Last Night of the Frühlingsfest

On the last evening of the Frühlingsfest in Bad Cannstatt there are always fireworks to mark the end of three weeks of revelry. After the smoke has cleared, there are 45 minutes left for a last drink, a last ride, a last kiss. Hoping to capture all this, I first took my gear to the river and waited. 

My idea was to capture the fireworks in the reflection of the river, which was nice and calm that evening. I had both my Sony A7 and RX100 with me. I set up everything and made sure I knew where everything was in case I had to leave my hiding place in the dark. It was already 9:45 p.m. and there was not much light left when the show started. At 1/6 sec. this shot reveals much of the surroundings.

Turning a similar shot on its head creates a somewhat surreal image, but this is exactly what I was hoping to capture: the dissipating flames waving in the ripples of water.

Later in the show the gathering smoke and increased darkness resulted in images that Carl Sagan may have liked for his show Cosmos.

Others resembled something more like the flowery delights that would thrill a botanist.

In 2012 I shot the Fest-ending fireworks show from the fairgrounds with an old 100-300mm lens. I ended up focusing on the iPad that the guy in front of me was filming the show with. The results looked something like this. (By the way, the pictures immediately preceding and following this bit of text were the only ones from the expensive A7 that I have chosen to show here. More on that later.)

 The smoke blew across the fairgrounds as I packed up and headed over the bridge - where all the other photographers had been standing!

A 5 sec. exposure of the bungee capsule revealed how it twists as it yo-yos up and down on its lifelines.

Time for a last ride and then what? Wait till the Wasenfest in October.

Soon the last Bratwürste were being sold off at half price to the hungry throngs. Many owners shut down early to avoid the last drunken hour.

It all has to be packed up and put away until the next fair - perhaps next week in Strasbourg.

Literally minutes after the last Wilde Maus rollercoaster coasted to a halt, these men were up on the tracks unbolting things bit by bit.

P.S.  As I mentioned earlier, this evening's better camera - and my personal favorite - was the RX100. The little Sony is inconspicuous, silent and helps you make excellent photographs. While playing around a bit with exposures during the fireworks show, I noticed a repeated frame pattern at the top and bottom of the underexposed images taken (at 200 ISO) with the A7. Perhaps you don't want to worry about any photographs you underexpose by 4-5 stops, but when shooting something like fireworks, you never know what exposure may end up to be the most interesting. In any case, I would be very interested to know if anyone else out there has noticed this issue. And if so, what do you think is the cause of this pattern? 

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Light for landscapes

Sometimes - even as a street and event photographer - you drive by a landscape on your way from Point A to Point B and you just have to pull over and see what's there for your sensor to feed on. That happened to me earlier this year as I was driving back from a friend's house. The morning sun hadn't broken through the fog yet and a field freshly planted lay embedded in thick morning soup.

 After wandering around the fields for a good amount of time, I started concentrating on the details of the agricultural tools lying around.

Then I thought I'd go for the standard up-the-antenna shot while I was there. With a white sky the struts stand out even better than normal.

One last series before leaving incorporated a foreground and a simple background. I also remembered reading somewhere to try vertical shots for landscapes, too. The final images reminded me somewhat of the photographs of Mark Seawell, whose work I admire so much. If you want to see some powerful landscapes, check out his collection.

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Inspiration

Each of us has a great amount of creative potential inside.

What is the trick to letting it out? For me, hard work is the answer. There is always an aspect of craft to every form of art. Pianists need to exercise their fingers regularly; painters, their hands and arms; dancers, their entire bodies. Writers must write, painters must paint, and photographers need to make photographs. Listening to music, watching videos of dancers, reading other people's books all day is going to give you information but will add little to your craft. You see, the moment your fingers hit the keys or the shutter, you have committed yourself to creating art. And that's where the journey begins - day after day.

I came to Germany nearly 24 years ago because I thought I wanted to study musicology, earn a doctorate and return to the US to teach at a college where I could introduce my students to good music. It took three semesters before I realized that, even more than the music itself, it was really the musicians themselves who fascinated me: the biographies of the composers and performers and, as I became better connected in the music world, the actual lives of the performers, composers, critics and even instrument makers. I didn't have a very good background in music theory, either, which really slowed me down and eventually made me switch back to studying languages.

