It was somewhere near Checkpoint Charlie, the most famous crossing point between East- and West-Berlin during the Cold war, that I spotted this setting.
Even though the Berlin wall has been pulled down for over twenty years by now and the checkpoint is nothing more than another tick on the to do-list of every Berlin visitor, I found that this image resembles the general German post-war idea.

As a follow up of my previous photo essay about the East Side Gallery, I wanted to bring you another piece of Eastern European tragedy.

If I asked you to name two famous walls, what are the odds that you will say “the Chinese Wall and the Berlin Wall”?
One or two rock fans among you may also note Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”, but with that we've named the most known walls I guess. Even though WiKi teaches us that there are many more.

For those of you who have just arrived from another planet or have been sleeping through most history classes, I’ll give you a short explanation of what the Berlin Wall is.
Stick with me, it’s not that much.

Excuses
Great weather is not always a good thing in every context, it appeared to me a couple of days ago. And boy, did we have a piece of great weather this spring.
Any of you living in some tropic paradise might wonder what else I’d expected but you must realise that living in Belgium most of the time means living in cloudy, rainy and windy weather.
But not this year, oh no.

To enjoy this to the most, I’ve been spending most of my time outdoors. Campin’, city trippin’, chillin’, relaxin’, (way too much) beer drinkin’ and certainly not... bloggin’

After two weeks of traveling through the country, Malaysia didn’t appear to be exactly what I had expected it to be. I must have had images in my mind of other South-East Asian countries like Indonesia, Laos or Myanmar, but Malaysia was nothing like that.
Arriving in Kuala Lumpur didn’t give me the culture shock I’m used to when going on inter-continental travels, it appeared to be a - relatively - clean, safe and modern city with as greatest tourist attraction the Petronas Towers.

In previous posts I have mentioned the term white balance from time to time, and what you should remember from it is that it is some kind of measurement of the temperature of the available light.
This is an easy to accept fact, but I think it gets more interesting if you actually understand what white balance is and what the different settings will do to your photo. Therefore I decided to write a post that goes a bit more into detail.

The Chain Bridge in Budapest is the oldest Budapest’s bridges across the Danube, connecting Buda and Pest. And if you ask me, it’s still the most beautiful one too. The design reminded me of Paris, especially with the use of big building bricks and the 48 meter high piers in the middle. And then there are the huge stone lions, protecting the entrances of the bridge.

Actually, I didn’t want to go to Iceland. The thought of cold makes me nervous and annoyed, like knowing you have a shitty day ahead of you. The reason why I went was because my girlfriend wanted to go Skiing, but the since thought of cold and sports makes me plain sick, I had to negotiate. We ended up with Iceland, because of the banking crisis the country was on the edge bankruptcy so if it wasn’t good, it would at least be cheap.
It wasn’t cheap at all.

Last week I have written a blog post about how to photograph in bad weather conditions. It appeared that “bad” may not be the right word as a lot of great photos are taken in different conditions than sunny with a slight breeze.
After discussing a couple of conditions, it occurred to me that I had more to talk about than I initially thought, so I decided to split the post up in two.
Here is part two of How to Take Photos in Bad - or “different” as you like - Weather Conditions.

One of the reasons why I like El Salvador so much is because of its lack of visitors. A lot of people still think that it’s a dangerous place where you will get mugged, shot and raped as soon as you set one foot outside of the airport.
Even in the backpacker community there are few willing to make a detour from the trail to visit this unknown country with its violent history.

How a photo will look when it comes out of your camera has a lot to do with the weather conditions at the time it was taken. A general accepted fact is that the best photos are taken under a cloudless sky when the sun is really low, very near to the horizon. This is what is called the golden hour, just after sunrise and just before dawn.

We find ourselves on the Malecon, a little outside of the centre of Havana. The big building on the right of the photo is the building of the U.S. diplomatic mission.

For quite some time this place has been the centre of U.S. propaganda. Once in a while the Americans placed anti-Cuban billboards in front of the building, to which Fidel Castro replied with anti-American billboards.

Very mature!

Indeed.

You've read it well.

