Well, it seems I have developed a certain faible for Paris. However, this time this wasn't a conference trip with one free afternoon in town but a personal three day holiday. Yay. Special point of interest this time: the Louvre and more precisely: its Leonardo da Vinci exhibition. Day 1. Taking a little walk. 🌍 Picture location – Saint-Étienne-du-Mont 🌍 Picture location 🌍 Picture location 🌍 Picture location – Panthéon Read more

Munich has a couple of nice castles with nice gardens. The castle gardens of Nymphenburg are pretty cool as there is a lot of water and woods. Also you can walk from this area to the next castle called Bluthenburg, which is a small moated castle. 🌍 Picture location 🌍 Picture location 🌍 Picture location 🌍 Picture location 🌍 Picture location 🌍 Picture location 🌍 Picture location 🌍 Picture location Read more

I must admit that I started this trip with a lot of prejudices as I was a bit afraid of Mallorca's reputation being a party island populated by drunk German tourists. However, it turned out that it is quite easy to get away from all this Ballermann stuff and the largest tourism centers. So you can enjoy a wonderful island with great mountains and almost Carribean-like beaches. However, you cannot deny that Mallorca is super touristic - so in this regard, this trip was just the opposite of the Azores journey earlier this year. Read more

Three years ago, we went to Franconia for a two day trip to Bamberg and Würzburg. Last weekend we repeated that idea. This time we went to Rothenburg and Nuremberg. People say that Rothenburg is one of the most beautiful medieval towns in Germany. So it is not a big surprise that there are incredible numbers of tourists (mostly from Asia). I personally thought that Rothenburg is nice but for some reason I was not too impressed. Read more

After visiting São Miguel, Faial and Pico, our last hop was already Terceira island. Day 12 This time we again took an aircraft starting from Pico airport. In case you are familiar with the Greek unit prefixes you know that “pico” stands for something pretty small. And Pico airport is by far the smallest airport I have ever seen. When we arrived, only a couple of firemen “were busy” having a break in the cafeteria and the security was not even open. Read more

After visiting São Miguel and Faial we took the ferry from Horta to Madalena, which takes about 45 minutes and costs only 3,20 EUR (1 person, no car). Pico island is home of the highest mountain of Portugal, Mount Pico, which is visible from more or less the entire island. Another characteristic feature of Pico are vineyards built on the volcanic and rocky soil. Day 9 Some rocks in front of the harbor of Madalena you pass with the ferry. Read more

Time for the second part of our trip to the Azores. After five days on São Miguel we flew to Faial, which is much smaller and feels even more … distant … to the “civilized world”. Day 6 The Azores have their own airline, called SATA, which connects some of the bigger islands using a couple of smaller turboprop machines. (Boy, these things are loud!). I was a bit afraid of the island hopping as I normally find airports quite stressful. Read more

This year we spent two weeks on the Azores, which is a lesser known group of nine islands in the Atlantic ocean about 1.500 km west of Portugal. A quite nice thing about the Azores is that the islands are not very touristic. Yet. There are no tourist buses, no cruise ships that spit hoards of retired people into the cities and no spots that are absolutely overrun. When you stand on Marcus square in Venice, you probably see more tourists than you will see when you travel the Azores for two weeks in sum. Read more

Two hours between arriving in Leipzig and having the first appointment gave me a bit of time to walk run around town. Quite nice there. Must return some day to visit the Völkerschlachtdenkmal and the Zoo. 🌍 Picture location – Behind Nikolaikirche 🌍 Picture location – Of cause somebody had to built that tent in front of the Alte Handelsbörse… Of cause! 🌍 Picture location – Thomaskirche 🌍 Picture location – Altes Rathaus Read more

The god of scientific conferences sent me to Washington, D.C. - a place where I actually wasn't too fond of going to as I am not too fond of the US in general these days due to all things like Trump, NSA, their terror paranoia and stuff… However, I decided to swallow my prejudices (and I had to swallow hard when I filled in the online travel authorization thing which felt like a cerebral colonoscopy) and to look forward the trip. Read more

Spring is coming… Reason enough for a quick trip to Salzburg. 🌍 Picture location 🌍 Picture location 🌍 Picture location 🌍 Picture location 🌍 Picture location 🌍 Picture location 🌍 Picture location 🌍 Picture location 🌍 Picture location 🌍 Picture location 🌍 Picture location 🌍 Picture location 🌍 Picture location 🌍 Picture location

