I wanted to do this post for quite some time now, but decided to save it for the last day of 2023. Because it means a lot to me. As a proud dad! Not that I didn’t embark on some nice trips myself this year: Seville and Dubai with The Significant Other. New York City together with Big Boy. But the families undisputed travel queen of 2023 is Big Girl. Because back in October she went to see the top of the world. No, she didn’t climb Mount Everest. But, fulfilling a dream, she went on an epic Three-High-Passes-Trek to the Everest Base Camp. Continue after the jump to see more of her trip of a lifetime to beautiful Nepal…
The last day of the year is upon us. Goodbye 2021! The Significant Other, Big Girl, two dear friends and myself spent the day hiking in the Austrian Alps in the Weißpriach Valley along the Lonka River. Enjoying a marvelous day. Walking along the mountain river has something cleansing to it. Washing 2021 away, looking forward to a brighter new year.
Once in a while I like to name a post after a song title. Like in this case: “The Long and Winding Road” by the Beatles. If you don’t know it, check it out, a truly magic song. I was inspired by watching the movie “Yesterday” the other night, the story of a successless songwriter who, after a global power outage”, discovers he is the only person left on earth who remembers the Beatles and now makes a career of playing their songs as his own. And I happened to take a fitting image during one of recent mountain hikes.
We’ve been living a happy life these past two weeks, as The Significant Other and I had managed to escape into the Austrian Mountains for a dearly needed break from our daily routine and Covid-19.
“Good friends are like stars, you don’t always see them, but you know they’re always there”, an old saying goes.
A Milky Way shot to open the photography year 2020. Taken with the Olympus OM-D E-M1 and the mZuiko 7-14mm F/2.8. Image specs 20 sec (camera on a tripod) @ f/2.8 , ISO 3200 and 7mm focal length.
Postprocessing of the RAW in Lightroom Classic – mainly using haze reduction and increasing clarity in parts of the Milky Way, plus some overall sharpness masking and noise reduction.
Mt. Rainier from Sunrise Road | 1/200 sec – f/14 – ISO 200 – 14mm
Continuing with our explorations of the Pacific Northwest, we left Seattle early in the morning for a day trip to Mt. Rainier National Park, which is a good two and a half hour drive via Enumclaw and Greenwater. Famous American conservationist John Muir once said: “Of all the fire mountains which like beacons, once blazed along the Pacific Coast, Mount Rainier is the noblest.” For more photos of the majestic stratovolcano and the surrounding National Park, continue after the jump…Continue reading “PNW Explored – Mt. Rainier National Park”→
Alpine Caribbean | Switzerland | 2018 | 1/200 sec @ f/9 and ISO 200
I’m back in the corporate rat race after a great weekend in Switzerland. After I finally made it to Zurich on Friday night to reach my family, we did spent an awesome weekend with friends, doing a great trip into the mountains on Saturday and for some well deserved chilling on Sunday. For more photographs and some location infos of this Caribbean like mountain lake as well as a peek into the “Little Swiss Grand Canyon” continue after the jump… Continue reading “Alpine Dreams”→
While driving back to Portland yesterday evening on Interstate 5 I noticed the Supermoon rising behind Mount Hood as I was already approaching the Columbia River. This was a too awesome opportunity to pass up. I took the next exit and drove just a quarter mile up a road to where I had the first unobstructed view of the big volcano.
Shot with the Olympus OM-D E-M1 with the mZuiko 12-100 mm F/4. Image specs are 1/320 sec @f/5 and ISO 200, at 100mm focal length, the far end of the zoom. I promise this is no Photoshop, it really was like this. I only slightly increased clarity when RAW processing in Lightroom Classic CC.
For more about this majestic mountain see the links to earlier posts about “The Hood” below
The Friday preceding Easter Sunday is Good Friday, a Christian holiday commemorating the crucifixion of Jesus Christ and his death at Calvary. It is also known as Holy Friday, Great Friday, and Black Friday.
We are spending Easter at a very good friend’s house in the Lungau region in the Austrian Alps. Not really the place for Street Photography, but the opportunity to capture some monochrome landscapes.
The weather was not all that great, rather fitting for the subdued mood of Good Friday. While the kids took to the slopes, the Significant Other and I hiked up the Weißpriachtal along the Longa River. Readers of this blog might remember my post about High Contrast Landscape Photography, where I took some Ansel Adams like images on a sunny December day in the very same valley during an earlier visit.
Today there were only low hanging clouds, nothing spectacular to photograph, so we just enjoyed the hike. Only when returning, I took my Olympus OM-D E-M1 with the 12-100mm F/4 Pro Zoom out of my backpack and shot a few detail shots of what nature gave me. Kind of zen-like. Probably nothing anyone apart from me would look at, but really satisfying me as a visual artist. I will share these images tomorrow.
