Forbidden City

Another opportunity to travel to China, a fantastic country. The first day I had a few hours on my own so visited the Forbidden City again. Beautiful as always...

Fragile, now the night is here...

Lonesome Cowboy

So I went to New York City for a week just the other day. Still, I had some time to walk around Broadway, including running into Matthew Broderick and Ewan McGregor after their shows. While that was fun for sure, I thought the lonesome Cowboy on Time Square was a bit more impressive.

Olympic Park

It has been a while since I last went to the Olympic Park. So I returned this weekend to see what it would look like post the Games. I really like the venue; it's an interesting mixture between wildlife and formal architecture.

One of the more interesting buildings is the velodrome, with its hyperbolic paraboloid shape and a red cedar timber outside it simply looks fantastic.

You can bring your race bike along or simply rent one for the day and off you go...

I also liked the Aquatics Centre, and some features seem to stem directly from the movie "I Robot", although those are just the spectators' seats....

Life thru a lens

The team I work for got invited to a wedding of one of our colleagues. Great fun, beautiful bride, everything you could possibly hope for. I had my little camera with me and pressed the shutter button just when my colleague Ellis was trying to take a picture. Proper example of "Focus on the important things", ha ha.

On the beach

A one-day excursion with my cousin to Dungeness. Classic British seaside pursuits are just not possible at Dungeness. What you do get is a hard, unyielding shingle beach and lots of isolation and strangeness. But then - when the sun shines - you can enjoy the sky stretching over flat marshland and surprisingly very few visitors.

Breakfast at ... London Bridge

Ok, so it is not quite Tiffany's, but surely it is just as exciting to have your first cup of tea right on London Bridge in your bridesmaid dress at 8am on a Monday morning. The two girls caused quite a stir, very funny.

Cricket

I think it's fair to say that for someone from mainland Europe the obsession the English have with Cricket is somewhat on the quirky side of things. Anyway, while I acknowledge I will never fully understand the rules it was actually quite an entertaining evening at the Oval.

Mont St Michel

A four-day Normandy trip on the bike over Bank holiday. Thank you Benon for a nice ride along the French coastline down south to Mont St Michel. Oh, should you happen to be in the area, you can skip the village with the promising name "Camembert", it's not worth it.

Shadow of a man

Since I decided to walk to work (rather than using the bicycle) I get a few shots every now and then during my commute. Great fun.

Artware

The V&A museum is certainly amongst my favourite London museums. However, I didn't want to shoot just plain statues. Given I felt inspired by the exhibition by Tony Ray-Jones (showing in the Science Museum, definitely worthwhile seeing!) I tried to capture a different side, a bit funnier, a bit more interesting, or so I hope...

Gehry House

Frank Gehry - according to the New York Times one of the most successful architects of our times - created some odd looking but very cool houses in the "Zollhafen" in Duesseldorf. Unfortunately, no one seems to live in them, they all appear to be occupied by very creative people from the media industry.

Too much information

Went for a walk on Oxford Street with the intention to shoot a few images at night. The one shot I liked was this one, a woman in front of a huge display..."Too much information" was what I thought that moment.

Highgate Cemetery

This weekend I went to a photography course to Highgate Cemetery. A cemetery? A bit pathetic, you may think. True. But then it was all about trying to capture the cemetery in Black & White. I didn't like too many of the images I took, but thought those three were ok....

Once upon a hill...

So I have been trying to find a decent subtext for this picture, but I have given up. I wanted to give the image some sort of meaning, but I guess it simply doesn't have one. It's just a picture I like.

Last night, when we were young...

London Jazz Festival

Great things happening at the Southbank. The London Jazz Festival is on, and some great artists are playing, you can even enjoy free concerts. Marcus Miller, Kenny Wheeler and a few more made for some great fun on Saturday, I just had to spend all day there.

Desert Rose

Last week I spent a few days in the middle of nowhere, or to be more precise, in Phoenix, Arizona. As I came in a bit before my conference started,  I took the opportunity to cruise around the desert on a motorcycle (I would call that heavy metal "agricultural" at best). Anyway, it was great fun and you get the sense how lonely one can feel out there.

The trip was some 200 miles, and some of the views very truly impressive.

The temperature was certainly on the high side, with peaks reaching 33 degrees Celsius. Not bad for mid-November, is it?

Ah! What pleasant visions haunt me....

...as I gaze upon the sea...
Like the long waves on a sea-beach
Where the sand as silver shines,
With a soft, monotonous cadence,
Flow its unrhymed lyric lines....

Poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "The secret of the sea", 1850

Shoe shining man

Another image I took while on holiday in NYC, but only managed to put online today. The bloke was waiting for customers to get their shoes shined. I do love his facial expression. He could with no doubt also play a major role in a gangster movie, I thought...

There is something...

There is something....something about the quietness when the sun has gone down and the city comes to a peaceful rest....have to admit that when I spent a few days in NYC recently it was really nice. Been to the Big Apple many times, but this time it was holidays, and discovering new areas was a lovely experience.

Growth

A stroll along Finsbury Avenue. Finding the right angle puts the perspective into context, whether it is a skyscraper or a a branch of a soon-to-be flower....

A day at the races

A friend of mine invited me to watch him racing around Brands Hatch in his old Mini. Great fun!

And although the next image wasn't taken on the very same day I think it tells a great story, too: Its all about dreams and something we strive to achieve...I admit I really like this picture.

Beautiful weddings are the best

I was invited to Avignon, France, to attend one of my best mate's wedding. It was breathtakingly beautiful, the venue could have easily been featured in a movie about the best things in the Provence region.

The crowd was lovely, and everyone was very fashionable.

Another nice thing about the South of France of course is that you get the goodies, like three different types of cherries, handpicked in a timely fashion for breakfast.

Lazing on a sunny afternoon

Had my lovely friend and her daughter over from Germany just the other day. We were hanging round my apartment although it was a sunny afternoon. She was flickering through one of my photo books and I thought the scene was somewhat bizarre, but check for yourself; it certainly made me smile. What a really nice day.

Troubled men, the fools we are....

But then, at least some things make sense...

Paris, Texas...

Not quite Paris, Texas, but on my road trip from London to Frankfurt I had the opportunity to have a few hours at wonderful Bruges in Belgium.

You should go see it, it's well worth the trip.

Isle of Wight

A weekend on the Isle of Wight. Very cold, but one could see the beauty of the island shine through, guess that begs a summer visit. And you need a sailing vessel, of course.

The Shard

Just the other day I went up the Shard, which for a small moment was the tallest building in Europe (now overtaken by Moscow's Mercury City Tower).  Good enough for me, I thought, so I settled to take some pictures from its 95-storey high visitors platform.

The only perspective though I really liked was this one:

Finally, I took a nice shot once I was back down again, I just happen to like patterns in photography:

Symmetry

Just a close-up shot of a tulip....love the symmetry...

Breakable

Went for a very early walk in snow-covered Frankfurt this weekend. The blue light was beautiful, I thought. I wanted to take a picture of the tree on the plain field, as it was sort of majestic (sorry for the obvious and hence somewhat boring wording).

But somehow the tree's true beauty only got revealed once I got very close.

Some of the branches were completely covered in ice. It felt as if somehow the ice worked as an insulation against the cold. And it felt very breakable, too.