Is this a panorama? A lighthouse

The light house at Hollum, Isle of Ameland, the Netherlands.

Is this a panorama? Eight pictures taken with a fisheye lens, combined with a standard post processing software. Since you can see all sides of the light house at once, and "panorama" translates from greek/latin as "see all", I'd say: yes, it is a pano! :-)

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On a ferry

Excellent weather - windy, but sunny, going last Friday from Holwerd in the Netherlands towards the Isle of Ameland. 45 Minutes time to kill! Definitely enough time for those two:

A 360 degree view of the ferry going towards Ameland:

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And a HDR image of the ferry, made out of three exposures:

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Compare the dynamic range to the first one!

A medieval tour

Today I'd like to invite you to a tour through medieval Germany - or, to be more precise, a tour showing you remaining old architecture, most times half-timbered houses, in several small cities in the State of Hesse, Germany.

A little background: One jokes that the forefathers of the Hessians, the Germanic tribe of the Chatti, somehow as the only tribe missed the big migration period ("Völkerwandung") in the very early medieval time. Maybe that's why the Hessians are very conscious and proud of their heritage - since they can't be proud of their discoveries and travels! True or not true - at least the Hessians show a lot of effort in caring for their old houses! ;-)

Let's start in the South of Hesse, in the Rhinegau, one of the wine-producing regions along the Rhine. Here we have a glimpse at Eltville, a small and nice town, with a plethora of restaurants offering good food and of course lots of wine, and a nice promenade. Here we see part of this promenade, and on the right side the old castle, originally built in the 14th century. You can see some ruins of it and the restored white tower. The tower was a so called "Wohnturm" BTW, a tower to live in, not one for defending the castle:

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Now we venture into Eltville's cobblestone streets with a first glimpse of some half-timbered houses and one of the many restaurants, this one called "Yellow House". Unfortunately - you may have noted - this weekend before Easter weather is bad and cold, and no tables wait for the guests outside:

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With a last look at the Old Town of Eltville - several colorful umbrellas included for free! - we leave this city:

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Now we'll drive a few kilometers up the Rhine to Johannisberg, risking a look at a vineyard with the Rhine in the background. On the right you see a Romanesque basilica belonging to an old monastery, and this basilica was built in the 12th century to honor John the Baptist - that is how Johannisberg or "John's mountain" came to its name:

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Venturing up to the North of Hesse we'll now visit Bad Wildungen, a small city and a health resort. It also sports a wonderful Old Town, here some glimpses of it. First the outer region of the Old Town in the evening light:

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In a side street we discover this blue ensemble:

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And finally a look at the market square including the Town Hall and a nice pano twin ;-):

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To the East of Bad Wildungen we find Melsungen, a fascinating town with an Old Town almost completely filled with half-timbered houses. Here a look at the market square with the Town Hall on the right side – the building in red:

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The sheer number of half-timbered houses you also can see in the side streets of Melsungen inspired me to this somewhat irritating, but at least really self made picture post-card of Melsungen, showing: one of those streets in the background, a sculpture on the left, some half-timbered houses on the market square on top and the Town Hall from 1556 at the right:

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Last station on our medieval trip is Korbach in the North of Hesse. Here we first see
again a part of the Old Town - on the left with the spire the Town Hall, on the utmost right the public library in the largest half-timbered building of the city:

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At a side street we discover something rare, a half-timbered house combined with baroque decoration - here it's door:

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Now something quite corny, a Hotel named "Goldflair" located across the Town Hall, with gold foils in the windows underscoring its name:

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And with this glimpse of the old market square with a nowadays unused pillory in its center we finish our tour. BTW: The pillory we see here indeed was never used. It was rebuilt in the 1960s for touristic purposes only - but it's modeled after the original that really once stood here - and that one was used for sure! ;-)

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I hope you enjoyed this travel back in old times - despite the bad weather! And now back to todays world & work!

A short trip through Weimar

Welcome to a short trip through the old city of Weimar, Germany!

