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Travel Tuesday: Bealach Ratagain
Tag: mountains
Lens-Artists Photo Challenge 223: “Flights of Fancy”
John invites us today, to imagine the unthinkable and go behind the border of imagination for this week’s Lens-Artists Photo Challenge. He writes:
“According to Dictionary.com, the idiom “flight of fancy” refers to “an unrealistic idea or fantastic notion, a pipe dream. For example, ‘She engaged in flights of fancy, such as owning a million-dollar house.’ This idiom uses flight in the sense of ‘a soaring of the imagination,’ a usage dating from the mid-1600s.”
and
“For this week’s challenge, consider sharing images of interesting or unusual subjects that represent notions or ideas that seem incredible even today or seemed. “
So, the jump point is set.
The French Brothers Montgolfiere used to have a dream, an incredible dream! And, in fact, they were able to realize it. On June, 4th of 1783, they presented their self-constructed vehicle to the amazed audience: the Montgolfière, the ancestor of today’s hot-air balloons. Their courage has opened up a new world for mankind.
This image is taken a few minutes before sunrise during my second flight looking east
.
The people of the North are used to this incredible glowing in the dark during the long and cold winter nights: Northern Lights or Aurora Borealis. But, unlike us nowadays, they did not have an exclamation for the moving lights above them. The old Vikings found a saga to explain it: At night the valkyries ride along the battlefields to collect all the past heroes and lead them to Odin’s table in Walhalla. The rays of moonlight were reflected by their arms and shields which are supposed to result in the amazing lights.
My third image is to honor the genius Catalan architect Antonio Gaudí. In the past, I already donated a few posts to him and his absolutely incredible work. He was able to think outside the box when planning buildings and was able to make heave stone seem to be light plant parts. All the shapes were derived from nature, just like this hall of forest trees forming the main ship of the cathedral La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. I got aware of parts of his work first when I was in my 7th or 8th class at secondary school. I’m so happy, to have been there a couple of years ago and I hope to revisit when the cathedral is once finished.
Maybe, I was able to inspire you to dig in your archive and find some images, you can publish your images on your blog and set a link to John’s inspiration post. Don’t forget to tag it with the tag LENS-ARTIST, so we can find it.
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Lens-Artists Photo Challenge 222: “mountains are calling”
“You stand up there, whith your head in the clouds” – John Lees
This line of Barkley James Harvest’s famous song Hymn came to my mind when I read the topic, Amy has chosen for this week’s Lens-Artists Photo Challenge.
But, there’s another line, tied strait to the other one:
“Valley’s deep and the mountain’s so high”
A mountain can’t exist without a valley.
The Bavarian Alpes seems to grow out of a plain when coming from the North. Seeming to be a barrier, and they are. The Alpes are the main reason for the quite stable weather in Europe.
Again, mountains having their heads in the clouds.
Maybe, I was able to inspire you to dig in your archive and find some images, you can publish your images on your blog and set a link to Amy’s inspiration post. Don’t forget to tag it with the tag LENS-ARTIST, so we can find it.
Take care!
Throwback Thursday: Walk with your own pace
When hiking with a photographer, the non-photographers in your hiking group have to wait every now and then. That’s especially true when hiking in such a fantastic and panoramic region like the Swiss Alpes.
But, later they are happy for benefiting from your images :😊
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Traveling in times of the pandemic
This is my first bi-lingual blog-post. Text in Deutsch weiter unten.
A friend of mine started a challenge to inspire the reader to travel without leaving the room and and calls it Zimmerreisen,which translates to room-travel. The German word can be a plural noun as well as a verb. I really liked the idea and I wanted to participate. As she writes her blog in German and addresses people living here I would also write this post in German. But, the majority of my followers don’t understand German, so I decided to write this post in both languages.
Puzzleblume named a few of rules for the challenge:
- each second Friday of a month a new turn
- pingback to her post
- 1,500 words should be enough (per language)
- Not only images. Tell us a story!
- use the tag #Zimmerreisen (and #roomtravel)
- use the given letters as stimuli for your imagination to find places or things starting with the given letters
- First we start with “A”, “B” and “C”. Use at least one of them for your post
I’ve chosen “Alpes”, “Balloon” and “Carnival” for this first roundtrip from the back of your seat to have
A few years ago, I was in Bavaria with some friends for having a hot-air balloon flight in front of the Alpes.