Today I have a day off and … well, I got bored pretty quick. For whatever reason, my brain spat out the idea to write a little program that computes something like histograms of photo galleries of my past trips. This means: the program loops through photos of a gallery sorted by date and time, determines the most dominant color in the current image and draws a line in that color. Read more

At some days you are really lucky… You need to attend a conference in Paris at Wednesday. As the conference starts pretty early in the morning, you must travel to Paris at Tuesday. As all planes except the one leaving Munich shortly after noon are super expensive, you take the cheapest flight and arrive in Paris at early afternoon. And finally the weather is all fine… So I guess it was pretty logical to walk around Paris for three hours and move the final conference preparations to a night shift…

We spent this year's autumn vacancies in Sicily and experienced it as a bit difficult, to be honest. The thing I (we) disliked the most on the island was waste. When you are driving around the countryside you find huge piles of waste bags at more or less each parking spot, under each bridge and actually everywhere else, too. Stray dogs rip open the bags and the wind distributes the stuff. Read more

A 1 1/2 day trip to – as some people claim – the northernmost city of Italy: Regensburg. Well, I do not know if this is really true but I liked the town. Well, Regensburg is pretty small, so – when you just want to walk around town, peek into a church now an then and look shop windows – you need about 6 hours. However, I think it is still worth spending a night or two as you can do some things in the surrounding area: Read more

A quick excursion to the mountains to evade the blazing summer heat in the office. Wallberg The first 800 meters of the ascent to the Wallberg from the valley station of the cable way are not very spectacular as you mostly walk on a quite wide way in the forest. However, the shade is pretty great for hot days and the way I easy to walk. As soon as you reach the Alte Wallberghütte things change and you have wonderful views down to the Tegernsee and other mountains around. Read more

Last year's Christi-Himmelfahrt-weekend-trip to South Tyrol was so enjoyable that we decided to do the very same thing again. So we selected (almost) the same weekend, the same place, the same hotel, even the same room. So this trip felt a bit like coming home ;-) Luckily, we learned from last year's catastrophic Brenner motorway traffic jams and set off pretty early (4:30 am). We reached our destination Scena (Schenna) already at 8 am without losing only one second in heavy traffic - so getting up early was totally worth the effort! Read more

Last Saturday I traveled to Taipei, the capital of Taiwan, for a conference. Luckily, there was some free time to visit the city and take photos. Honestly, Taipei is not the usual photo beauty like Venice, Edinburgh, Strasbourg, etc. So you don't walk around the town and think at each random street corner or place “Oh boy, this is so pretty!". But there are still amazing and interesting things to see. Read more

Some pictures from the Olympiapark in Munich taken at the first “summer” weekend this year. Sadly, odd winds are currently transporting a lot of dust from the Sahara over the alps up to Germany. For this reason the visibility was not too great. I said the visibility was not that great.

Nine years ago we visited Madeira for the first time. Lately, we returned to the island for another hiking trip. I was quite interested to see what changed in that time. Well, not too much: They built an awful lot of tunnels and streets in the Funchal area – so driving got a bit easier – and also the hotel suburbs of Funchal grew even bigger and even more repellent. Oh yes: and Funchal airport was named to Christiano Ronaldo Airport, who apparently was born on the island. Read more

Honestly, I do not understand carnival and many parts of it are - in my personal opinion - simply stupid. However, now and then I like to go to a carnival parade and photograph this happening. This weekend we somehow ended up in the small town of Ochsenhausen which is “close” to Ulm. The particular difficulty (and beauty) of this parade was that it is a night parade. However, night means slow shutter speeds. Read more

Sunday afternoon trip to the Museum Fünf Kontinente, Munich.

Nine years ago we visited Madeira for the first time. As we are planning another hiking trip on Madeira , I went through the old photos and other recordings to find out where we have been. I also used the opportunity to post some pictures which appear to be taken with my first 6MP DSLR. Back then, times were simple (we were savages!) and I had no GPS tracker or smart phone with tracker app. Read more

In autumn 2014 we visited Sardegna for hiking and also a bit for its beaches. For some reason I do not really understand, I almost forgot about this holiday. Recently I watched a TV show which played on the island. This brought back some of my memories and I decided to go through my “old” pictures. Apparently we didn't have the greatest weather there as most pictures show pretty much haze and dark clouds. Read more

Some time ago I bought a Samyang 12mm ƒ2.0 for my Sony Alpha 5100. For those who do not know what the 5100 is: it essentially is a more compact Sony Alpha 6000 without an electronic viewfinder. Buying the 12mm was a huge mistake as it put me into a huge dilemma. I started to like the lens so much that I actually wanted to use it all the time. It is sharp, it renders colors in a nice warm manner and ƒ2.0 is great for not well illuminated areas such as churches, or at night. Despite the lack of an image stabilization system, I never got a shaky image. And I never got one shot which was out of focus, which is surprising, as this is a manual focus lens. In my eyes that lens is superbe (minus some glare when the sun gets in the way). Read more

