My Photos
My Portfolio
Didn’t get it yesterday, but I finally got my JavaScript/jQuery based Portfolio up and running. I’m using Galleria – a nice script that has Flickr support integrated.
It’s pretty simple to set up – but the docs aren’t straight forward 
<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title>Christian Kildau's Portfolio</title>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="./galleria.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="./galleria.flickr.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="./galleria.fullscreen.js"></script>
</head>
<body>
<div id="galleria">
<script type="text/javascript">
api_key = '0a5a49ea38e03b11f477aaf066b5dcd2'
var flickr = new Galleria.Flickr(api_key);
flickr.getSet('72157614373115604', function(data) {
$('#galleria').galleria({
data_source: data,
image_crop: false,
show_info: true,
autoplay: true,
transition: 'fade',
preload: 3,
});
});
</script>
</div>
</body>
</html>
No Flash required, so it even works on my (veeeery slow) iPhone 3G…. 
EDIT: Forgot the link. 
A Portfolio for my Website
I was looking for a way to add a Portfolio Slideshow to my Website for the last two weekends now, but it looks like my requirements are pretty high:
- Interoperability (e.g. no Flash)
- Easy handling
- Smooth transitions
- Automatic resize to fit the Browser’s windows
- Use Flickr as CDN and for stats
I came across a jQuery based solution called Galleria, which fits my needs pretty much, but it was slow! My Core2Duo MacBook Pro had a hard time sliding trough my 1600px images! And I haven’t got it to work with Flickr so far. I think Galleria is the way to go and I’ll try to get it to work with Flickr and play more smoothly, but in the meantime I embedded a Flickr slideshow in Flash… See My Portfolio
Hope to get it done today, but don’t really count on it 
Czech Republic – Final conclusion
What has started as a 10 day road-trip from eastern Germany trough the Czech Republic, Austria and maybe Switzerland back to western Germany ended after just two days in Prague. On the first day we visited Karlovy Vary and drove to Prague on day two. But in Prague some ************* have smashed a windows and broke into our car and stole every single piece of clothing I own, my girlfriend’s laptop, my tripod, the car radio, ball pens, old shoes, some coverings, the drink holder…
We called the Czech police. They didn’t care, they didn’t come. They didn’t let us file a charge. 2500€ lost. No insurance will cover it. The car was that damaged, we had to abort the trip. Not that I wanted to continue, without any clothing.
I didn’t like the Czech people in the first place. They were rude, they all didn’t give a crap about anything. Several times my tripod has almost been knocked over. Every time we had a question the officials pretended they didn’t speak English or German or whatever.
I write this post just to put it all behind. Karlovy Vary and Prague are nice cities, I’ve been there the second time now (this time just to take photos), but they won’t see me again. Ever.
Things went wrong in Hamburg
Last weekend my girlfriend and I spontaneously decided to visit Hamburg. We only did a quick research and then knew what we wanted to see: the Port of Hamburg, the old Elbe tunnel, the Warehouse District, the Fish auction hall, the old Town hall, the Jungfernstieg at the Binnenalster and the famous churches. Not to forget Reeperbahn! That’s the theorie…
I find cities look best when it’s lights are already turned on, so we wanted to see the most of the sights at night.
On the first evening we wanted to see the harbor. Our hotel was close to the Central Station so we decided to simply walk. Sadly Internet on my iPhone 3G was that slow in Hamburg, that I couldn’t see my map with the photo locations, so we had to walk on our own and find some sweet spots. At the beginning we walked totally wrong and ended up in the fruit district of the harbor. We then walked along the harbor trying to get to the right points. On our way we walked right in between HafenCity and Warehouse District so that we didn’t see both. We walked up to Landungsbrücken when it was already 12am, but I wanted to see at least the old Elbe Tunnel! So we walked trough and tried to find a nice spot at the other side of the harbor, but didn’t find anything. So we walked back, decided to take a drink and then took the train back to central station and our Hotel.
The next day our schedule was pretty tight, because we didn’t get the harbor shots… we started at 10am, went to central station to get a Hamburg CARD. With the Hamburg CARD you can use all public transportation (more on that later), and you get a discount on most tourism stuff.
Our first stop was the old Town Hall which is a nice walk along Hamburg’s shopping street. But I didn’t find the old Town Hall very special, at least not in bright daylight! We then headed over to the Binnenalster and Jungfernstieg, which also looked, well… let’s say nice during daytime.
The weekend was hot, very hot! After just 3 hours we already needed a break! So we wanted to take a train down to Landungsbrücken and make a harbor tour. But there were some heavy constructions going on, so we had to take several trains, which isn’t that easy if you don’t know the city… Finally at Landungsbrücken, we got a 2€ discount off thanks to our Hamburg CARD! Awesome…… The harbor tour was very nice and we got a good overview. But still not a single good shot!
And believe it or not due to the heat on the boat, the glue which sticks the rubber grip on my Nikon D90 melted!
