The cheetah and the grasshopper live in South Africa, the baboon and flamingoes are from from the Tierpark Hellabrunn Zoo in Munich, Germany and the gorilla at bottom lives in Parc National des Volcans, Rwanda. More gorilla photos here. All processed in Photomatix and Photoshop. Click 'em to make them bigger. More HDRs here.
Oktoberfest ended yesterday in Munich with the loss of
"a Viking helmet, two crutches, an electric wheelchair, a rucksack containing two foldable camping chairs, a case full of musical notes, 1,300 items of clothing, 520 wallets, over 1,000 identity cards, 390 mobile phones, 370 pairs of eyeglasses, 90 cameras, 80 items of jewellery and watches and 425 keys..."
and only one set of dentures, down from previous years.
"The year I started," a worker in lost and found said, "I remember we had five or six sets of false teeth in, and a pensioner walked in and tried them all on. Unfortunately, his weren't among them."
Read all about it here in Der Spiegel.
The Englischer Biergarten, Munich.
HDR of a baboon at the Tierpark Hellabrunn, Munich. It's a single shot re-exposed +3 to -3 EV and recombined in Photomatix Pro, then desaturated and sharpened in Photoshop CS5, with effects applied from Nik Software. Click it to make it bigger.
See more HDRs, more Animals & Wildlife and more photos from Germany at EarthPhotos.com.
It's the Max Grundig Klinik Schlosshotel Bühlerhöhe. Excellent clinic, great oncology department. "Former Ukrainian President Vickor Yushchenko and former Russian Economics Minister German Gref have been treated there."
And it's a possible exile in Germany for Hosni Mubarak.
Looking out at snowfall and just general wetness from the studio window here on the farm. Seems like a little color is called for. This flamingo and friends live in the Munich, Germany zoo. This week's Wednesday HDR is a single shot from a Nikon D700, reexposed and then combined and tonemapped with Photomatix Pro, and finished by extracting the star of our show and blurring the rest of the photo in CS5.
There are 320 more HDR photos in the HDR Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
Top: After processing. Bottom: Photo as shot.
Last month we visited the Munich zoo for this photo. There were obvious problems with the photo as shot, bottom, including my having left the exposure compensation at +2 from the night before and shooting a dark object against a bright sky. It cleaned up pretty well, though, after HDR processing in Photomatix and some finishing in Photoshop CS5.
There are a few more photos from the Munich zoo in the Germany Gallery and currently 274 photos from all over in the HDR Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
Marianplatz and the Rathaus, Munich, Germany. We posted an earlier version done on my little MacBook when we were still in Munich, but this one has the benefit of being produced on the 23 inch Apple monitor here in the studio.Three exposures combined in PhotoMatix. Then in CS5 we extracted the yellow, green and blue bits, desaturated the rest and added the yellows, greens and blues back. Click it to make it bigger, or click here to make it huge.
Incidentally, we had two photos from our Baltic/Scandinavia trip chosen as "Editor's Picks" on Sunday on the HDR fans' site HDR Spotting. Here's one:
Right now there are 262 photos in the HDR Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
Remind me next time - Munich is full of tourists in August. Every third person is American. Not normally our preferred situation, but the weather is gorgeous, and as compared to the Baltics and Belarus it's a perfectly shoulders-down, upscale end to these past three weeks.
Culture? You name it, we've done it: The higher brow kind - art museums (both the Alte and the Neue Pinakothek, which makes for a long day of standing), and the local kind - beer, sausages and sauerkraut at the beer garden at the Chinesischer Turm in the Englischer Garten.
Count the red jerseys. Public opinion is squarely behind Bayern Munchen, the home team.
Here's an HDR of the rathaus with it's famous glockenspiel - city hall from all 306 steps up Peterskirche. Click the photo for a bigger version.
Or, more specifically, "... a globally standardised 3D digital elevation model of Earth, and with a
measuring point density of 12 metres, it will be incredibly accurate," according to the director of the project, which is called TanDEM-X.
Two satellites will map the earth's terrain in tandem, creating the 3-D effect. The second satellite was successfully launched on 21 June.
"Within three years, this will create a gigantic data record equivalent to the storage capacity of 200 000 DVDs, " says the German Aerospace Center site.
See also a very nice animation here.
Illustration from the German Aerospace Center site.
As a single event, the initial breach of the Berlin Wall succinctly symbolized the entire tumult of twenty years ago, so on the twentieth anniversary of the event earlier this month everyone reflected on what it meant to them, personally, and what it has meant to the wider world. But the wall's fall was just the beginning of change.