To understand the role and importance of Weimar for the history of Germany one has to know that it was home of some rather progressive ideas. There were a lot of tiny states on the territory of todays Germany, but in 1816 the State of Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach was the first to give itself an constitution.

This was during the "Golden Age" of Weimar. In the second half of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach was governed by the Duchess Anna Amalia and her son, Duke Charles August. Those two were open minded and friends of the arts, and a lot of philosophers, writers, composers found not only their home, but also their freedom in Weimar to explore their ideas. Some of the most important works of German culture have been created in Weimar in this time.

Now let's begin our tour of Weimar. We step out of the Central Station of Weimar, and we're greeted with cloudy weather and look along the Charles August Avenue towards downtown Weimar:

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Since the weather gets even worse we'll wait a few hours, and after night has set in we will now have a short walk through downtown Weimar with some of the most famous buildings.

Let's start at the Frauenplan, a square where not only one of the oldest fountains of Weimar (right) can be found, but also a large house (left) where the German writer Goethe lived for almost 50 years, until his death in 1832. After his death his rooms remained untouched for another 50 years, and they were converted to a museum then:

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Goethe had one great friend - even if the friendship needed some years to really start, they definitely didn't like themselves at first sight - and this friend was Friedrich Schiller, writer and playwright. Schiller resided for the last three years of his life in a smaller house in central Weimar, not far away from Goethe's house, in a street nowadays named Schiller Street; here he wrote some of his later plays, e.g. "Wilhelm Tell". He died there in 1805, and now it serves - of course - as a museum. You find his house on the left of this pano, and are invited to have a look into Schiller Street, a pedestrian zone:

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Around the corner we'll find the old market. We see the Neptune Fountain in the middle foreground, to the right of it Cranach House,a Renaissance building and home to the painters Cranach the Elder and > the Younger. In the background center we can see a wider white building - that's the Hotel "Elephant", built completely new in 1938 as a rather modern house (and because of that it was Adolf Hitler's favorite place during his frequent visits to Weimar), but the history of this Hotel dates back to the end of 17th century: it was a house for travelers and at the same time a meeting place for people like Goethe, Herder, Schiller, Bach - to name only a few ... :-). On the far right finally the Town Hall, comparatively new - it was built 1841 in Neo-Gothic style:

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After a good night's sleep we'll return to the market for some closer views of the Cranach house (transverse Mercator projection used for this pano) ...

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... and of the Town Hall, taken from a side street:

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We'll stroll from the market to the Theater Square, a large one with the National Theater on the right and the Bauhaus museum (formerly the storage house for backdrops and other theatrical scenery) on the left. In this theater the national assembly convened in 1919 to declare the first German republic, the so called "Weimar Republic" that endured until Hitler's rise to power in 1933:

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In the front of the theater we see the statue of Goethe (left) and Schiller (right), built in 1857:

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A short walk, and we arrive at Herder Square with the Herder church (Herder was another famous German writer, but also a priest and philosopher). The place in front of the church is full of cars, and for this viewpoint close to the church I had to revert to a special projection method - that's why the statue of Herder you can see on the right is a bit thinner than in reality ;-). BTW: In this church, built around 1500, Johann Sebastian Bach was organist 1708-1717, decades before Herder's time:

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Alongside Herder Square one can find some nice houses, like these two:

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Nearing the end of our tour we'll now walk towards the "Stadtschloss" or City Palace, residence of Duke Charles August, demolished in a big fire and rebuilt under the direction of the multi talented Goethe later on. Here a view from the central court of the Stadtschloss towards Weimar - in the background you see the Music Academy of Weimar, named after composer Franz Liszt, also a resident of Weimar in the 19th century:

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And now we close with this view of the City Palace from the outside with it's 16th century tower, one of the few remains of the original structure (right). On the left in this pano we look towards the gardens on the river Ilm, and in the center we see the famous library of Anna Amalia with its splendid Rococo decoration (absolutely no photography allowed inside, metal detectors used ...) - not the pink building on the middle left, but the central one right to it behind the trees on the hill:

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Hope you enjoyed the tour!

