photography

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.