In this year, we spent our “main” holidays in Northern Italy and Tuscany. More precisely, we followed a route starting in Verona to the lake Como area. Next, we headed south to the Ligurian coast near Genova. We also spent some days in Tuscany in the Sienna area. Finally, we went back to the north and visited Bologna and Venice. Verona Verona is such a nice town. So I am sorry that I start with some photos taken near the Casa di Giulietta, the house where Romeo's Juliet lived according to the book. Read more

Something you do not see every day: the empty exoscepeton of an insect; here of a mayfly as somebody told me later. Neat. But also a bit creeey. Original size ~1cm (Body, no legs, no tail). Taken with my macro lens hack.

Some photo cameras, for instance the iPhone, produce photos where the image's orientation is specified in the EXIF meta data. When displaying the photo, software first reads this information and rotates the photo accordingly. In some situations the software rotation does not work. One example is when you embed pictures into web pages: Read more

Since some time I think about getting a macro lens for my Sony 5100 (E-mount, APS-C). The reason is quite simple: you are not always at interesting places where it is worth taking photos. But with a macro lens you can take nice pictures of insects, flowers, small objects, leaves, mushrooms, … quite everywhere. My problem has been so far that there is no lens for my camera that really excites me. Read more

Some pictures from my last business trip to Bremen. The pics were taken while running around town to see as much as possible in a two hour “leisure” time period. So don't expect photographic miracles. I am always quite amazed how nice Bremen's old town actually is. Be sure to visit the area around the town hall and the cathedral, and the so-called “Schnoorviertel”. Near the town hall you also find the surprisingly small statue of the famous “Bremer Stadtmusikanten”. Read more

I got myself a really cheap action cam. Think “China copy” and “Go Pro” and you know what I bought. However, for its 35 EUR price tag that thing is pretty cool. One problem with that cam is that it comes without any software. So you need to dig around a bit if you want to get creative with recorded movies and pictures. So far, I tried two things: time lapse videos from a sequence of photos and stabilized videos. Read more

… a quick test of the Guetzli JPEG encoder published some weeks ago by Google. To my big surprise, you cannot encode TIFF or another lossless image format into JPEG. You need to export your RAW camera file first to JPEG @ 100% quality. Then you encode that file with Guetzli. Seems a tad odd to me, as you have a lossless compression two times. The speed of Guetzli is furthermore quite disappointing. Read more

Another short vacation over the long “Christi Himmelfahrt” weekend - this time to Scena (Schenna) in South Tyrol, near Merano (Meran). I haven't been to South Tyrol for about 20 years and didn't remember how beautiful this stretch of land is. Definatly a place to come back soon… The only huge drawback I see is the horriffic journey from Munich via Austria (Inntal motorway is limited to 100km/h), the Brenner motorway (the epicenter of traffic jams), and crowded side roads to the final destination. Read more

A second trip to a research retreat in Raitenhaslach. This time I brought the 8mm to snap the ceiling in all its glory.

In some parts of Germany, people set up May trees (“Maibaum”) on their town square at May, 1st. Yesterday my hometown got its new one. I always thought these things would be set up by manual labour. However, in the meantime I learned that this is forbidden in most towns due to security reasons. Hence, a mobile crane must be used. The pictures have a little shallow colors and are dark, I admit. Read more

Again some tests with the 8mm at Auer Dult, Isar and Chinesischer Turm. 🌍 Picture location – Wiki-Links: Paulanerkirche (München) • Mariahilfkirche (München) • Mariahilfplatz • Auer Dult • Fachakademie für Sozialpädagogik der Armen Schulschwestern von unserer Lieben Frau 🌍 Picture location – Wiki-Links: Paulanerkirche (München) • Mariahilfkirche (München) • Mariahilfplatz • Auer Dult • Fachakademie für Sozialpädagogik der Armen Schulschwestern von unserer Lieben Frau 🌍 Picture location – Wiki-Links: Paulanerkirche (München) • Mariahilfkirche (München) • Mariahilfplatz • Auer Dult • Fachakademie für Sozialpädagogik der Armen Schulschwestern von unserer Lieben Frau Read more

Recently I got myself an Samyang 8mm F2.8 fisheye prime lens. The distortions are somehow disturbing but the 180° degrees of viewing angle are also amazing. Here some pictures from Marienkirche Reutlingen.