A symmetrical tour: The Olympic Stadium in Berlin

Browsing through my photographs I gleaned from my recent visit to the Olympic Stadium in Berlin I noticed that I rather often had chosen symmetrical views of this big edifice and its surrounding architecture. No wonder: they do suggest themselves, since the Olympic Stadium and most of the related buildings and squares are built symmetrically along an axis that is orientated from East to West (with an angle towards the South).

Of course this awe-inspiring and well ordered architecture was intentional. Hitler realized the chance he had using the 1936 Olympic Games - awarded to Berlin 1931, two years before Hitler's rise to power in Germany - as a propagandistic platform for Nazism, presenting his regime powerful and modern, but at the same time peaceful and open to the world. We all know what it was in reality: racist, antisemitic, preparing for war, and with deep roots in nationalistic-fascist, backwards oriented, "völkischer" ideology.

Forbidden looking inside stairway at the Olympic Stadium. Click here for large version

The Olympic Stadium and all the surrounding facilities and buildings, built 1934-1936 for the Olympics, reflect this clash between modernity and backwards oriented ideology. For one the stadium oriented itself on antique ideals - it's partly modeled after the Colosseum in Rome - but it recognized the need for modernity, and another important influence was the architecture of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, host of the Olympics 1932.

The same clash between modernity and nationalistic ideology can be seen looking a bit closer at the details of the architecture: facades made from natural stone and classical and neoclassical forms abound, but those natural facades only conceal the state of the art concrete and iron building technology that was being used.

Colonnades at the Olympic Stadium with natural stone facades. Click here for large version

Also the classical and at the same time modern stadium is only part of the whole architecture; it is supplemented in the west by a large field, the Maifeld ("Mayfield"), used for propaganda events. The Maifeld has gigantic stands, and in the center of those a militaristic memorial was located, the "Langemarck-Hall", originally dedicated to young soldiers killed in a battle of the first world war, glorified as heroes by the National-Socialists. In the East the "Olympic Square" can be found, a large place for deployments of all sorts during the Third Reich. More on that later. In the North finally we find a smaller Olympic Swim stadium, complemented by a smaller square (Coubertin-Platz) on the South side to keep the symmetry. Google Earth shows how the whole ensemble looks today (follow the link for a view of the map).

Of course the question poses itself what to do with the stadium and its surroundings after the end of the national-socialist regime: demolish all of it? Or only the buildings and structures that today still emanate the spirit of the National Socialist like the Langemarck-Hall? Or re-use as a historical information center and at the same time - in true Olympic spirit - as a place where people of all nations can meet and celebrate?

Detail of the stadium's modern roof. Click here for large version

The Germans decided for the latter. So nowadays on one side you find a modernized and renovated Stadium, shining like new since the 2006 World Soccer Championship, with a fascinating modern roof (originally it had none, for the Championships 1974 it got a first, smaller one); on the other side all buildings and squares have been retained, but supplemented by information tablets you'll find all over the place and a museum giving extensive historical background of the whole area. And where do you find the museum? At the Langemarck Hall, now serving information needs and nothing else.

We'll now look closer at the stadium. To get to the scene we first need to travel there - and we get there with the subway, leaving it at the station "Olympia-Stadion":

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A short walk brings us from the station to the Olympic Square ("Olympischer Platz"), and here our walk on the big East-West axis (tilted a bit to the South) of the Olympic area begins. The square - as already said - was used for deployments, one of them an infamous one: on November 12th 1944 people came here to be sworn in as a sort of "Hitler's last army"; it was one of ten places in Berlin that served this senseless purpose. Nowadays it's used mainly as a parking lot:

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Now were looking at the entrance of the stadium, where the Olympic Rings are held by two towers - the tower of Prussia and the tower of Bavaria. The naming of the towers - there are two additional pairs at the West side of the stadium - follows nationalistic ideology after which all Germans came from one of six clans or people: the Bavarians, the Prussians, the Saxons, the Frisians, the Swabians and the Franconians. The towers are named accordingly.

