After the loooong online form with lots of interesting questions i finally got my visa!

Looks like it will be nice and warm – hope that the aircon in the bus is working! I have the upper sleeper on the left side of the bus. So i can look out of the window or sleep – should be a nice trip. Happy to have a iPod and ear plugs – lets see what i will use more on that trip.

Interesting nugget of information – this is not the original – Napoleond did steal it from italy – after he was gone italy wanted it back and the french did give it back. turned out that italy did steal it from turkey in the 1st place. do you think the original will ever make it back to turkey???

If you want to get the job done – leave it to the germans!

Another nice time lapse photography example i found on the inter web: Asylum by Drew Geraci. I can only imagine how they took the pictures.

From the description: Take a dark journey into the forgotten, where time stands still. The paint has peeled off the walls and the only occupants are the souls of those left behind. This is the Asylum.

Opened in the early 1920s, the Asylum closed down and was abandoned decades ago. Rooms remain untouched – left as they were when the last of the employees departed. These buildings stand as a testament to the horrors and miss treatment that patients had to endure during the time of its operation.

Our 7 month journey into the Asylum led us on many adventures; from dodging security vehicles, ghostly figures and even a meth head. This is no place for the faint of heart. Asbestos blanketed every room we entered like new winter snow, so shooting was sometimes difficult.

This project is a combination of traditional HDR, tone-mapping, and standard time-lapse techniques. With the use of the Dynamic Perception Stage Zero and a Merlin head, we were able to capture the grit and the grime of this wondrous place, like it had never been captured before. Every single frame in this production is a still photograph, no video was shot. It took nearly 35,000 individual frames over 7 months to complete this project.
In return, it took tremendous help from many individuals to complete this project.

This is a nice combination of HDR and tone-mapping as the HDR is not overdone – just as it should be. Spooky place and strange that one leaves a place like that. You would think that they take everything that is still usable and reuse it. The furniture for example??

A few of my friends did organize a small bbq at my place to say “Welcome Back” Cheers guys!
You find a the pictures here -> Link to the pictures <-

Christoph Rehage walks across China over a year and grows a big beard

In 2007 Christoph had the idea to walk from Bejing back to Germany. In the end it did not work out and he did stop his trikp in Ürümqi. In the beginning he did shave head and beard and in the end again. In between you can not only see his hair grow – you can see friends he made on the way and things he saw. Quite a source of inspiration.
Find his blog here: http://www.thelongestway.com/