The really great compilation called The Collapse of Communism, as written at the time by the correspondents of the New York Times, captures the sense of wonder with which we all watched the daily events, from Lithuania in the northwest of the increasingly tenuous Soviet empire all the way down to the Caspian Sea, where pogroms against Armenians had already begun in Baku, Ajerbaijan by this time twenty years ago.
Just today twenty years ago, 24 November, 1989, the Czechoslovakian Communist Party leadership resigned and, from a NYT article on 25 November by Steven Greenhouse, some
"350,000 protesters crowded into central Prague in the eighth straight day of huge demonstrations.
"In a striking paradox, the throng was addressed by Alexander Dubcek, whose liberal regime was overthrown by a Soviet-led Warsaw Pact invasion in 1968.... It was Mr. Dubcek's first public appearance in Prague since 1968."
Ominously (since we all watched the brutal Christmas Day demise of the Ceausescus), further to the southeast in Romania, old Nicolae and Elena just didn't get the whole change thing. From Alan Riding, writing in the NYT twenty years ago today:
"In a huge display of government control, tens of thousands of workers were marched to a demonstration here today to celebrate the re-election of President Nicolae Ceausescu as General Secretary of the Communist Party."
Read the entire article, In Rumania, the Old Order Won't Budge.
(Photos: Top, "Red Square" sign from the Russia Gallery, and bottom, the Ceausescus' Palace in Bucharest, Romania, from the Romania Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.)
I second the emotions of Alison Smale, writing in Friday’s New York Times: “Recalling the spontaneous joy of unexpected liberation, let loose on a city that had always known how to party, makes me tremble with emotion even now, 20 years on.”
Smale crossed the border from East to West twenty years ago today. It took my friends and me seven more weeks, until New Year’s Eve, to get there, but the celebrations and the emotion continued.
You may never in your life stand at the unquestioned most important spot on the face of the planet but that’s what Berlin was twenty years ago, and when I think back now, I most remember the collective dynamic - just the raw emotional feel of the place. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people had come from absolutely everywhere, and every single one of them was exuberant, tolerant, exultant.
As soon as we arrived, having rolled across the then-scary corridor through East Germany to West Berlin, we dropped everything and headed straight for the wall at the Brandenburg Gate.
What a year for big anniversaries: China's leadership has successfully negotiated theirs, the fiftieth anniversary of the Dalai Lama's flight from Lhasa to Dharmsala in March, the twentieth anniversary of Tiananmen Square in June, and the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic on 1 October.
Now watch tomorrow as Iran marks the thirtieth anniversary of the U.S. embassy takeover by radical students in Tehran, and next Monday is the twentieth anniversary of the first crack in the Berlin Wall. Your then somewhat more youthful correspondent stood atop the Berlin Wall with thousands and thousands of others on New Year's Eve, 1989. I'll have a photo or two next week.
(Photo of flags above the Tiananmen Gate from the China Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.)
Germany has banned air traffic over Oktoberfest.
I’m not entirely clear about everything that happened that night. Perhaps you’re the same way about certain New Year’s Eves.
I remember that well before midnight I sat atop the Berlin Wall beside a teenaged East German, our legs dangling off the western side. He’d never been beyond the wall. Looking back west there were dozens, maybe hundreds of American flags. There was a lot of love in the air.
Out there in the crowd, wearing a costume that twinkled like a Christmas tree, American performer David Hasselhoff sang while standing on one of those heavy-lift cranes they use to work on utility poles. Looking back I thought I must have made that part up, until I saw video confirmation.
One thing I’m sure of is that the Berlin Wall was made to be very, very hard. There was a great crush of people as far back to West Berlin as you could see, and everybody was determined to chisel out his own piece of the wall before the whole thing went away.
I borrowed a hammer and chisel and pounded away. You’d isolate a golf ball sized bit of concrete and the final blow would send it skittering along the ground where someone else would happily scoop it up and be gone.
I eventually carved out my pieces, which are now encased in plastic with the date 31 December, 1989.
Before the new year was out, East Germany was gone. The magazine Der Spiegel has captured the zeitgeist of the country that is no more, in 45 photos taken just before and after reunification in 1990, in this online gallery.
We're scheduled to be in Munich in early June. Place your orders now, and while we're there, we'll pick up some Obama Fingers for you.
From Foreign Policy's Passport blog: "The packaging says the product is 'tender, juicy pieces of chicken breast, coated and fried.' A curry dip is included."
(Photo from Foreign Policy's Passport blog.)
Common Sense and Whiskey is the companion to EarthPhotos.com, where you can see and buy professional photo prints from 105 countries and territories around the world, and the blog for Common Sense and Whiskey - the book. It's Intelligent discussion about the world out there.
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