Expat Bloggers Meetup - Great St. Martin Church, Cologne

Last Autumn, Frau A and I attended our first English Bloggers Meet-up in Germany.  The group's 2011 meeting was held in Cologne, where we had a wonderful tour of the Dom (Cathedral).  After the Cathedral tour, we had some further activities and meals in the Altstadt (old city).

First, I noticed a funny sign outside the Cathedral selling a book "Hooray, we're still alive!" about post WWII years:

Then, we walked past the Hauptbahnhof (main train station) just outside the Cathedral...

...and down towards the Rhein river.  Some trees were already starting to turn brilliant colors:

We walked along the Rhein for maybe 5 minutes before arriving at the Great St. Martin Church:

Cologne is arguably the center of Roman Catholicism in Germany, and there are a lot of churches to see.  In fact, St. Martin is one of the twelve Romanesque churches in the city!

St. Martin's foundations go back to about the year 960, with the current buildings being erected as early as 1150. 

St. Martin's history also includes ties to a Benedictine Abbey, fires and reconstructions, and WWII and rebuilding.

It's obviously much smaller, less dramatic, and less "fancy" than the big Dom, but also almost no tourists!  The simplicity and quite made for a great contrast with the overrun Cathedral.

This lady stopped for a prayer and was right at the light's edge, from light to dark.  Beautiful.

After a while for photographs, looking around, and quite comtemplation, we left and headed out for a late lunch.  The hot topic of discussion at the bloggers' table:  photographic equipment of course!

One of the bloggers had a funky lens that had a 45-degree mirror at the end of the barrel... to see around corners.  (below: the lens is pointed right, but the mirror is facing my camera and captured me)

Lunch was at a Turkish place, and we loaded up on hummus, tzatziki, etc.  This is quite typical, since there are so many Turks and a strong Turkish influence in almost all major German cities. 

Frau A and I like the Moroccan-style lamps:

After a hotel pause (read:nap) we met for a late dinner at a Cologne establishment, serving Kölsch beer, naturally.  Here was a waiter filling up a tray from a true traditional wooden keg:

Kölsch is more like smooth Bavarian helles than the hoppy pilsners served in most of northern Germany.  Also, rather than a huge 1L stein, Köksch is served in small, thiner glasses.  That makes sure there isn't a lot in a huge mug that gets warm over time.

The waiters just mark your coaster to keep track of all the smaller glasses you order.  Like the waiter above, they carry around lots of fresh glasses in a special tray and just keep replacing empty glasses at every table.

We ordered the gulash soup (Hungarian in origin, of course, but adopted everywhere in Germany) and local wurst served in a pan, with bread and mustard.  The perfect dinner.

Before we left at the end of the weekend, there was one more church to see -- this one has the bones of 10,000 virgin martyrs!  Stay tuned...

Friday Photo Favorite: Feed Me!!

Not so little Greylag goslings in the English Garden, Munich. 

Two Tours of the Cologne Cathedral

This post has a LOT of photos, so I'll try to keep the text to a minimum.  One of the events at the English bloggers' meet-up last year was a tour of the Cologne cathedral.  What was special about this was that the guide took us on service elevator to the upper level, and we walked around both inside and outside (to a unique lookout).  The next day, during free time, Frau A and I took the more public route of walking up the stairs to the root of the spires.

Check out Wikipedia for info on this famous cathedral - started in year 1248, is the largest gothic church in Northern Europe, is Germany's most visited landmark, with the largest free-swigning bell in the world: 

The day before the tour (when we went to Aachen), we grabbed a photo from the front in sunlight...
(note:  you can see the lookout we will visit on the first tour in this photo, with a small spire above it)

...and then at night:

This is the cathedral from the "back", near the bank of the Rhein river (the entrance is on the city side):

From this side, you can see the two huge spires that are it's calling card on the Cologne skyline:
(these are the destination for the second visit the following day)

As a gothic structure, there is a lot of detail of course: 

For the first tour, we met a guide at the side of the cathedral, and entered basically through a locked construction/restoration entrance.  We immediately took the maintenance elevator up to the next level.

