May, in front of the alps
The notion of “different” is for photographers quite limited. If you take a lot of pictures (and I do..) you will find sooner or later that you always and again take the same pictures. Either you end up in the same place or you develop your style. Developing style means that your pictures are recognizable, well, probably boring. When I start to think about that, I’m glad not to be a professional photographer in the sense of having to make money with photography. “Et alors?” Well, I can just post the pictures I like 
I like, for example, my dog. He’s showing signs of age and spent the whole afternoon on the deck, without being attached. Just a few summers ago he would have used the opportunity to sneak off and have a ball around the village. Now he prefers to stay in the sun and watch us doing stuff outside (like cooking.. ).
He’s cool and with age our relationship (well..if you can talk about relationships) seems to be more and more like “friends” than master/dog. I know enough about dogs to not really believe that, but things are getting easier and easier
Another image which never ceases to “oh wow” me is the sky over the alps.
That sky is a story by itself. Just look at it. I used a flash on the foreground and imitated some filters with lightroom on the sky, but no photoshop.
Another all-season-favorit is St. Roche. The two trees, the monument..an everyday “oooooh so nice” . You can see the Alps in the background.
I put the flash in the grass and triggered it with the camera flash.
Lisboa
I really love this city 
http://photo.genevainformation.ch/Travel/Lisbon/3397071_wLC6pm#!i=1759273353&k=MFhBvvL
First Person is now available!
During Summer 2011 I wrote a novel, based on an idea which had occupied my mind for a few years. The name of the book is “first person – is it a game or reality?” and you can download it (http://fp.oym.me) for free/pay as much as you like or buy a paper copy at createspace (or amazon).
Why do you like art?
This sunday morning my daughter was doing her homework, sitting next to me. While trying to find excuses not to do her actual homework she asked if I liked mathematics. “No”, I said, and with fully risking to offend lots of people I can say that I never had the feeling that mathematics in school were related to getting anything done in real life. “So what do you like” she asked (and she asked that in german with her french accent) and I answered: “English I liked, but mostly Art”. “Art?” she asked further, “but why?”. So I take a piece of scrap paper and draw this.
“What’s this to you?” I asked. She replied “a box with a line inside”. “But what else?”. A mouth, a strip of road, a snake, a window (if you turn it 90°), the horizon, the border of a table..that’s why I like art: As a source of inspiration, a tool to develop an idea or feeling, to share, to kick off a thought process, as the outcome of a thought process which then makes someone else think and so on. I heard twice this weekend that we leave not a lot behind, once from my father who looked back on his working life, once in a movie. Most of the things we do are “in the system”, and as the system is reinventing itself, others take our place and wipe out what we thought would last. But Art. It’s not replacable, not redoable because there is no possibility for re-doing art, only for copying it. But the initial work remains (until someone throws it away like I will do with my paper).
This paper, by the way, was the delivery note of my proof-prints for the novel I wrote.
Long time without posts
Well, a lot of things have happened
First, the job picked up a bit in pace and I’m spending again a lot of time on the road, between here and Switzerland..my radius has been extended to Zürich, and that’s quite far away.
But I have not been activity-less. I wrote a book, a novel this time. It’s closed, plot-wise, but I’m still listening to feedback. Currently I’m looking for a cover. I have followed Reto’s good advice and used crowdsource – and I’m impressed with the results. You can see the proposal I have received here.
It’s true that I have neglected the camera a bit in the last weeks, so I took it with me when I walked the dog this evening:
Water.
We forgot to take something to give the dog water..turns out he’s perfectly happy with this solution (attention + water).
Barrage de Roselend
The Barrage de Roselend turned 50 this year and this week-end they had the doors open and organized a party. The public transport sucked, all prejudices about the capability to organize things came true..well, might be they were overwhelmed by the number of people which passed by. But! The site is beautiful, the party great and we had a good day
The barrage is used to power electricity generators in the valley (1200m below), but there’s a small generator on the barrage itself.
