Schowo madness

We just got out of this yearly festival thingy which goes on in our fair town. I mentioned something about it in one of my posts from last year, basically for 5 days the city “celebrates” something, although I have no idea what. During this time they have all kind of “entertaining” events in the city center. Yes, that is exactly where we live. There are all kinds of stands with food and drinks and also 2 stages where bands come and play.

This is considered an attraction in this area so people come, and they come by the truckload. For 5 days, from friday until tuesday, these events last from morning until midnight. Some might even think this is a great thing and a great place to have fun.

Well, NOT if you happen live here, I can tell you that! One of the stages is right in front of our house so unless you happen to live in a bunker 100m underground, then there is no way in hell you can have a moment of quiet and peace, even with the windows closed. Which we could not really do because there were above 30C outside. This was really horrible.

Last year we planned to take vacation days during this period and just get out of the city. Unfortunately, things didn’t go as planned and we had to stay home and endure for 5 days this madness. And they play this horrible fanfare music shit they seem to like to much here in Germany, beer tent music we call it. I imagine if you are completely drunk, in a mass of equally drunk people, then this music might appear appealing to your beer-soaked brain. Not our case.

And when they are not playing the beer tent music, they play those old stupid pop songs or “schlagers” how they call them here. I really don’t get this, maybe they were popular 30 years ago but now ? How come they can’t bring some normal bands which could appeal to people younger than 60 ?

Then not only do we have to cope with this auditory cacophony but they play it so damn loud. The volume is so loud you can hear that shitty music booming through the house even with your hands over your ears, you can feel the house vibrate, hell you can feel your insides vibrate. There were a lot of complains about that last year and they promised they will try to keep the noise down a bit this year. Bullshit, nothing happened.

All this until midnight. And once they stop, it’s not over yet. It takes another hour until the banging stops, until the drunks stop yelling at one another, until they stop pissing in trash cans or in flower pots.

Here are the people who organized this “wonderful” event:

What is the most obvious part of the picture ? Yes, the beer. What a shock. Thank you for 5 days of my life that you wasted!

Digital workflow

A while ago when I got my camera (well, the “real” camera) and the first week of euphoria and countless of useless pictures passed, I realized that I need some sort of archiving mechanism. So I did some research and after much reading I arrived at the solution that I used ever since. It’s a combination of what I read on various sites and blogs (unfortunately I don’t have their addresses any more) and some of my own ideas.

I usually work either on my computer at home or on my laptop when I am away. I could either keep the images on the laptop/desktop and sync them when I am at home or just work on a portable hard drive. The portable disk made more sense so I got myself a 320GB Seagate FreeAgent Go USB drive, storage is quite cheap these days:

The drive is nice, physically small, fast and big enough for what I need. I just connect it to whatever computer I happen to be using, the desktop at home or the laptop while I am on the go.

To manage the photo collection I use Adobe Lightroom, which is in my opinion the best tool for the job. Lightroom organizes photos in “catalogs” and I personally have 4 of them:

• Incubator: this is where I import the pictures from the camera. Once the pictures are imported, I go through them and delete the trash right away. Then, the most important step, I edit the pictures’ Metadata which is made very easy by Lightroom. On import I already insert common copyright info (my name, website, etc) but now I also update the image location, the city and country. Based on this info and the image timestamp, Adobe makes managing very large collections quite easy.

  After I do that, I work on the images and I edit them in Lightroom as needed (brightness, contrast, exposure, noise reduction, sharpening, color correction, etc). Depending on what I want to do, I might send them to an external editor for further processing: Photomatix for HDR or maybe Adobe Photoshop for more complex editing. Only after the processing is done I decide what to do with the image. I use 2 color labels for that:

  • Green: images which I consider to be “keepers”, this is where I choose the pictures I might publish on Deviantart or other similar websites.
  • Blue: personal images. They are things like portraits, family pictures, and so on.
• Selected: This is where the images labeled as “Green” go.
• Personals: This is where the images labeled as “Blue” go.
• All Raw: This is where I copy every image from the Incubator catalog. It includes images of both blue and green labels as well as the raw images. This is a sort of backup catalog and I don’t usually look here often unless I need the raw version of a image to recreate something. This is also the biggest catalog since it contains all the pictures I made so far.

Each catalog has its own folder on the USB drive and images are organized based on the date: Year – Month – Day. That is done automatically by Lightroom when the images are imported from the camera. The powerful filtering makes it quite easy to sort through thousand of image:

I almost always shoot in RAW and not in JPEG. Yes, the resulting image can be up to 20MB, much bigger than a JPEG and you need to spend some time to post process it in Lightroom but you are much more flexible and the end result is far superior. I only export JPEG copies of the images I want to upload on the web. So far I don’t have problems with the space, the biggest catalogs are the AllRaw and Selected, with 42GB and 17GB.

Once the images in the Incubator are copied to the other 3 catalogs and I make sure they are correctly imported there, I empty the Incubator. This whole process works ok for me. The portable hard drive makes it easy to switch between laptop and desktop, where I have the same tools installed.

Of course, backup is important too. The catalogs themselves (which are actually the Lightroom databases) are backed up on my home NAS server, as well as the physical images. I may switch soon to backup to the cloud backup everything on the Jungledisk account. The whole portable drive is fully encrypted with Truecrypt  so even if I somehow loose it, nobody can really rummage through my personal collection.