As we exited, we started walking through the passage that outlines this upper level inside the cathedral.
You can see the passage to the left of Frau A, and the cathedral opens up below on the right:

This is the view of the cathedral inside, from this second level (basically looking right and down from Frau A, through the pillars and over the stone edge): 

I stuck my arm out and took a few blind photos to try and get a better view.  You can see organ pipes on the left and the main altar at the far front of the cathedral:

This is the same shot processed in HDR to try and show more detail:

There were neat twists and turns through the passage:

Coming around the end, we got a glimpse of the main organ pipes...

...and now we are looking at the other end of the cathedral inside, at the front entrance:

We passed some places where light coming through the huge stained-glass windows hit the wall.  Great views.

At one point, the passage took us a bit higher...

...and we had a tremendous view of one of the windows:

Then in another narrow section of the passage, there was a stained-glass window on the left, and the light hitting the wall on the right.  Just awesome.  Got one shot with Frau A, both in regular processing...

...and in HDR:

Here is a view just with the stone and light (regular)...

...(and HDR):

When we reached the far side of the upper level, we took a door to the path wandering along the outside of the cathedral.  We were literally walking under the flying buttresses, and over the roof of the trancept (I think):

This is looking back down the first part of the path.  In the background is a bridge over the Rhein river:

The path takes a turn to continue along the outside of the cathedral.  You can see members of our bloggers' group ahead of me:

Up ahead is the guide (a student, I think, with expertise in the cathedral's architecture and history).  He is standing before the door that will bring us to the next part of the tour, with maintenance ladders on the rooftop...

On the last few meters before reaching the door, we had a great view of the Rhein:

This is zoomed-out to the bridge seen in the prior photos - obviously for trains, and not cars:

Just at the door, the view straight ahead was to the Hauptbahnhof (main train station)...

...and a bit of the city as well:

This was the view when we got back inside the cathedral:

You can see the tops of the domes in the cathedral ceiling through the scaffolding, beneath our feet!

A set of metal stairs will lead us to the looking mentioned earlier:

Looking down, you can see more of the domes in the roof that tourists are staring up at in the cathedral right now!

At the top of the stairs was a "trap door" that opened into the lookout.  This is NOT one of the two huge spires (that comes in the next tour) but is the smaller one.  (See the first photo on this page to see the difference.)

From up here we had an unimpeded view of the Rhein river...

...and the Hauptbahnhof:

Looking up in the city direction, the twin spires loom.  Next day's visit will take us up into the bottom of these:

As usual, there is always restoration going on, with scaffolding obscuring parts of the building:

With a little zoom, we could see the ladder going to the very top of a spire!

Looking down, we could see the buttresses again and the path that we walked along outside the building:

It was cool and breezy up there, but Frau A agreed to post for a second:

On the next day, we took a different "tour".  This time, it was the unguided access to the stairs climbing up to the base of the spires.

Before getting in line, we spent some time at ground level inside the cathedral:

We could spend hours here taking photos.

We had to wait about 20-30 minutes in line, pay, and then start the slow (and tightly winding) stairs up almost 400 steps (the girls ahead of us counted).  We finally reach inside of the base of one of the spires.  Looking up:

Then up further to a walkway just outside the spires that was heavily covered with metal chain link fence:

This is not just to keep things from going down - the fence was above our heads as well.

The fence got in the way for photos, but despite the blurriness it's a nice view.

Looking down from here, you can see the place/platform/lookout we were on the day before: 

And of course the views of the Rhein here were great as well:

It was really a stunning trip with the bloggers' group, and a must-do for any tourist to Cologne.

Friday Photo Favorite: Istanbul Sistern

On our Easter trip to Istanbul, we saw the Sistern... built during the 6th century.  A fabulous place for photos.

Note:  FC Bayern plays Chelsea tomorrow for the Champions League title, and the game is in Munich!  It's already rowdy here.  Good luck to FCB and have a nice weekend.

Friday Photo Favorite: 1st Hummingbird of the Season

We were in the Charleston, SC area this week, and my mom put out the hummingbird feeders. This little guy was the first taker.

I half expected he would come back about 3 seconds after I gave up waiting with the camera, but luckily he let me get a few shots, albeit with a pretty wide lens. Next time, I'll bring the telephoto lens and enjoy a relaxing morning coffee + bird stalking. 

