Bicycles

© Joselito Briones

This was taken around the corner from yesterday's passage. This was taken with the Olympus E500. The original, of course, was in color.


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Old passage

© Joselito Briones
These are photos of a small shortcut/passage, close to the clothes alteration shop. These were taken last Friday.


© Joselito Briones


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Erlangen Photos

© Joselito Briones

I spent most of the day processing the photos I took last Friday and yesterday, and there's quite a lot of them, so for the next few days I'll just be showing you these photos.


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It's a wrap!

© Joselito Briones

Well then, today's the day we flew back to Germany. Pretty uneventful, which is pretty much how I prefer it. We got to the airport (Jane drove us) really early, and I had plenty of time to kill, so I decided to edit some of the digital pictures with the iBook that we brought with us on this trip. I used the software from Olympus, called ”Olympus Studio". Pretty good. The most useful feature is the exposure adjustment, and the distortion correction and the fisheye lens distortion correction. I continued editing pictures during the flight, and got very little sleep.


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One more

© Joselito Briones

Last Union Square photo, promise. Also taken from DSW, I like how the place is covered with snow, and the atmosphere complete opposite of what it looks like in spring and summer (doh) where the place is full of skateboard kids. This photo was post processed, there was way too much difference between the highlights properly exposed (buildings in the background) and the shadows (the whole park) so I had to tweak it a little.


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Old trees

© Joselito Briones

Just another experiment in post processing... this is a digital snap of trees as observed from a window of a moving train... on the way to Berlin. I tried to make it look like an old sepia print.


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A Little Lesson in Filipino

© Joselito Briones

I challenged one of my nephews, DanMark (yes, same as the country, German spelling), "Big Mac" to some of us, "Kuya Makky" to some of his cousins, to tell me something, so I can tell you about it.

Here's what he came up with (with my attempt at understanding the relatively new Filipino shorthand, and a translation):

sori poh sa late reply heheheh
d poh ako nkapag log in ng 2 days hehehehe
dto poh ang bago d2 nagtitinda cla lola ng fishball at halo2 un ang bago d2
hmmpp c kuya magkakaroon na ng panganay ewan ko lng poh kung kelan ang due date ni ate lanie ^_^
bkit yaw nyo poh pagandahin profiles nyo??.

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Sorry for the late reply ("poh" is "po", a Filipino word to indicate some sort of respect, the way one would say "no, sir" to an older relative)
I wasn't able to log in for 2 days hehehehe
Here, what's new is that Gramma ("Oma" in Germany, "Inay" to me) is now selling fishballs and "halo halo" (a typical Filipino treat of sweets in ice and milk). That's what's new here.
Hmmpp... Don Don ("kuya" is brother, usually how all the siblings call the eldest brother, as "ate", sister, is used to address the eldest sister - older brother or sister other than the eldest is addressed as "kuya" or "ate" with the name attached to it) will have a firstborn already, I just don't know when Ate Lanie (Don's wife) is due. (a smiley)
Why don't you make your profile (referring to my friendster.com profile) look better?
-

You know how nothing ever happens to me when I ask my nephews to provide content to my letters to you.

The picture above is a composite, of course, the background is Times Square, in New York, while Mark's picture was taken in the Philippines.


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Golden Pond

© Joselito Briones

I always passed by this puddle in the middle of an empty construction site, on the way to Frankenlabor, here in Erlangen. There's something about it that made me keep looking at it, and I didn't know why, so I thought, I'll just take a digital snap of it and see what's in it. I picked the image apart and saw that there's actually plenty of color hiding behind the murky grayness of it, so I thought I'll just process it, turn it into something that resembles more a pond, sort of an hommage to Monet (pictured left is the result). I thought his paintings of ponds and water lilies were awesome, first time I saw them in Rouen, when I went there to study basic French many many many moons ago. I visited the actual garden that he painted, his own, in Giverny, just to see what inspired him to paint such wonderful pictures.


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Gray Day in Berlin

© Joselito Briones

Nothing's quite right today. I woke up with a headache. It started before I went to bed last night, there was no place I could go to to buy some paracetamol. Or maybe I just didn't know where, but sure enough I asked several places. I went out after shower, hungry for breakfast, determined to go to the first place I see that serves anything digestible. The sky's gray. My only full day here in Berlin and the sun decided to play hide and seek. Bleh.

© Joselito Briones

First thing I saw was KaDeWe. Sure, those Dior clothes look yummy, but not in a nourishing way, the opposite actually, it made me want to not eat ever again so I'll fit in them. I'm sure though that if the store was already open I'd have gotten in and procastinated on getting headache relief. Thankfully, the KaDeWe apotheke around the corner was already open, so I got myself some painkillers.

© Joselito Briones

I wasn't so lucky food-wise. The first place I saw was McDonald's. I had mcMuffins. It did the job. It didn't stop me though from stopping at several wurst vending places while walking and talking pictures all day.

© Joselito Briones

These are all taken with a digital camera, the one I got as a present on my birthday. As you can see, in all the pictures, the sky is consistently gray.

© Joselito Briones

First two pictures, left and above, are of the same building, in the Museum island, something something dome, my map said. The first one was taken while I was walking along the river bank, just before it rained. I let the rain pass while having espresso in a sand bank (made to look like a beach) cafe, then continued on to the island itself, the next picture.

© Joselito Briones

I went around the island, until I got to where I started, the east tip of it, and took this picture (left), which I'm sure so many others have taken before, a visual gag trying to make the TV tower look like it's on top of the dome of another museum. I think this is going to be the theme for today: taking cliche' pictures. Only doing worse version... one with gray sky on every picture. Hmmm... come to think of it, this had always been the theme of all my pictures. Oh well...

© Joselito Briones

The digital camera actually adjusts the brightness, so that instead of dark gray which I see in reality, the images have a very bright gray sky.

© Joselito Briones

It's all museums basically, this area, so I decided to go somewhere else, and headed towards the Reichtag (left). Last time I was here in Berlin was 1999, and the only two places I remember from then is Liebskind's Jewish Museum and this, the Reichtag. The rest are all a jumble of cranes. This city was full of promise. And if anyone's to gauge its fulfillment, now's the best time.

© Joselito Briones

The next few pictures were taken in the same area. Except for the last one and the one before that, taken in Mitte, and the third one from the last picture, taken in Galleries Lafayette (designed by Jean Nouvel), close to Unter den Linden, where I bought a couple of socks.


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2006.12.01
As you may well know by now, i've reformatted my blog, and some pictures are too big (and I now deem unnecessary) to put here, so if the text refers to a picture that isn't shown here, that's because I've taken it off.


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Another dose of red

© Joselito Briones

I know I'm sure by now you've seen plenty photos of the building where I live, but here's another one anyway. I photoshopped the sky so that it's flat and cool grey in tone to make the whole image look more like color swatches.

Got back early this morning (or late last night) from Amsterdam. That was a good trip, even the bus ride back wasn't so bad, I managed to get some sleep.

Can't wait to see how the pictures I took came out.


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The serial scanner

© Joselito Briones

I think I've become a serial scanner. Encouraged by yesterday's photo, I decided to dig up other films. This one is the film version of a digital image that you've seen before, from the Malt Whiskey Society of Edinburg, in Scottland.

I went coo coo when I discovered that the lab where I took the film (in London, close to where we used to live) messed up the whole roll. It had more speckles and scratches than a silent movie, and I had to spend so much time to repair it. In the end though, it was worth it. I'm thinking of having it printed poster size. The film is in medium format, there's enough detail in it.


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P.S.
This is what the Flickr people has to say about the photo.


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