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If we move further towards the stadium we can note one thing: it looks big, but it is not towering above us as big as other great stadiums. The reason for this we can discover if we move into the stadium, and climbing only a few steps we now see it: it's built as an "Earth stadium", meaning the field and the lower tiers are built into the earth, and only the upper tier rises above the ground:

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Moving further we can look down into and toward the East side of the stadium. In the center background we can see the Marathon gate, where the Marathon runners came in for their last rounds. Further back we see part of the Mayfield with its central tower, the "Glockenturm" or Bell tower, not belonging to the clan towers - it rises on top of Langemarck hall:

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Now we have moved to the Marathon gate and turn around 180 degrees for a look at the container for the Olympic flame, framed by the modern roof:

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Let's step a bit back now to have a wider look at the Marathon Gate framed with tablets showing the winners of the 1936 Olympics:

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Here now a closer look at the tablets on the left side, listing Jesse Owens as winner of the prestigious 100 and 200 meter races - he also won the long jump and the 100 m relay race. Hitler certainly was not amused, as this didn't fit his racial theories at all:

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Let's turn around 180 degrees again for this view of the Mayfield, 375 meters wide with gigantic stands; field and stand could be used by up to 250.000 people for propagandistic events. During the Olympics it was used for Polo and for gymnastic shows. Nowadays it's used for all sorts of events, to name only one: Phil Collin's 1994 concert of his "Both sides" tour:

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For another look at the bell tower we'll now leave the East-West axis, and see it through another pair of the clan towers, this time the Frisian and the Saxon towers:

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Going to the South of the stadium we'll finally risk a look a the Olympic Swim stadium:

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Hope you enjoyed the tour - in spite of all the, not all the time too pleasant information!

A short Berlin trip

A recent visit this week to Berlin yielded some nice panos - so accompany me on a short Berlin trip!

First a look at the very efficient public transportation system in Berlin - since we need to move around a bit on our trip! :-) Here the Suburbun Railway ("S-Bahn") station "Alexanderplatz":

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The railway brings us to the Olympic Stadium with its fantastic new ceiling, that hosted the infamous 1936 Olympics, and in younger history the finals of the world soccer championship in 2006:

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Not far away from the stadium we'll find a castle - "Schloss Charlottenburg". The two similar looking buildings on the left side of the pano, both belonging to the original architectural ensemble of the castle, are the Egyptian Museum (far left) and the Museum Berggruen (middle left), the latter hosting a splendid collection of paintings and sculptures of Picasso, Matisse and Klee:

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Back in the center of Berlin we'll risk a look into the "Heckmann-Höfe", one of the typical examples of Berlin architecture with inner courts; this one located between Auguststraße and Oranienburger Straße:

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Later in the day it's time for some shopping - so lets visit the Quartier 206, a luxury shopping mall at Friedrichstraße in central Berlin:

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Round the corner of the Quartier 206 we'll find the Gendarmenmarkt - one of the nicest squares in Berlin: on the left you see the "German Cathedral" (now hosting an exhibition about German history), in the middle the "Konzerthaus", a concert hall, and on the right the "French Cathedral", serving nowadays a Huguenot museum:

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Now let's stroll towards the Reichstag for an unusual view of it - together with additional buildings belonging to the administration of the German government, the so called "Bundesband", at a bend of the river Spree.

Here all that seen from a viewpoint near the small Marschall bridge - from left to right in this true 360 degree pano: part of the Marie-Elisabeth-Lüders-Haus; several buildings at the other side of the Spree river; the Reichstag; the Paul-Löbe-Haus; and again on this side the Spree river the Marie-Elisabeth-Lüders-Haus we originally started with: ;-)

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Hope you enjoyed this small tour of Berlin!

Romanesco

Couldn't resist photographing it before eating it:

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Romanesco is a cauliflower with an interesting similarity to fractals - it's pattern is repeating itself self-similar in different scales. Fascinating, isn't it?

This macro shot was of course mirrored once and stitched together to enhance the mathematical structure of the plant even further. A duplex treatment gave the nice colors.

Tastes less pronounced than broccoli, but has an interesting mild note standard cauliflower hasn't, BTW.