Travel and Photography: A Vicious Cycle

Anyone who has met us for at least, oh, 2 minutes knows how much we love to travel and see new places all that this wonderful world has to offer.

And in the past few years, we've both developed a love of photography that usually goes very well with our love of travel. I now find myself taking pictures not just to document the trip, but also enjoying the challenge of trying to capture the beauty of a special place or cope with difficult photographic conditions.  Or, sometimes I start to prioritize destinations based on the photos we could take. There were many reasons I was excited to go to Istanbul over Easter, but the truth is that one of them was I wanted to photograph the gorgeous mosques now that I had a good camera and knew (somewhat) how to use it! 

Sometimes hard to balance the desire to see the sights with the other desire to photograph it. You would think these are always the perfect combination. And though usually they go well together, sometime I find myself concentrating more on the photography than seeing the place. Not sure if that's "right" or "wrong" and it may be quite normal, but it's a bit like the typical quandry of how much time to spend on seeing the sites and how much time to spend eating, relaxing, and soaking up the culture. 

The right balance is key for an enjoyable trip. The Europeans often marvel (and not in a positive way) at the typical American European holiday: It's usually something like 5 cities in 6 days, or sometimes even more cities than days.  I always explain that we have to make our short trips count since we Americans have much less vacation time and great difficulty getting longer than a week off work at a time. But this feeling like you have to see it all and not waste the trip leaves us exhausted by the end of the trip and suffering from what I'd call in Europe "castle fatigue" or in Egypt "tomb burnout."  Andrew from Grounded Traveler calls it the "Aquarium Effect of Sightseeing," but the result is that after too many castles/tombs/old squares they all start to look alike and it's not really that much fun anymore. Diminishing marginal utility of sightseeing...I'm having flashbacks to econ classes...

After enough years of travel (and of having the wrong balance), I've learned to be OK with taking a trip somewhere great and not seeing everything. We usually prioritize what we want to see, and then we don't worry too much if we don't see the rest. It's much more enjoyable if we take the time to sit in a cafe and have turkish coffee or watch the scenes from a lunch table on the plaza instead of rushing around to see everything. Fish and chips in London, macarons in Paris.... part of travel is soaking up the culture and getting to try new foods, right? 

But I'm still working on finding my travel/photography balance.  Sometimes we get so wrapped up in the photography that we forget about how interesting the subject is. I guess luckily there's the internet and we can always read more about it later. Though I struggle with the same question of "am I getting everything out of it that I should?" 

Our trips often look a lot like this

(I'd just gotten a macro lens, so we pulled over to a scenic spot on the way home from spring skiing)

Or this, at Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna

We're learning to manage it better and build in time for photos, since that's one of the fun parts of the trip. We know that when we stop to take pictures, we're a lot slower than the average person, so we build in extra time to the schedule. And especially extra time when we're hiking!

But I've recently realized there's a bigger problem with combining travel and photography - it's a vicious (and potentially expensive!) cycle. 

The more I travel and practice, the more I enjoy photography. And the better my pictures and processing get, the more I want to take pictures and improve my photography. And the more my photography improves, the more unhappy I am with the older pictures because I remember how beautiful the place was and I know I could do it better now. So then I want to go back and "do it right." And I want more equipment...

Luckily the processing side of it only costs time and terabytes in the digital photography world. Herr J is finding that out the hard way. Every time he learns a better way to process the pictures, he wants to go back and redo the older ones. That can eat up a lot of time! As for me...I'm still trying to get through the huge backlog of almost every photo I've taken since getting a DSLR.... But we now have a digital photo frame filled with hundreds of beautiful places and happy memories.

Last week as I was dreaming of potential honeymoon destinations, I was inspired to look through my safari photos from a trip to South Africa a couple of years ago. This trip was the catalyst for upgrading to a D700. I'd been thinking about going to full frame and knew this trip was coming up later in the year, so it was a good time. The problem now is that I didn't know a quarter of what I know now (and there's so much I STILL don't know!). So I was disappointed looking back through the pictures. There were some good shots, but most of them were not what I remembered/expected and a few simple adjustments like shutter priority would have really made a huge difference. 