Being honest: I did not become the biggest fan of BCN. I liked the trip, there are a lot of great things to see, but somehow the city itself did not amaze me as much as Prague, Rome, or Paris did/does. Maybe because most parts of the city are so narrow and so unstructured? Or because I had none of these amazing moments when you stand in front of a truely iconic monument like the Colosseum for the first time? Read more

Some more pictures from the past: this time from a road from La Rochelle following the coast to Saint-Malo, Rennes and Nantes. 🌍 Picture location – Wiki-Links: Bistum La Rochelle • Vieux-Port de La Rochelle • La Rochelle • Universität La Rochelle • Fort Louis (La Rochelle) 🌍 Picture location – Wiki-Links: Schloss Nantes • Kathedrale von Nantes • Orgeln der Kathedrale von Nantes • Nantes 🌍 Picture location – Wiki-Links: Orgeln der Kathedrale von Nantes • Kathedrale von Nantes • Nantes • Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes • Schloss Nantes Read more

Once more some “old” pictures. This time from stunning Prague.  🌍 Picture location – Wiki-Links: Teynkirche • Prager Altstadt • Mariensäule (Prag) • Altstädter Ring • Palais Goltz-Kinsky  🌍 Picture location – Wiki-Links: Mariensäule (Prag) • Altstädter Ring • Prager Rathausuhr • Okres Praha-západ • Okres Praha-východ  🌍 Picture location – Wiki-Links: Prager Rathausuhr • Kanuslalom-Weltmeisterschaften 2013 • Mariensäule (Prag) • Okres Praha-západ • Okres Praha-východ Read more

Old but still good. Photos from our road trip through Scotland in 2011. We started in Edinburgh (“eddin'barrah”), followed the eastern coast line to the most northern town called Thurso and drove down the eastern coast line down to Glasgow.  🌍 Picture location – Wiki-Links: Princes Street Gardens • Princes Street • One O’Clock Gun • Edinburgh Military Tattoo • Edinburgh Castle  🌍 Picture location – Wiki-Links: St Giles’ Cathedral • Heart of Midlothian (Edinburgh) • National Library of Scotland • Bahnhof Edinburgh Waverley • Museum of Childhood (Edinburgh) Read more

Another trip to Berlin - for another project presentation. But this time a little longer - more time for evening photo walks. 🌍 Picture location – Wiki-Links: Gertraudenbrücke • Juwel-Palais • Petriplatz • Spittelmarkt • Gertraudenstraße 🌍 Picture location – Wiki-Links: Liste der Kulturdenkmale in Berlin-Mitte/Friedrichswerder • Schinkelplatz • Hotel d'Angleterre (Berlin) • U-Bahnhof Museumsinsel • Schloßfreiheit 🌍 Picture location – Wiki-Links: Lustgarten (Berlin) • Granitschale im Lustgarten • Humboldt-Box • Radfernweg Berlin–Usedom • Oinochoe des Schuwalow-Malers (Berlin F 2414) Read more

Every now and then, a visit in the Pinakothek der Moderne is nice. 🌍 Picture location 🌍 Picture location 🌍 Picture location 🌍 Picture location 🌍 Picture location 🌍 Picture location 🌍 Picture location 🌍 Picture location 🌍 Picture location 🌍 Picture location 🌍 Picture location 🌍 Picture location 🌍 Picture location 🌍 Picture location 🌍 Picture location 🌍 Picture location

A quick Sunday trip to the Staffelsee. A wonderful part of Bavaria! 🌍 Picture location – Wiki-Links: Uffing am Staffelsee • Mühlwörth • Seehausen am Staffelsee • Staffelsee • Kloster Staffelsee 🌍 Picture location – Wiki-Links: Staffelsee • Seehausen am Staffelsee • Mühlwörth • Wörth (Staffelsee) • Kloster Staffelsee 🌍 Picture location – Wiki-Links: Staffelsee • Seehausen am Staffelsee • Mühlwörth • Wörth (Staffelsee) • Kloster Staffelsee 🌍 Picture location – Wiki-Links: Mühlwörth • Uffing am Staffelsee • Staffelsee • Seehausen am Staffelsee • Kloster Staffelsee Read more

Near Garmisch-Partenkirchen you find a gorgeous :) gorge - the Partnachklamm. 🌍 Picture location – Wiki-Links: Große Olympiaschanze • Eckbauerbahn • Gudiberg • Staatliche Vogelschutzwarte Garmisch-Partenkirchen • Badgasse (Garmisch-Partenkirchen) 🌍 Picture location – Wiki-Links: Graseckbahn • Partnachklamm • Gudiberg • Große Olympiaschanze • Eckbauerbahn 🌍 Picture location – Wiki-Links: Graseckbahn • Partnachklamm • Gudiberg • Große Olympiaschanze • Eckbauerbahn 🌍 Picture location – Wiki-Links: Graseckbahn • Partnachklamm • Gudiberg • Große Olympiaschanze • Eckbauerbahn Read more

Fog + Cold = Hoarfrost. Nice.

