Morning Read

Took this photo while having breakfast in Hilden, I only had my Nexus 5 phone with me since I didn't intent on doing much photography.

Late Summer Afternoon Walk

Took this while out enjoying the late summer sunshine and an afternoon walk through the woods and fields in Hilden. The Nexus 5 gets often slanted for the camera quality but it's actually very good and with some processing in Snapseed you can get great results from it.

Silhouette Selfie

In between chilling out, doing some gaming on my Surface Pro and browsing through photos, I was having some fun taking a selfie using the shadows on the wall.

The Lost Posts - Part 13: Welcome Bear

N5, f2.4, 1/398, ISO 100, JPG

The Lost Posts - Part 12: Forrest

N5, f2.4, 1/53, ISO 208, JPG

The Lost Posts - Part 10: Hilden Sunset

N5, f2.4, 1/1484, ISO 100, JPG

The Lost Posts - Part 9: Car Wash

N5, f2.4, 1/84, ISO 123, JPG

The Lost Posts - Part 7: Mushroom

N5, f2.4, 1/120, ISO 222, JPG

The Lost Posts - Part 6: Foosball

N5, f2.4, 1/595, ISO 100, JPG

The Lost Posts - Part 5: Flower

N5, f2.4, 1/796, ISO 100, JPG

Blogger Abroad - Back Around the World

It has been a few weeks but I am ready to jump on another jet plane and continue my journey around the world. All family matters and other things have been sorted so there won't be more interruptions before my journey finishes.

Day 1 - London to Brussels, Cologne and Hilden

First day of my journey and the first stage started from London St. Pancras. It was an early start, I got there before 8am to have time for coffee and some photography.

It felt good to finally set off to the journey I have been thinking about and planning for the past months.

Checking in and going through security at the Eurostar terminal was quick and the train left on time at 8:58 towards Brussels Midi.

During this first journey I realised that my initial plan to have Google Tracks track the whole journey will not work out as the GPS reception in trains and through the tunnels is not very good and the Fonepad has a pretty crap GPS built in. Will have to leave this part out and maybe just track my walks instead.

The journey was otherwise uneventful and we arrived on time at Brussels Midi to a grey sky and heavy rain.
My first thought was to go and seek shelter in a cafe or bar, have some coffee and maybe some Belgian beers.
Then I realised that this will not be the first time I will get rain on my trip so I took my jacket out and set off for a walk around Brussels to take some photos. I had just over 2h in total to spend till my next train to Cologne.

Most of my photos from Brussels were street photographs of people as the buildings and architecture was very uninspiring due to the grey and dull weather. This combined with the fact that I tried to keep the lens free from drops so tilting the camera up was not really what I wanted to do too often.

The ICE train left on time at 14:25 with the usual German efficiency and I managed to get my favourite seat in the train. If you ever travel on the ICE, don't bother to book a seat but just go for the bar car and find a seat there, it's the best place as you have a table, get served and can enjoy a coffee or beer while watching the landscape go by. The only downside is there are no plug sockets but this is not really an issue.

Arriving in Cologne to a brighter sky was a relief and meant I could pack my jacket away. Rather than taking the first train to Hilden, I decided to go for a short walk around and take some pictures around the Dom.

After my time in Cologne, I took the train to Hilden to see my parents and brother before I will head onwards to Copenhagen tomorrow evening.

Walking back home in Hilden, I saw this nicely lit shop and had to take a picture. I am very impressed how it came out and it it my favourite photo of the day.

You can see all pictures I took today on my unedited Flickr stream here, I will upload automatically all pictures there taken with the Eye-Fi card ad will manually upload the others to have as a cloud backup.

As a side note, I will try to post more of my preparations and planing stages throughout the journey and will keep the blog updated whenever possible. If you post a comment or send me an email, I will always reply as soon as I can.

Tree in the Front

GXR A16, f6.3, 1/233, ISO 200, JPG, 24mm

Sitting and Watching

GXR A16, f5.5, 1/810, ISO 200, JPG, 50mm

The image quality of the A16 Zoom is very good and it is silent in operation.
The feel of the module is something I still don't like as it feels to plasticky but the upside is that it is light and carrying it around is not a problem.

The Scribblings on the Wall

GRD, f5, 1/410, ISO 100, JPG

A post from Hilden in Germany today. Am spending the weekend here so this is why I did not have much time for posting on my blog.
The weather was great and a very nice change from all the grey skies in London. Took this picture while walking around town. I liked how she stood in front of the wall and the colors. However, I do not like stupid scribblings on walls. If people want to spray graffitti on a wall, they should do something more interesting. How about a nice drawing, a social commentary Banksy style or just a interesting or meaningful message written in nice letters? But not just stupid scribblings. This is not art, it is no social commentary and nothing meaningful. It is just vandalism and for this people should be punished harder. This was my social commentary on my blog where I can have my own scribblings on the net ;).