Looking through those photos again, I concluded that:

1) I'm so lucky to have the chance to go such an amazing trip

2) Wow, I did NOT know how to use my camera back then!!

3) I need a longer lens

4) I need to go back*

* this one probably is only 50% photography related. I just love animals. I could easily be a safari junkie!

Realistically, I can't justify one of those awesome, superfast 400mm+ lenses. Even if money were no object, would I really carry around a 10-15 pound lens??? 

No, but looking through these photos - remembering how amazing it is to see the animals and knowing how much better the pictures could be - I find myself wanting to take more pictures and travel more. (And really wanting some extra reach) In the short run, a trip to the zoo or to one of Germany's safari parks would be a great idea. All the fun of seeing/photographing animals for a fraction of the price and travel time! And a good opportunity to practice before the the next time. Maybe next time we rent a lens? I'm currently still failing, but I keep trying to rationalize Nikon's 70-200mm 2.8 and a 2x teleconverter. Herr J's micro four-thirds with it's tiny, light effectively 600mm lens beats me every time!

But, back to South Africa...while there were disappointingly few good ones among the couple thousand photos I took, there still were a few good ones. And I guess even the not so good ones are worth keeping, since they provide me with memories of good experiences and time with friends. And, of course, inspiration for the future! 

Here were some of the better ones:

The vultures waiting for the lions to leave the dinner table

 

 In the middle of a huge herd of Cape Buffalo and their birdie friends

This one of the European Roller came out very well!

We unintentionally drove right into the middle of an elephant herd. None of the photos of the babies came out well, but one or two out of a hundred worked. Frustrating about the photos, but I do have the memories.

 

More birds, either waiting for a free meal or hiding out up high as the predators come out for dinner time

In this case, the 70-300mm was plenty to get a nice close shot of a Cape Buffalo. I like how their horns grow to look like they're wearing an old-fashioned wig. 

Not very nice skies, but a decent shot of the Southern Yellow-billed Hornbill

 

Procrastination actually paid off for me here. Upon returning 2 years ago, I did nothing other than convert the RAW files to jpg. But in the last month, we've found out how to rescue those grainy night shots using Topaz DeNoise. It's a bit of a miracle-worker!

No animals, but this one pretty much sums up the safari experience....hats, cocktail hour, photography, and some wildlife magazines. And a big bowl of brightly colored monkey balls.  

Capturing the moon is one of the big photo challenges I haven't yet worked out, but I do like the dreaminess of this shot of it coming up above the trees and grass.

And it's shots like these that make me want the big boy lenses.....This was at 300mm and cropped as much as I could. Though the picture is nothing special, it reminds me how helpful the monkeys were. Thanks to their incessant screeching, we realized there was a young leopard nearby!

Sure, I'm biased because I love cats, especially big, boldly patterned ones. But the leopards were by far my favorite animal out there. We saw 3 or 4 of them. They are breathtakingly beautiful and one can easily lose an hour just watching the leopard stroll around, roll in the grass, and primp. And my lack of good photos of the cats (and anything that moved, really) makes me want to go back and try again. Too many were blurry (use a faster shutter speed), not proper exposure, or obscured by grass (more careful composition). I want to go take a beautiful portrait of the cat's face, but I just never got in close enough.  Isn't he gorgeous? 

(Something tells me that getting a leopard to stay still and to look in my direction is going to be equally frustrating as trying to get my housecat to pose!)

And finally, we found the giraffes, about 5 minutes before it was time to turn around and head back to the airport.

 

It wasn't all big creatures. The smaller ones were everywhere too. Luckily this little guy was slow enough for me to catch him in focus. Unfortunately most of the smaller, faster creatures were too far or too fast to really be in detail. Especially the wildebeasts and the cute little warthogs that ran through the grass with their anntenna-like tails sticking up - just like Pumba!

 

Though I was able to get a few impala not running.  

Friday Photo Favorite: Puppies!

I'm so tired right now and a bit stressed out. Trying to get everything done before deadlines next week. 

For anyone else who's having a rough week....PUPPIES!!

Cute, fluffy sweet Husky puppies. 

I feel better already.