Ride home

Early evening shot from Vienna of the trolley.

Surf's up

 Ocean Beach, San Francisco, California. 

Railing

 Railing on a boat in Izola's marina.

Golden Gate

 

Spent a few day in San Francisco towards the beginning of 2023. I took a boat trip out towards the Golden Gate bridge late one evening with a brilliant sunset. This is one of the better photographs from the trip, I love the lovely gentle golden color on the bottom part of the bridge.

Tracks on gold

 

Another shot from Vienna, right outside the Prater amusement park (shown in the last post).

Prater

 

The Prater is an old amusement park in Vienna (its full name being the Wurstelprater), this is one of its more well-known attractions, the Wiener Riesenrad, constructed in 1987.

Via Col Vento - in harbor

 

A quick shot, taken during a calm winter's day in the Izola harbor. 

Cyclist

 Taken in Vienna one autumn afternoon with the sun starting to go down.

Piran

 

I took this during our last vacation, towards the end of August. I think there might have been a bit of rain during the day which cleaned up the atmosphere - the visibility was quite good despite the clouds in the sky.

Walking in the light

 

This was taken sometime last year in the Hohe Domkirche St. Petrus, the Cathedral in Cologne, Germany.

Bavarian Castle

The Veste Oberhaus is a fortress which overlooks the confluence of the Danube and Inn rivers, as well as the old town of the Bavarian city of Passau. It's a very impressive castle - this photo was taken from one of the castle walls, with the old town out of sight behind it.

Cathedral

This is St. Stephan's Cathedral in Passau, a beautiful city in the south-east of Bavaria, Germany. It houses the largest cathedral organ in the world, also the largest organ outside of the US. Photography in churches and museums is often frowned upon, but this is mainly because of people who use flash - not that it's at all useful. Passau is known as the city of the three rivers, as the Danube, the Inn and the Ilz all join in this city. It's not very well-known but it has a beautiful old town and a very impressive castle.

Skopje 2011

From our trip to Skopje at the end of this summer. For friends, they know who they are ;)

Skyscraper

A huge skyscraper in Shanghai, though it doesn't look so tall since the photo was taken from an even larger building - the Shanghai World Financial Center. This is currently the second highest building in the world, though it has the highest observation platform. The buildings around it are huge, so it's weird to look down a them. Sadly, Shanghai has quite a bit of smog, which means that the visibility isn't what it could be.

Police officer

I'm pretty sure police officers are exactly the same all over the world - and I love the slightly bored expression on this guy's face. Who know how long he's been standing there, and how much more he has to go before his shift ends.

The Constellation

I took this photo in the summer of 2010 in Stockholm during a ride on a small ship from our hotel towards the center of the city. This ship was leaving the dock, and we felt quite small as we made our way around. As can be seen, this is the Constellation (the ship's full name is the Celebrity Constellation) and she even has her own Wikipedia page. During the summer months, when this photo was taken, she travels the Baltic sea, during the autumn she's in the Mediterranean and in the winter she's in the Carribbean. Here are two more photos from this same trip to Stockholm - one is a shot of the town around midnight, and another with a couple of pretty Swedish girls.

Imposing

 

Taken in Shanghai last week, this is the Shangai Art Museum, though it also houses a restaurant on the fifth floor (which is the reason I was there in the first place). I found Shanghai interesting because it's such an intense mix of the old and the new. You can easily have a traditional Chinese building next to a huge, modern skyscraper, with a European style building next to that. 

The overall feeling in Shanghai is that it's big - very big. The city has a population of over twenty million (and that's just the official number), and the area is about a third of the size of Slovenia (a good six thousand square kilometers). I loved it, even though I could not imagine living there for any extended period of time. 

Just to note, the photo above was taken hand-held with a fixed 28 mm F/2,8 lens. Shanghai is actually very, very bright, especially at night. It has quite a bit of smog, which tends to reflect the light back down. Because of this, I imagine one never sees the stars (kind of sad, when you think about it).

Swan

This beautiful swan was relaxing in Zurich, where I recently spent a couple of hours during a stop-over on my way to Shanghai (yes, photos from there are on their way). This is in the center of the city, where the Limmat river runs from Lake Zurich. The light was pretty nice, since it was still quite early in the morning and the autumn sun hadn't risen too high yet. I had a (borrowed) telephoto lens which allowed me to take this tight shot from quite far away - I think this gives the photo a more intimate feel.

Corner of Leavenworth and Lombard

To many people, these two street names don't mean a thing and this is just another pretty picture. But Lombard Street in San Francisco is known one of the crookedest streets in the world - though the crooked part is just one block which runs down a hill with a grade of 27%. The block itself starts at Leavenworth and heads up to Hyde Street, and most photographs of Lombard Street are taken at the corner where Lombard Street intersects Leavenworth.

Windy

Taken on top of London's Monument this spring. Gregor and I visited his sister for the weekend, and we did all of the usual touristy things one does when in London.