My photo of the day was that of the mountain above us, in a brief moment when the clouds opened up and gave us a vista of a moody mountainscape. Perfect for a Good Friday.
Image specs are 1/640 sec @ f/7.1 and ISO 200, focal length 100mm (equals 200mm full frame equivalent).
Wish you all a great start into a hopefully splendid Easter weekend!
I haven’t done a “Monday Mountain” in quite a while, but I thought I show off this photograph of a rugged, snowcapped peak in the Northern Cascades. Unless previous episodes, where I wrote about particular mountains, I have no clue how this peak is called. If anyone recognizes this quite distinctive shape and has an idea, please leave the name in the comment section.
Image specs are 1/800 sec @ f/7.1 and ISO 200, focal length was 100mm (200mm focal length full frame equivalent). The photo was taken with my OM-D E-M1 and the mZuiko 12-100mm F/4 Pro Zoom a few minutes after takeoff in Seattle, on our way towards Canada, while we were still climbing to cruising altitude.
Raw- and monochrome conversion in Lightroom CC Classic
I finally got home from Portland at Saturday evening, in the middle of a little snow storm. And I made the birthday party with only one hour of delay. Next time I set a foot into an airplane it will be for a week of vacation in NYC with the Significant Other. Less than three weeks to go. Life is not too bad 😉
My return travel to the Streets of Nuremberg got off to a bad start this morning, when just after 6am I got a text message from KLM that the flight from Amsterdam to Nuremberg tomorrow (Saturday morning) has been cancelled.
Well, let me guess, if KLM cancels a flight from their home airport 20 hours before it actually happens, it probably won’t be due to a malfunctioning aircraft or the weather (which will be fine, I already checked). Maybe because the flight to Nuremberg on a weekend morning had a low load, so it’s cheaper to cancel and cope with a few angry passengers?
Just speculating…..not the first time that happened to me…Lufthansa does that regularly with their short haul connections from Frankfurt or Munich to my city (but here I can get at least on a train). And we got already notified that Air France cancelled the originally booked morning flight Paris to Nuremberg in coming August when we return from our vacation in the Pacific Northwest on a Saturday morning. We get to wait an extra 10 hours in Paris before eventually being transported to Nuremberg on the evening flight….anyone seeing a pattern here?
Now you could argue that I shouldn’t complain as long as I eventually get safely home in one piece. But I’m just not looking forward to this 8 hour layover in Amsterdam when I could be home with the family. And to make things worse, I will need to go directly to an evening event in my clothes that I’ve been wearing for 28 hours by the time I land, because I won’t have time to head home to shower and change. Thanks KLM, much appreciated! And a platinum status card doesn’t help either….
On a brighter note, I got another nice view of Mt. Rainier while approaching Seattle. With the sun pretty much behind it, it was difficult to shoot, colors were dull, for that I already had a B&W conversion in mind when taking the photo at 1/2000 sec @ f/4.5 and ISO 200. Remember, when shooting out of an airplane window, make sure you use a wide open aperture to minimize degrading effects through a dirty or scratched window. Camera was my Olympus OM-D E-M1 and the mZuiko 12-100mm F/4 Pro Zoom.
Now I’m sitting in sunny Seattle waiting for my flight to Amsterdam to board. In the end all will be well. I hope!
My first business travel of 2018 took me once more from Nuremberg via Amsterdam and Seattle to Portland, Oregon, where I arrived in surprisingly warm and dry weather after 19 hours total travel time at 2pm in the afternoon. For the airport I went straight to the office for an afternoon of meetings, before I collapsed in my hotel bed at 8pm in the evening and logged 8 hours of sleep before waking up at 4am this morning, a surprisingly long night considering the jet lag effects. To sum it up, back to business as usual for the job that pays the bills.
While connecting through Amsterdam Schiphol I saw a lady taking shots of the famous video screen clock in the international terminal area between the D and E gates. As during previous visits to AMS I myself have taken quite a few shots of the man inside the clock drawing, erasing and re-drawing the hands, I took my Ricoh Gr II I brought along as camera on this trip and shot this monochrome photo of a fascinated fellow traveler.
After the jump you find my original color shot of the video clock, a few photos of passengers on the walkway between B and C gates before I finish off with the high contrast monochrome landscape photo of a “broken mountain” that I took with my iPhone from the window of my Alaska Airlines Dash-8 on yesterday’s last leg from Seattle to Portland…. Continue reading “Travel Day (8)”→
