This summer I started to care for a vine in my backyard, which was in a bad state. Unfortunately a little late for cutting it into shape. Nevertheless I removed all the dead branches and fruitless young shoots.

Now, since fall has started, the time of harvesting comes closer. I am quite proud that I managed to grow so many grapes – okay the berries are somehow small but that may be caused by the type of wine. On the other hand everything is absolutely organic. Next year I will try to optimize the result of the harvest by starting to care for it in late winter.

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This year I had not planned any big vacation trip to some awesome target. No. I just wanted to stay home and keep things quiet. Thus I decided to spend a few days in the South-West of Germany – a region I haven’t really been at before. I met with Dietrich, a good old friend of mine, who was working in Stuttgart for a short period.

We did a lot of bike-riding – man, Stuttgart is a really hilly city and it cost me a lot of sweat to reach some of our targets. But then we also did some nice roundtrips to the Black Forest and the Swabian Jura by car. One hightlight was a multi-day trip around lake Bodensee with short visits to the Swiss Alps. Finally it was a great holiday trip with lots of new impressions, funny conversations between old friends, visits to beer gardens to watch the football championships and ofcourse with a lot of shooting photographs.

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Every Doctor says: You need to move to keep your systems intact. Umm. Therefore this morning I have woken up my bicycle from winter sleep and planned my first test ride for this open air season.

The weather was perfect for cycling, but not really for photography (and lightwise it was the wrong time anyway). But to take my camera with me turned out to be quite a clever decision. Every now and then I could stop, pretending to take a photo :-). Since spring has just started in our area, I decided to take some pics of fresh leaves  and other greenstuff. So I have lots of green and surprisingly even some shiny yellow.

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Today I got a short message from David Hobby,  a.k.a. The Strobist, that he has made my German translation of his famous e-book “Lighting 101” available via his website.

During the last few weeks I did the translation, editing and layout with my editorial service GermanoMedia. This book is the renowned beginners guide for photo enthusiasts who want to learn lighting techniques, that drastically improve the quality of their speedlight photography.

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Whenever one of our friends from Nikonpoint photography forum is in town and suggests to meet for a photowalk some forum members from Berlin are ready to meet and to do some cool shoot.

Tonight FM2-User from the city of Mainz was in Berlin and we suggested to make use of the Blue Hour in Berlins Government district and to walk along the river Spree. It was quite a short distance, maybe 1500 metres and our bunch of four were shooting for about only 75 mins. But this was absolutely okay because the evening sky and the illuminated Buildings were excellent subjects.

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Today I had an appointment with a property manager of a historic building in Berlin’s center. He gave me the assignment to shoot refurbished offices at famous Borchardt House near Gendarmenmarkt.  (You may know that my commercial photostudio specializes in real estate photography.) This was quite a challenge because those 8,000 sqft where completely empty.

But when the manager took me on a tour for a first look I immediately knew what to do. There were so many visual highlights in those offices I could concentrate on:

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This week I had the chance to attend a BBQ seminar on behalf of BBQexperte at one of the Grill Academies powered by Weber. At a rural district of the City of Leipzig we met at Genussakademie 7Sinn in a historic farm complex, where chef Jens Becher celebrated a great variety of BBQ dishes.

Besides all theory we also had the chance to prove ourselves als Junior Grill Masters. Okay, I haven’t done so much in terms of food preparation and grilling because I wanted to document this event with my camera.

But finally I had a blast, capped with a selfmade 8-course dinner.

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Visiting a photogenic city and having plenty of time – what else would make a perfect photo night? Perfect weather. Well the first two things I had last weekend. But the weather was rather a challenge than being suitable for citynight photography: drizzling, foggy, low clouds and gusty winds.

My good old friend and photographer Volker lives in Dresden and was the perfect guide for our nightly photowalk. Ofcourse we started with one of the most famous vantage points: Canaletto’s View. (Canaletto was a painter who portrayed Dresden at around 1750.)

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