In my hometown there is a “Perchten und Krampuslauf” (no idea how to translate that to English) at the day after Christmas. 🌍 Picture location 🌍 Picture location 🌍 Picture location 🌍 Picture location 🌍 Picture location 🌍 Picture location 🌍 Picture location 🌍 Picture location 🌍 Picture location 🌍 Picture location 🌍 Picture location

Some years ago, TUM leased the Raitenhaslach Kloster near Burghausen, renewed it and re-purposed it to a conference center. 🌍 Picture location – here the largest and most beautiful conference room. Sadly, it is not allowed to heat the room to a nice temperature as the wall paintings could be damaged. Also the acoustics are not very good so you have a hard time understanding what was said…

A quick trip to Berlin for a project presentation. Here some photos mostly from the Gendarmenmarkt. 🌍 Picture location 🌍 Picture location 🌍 Picture location Me and a colleague pretending to have a intense discussion for one of the press photographers ;-) 🌍 Picture location 🌍 Picture location 🌍 Picture location

A quick conference trip to Vienna, which is absolutely stunning at day and night. I was lucky to stumble upon the “Wien leuchtet” (Vienna glows) festival in the museum district: some folks set up a huge light show using dozens of large video projectors and speakers. As canvas they used the buildings of the art history and natural history museum that face each other. Pretty nice. 🌍 Picture location – Wiki-Links: Peterskirche (Wien) • Ensemble Theater Wien • Garage X Theater Petersplatz • Öffentliche Bedürfnisanstalt am Graben • Wilhelm Frick Buchhandlung Read more

Our second holidays in Crete. This time in the north east close to Chersonissos. So no big road trip and BnB-hopping this time. Honestly, I would not recommend that you stay in one hotel for more than three days. When you want to go to the cities of Chania, Rethimnon, etc, go to the mountains for hikes, or swim in the sea at the south coast (which has nicer beaches than the north) you spend quite a lot of time in the car. Read more

Some pictures from the rooftop of the TUM center of advanced studies. At the right side of the first photo you see the building site of Galileo, the new campus center. 🌍 Picture location - View to the south. 🌍 Picture location - Galileo building site. 🌍 Picture location – The world famous and only atomic egg. 🌍 Picture location - View to the east.

This year's summer journey led us to Denmark and Sweden. More precisely, we flew to Copenhagen, took the train to Malmoe, and rented a car there. Then we followed the eastern coast up to Stockholm. To my own surprise (I honestly did not realize this when planning the trip), we covered an area larger than Portugal and drove about 2300km in ten days. Not entirely relaxing but we were not disappointed. Read more

A road trip to a (maybe) lesser known/famous region of Bavaria: Franconia. More precisely, the cities of Würzburg and Bamberg. I have never been there so far, but I liked it a lot. I think Würzburg is a little more urban than Bamberg, but also very nice. Bamberg is an incredible medieval town somehow comparable to Strassbourg or Tübingen (where I studied). Not surprisingly, Bamberg is an UNESCO word heritage. Read more

Some photos from our trip to Rome from March 2016! The 3 1/2 days we had in the city were just enough to cover the most important things you “have to” visit: St. Peter's Basilica, the Vatican Museums, the archaeological center of Rome (Palatine Hill, Forum Romanum, Colosseum, etc.), the Pantheon and (for Dan Brown readers) the different locations known from Angels & Demons (Illuminati) like Piazza Navona and churches like Santa Maria della Vittoria. Read more

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I have the habit to log my route when I'm traveling, hiking or sometimes even shopping in town. The GPX track is useful for geotagging photos or simply for understanding where I have been. Yesterday I had the idea to convert a GPX track to something that gives me an overview about interesting places nearby my track. So I fiddled a little with Python and wrote a script that extracts the lat/lon coordinates from a GPX file sends these coordinates to the Geonames database extracts text from the Geonames reply creates a very basic HTML page with some describing text about the interesting places nearby and a link to Wikipedia. Read more