Still alive

Yes, I am still alive, I just took a small break from the blog for a while but I have not forgotten it.

We are still waiting for the real spring to finally come. The weather got a little better in the meanwhile but there are still quite a lot of days with temperatures below 10C.  Still, there were nice days too and we tried to take advantage of them. The best thing is though, when we come home from work is no longer dark outside, that’s a big plus.

As far as work goes, things are so and so. The so called crisis is affecting everyone and our company is no exception it seems. They are trying to cut costs from everywhere and while I can’t really say I blame them in a way, I definitely don’t enjoy it. I am currently still working in the “lovely” town of Rheinbach but there might be signs that I could be working again in München. That’s still not that close to home but it’s definitely better than now. It’s quite a bit closer (around 2h drive as opposed to 3-4h drive to Rheinbach)  and it’s a real city for a change, much more to do there.

Otherwise I enjoyed my new hobby and I took advantage of the longer days and better weather and went to all kind of places to make pictures. Among other things I tried my hand a bit at street photography (that points to a Deviantart group on the subject) but I am still not that comfortable with it. I find it a bit awkward to just go to people and ask them if I can take a picture :) So my attempts so far were from the distance or when nobody was looking. Sometimes it just works to walk around with the camera in my hand and snap shots while I pass people. Later on I usually have to trash quite a lot of them but a few are decent and worth keeping. Need more practice I guess :)

Below some pictures I took in the past month. As usual, a click on the image takes you to its page when you can view a bigger version.

[Picture Upload] Fire sunset

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.

[Picture Upload] New Day

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.

Back in the fray

Unfortunately my vacation days are over and I am back at work. After 4 weeks at home (the longest vacation/time off I ever had) it takes a while to get used to being at the office again, but I am getting there.

In the meantime in The Cave, the kitchen renovation is almost done and it looks MUCH better now. Still, my wish to make pictures and post them has been denied because it does not look “perfect”, there are some thing left to be painted. So maybe this coming weekend.

The bathroom upstairs is almost ready too and in the last weekend we cleaned and renovated the small room downstairs where we have the washer and the dryer. Before it was yucky and ugly, now it’s clean and with gypsum on the walls instead of wallpaper. It also has a new floor and the room is properly sealed. The previous owners were pigs, no other way to say it.

I started doing more stuff with my new Canon. First of all I was a bit surprised to find out it does not come with any kind of memory card so I got a 16GB SD Card from Amazon and now everything is fine. Most of the time I shoot in RAW format and I do the post-processing in Lightroom or RawTherapee if I am in Linux, so the extra space on the SD card is welcomed because one RAW file can take up to 20MB.

I still have a lot to learn but I have reactivated my Flickr and Deviantart accounts and I started posting there my first attempts. I have also updated the blog with a small widget which displays the latest flickr Deviantart uploads (the flickr widget looked crappy).

• Me @ Flickr (RSS feed for updates)
• Me @ Deviantart (RSS feed for updates)

I wish I would have some faster lenses, even something cheap like the Canon EF 50mm/ 1,8/ Objektiv II for a start, but that’s really not a priority right now so it’ll have to wait I guess.