We also had some grilled meat with potatoes (natur and baked with garlic sauce). It was really tasty and the portions were really big, didn’t manage to eat all of it.
Too bad I forgot to make pictures, even though I had the camera with me. Oh well, next time because we plan going there again sometime.
Tags: food, grill, mamaliga, polenta, romanian, sarmale, stuffed cabbage, zum rad
Daily stuff | Stefan | 2 March 2010 6:45 AM | Comments (0)
On the right, remains of a nice fortified castle from the Renaissance period, located in the old part of the town. The castle is part of a bigger fortress.
On the left …. local FinanzAmt building (german IRS).
HDR Image, 3 RAW exposures, curves adjusted in Lightroom, letterbox added in Photoshop.
Clicking the image takes you to its Deviantart page. There you can see the full view or hit the Download link for a big version.
Daily stuff, Pictures | Stefan | 26 February 2010 12:30 PM | Comments (0)
Clicking the image takes you to its Deviantart page. There you can see the full view or hit the Download link for a big version.
Daily stuff, Pictures | Stefan | 25 February 2010 11:30 PM | Comments (7)
Clicking the image takes you to its Deviantart page. There you can see the full view or hit the Download link for a big version.
Daily stuff, Pictures | Stefan | 24 February 2010 11:20 PM | Comments (0)
The roads are full of people who should be banned from getting closer than 50m from a car, let alone drive it. And while it’s true that the amount of idiots driving around is far smaller here than on the romanian roads, we have our fair share of them. Unfortunately.
I was driving on this 2-lane national road, a “Bundesstraße” how they call them. I was on the speed lane and I was driving at some distance behind a Smart 4Four, everything was fine. Ahead of both of us, there was a slow driving truck on the right lane and behind it, a Mercedes A-Klasse. The speed limit on this road as 120km/h, them two were driving at most 100km/h, if not slower.
As the guy in front of me approaches them, the A-Klasse suddenly pulls out, cuts the guy off and starts to overpass the truck. I personally didn’t see any signaling. The 4Four had to break rather hard in order not to smash into the A-Klasse. I was some way back so I didn’t have to break that hard.
The guy in the 4Four got very pissed, and with good reason. He honked the idiot in the A-Klasse, flashed him too I think. After the A-Klasse finally passed the truck, with less than 120km/h, the 4Four pulled next to him and the driver started to wave his hands at the idiot, his screams being probably less than kind. I guess he could not let it go ’cause he went on the right lane in front of the A-Klasse and hit his breaks. By now I was also next to the A-Klasse and I looked inside. There I could see one of those old retards who should’ve been banned from driving like 15 years ago. He was just showing the finger to the guy in the 4Four .
I do not really condone what the 4Four’s driver did, getting in front of the other guy and breaking, but I can certainly understand him. I would’ve been probably just as pissed. I imaging this is how most accidents happen, not so much because of high-speed driving but because some people are just idiots and endanger everyone else. I really think that after a certain age, people should be called and re-tested, to see if then can continue to drive or if they should be put into an asylum and fed intravenously.
I have to say though that this is the first time I saw such violent behavior since I am in Germany. As opposed to Romania, where my blood pressure starts rising already 30km after passing the border.