Over the past 28 years I've been a teacher in some capacity. I have never liked George Bernard Shaw's saying, "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach," because it sometimes hits home too closely. However, during my teaching, I always did the same assignments the students did. I wrote the short stories, took the pictures, acted the scenes - whatever it was - because I like doing, too. 
Teachers are indeed important, but we are all students of the world, so let's keep on doing!

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Driving through Manhattan

After I picked up our rental in downtown Manhattan, I had to drive back up to E. 101st Street to our great bed-and-breakfast to pick up the family before driving down to Richmond. Having my trusty Sony RX100 with me, I put it up on the steering wheel as if I were driving through Russia's traffic-crazy roads.
Except that I wasn't really expecting to have to defend myself in court with video evidence of another driver's offensive maneuvers. I just wanted to take some shots of New York life before we left the metropolis.
Below is a fairly typical scene - or at least I think it is: a doorman holding a cab door for a hotel guest without really communicating with him.

The next shot shows a beautiful fire-escape next to a building with new balconies and different fire-escapes. Surprisingly, the architecture didn't really fascinate me quite as much as I had expected.

As I climbed up 1st Avenue, the wealth seemed to be left by the wayside and signs like this one popped into my eye.

Then the most outrageous thing happened! I hadn't expected to have the entire avenue taken from me by a bus, but this one waited until I stopped for a red light (what was I thinking, right?) and then pulled through the intersection from my right side all the way over to the far left lane!

Think that's bad? His buddy in the next bus came up on my left and left me no room to escape. I was just waiting for Matt Damon to crash through the two buses in an old Renault 4 with the Soviet police force in pursuit!

As might be expected, nothing of the sort happened. I got up to Spanish Harlem and down to Richmond within a mere 8 hours!

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Tearing down the church

Several years ago, our family went to this downtown Methodist church with some friends. Today it's gone. It's been torn down  to make room for a shopping mall.

Buy - Rent

The construction site produces a fair share of dust in the air, creating interesting light for photographers.

Too late to look for the offering plate now!

The new cross

Ruins

The window had been long since bricked up

Exposed: The pink wall of the youth room

Stairway to heaven

Save that parking meter!

Looking in vain for the parking meter

Next in line?

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Das Frühlingsfest war da

The spring fair came and went - unlike spring, which hasn't yet shown its real face here. But we're hopeful.
One Saturday evening I was invited to join the fotocommunity group from Kirchheim/Teck at the Wasen. We were to meet at 5:30 and I had told some other people about the meeting and was hoping to see them there, too. But at 5:00 I looked out our door and saw that it was cold and drizzly. That's not a good pre-requisite for a fun photowalk, but I decided to go anyway. However, I put back my Sony A77 and the new Tokina 11-16mm lens I had hoped to try out there and just took along my Sony RX100 pocket camera. Since I had taken pictures at the fair the past couple of years, this would be a good test for that camera, I thought.
By the time I arrived at the fairgrounds at 5:30, the sun had come out and it was warm! This first shot was taken around 5:40!

The Sony did a good job capturing the swinging pendulum while looking right into the sun.

And the RX100 is fast enough to focus on someone walking right by me. The fact that it doesn't make a sound a that it looks inconspicuous helps when doing street photography.

The colors are bright and cheerful - as opposed to these subjects.

The fact that the camera is small and light makes it possible to shoot from the hip, enabling you to capture honest poses.

I'm still a sucker for the watercolor picture effect of this camera. This photograph was shot through the transparent plastic siding of the crepe tent.

DANG! The camera is able to capture fast-moving cars!

The gesture!

I consider this a very lucky capture: The guy's pose, the flames below and freaking people behind him!

This could be a film still from a science fiction film. The new recruits are landing on the space ship and are going to be instructed by this war-torn captain.

Trying to get a new angle on the bumper cars.

Old-fashioned carousel.

This shot was actually taken the following day when I went there again with my daughter and her friend. The sky was amazing.

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