Since we still had a lot of sights to see we hurried up a bit and walked to St. Michaelis church, spent a lot of time looking for a supermarket to buy some water, walked back trough Warehouse District (to really see it for the first time!) and then walked back to our Hotel to take a nap
We still wanted to see the harbor, the Warehouse District, the Fish auction hall and the Reeperbahn. We started again at 8pm to take some night shots. Mobile Internet still was horribly slow, so I still couldn’t load my map! We took the train to Landungsbrücken again, then walked up to the Fish auction hall, then headed further to Dockland. When we arrived at Dockland the light was just crappy so we waited some time and discovered one thing I find totally awesome about Hamburg: The Habor ferries! They have ferries all across the harbor, with stations that look exactly like Bus stops, just on the water. And it’s even included in the Hamburg CARD! We took one, drove to it’s last stop and then drove back. Totally awesome! Back at Dockland the light was better, although I now found it to be already too dark as the nice blue sky was almost gone. I took some shots until we wanted to go to Warehouse District. It was already 12pm and the Reeperbahn was much closer so we decided to visit that first. Which again wasn’t a very good idea. It was horribly crowded, but fun to watch. When we finally came to the Warehouse District the damn lights were already turned off and the entire scene just looked boring
We walked back to our Hotel and fell to bed at 3am…
The next morning we didn’t want to walk trough Hamburg again, so we decided to drive back and visited some friend we met last year on our Trip to Egypt… By the way: we walked about 35km that weekend!
If we had a better plan, I think our Hamburg experience would have been awesome! But even with our crappy plan the trip was great.
Color meets Black & White
I really love Black & White, so I try a Black & White version of most of my recent pictures.
In the last week I’ve been to Sanssoussi in Potsdam, Germany near Berlin and to the Saxon Switzerland near Dresden with my Girlfriend. The weather in Potsdam was great, but that attracted so many tourists, that it was almost impossible to get a good shot of the castle. In the Saxon Switzerland the weather was also great, but although we went there in the late afternoon the sky still was like f/64 whereas the canyon was like f/1.4.
Here are my favorite shots of this week, I couldn’t decided weather I like the color or the Black & White version.
What do you think?
BlogTimes Photo Contest (my first one)
The German blog ‘BlogTimes‘ has recently started a photo contest for city and landscape photography. So far I have never participated in any photo contest, but this time I thought I’d do so with my favorite three pictures:
Wish me luck. The contest ends on August 15, 2010.
Rügen in Spring
In early April my girlfriend and I went (as my birthday present) to Rügen, a small Island in the Baltic Sea in the north-eastern part of Germany. Thank you! It was great, even if you didn’t expect it and we almost died . The weather wasn’t always great, but it was a lot of fun walking and shooting there together.
We arrived pretty late at about 5pm, but the ride was fun. My girlfriend had her first-time-ever on a car ferry. We checked-in and decided to visit a small town called Sellin which is famous for it’s pier later in the evening. It turned out that it wasn’t very easy to find this town. There were no signage and our navigation system didn’t know it either. But thanks to Google Maps we did find it tough.
On the second day we’ve been to the northernmost point in Germany called Kap Arkona and a very cute and old fishing village called ‘Vitt’.
The third day, which was also my birthday, the weather was much nicer and we decided to go walking. Our Hotel was very close to Jasmund National Park with it’s impressive chalk cliffs. Over a small stairway we wanted to go down to the ocean – not knowing what was going to happen. We walked and walked. Most people just turned around, but we didn’t really notice that at this time. We kept walking and walking. There should actually have been four stairways on our way, but they weren’t! It turned out that the hard winter here in Germany damaged big parts of the chalk cliffs and let avalanches of chalk and mud fall down into the ocean and the stairways with it. The nice thing about this is that the chalk colored the ocean almost turquoise and created a nice Caribbean feeling. On our way we climbed over many dried mudflows without any problem, but a few kilometers later there was one that must have been very new. I climbed at it, walked a few steps and then suddenly half of me was gone… caved into mud to my hip. I threw my camera over to my girlfriend which was still on secure ground and then somehow managed to pull myself out. Loaded with tens of kilos of mud I went into the ocean to get rid of at least some of it and then wanted to walk back the 10km to our car. But not my girlfriend. We saw a stairway at the other side of the bay, so she (much lighter that she is) somehow managed to find a way over the mud, whereas I just walked through the ocean… An hour later we were back up on the top of the cliffs. But we didn’t walk back to our car, no. We walked all the way to the Königsstuhl and then took a bus back to our car.
The last day we headed home and made a short stop in Stralsund.
Watch the Flickr Set or Flickr Slideshow
Read more…
Animal Photography
One of my resolution for this New Year was to try different things in photography. I wanted to learn more about lighting, wanted to get into portrait and animal photography. Well, the year is almost half done and I just started…
It was a lot of fun to shoot these animals and since I’m currently into all this black and white stuff I tried both, color and b&w. The latter mostly just looked better in my eyes.
All images shot with Nikon 70-300VR. Developed in Lightroom.
Going Black & White
I am recently very interested in B&W (No, not Bowers & Wilkins, but Black&White). I was digging through my unedited photos today and tried B&W conversion on some older ones from last winter that I actually found rather boring because of the flat light.
Here’s my favorite so far:
I played with contrasts, clarity, color channels, added a graduated filter and so on to get this look. Here’s what it looked like out of the camera:
What do you think? Did I overdo it?
My first attempt on photographing the moon
Last night we had a very clear sky over Frankfurt, Germany so I tried to take a picture of the moon for the first time just to notice that it needs a really long lens. I took this shot with the Nikon 70-300 VR ranked out to 300mm and still this is a 1:1 crop. Beacause the 70-300 VR tends to get a bit soft at the higher end I sharpened the image quite heavily. Maybe too much?
Search this Site
Hi, my name is Chris. I am a wannabe photog, traveler & geek that lives in Hesse, Germany. more about me...
follow me on TwitterMy flickr Fotos
Sponsoring