The inside looks as if it inspired some computer game makers:
Markets: Ajaccio
Admittedly, we want partially to this market because I wanted to take pictures
I think that the pictures of this market are among the best ones and will likely make it into the competition.
Olives are typical for the french south and I guess I need to have some “yeah, I like that lifestyle”:
That’s actually a first for me, never seen that before:
Cut on the market..in Germany that’s over for hygiene reasons:
Fish is sold in a separate Hall with climatization:
(I know, that’s not “fish”, but it’s in the fish hall..)
Markets: The medieval festival in Andilly
I was selling crêpes during daylight (if you want a treat, ask me to make crêpes for you ) and had only at night time to take some pictures. The good thing about it was that I had time and the people, too. I had a few good discussions and took this awesome picture of the flame (which is now my screen and phone background).
When I asked if I could take pictures of the chessboards I was made fun of..but not too badly, it ended up friendly
I have the baker on the first post to the series, and here is his bread
And here the baker. I just like this photo too much to not show it again:
Markets: The Minneapolis Farmers Market
That’s the only market I visited with the purpose of getting pictures for the competition. I was there when it opened up and staid for a few hours. What I found was that people on the market were very friendly, photographer-friendly but as well warm and nice – it was a good experience. And they sort of could not believe that I came there to take pictures. They assumed, too, that I was living in the US, seems that the idea of “spending vacation time in Minneapolis” is strange.
There are more pictures in the Gallery.
At a glance.
I have not worked on these pictures yet, so there will be follow-up posts with better quality.
The moon is always nice, but I need a much better lens to take good pictures of it.
How about some sunerise?
On first sight I really liked this one:
There’s more technique behind this image than what it might look like. As it was broad daylight, the “long” exposure was not that easy to get to ..
My Nook
Two books worth 20 USD each in my hands I was standing in front of the cashier at Barnes and Noble in St. Paul. The Nook in front of me was advertised at 136 USD (120-something plus the incomprehensible and confusing sales tax). The books would cost 9$ each as an eBook, plus I would have access to the Barnes & Noble online store an be able to buy eBooks “right now”. The “right now” is important to me – if I read about something, I want to read on without waiting weeks for english language books being delivered through mysterious ways to France
I’m biased with eBooks and readers. We do run a book store in Cruseilles and eBooks are sort of “the enemy” to book stores, aren’t they?
But back to the Nook, first. The low-cost Nook has a touch screen, an eInk-Display and six buttons – one to switch it on and off, one to wake it up and to get to the menues. The other four buttons are used to scroll up and down – two on each side. That’s it. The display is a touch screen. The software on board allows to connect to the store and content can either come in that way or through the (supplied) USB cable.
While I was in the US, I was easily able to purchase books in the online store. To get my newspapers on the reader I installed Calibre, an Open Source eBook and content management tool. Calibre is pretty cool – it downloads stuff from various sources, a lot of them free, and converts it to pdf or epub so you can read it conveniently on the reader.
Reading with the Nook is excellent – the device has no internal light, I depend on the surrounding light. But even a flashlight in a tent is sufficient to read. In that characteristics, the Nook is close to a real book. The page flipping works fine, the text changes fast enough. On the cheap version (which I have), forget about images and graphics. It’s good for text, but not more.
While the upscale Nook Color has tools to read email, mine does not – and I’m happy with that. If it would do anything else but “present text to be read” I’d be drawn away from the text sooner as I could switch pages.
I do like the reading experience and am proud to say that I’ve read more books in this short amount of time than I remember reading .. for long. What comes in favor of the thing is the light weight, the good display and the “open” (enough) design. In the worst case I can even put PDF via the USB connector from any pc or mac on the Nook. Pretty cool.
The one book which is impossible to read is the Headfirst PMP book – they do use a lot of graphics and the Nook fails to display. Pity..so back to the Netbook for that one.
Adding content via the B&N online store fails from europe (“we only deliver to customers in the US”) but if you accidently have a vpn tunnel open and the endpoint has an us ip address, things just work fine.
Am I scared for the book store? Not really. Books will have a place in the future. The Nook is nice but it’s not a book