Your eyes are not fooling you.

I have traveled one of Europe's roads least traveled... by independent travelers.

Lanzarote, an island of the Canaries, a Spanish archipelago near the west cost of Morocco, is quite well known for its all-in, all you can eat and drink package holidays. A high percent of the tourists have probably never seen the outside of their hotel or maybe for a five minute walk to the beach.

Somewhere in the beginning of 2009, for the first time in my life I planned a trip to a place where it was actually colder than at home. Iceland.
The plan was to drive the whole southern coast from Reykjavik to Höfn and back, making a couple of detours along the way to visit glaciers, waterfalls, the “golden triangle” and Vik.

Personally, I don’t like planning a trip. It gives me stress.
When people - including myself - are planning, we tend to forget that we might want to stay in a certain location for a little longer or be lazy for a couple of days or get food poisoning. These things then mess up the planning, you have to re-plan and skip things and you get annoyed.

_{Photo by mikebaird}

When I try to think about a trip to Morocco I took three years ago, there are a couple of events that come to mind. When I have a look at the pictures I took over there, my memory gets a boost and my imagination brings be back to Jemaa El Fna within seconds.

People who like both photography and traveling, like myself, usually find it very enjoyable to combine both hobbies. Living in the age of digital photography, this often results in hundreds or thousands - depending on the length of your trip and the speed of you trigger finger - pictures.
The more pictures one takes, the more important the storage media becomes, because let’s face it, about 95% of your luggage is easily replaceable but your pictures are in that other five percent.
Needless to say, good storage media is important to secure your images, and every image should at least be available on two different media.
In this post I will give you an overview of the possibilities.

The memory card

It’s been about three weeks since my latest adventure, which included parts of Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua, so I figured that the time has come to publish parts of the only things I was able to bring home: pictures and memories.

It's been a while... maybe a very long while, but I have not been sitting still! And to prove this, there are some new picture galleries available of my latest travels: to the Western Balkans.

More specific to Albania , Montenegro and Bosna i Hercegovina .

Have fun watching and let me know if you see anything you like!

Meet Andrzej Dragan, a thirty two year old photographer, born in Poland.
There must have been hundreds of others with that profile, I guess, but I'm sure that none of them have a similar history.
Dragan was a student in quantum physics on the universities of Warsaw, Amsterdam, Lisbon and Oxford. During his studies he won several science awards and in the end he got his PhD Cum Laude.
Next to science he has won several national and international awards for composing music.

Following to post and post, here are the last two old travel photo galleries (I promise!)

Guatemala 2007

Cuba 2006

Feel free to leave a comment if you like something!

Nah, I'm not going to copy the whole post of yesterday.

Here are two more galleries from my travels to Morocco and Budapest in 2007.

Have fun!

As promised a couple of weeks ago, here are some new photo galleries - Hooray! - from my trips to Mexico and Guatemala.

Actually they aren't really new and you could already see them on the previous site but they're new in here, so shut it and watch them! They have been a bit revised though in Photoshop and Lightroom. I also need to mention that they have been taken with a compact camera - a cheap HP if I remember well - so they might be not that sharp and they aren't going to win any art prices but I hope you like them anyway.

Some time ago I followed a class about the photography style Urban Exploration. Which is about taking pictures of abandoned places like old factories, hospitals, tunnels,...
It takes photography to a different level because it's much more than seeing something beautiful and pressing the button. Yes I know, photography in general is much more than just pressing buttons and photographers of nature and animals often have to wait for hours and hours in the cold before they get their shot, but still I find this different. Maybe because it's illegal. It's all about entering an abandoned place, climbing over fences and through windows, the fear of getting caught or hurting yourself.

A couple of years ago I met Bryan in a hostel in Oaxaca, where we both ended up while travelling through Mexico. I have to admit that the first impression wasn't very overwhelming, I actually found the guy a bit strange. He was small and skinny and tattooed all over his body, he was always very energetic and whatever he told us, he said it like it was the most exciting thing on earth. After a couple of Mescal and Tequila filled nights of which I barely remember anything, I had to change my mind. I liked him.