Monday, December 31, 2012

Bi-Weekly Photo: Madrid at Christmas

I'm back home for the holidays, visiting my family and friends. The latter is not always easy, since my family lives in Segovia and most of my friends in Madrid, 100km away. I took the bus to Madrid last Thursday afternoon hoping to meet a friend, but when I arrived I couldn't get in touch with her, so I took the chance to walk around Madrid and get some practice with the 50mm prime lens I got for christmas. I had never used a prime lens before, and I thought it would be harder to get what you want on the picture without a zoom, but i got used to it pretty fast. I guess that the fact that a 50mm gets more or less what you can see with your eyes in the picture helped a lot. That does not mean that the quality of my photos has gotten better, it just means that they contain exactly what I wanted to capture.

 
I spottet this protest against the plunge of Bankia's shares in Alcala at the center of Madrid. It's one of the few signs that make you notice that something's wrong in Spain. Which is something I really like about Spain: even though the situation is somewhat tough right now, the general feeling you get in the streets is that of a lively crowd.

Another thing I noticed is that the christmas decorations were simpler and there were fewer than in the past few years.


This, in my opinion, is a good thing. A few years back they started putting up lots of colors and weird "artsy" forms which didn't really have much to do with christmas decoration... Imagine the picture below, but with lots of different colors:


Monday, December 17, 2012

Bi-Weekly Photo: Somewhere in Castilla la Mancha

This was one of the many moments I regretted not having a GPS tracker for my camera. I took this picture from the car when my brother and I were travelling from Madrid to Alicante, on the eastern coast of Spain. If I remember it correcly, and by the looks of the landscape, the photo was taken somewhere in Castilla la Mancha:


I know the post is titled Bi-Weekly Photo, not photos, but i'll make an exception. Here's something you will almost certainly encounter as you drive through Spain's roads:


These bulls were originally put up during a marketing campaing by a company named Osborne, and have since become an unofficial symbol of Spain.

Friday, December 14, 2012

Christmas in Germany - Feuerzangenbowle

It's that time of the year again, when magic and freezing temperatures turn the reaction to cheap warm wine from "eeewww!" into "mmmmhh... Can I have some more?". Once again, Munich is filled with christmas markets with all sorts of beautiful [and slightly overpriced] ornaments, delicious foods and of course, hot beverages, mostly alcoholic, to keep us warm. Here's a picture of an ornament shop at the christmas market in the "Marienplatz", with the town hall in the background:

Ever since I saw the movie by the same name I've wanted to try a "Feuerzangenbowle", a traditional christmas beverage made of hot wine with cinnamon and other spices, which is then sweetened by a block of sugar soaked with rum and melted by lighting it on fire. It was quite interesting to hold the cup and watch the sugar burn, slowly melting into it.
I burned my tonge attempting to drink it shortly after the flame went out, but once it cooled down a bit, it was really a treat! This is what it looked like half way through the "melting process":


Monday, December 3, 2012

Bi-Weekly Photo: Alcazar de Segovia

This is a picture of my hometown's old castle, the Alcazar de Segovia in Spain. Since I don't really know much about its history, and copying what another website says is kind of pointless, here's a link to Wikipedia.



Here's something interesting though: Take a look at the DVD cover of "The 10th Kingdom" and see if it looks familiar. Yep, they took the Alcazar and several church towers from across Segovia (including the cathedral, of which I will probably post another photo sometime) and pasted them all together. I think the Alcazar was also used as an inspiration on several other movies, but I don't remember any specific one right now.

Monday, November 19, 2012

Bi-Weekly Photo: Arc de Triomphe

During my road trip in the summer I experimeted a bit with my camera. I wanted to try panorama photography, and the Place Charles de Gaulle in Paris seemed turned out to be a pretty good setting.


This is my first attempt at making a panorama photo. I stiched 16 pictures together with a piece of software called Hugin, trying to cut out as many cars as possible from each picture. Since the Place Charles de Gaulle is a huge intersection, it wasn't an easy task, and I couldn't remove every car, but I got close enough.
I also haven't gotten a hang of all the software's parameters yet, so the angle is a bit off (as you can see by the round upper edge of the Arc de Triomphe), but overall I'm quite happy about the result.

Monday, November 5, 2012

Bi-weekly photo: Madrid's subway

For this weeks entry I wanted to post a picture that probably does not have any artistic value, but symbolizes my daily routine during my school years. I took this picture during the trip to Spain in September. It shows the subway station "Nuevos Ministerios" in Madrid, one of the major stations of the Metro de Madrid. In case you're wondering, in Spain we have right-hand traffic. The Metro de Madrid is an exception. Apparently, when its first line was built, left-hand traffic was still the norm in Madrid, and when they changed that, they decided to keep the subway as it was to avoid additional costs.

