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:
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.
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).
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.
Daily stuff, Pictures | Stefan | 
July 3, 2010 7:36 pm | 
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