You know, flying balloons depends very much on the weather. While for most time of the year a balloon can fly safely only during the morning or evening hours, during winter they can also have good conditions during the day. So, we met at about 8:30 with the pilot and tried to find a good spot to start. The sky was covered with thick clouds, but the weather report (not the forecast) said, it would be possible to fly. And we did! After a couple of 10 meters, we touched the clouds and when we came out of the clouds, a sunny blue sky was above us. We went up to 1,000 meters and enjoyed the view to the Alpes.
Where’s the “C” you might ask. This happens during the core time of the carnival season while we were escaping the carnival festivities. In German, carnival translates to Karneval. The origin of this word is Latin “carne vale” and means “meat, farewell”. This festivity is the last before the start of the lenten season, which ends on Holy Saturday.
Btw. I’d encourage you, to join. I guess, it’s a lot of fun 😊
German:
Eine Co-bloggerin von mir hat eine Challenge gestartet Post zu schreiben, in denen man reisen kann, ohne das Zimmer zu verlassen und nennt das “Zimmerreisen”. Ich fand die Idee so gut, dass ich mich auch daran beteiligen möchte. Da mein Blog aber in Englisch ist und Ihre Idee in Deutsch, habe ich mich entschieden diese Post Zweisprachig zu schreiben, denn die Mehrheit meiner Leser verstehen kein Deutsch.
Sie hat ein paar Regel aufgestellt:
- jeden zweiten Freitag startet eine neue Runde
- Pingback zu ihrem Post setzten
- 1,500 Wörter sollten genug sein
- Nicht nur Bilder, sondern eine Geschichte erzählen
- Den Tag #Zimmerreisen benutzen (und #roomtravel für englisch-sprachige Leser)
- die gegebenen Buchstaben als Inspiration für den eigenen Blog-Post nutzen. Die Orte oder Gegenstände sollten mit diesem Buchstaben anfangen
- Wir beginnen mit “A”, “B” und “C”, und mindestens einer der Buchstaben muss verwendet werden
Ich habe mich für “Alpen”, “Ballon” und “Carnival” für diese erste Runde entschieden.
Vor ein paar Jahren war ich mit ein paar Freunden in Bayern um eine Fahrt in einem Heißluft-Ballon vor der Alpenkulisse zu unternehmen.
Wie jeder weiß, Ballon-Fahrten sind sehr Wetterabhängig. Die meiste Zeit des Jahres können sie nur in den Morgen- oder Abenstunden starten. Im Winter hingegen besteht in den Alpen auch die Möglichkeit tagsüber zu fahren. So haben wir uns morgens gegen 8:30h mit dem Ballon-Piloten getroffen und einen Start-Platz gesucht. Der Himmel war mit dicken grauen Wolken überzogen, aber der Flugwetterbericht sah für einen Start gut aus. Nach einigen Duzend Metern haben wir die Wolken erreicht und nach einigen weiteren Duzend Metern erfolgreich durchstoßen, wo wir von der Sonne und strahlend blauem Himmel erwartet wurden. Bis zu 1.000m sind wir aufgestiegen und konnten die Aussicht auf das fantastische Alpen-Panorama genießen.
Was ist mit dem “C”? Die ganze Aktion fand in der Karnevalszeit statt. Zwischen Weiberfasnacht und Tulpensonntag, während unserer järhrlichen Karnevals-Flucht (darüber habe ich schon ein paar Mal geschrieben). Karneval, oder in Englisch carnival geht zurück auf das mittel-lateinische “carne vale”, das “Fleisch, Lebewohl” bedeutet. Aschermittwoch, mit dem Karneval abschließt, ist der Beginn der Fastenzeit, die mit Karsamstag ihr Ende findet.
Btw. Eventuell möchtest Du auch teilnehmen. Tu es!
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Monochrome Monday 7-29
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Monochrome Monday 7-24
A long and lonely road – Road 1 (Ring road) in Southern-Iceland in June 2020
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Throwback Thursday: Graubünden
Two years ago I was in Graubünden in Switzerland for a few days.
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Monochrome Monday 6-51 – Wanna talk?
I saw these nice English telephone boxes last year in Wales. As we are currently hindered going out and are locked in our homes to save us from getting infected by the SARS-CoV-2 virus for several weeks now life becomes kind of boring.
As so many of us are currently locked at their homes similar to sitting in jail and certainly have talked to nearly every relative and friend. Every housekeeping is done, reading, listening to the radio and watching TV or binge-watching whole seasons becomes boring. So, maybe it’s interesting to talk to a complete stranger, whom you only know slightly from reading her blog posts.
Although I’m not alone, but I’m curious about talking to people and get to know a bot about how they feel these days. Therefore I’m offering a skype call. Simply talk half an hour or so. No specific topic. A bit like you could do when meeting someone in a metro or a bus station.
Therefore I make an offer: do you want to talk to me? I’m offering a skype call. If you’re interested, drop me a line in the comments. I won’t publish that comment and only use the email address you’re leaving me, to contact you for negotiating a suitable time slot. You know, I’m in western Europe and located in CEST, that’s UTC+2 (because of the daylight savings time).
You can find your timezone i.e. when looking on the world map published at Wikipedia and then use Google by saying for example “13 PST CEST” and get back “22:00h”. So, you can see, it’s 10 p.m. (= 22:00h) for me when the people in i.e. San Fransico or LA have 1 p.m. (= 13:00h; PST = Pacific Standard time).
So, anybody interested? I’m curious for you 🙂
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Monochrome Monday 6-50
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Throwback Thursday: waiting for the sun
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Throwback Thursday: Norway Pano
Last week I was working on some images taken back in 2016 in northern Norway at the Ofotjord.
Here we have a panorama image from that pile of up to now undeveloped images. It consists of 13 single horizontal images taken with a full-frame camera. Each image has 6016×4016 pixel. So, each of them has 24 mega-pixel. All images are shot hand-held at 70mm, ISO 400, f8, 1/1600s. It’s end of February and 13:49 😳. See, how low the sun already is at 17:01h.
Another way for creating such panorama images is by taking a wide-angle lens. But this approach has a downside: you’re losing details. For getting only the interesting part of the landscape you have to cut away huge parts of the sky and probably some parts of the foreground. In the remaining part of the image, the details are very tiny. On the opposite, when taking a telephoto lens, you get smaller parts of the landscape but each of the images has more details compared to an image taken with a wide-angle lens. In the end, all these images are stuck together to get a nice panorama image like the one above.
The resulting image of this process is quite big: 23997×2391 pixel and uses about 500MB in 16bit TIFF format on my disk. Converted to JPG the size shrinks down to about 40 MB but loses some color gradings because JPG only has 8 bit per color channel. I explained the problem with 16 vs. 8-bit color-depth already in the past. Next, I resized the file for web-quality. The image above is the downsized version: 9093×900 and 1.7MB.
Click in the image to see it in a better way.
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Monochrome Monday 6-37
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Monochrome Monday 5-41
Paint the sky with stars
Wordless Wednesday: winterly Allgäu
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A new track
Five Sisters
Monochrome Madness 5-13 / 219
Another image from Scotland. Eilean Donan Castle located in Loch Duich, next to the Skye-Bridge connecting the Isle of Skye to the Scottish main-land.
This is my contribution to Monochrome Madness organized by Leanne Cole.
“Monochrome Madness” is now in its fifth year of existence. Look at Leanne’s site on Wednesday (Australian time), to see many more monochrome images created by many other talented photographers from all over the world.
I’d also encourage you to participate. The conditions are published in each of her Monochrome Madness posts.
Take care!
Monochrome Madness 5-12 / 218
This is my contribution to Monochrome Madness organized by Leanne Cole.
“Monochrome Madness” is now in its fifth year of existence. Look at Leanne’s site on Wednesday (Australian time), to see many more monochrome images created by many other talented photographers from all over the world.
I’d also encourage you to participate. The conditions are published in each of her Monochrome Madness posts.
Take care!
Summer in the highlands of Iceland
Wordless Wednesday: Starry, starry night
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Waiting for the summer
Throwback Thursday: Lofoten
A winter trip to northern Norway does not always mean: cold, dark, lots of snow and never-ending darkness..
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Monochrome Madness 4-39
This is my contribution to Monochrome Madness organized by Leanne Cole. Look at her site on Thursday (Australian time), to see many more monochrome images created by many other talented photographers from all over the world.
I’d also encourage you to participate. The conditions are published in each of her Monochrome Madness posts.
Take care!
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