That’s about it. I don’t know if this is the best solution and I am sure it does not work  for everybody or it might be overkill for some but it suits my purposes ;-)

Lakes

Really hot weather these weeks in Germany. It seems the summer finally decided to come in force and we have temperatures of 30C or more each day. At work I am somewhat lucky, we are in the northern part of the building and the heat is not that bad. I know for a fact that on the other side of the building they have in the rooms temperatures with quite a few degrees more. It’s an oven.

As usual, whenever I can I try to do some photo walks each week and since we visited that lake the previous weekend, I thought I should see what lakes are there within reasonable driving distance from Munich. It turns out there are quite a few.

There is a chain of lakes some 50km outside Munich so I went there before the sunset, so I can have better light. And less heat. This was not one of my better ideas because there was no easy way to get to the lake shore. When I finally found a way, I also found a camping spot with lots of them camping buses and lots of people. But the worse part were the mosquitoes. I could not believe how many they were. As soon as I would stop to set the tripod up or to make a picture, I would literally get attacked. I am all for sacrifices in the name of art but this was way too much, only the first two pictures are from there because I decided to cut my loses and leave before I become a bloody pulp.

I did some more research and the next day I went to Walchensee, one of the deepest and biggest alpine lakes in Germany. The lake is some 70km south of Munich, in the Bavarian Alps and this was a much better idea. It didn’t even take so long to get there, took me more to get out of the city than to drive the 70km since there is one of them no-speed-limit autobahns going south right towards the Alps. Oh, and there were no mosquitoes whatsoever. Not even one of the little punks.

The place is simply beautiful, the weather and the light were perfect and everything looked so serene and peaceful. There is a road going almost all the way around the lake so I just drove around, stopping every now and then to make some pictures. I left when the sun went below the mountain ridges. So here they are, the images:

Nature

It seems that summer finally came to our part of the world too. Last weekend we had really nice weather, although a bit on the hot side. So in the late afternoon on sunday we went to the nearby small town of Adelberg where not far from it, there is a lake in the middle of a rather thick forest.

There is a path going all around the lake, it took us almost 2 hours to walk it but I would say it was well worth it:

Kitchen

The kitchen on our floor didn’t look good at all when we bought the house. The colors were bad, the floor was bad and (what you fortunately can’t tell from the pictures) it smelled bad.It was something like this:

Since the kitchen is now close to being finished, I recently I got some sort of approval from the powers-that-be to make pictures. I personally thing it’s a huge improvement :-)Part of the kitchen:

Oldtimer firetrucks

Oldtimer firetrucks near where we live, they looked kinda cool:

Tegernsee lake

Last week I went on a short trip to the Tegernsee lake which is south of Munich.  The lake is somewhat big and the whole region looks very nice. It has a couple of small villages around it and everything looks very pretty and clean. I took some pictures, of course (each images takes you to its dArt page where you can click for a bigger view):

Things are not very cheap around there but I guess that was to be expected.

Visit to Prague

Last week we took advantage of two free days and we went for a quick getaway to Prague. We left on thursday, we wanted to leave in the morning but it didn’t quite go as planned so we left a bit later in the day. But still, Prague is not that far from where we live and almost all the way is only autobahn so we got there in the afternoon.

That was not so bad in itself because the weather was rather bad that day, it rained a lot. So we only went a little bit to the city to look for some things at Tesco, one supermarket which is not present in Germany. Even though I did read a lot about this before, I still did the mistake of trying to park in the city center. That was a bad mistake, the timing was bad and traffic was horrible. We did find a place eventually but it was very annoying.

The next two days we had really beautiful weather. This time we parked some ways from the city center where parking was really cheap, at least compared to Germany (something like 60 cents per hour). And then we walked through the city. A LOT. We spent about 7-8 hours that day in the city and most of that was walking, except some breaks for food, stores and stuff. Even though we were kinda dead at the end of the day, we liked it a lot and it’s one of the best ways to actually “see” Prague.

The city is beautiful. Even though it also suffered some bombing from the americans during the 2nd world war, the damage was far less extensive in comparison to other cities which were bombed during that time. As a result one can see a lot of very beautiful old buildings in very good condition. You also see a lot of cobblestone roads which reminds of Bucharest, there are quite a few there too. But unlike Bucharest, Prague is a very clean city. It’s actually quite a lot cleaner than many German cities.

As prices go, Prague is in quite a lot of aspects cheaper than Germany. Food is cheaper, cigarettes are cheaper,  diesel/benzine  is the same, accommodation is much cheaper. As everywhere, you can pay hundreds of euros for a room if you really want to but the normal prices are much lower than in Germany. First night we stayed at a hotel closer to the city center for 55 € and second night we found another hotel, little bit farther from the center for only 39 €. That is for a double room, breakfast included. There is no way you find that anywhere in Germany, not in a city anyway.

On saturday, before we left for Germany, we went and visited one of the biggest flea markets in Prague. The place is huge indeed and we went there thinking we will  get loads of nice and cheap things. We did not, unfortunately. The flea market is big indeed but most of it is full of junk. I mean that’s what you usually find at flea market but here things were really junky.  So we were kinda disappointed with the whole huge flea market thingy. I did make some pictures though:

Anyway, overall it was really nice and we plan to go there again because there is a lot we haven’t seen. And of course, some of the pictures I made in the city: