Lassal – photography
Not really. But looks fun, does it not?
We are having the Women’s World Cup (soccer) in Germany and part of the show is right in front of our house at the riverside. Bad for walking the dog.
The night I took the picture above, they were installing the spot lights.
So you see: most of the explanations are trivial and boring.
Best to stick with the UFOs …
Guess what?!
YES!
It toke me a long way to finally press the purchase button on the iPad. But I did it. And I do not regret it a bit, now that I finally got to this stage.
The main points for me are clearly that I can update my presentations in no time and look professional. While I was carrying paper presentations around with me, I would actually have to reprint them time after time because they would get messy in my bag and when people leafed through them. Depending on whom you want to show your work to, a coffee stain and crease might be acceptable – or not.
Secondly, I can actually fit the iPad into most of my handbags while still being able to use my 10finger system with the keyboard. It feels a bit like playing on a piccolo flute, but it works, and that is the most important. Every one who learned to type with 10 fingers knows how lost you get, when you all of the sudden have to switch to two fingers: takes me forever and I never know where the letters are. I sincerely do not manage to type with two fingers without loosing my good mood (and the train of thought).
As I am working on three books right now, I have a lot of writing to do, so always having the iPad with me is less of an issue than carrying my large screen macbook pro around or typing stuff into the tiny iPhone. And you probably know how it is with the “perfect expressions and statements”: they do not tend to come when one is sitting at a desk, ready to type, but when one is standing in the ticket line, going out to walk with the dog, having a latte in a little street corner coffeeshop or just sitting at the river or in the subway. Now I flip open the iPad, jot the thought down in no time, send myself an eMail as backup and there I am! Perfect.
Obviously the iPad has more to offer than just this. But even if I merely counted the points mentioned above, I did a good deal with it. Considering the sheer amount of presentations ahead of me, I actually saved money if I use it for more than 9 months.
Amazing thought.
They cleaned the pond recently and replaced the lights. So now, in the night, when your eyes are drawn to the only late lightsource in the backyard, you have these two glowing eyes staring back at you. I do not want to complain, but I think they could have done a better job with the light – less haunting. On the other hand side it kinda fits to the character of the place: always empty, always watching. Kinda Stephen King like – only this time it is a backyard with a pond instead of an house.
They put something in the water to make it turn green – or probably they forgot to put in something to keep it clear. But I have to say that I prefer it this way. I always wonder why on earth pools are painted light blue anyway? What most unnatural color to put into a pond like the one in our backyard! I kind of understand why you have this in swimmingpools – the notion of clean and cool. Especially in warmer regions a dark color in a pool would just help increase the water temperature, and with this the growth of everything you do not want to have in that water … but why in a pond? Oh well … it is beyond me.
I guess it is just this way “because it is done this way”, meaning: people do not reflect about alternatives. I fear it is not even about not wanting to take risks – most likely it is about unawareness and being pigeonholed.
Maybe it is just, so that I take some picures … But that would be to take myself to seriously, I fear. :)
Where there is no light, there is no shadow.
Cliché – but true.
A day earlier at a barbeque party. Same thing, only different.
Always worth it to look up once in a while.
From a bottle of Clos Napoléon, 1986, Fixin 1er Cru.
I have been carrying it around with me since that time – along with several other bottles that probably did not survive either.
May my friends forgive me …
Yes, I have been warned.
This was the first image I submitted to David Alan Harvey for BURNmagazine. He published it in the “single images” section.
It shows a church on a hilltop in Bornheim, where I lived. The wintery night skies and snowy grounds glowing in the lights of Frankfurt’s bank district, that is situated behind the hill. The offices all lit up, people desperately working until late at night. It was the time of the economical crisis in the banking sector. And the crisis reflected all over the place. Quite literally, as one can see.
After a lot of coffee and cereals I decided to release the first part of “The Signs That Mock Me As I Go” for publication.
That was the easy part.
Now I need to figure out how one can show a group of work online, that is more of an object than of an image. Very tricky. For example, I could easily come up with a smell for the exhibition (I am an eye-nose type of person), but I find music very hard to deal with. Give me a cd and I can listen to it forever. Every new song that comes up deletes whatever came before in an instant. As if I only had memory for one single song – always the last song I heard I will remember for as long as I do not hear anything new. It is different with sounds, strangely enough. But I am probably the worst music customer ever, with maybe 3 records that I have bought in my whole life! Considering that my partner is a part time musician, this is actually horrifying to admit.
So now … how do I deal with music for this video that I need to submit? … Dang. Hopefully I remember where I put those 3 records I was talking about.
As I am currently preparing to shut down Lassal-LIGHT, to make room for Hunter/Lassal, I found this little image on the site. Nostalgia!
He does not quite fit under that piece of furniture anymore. So nowadays it is me who needs to get his ball when it rolls under there.
They grow up so fast …
I need some more empty wooden boxes of wine for my photography books.
Anyone wanna come and have something to drink?
:o)
This picture of the backyard shows a bit how the new year feels to me right now: yet not exposed properly, yet undefined. Not in a bad sense, only in the sense that there are many possibilities yet to work on. I like this feeling: It is freedom!
But to have freedom is one thing – to use it wisely is another animal completely.
If there is one lesson that I hopefully learned in the past year, it is that there is never the perfect time for anything – or at least hardly ever. If you want to do something, do not wait for the perfect time, but make it BE the perfect time. Otherwise the chances are high, that you will end up not doing it at all.
Last year I spent too much time waiting for “right” constellations or for the “right” moods & feelings. Ok, I had the excuse of being sick and having to sleep most of the day, but … if the sickness had been more threatening and 2010 my last year alive, there would have been a lot of things I would have missed by having waited for the arrival of better times. Sometimes there will never be a better opportunity than what is right in front of your nose. And you better not waste it.
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