Sunday, October 28, 2012

Munich in Autumn - Revisited

Just last week I posted about the great weather we were having in Munich. This is how the weather looked like today:


It's snowing! :D


Also, Halloween is around the corner, and Pia and I wanted to try carving a pumpkin (no, we've never made a Halloween lantern before). Here is the result. What do you think?


Monday, October 22, 2012

Munich in autumn

I was thinking of posting a photo that I find interesting every two weeks. I didn't manage to post a single photo since the trip in September, so I'm not sure if I will manage to keep up, but it's worth a shot.

I want to start by posting one of the more recent photos. Since we're having great weather conditions this weekend in Munich, my girlfriend and I went for a walk in the park ("Englischer Garten") and took the camera with us:



PS: Feel free to leave a comment below! I would love some feedback, and it would be great to get to know my audience :)

Monday, September 10, 2012

Timelapse: Paris, France - Segovia, Spain

EDIT: Hint: If you just want to see the video, skip to the bottom of this post.

The bad quality of my posts about Japan is a very good example of why I shouldn't try to do anything creative at night after long trips. Still, I couldn't resist browsing through the pictures we took during our trip for the timelapse video tonight (after a 6 hour long drive). And of course, after looking at the pictures, I wasn't going to go to bed. I ended up making the entire video between 2:00 and 4:30 (AM).

First things first, here's our setup (if you didn't read the last posts, i'm currently on a road trip with my brother):
We used a small 720p Webcam, which we attached to the car using our extensive mechanical engineering knowledge and duct tape.

On the software side, we were running a small program named fswebcam on linux. If anyone is interested, here's the bash script I wrote so I didn't have to type in everything every time I wanted to start recording:

 #!/bin/bash  
 FOLDER=timelapse3s  
 if [ $# -ne 1 ]; then  
     echo "Usage: $0 <video device>"  
 else  
     if [ ! -d $FOLDER ]; then  
         mkdir $FOLDER  
     fi  
     fswebcam --no-banner --jpeg 95 --loop 3 -S 6 -r 1280x720 -d $1 $FOLDER/timelapse-%Y%m%d-%H%M%S.jpg  
 fi  

I cut the video with kdenlive. It can import a bunch of images as a video natively, but it's not very efficient at it, an my netbook is not that powerful, so I decided to merge all the images into a video first and then just edit that with kdenlive. To do that (without losing quality) you can use ffmpeg and select mjpeg as the video codec:

ffmpeg -f image2 -r 8 -i %d.jpg -vcodec mjpeg video.mp4 

I don't remember where I got this from, but it works. Your files have to be renamed first, so that ffmpeg finds them using the format string passed in the -i parameter. I also made a script for that:

 #!/bin/bash  
 if [ $# -ne 2 ]||[ ! -d $1 ]||[ -e $2 ]; then  
     echo "Usage: $0 <input_dir> <output_dir>"  
     echo " <output_dir> must not exist"  
 else  
     mkdir "$2"  
     COUNTER=0  
     for file in $(ls "$1")  
     do 
         cp "$1/$file" "$2/$COUNTER.jpg"  
         COUNTER=$(($COUNTER+1))  
     done  
 fi  
 

So, without further ado, here's the video. I hope you like it!


In case you don't like the embedded player, click here

PS: Here's where I got the music from: http://www.jamendo.com/en/artist/4402/outsider

Saturday, September 1, 2012

Road Trip

Like last year, my brother and I decided to make a road trip from Germany to Spain. Last year we only stopped to take turns driving, and didn't enjoy the trip itself to the fullest. This time, we wanted to change that, so we stopped and stayed in Paris for the night. We also attached a webcam to the car to "document" our trip with a timelapse video. We have over 20000 stills that have to be merged, cut and edited, so until then, here are some photos I took with the other camera:

My brother and me at the Trocadero in Paris


Notre Dame -- Taken from the car while driving by

Nice sunset somewhere in south France

Saturday, August 18, 2012

New Camera [UPDATED]

After thinking about it for the past 2 years, I recently decided to put the money down and ordered myself a DSLR. My girlfriend's parents had planned a hike around Garmisch-Partenkirchen (Germany), and since the Camera conveniently arrived one day before that, I thought it might be a good chance to give it a try. Here's the result:

In case you are wondering about the noise in the picture, I let the camera set the parameters for this picture, and forgot to lower the maximum ISO speed. It was taken at ISO 3200... On the other hand, the noise makes the picture look a bit like a drawing, so it's not that bad :D

EDIT: Here's another one. This one was taken from my window at home.