February is going towards its end and I don’t want to let him go without a blog blog post.
The highlight of this short month was very much a weekend, which didn’t take place in Germany, but in Switzerland.
After New Zealand my group of friends has spread over a vast area, so that meeting often come with visits of bigger cities. As was this time. And you can come with me on the picture journey to Zurich:
This post is the first of its kind on my blog, as it is a product review. NO other object would be more fitting than a photobook, don’t you think?
The company Saal-Digital gave me the opportunity to test their photobook and I made use of it!
It is a nice thing, to HAVE pictures and to share them online, but imprinted you give them a whole new significance.
As much as I usually like photography, a photobook of the own pictures you don’t capture every day…
This now is the result. My most loved pictures of many lovely places on paper. As this is my very first photobook, I will just tell from my perspective, how it works with Saal-Digital.
So you begin with installing the software you install on your computer.
The same offers many functions for any kind of product, of which the photobook might just be the most complex.
The process is quite simple, you just drag the images from the proprietary file explorer to the desired page, all intuitive. Cutting and pasting works like a charm, too, as does the feature to mirror to pictures on a centerfold. But all that mighty the internal file explorer is not, so I effectively chose the pictures from the Windows file explorer. Maybe, on the other hand, I just have a ton of pictures. 😀
I designed my first photobook in a puristic way and left out twirls and text entirely. Colour and print quality are most fine, I do not doubt, as far as my inexperienced eye can evaluate that. Even more, as the images out of my small-sensor camera let their limited detail show. I am happy not to have chosen a bigger format. For that you need bigger pictures. Also impressive are the black areas. For they are just black.
One point of convenience I didn’t notice until my family pointed it out to me: Not every supplier of photobook lets you design the fronts inside covers.
Also, you get the option to remove the Saal-Digital bar code for an additional fee.
In the end I missed the chance to see all pages back to back. You do get the scroll bar to browse through the pages, but I couldn’t make it full-frame. As rearranging the pictures between any page would be the icing of the designer’s cake.
With the cover I went for the cushioned variant. Now the book feels appealingly soft and every beholder liked to turn it over a second time in his hands. 🙂
Bottom line:
A splendid product, which is determined only by the own pictures and design ideas, in the end. Delivery was very fast as well.
Now I want to put more pictures of mine on paper. Yay!
For 8 months I now live the life of a homecomer. That is not even half of the time period I spent abroad. It was evident that there would be much change. Compared to the time before, compared to the time over there and the life right now. The life after.
Just as the new year began, it made me think. Where have I been in all of 2016? You can read up on it. From the most beautiful end of the world, through an exciting continent after the other, towards the familiar home my way has led me.
Where will I be in 2017? In my home town. In an apprenticeship. And that won’t be the last year of that kind. After many months of short-term plans, my life is put on rail tracks once again. In a blog post from 3 years ago I said it with the same words already. But back then I didn’t know about the opposite. About the life without rail tracks.
In New Zealand I didn’t have these commitments at all. Places, people lifestyles you could change just like that and of course keep the best of it. Wellington, the life in the flat and my newly won friends are most precious to me to this day.
But even these commitments had to be let go sooner or later. When you moved on, moved out or circumstances changed. The best thing about it is meeting again. Either over there or here… Some things in our lives change, but when the strongest ropes prevail, everything stays as is. Unchanged.
Every decision you make, brings a trail of change. Back then I decided to move in to a flat and I got friends for life out of it. We set out on a short weekend in the South Island with some au pairs who hadn’t ever met before then. To this day we are true friends. And Wellington got quite a number of hearty stories out of it! The au pair family I have left, alongside Wellington. But only to become friends with many more in the South Island, get into some nice work places and live in an amazing flat one more time. When I traveled with my parents and with Elvis, I got to see many places and people again, before actually moving on.
Many homecomers see all the differences between the life abroad and the life ahead directly from the start. And many have trouble fitting in again. I didn’t have a hard time to re-accustom to ‘Mum’s bosom’. There wasn’t so much of a change that wouldn’t let me live the life I had before.
And the flow was there, to see the people, to tell many times how I liked New Zealand and most of all, deciding for a career path, which you would like to walk on for a longer time.
Now I have been walking this path and come to notice that this might pretty much be the last greater decision I will have taken for some time.
Do you remember, how I longed for a regular life at the end of my time in New Zealand?
Now I have it. And now it is just this element of ever-present change, which I come to miss.
I know that for my career it is a good thing, to have a regular life. To concentrate. To live consistency. To have frames, to have rail tracks.
And you notice in my way of blogging that variety and number of the posts have ceased to some extent. Among other things, I continue the blog exactly because of this, to let you see how life changes.
This is my bog posts about the subject ‘homecoming’. Of course I have been home for a long time and I can’t seem to grasp it anymore, having traveled for such a long period. But now the meaning begins to get to me. And with these broad subjects I like it more, to report from the ‘big picture’ perspective, rather than out of the moment itself. Especially forming a conclusion like this.
But never fear, this is but an interim conclusion! Because as much less change I go through right now; there is still a chance for anything to happen.
And not for the least, you have always a say in this process yourself…
Why I travel this much these days?
Good question. Maybe because I notice how easy it is. Maybe because so many more places come to my attention that I want to discover. Maybe also because there are people here and there who I want to see again.
Dear friends from the time in New Zealand are spread across Germany and the whole world. To Passau I didn’t go just to into the blue, for I had a lovely home for the time staying there.
Also, the weather blessed me with luck. And that at the very day I walked m camera. 🙂 Please look at another wonderful German city from above, below, left and right and one fabulous drake:
Without a doubt, the highlight of the weekend was not the city itself, but the hours spent together. Every moment shared is worth double. It was a wonderful time! Time before Christmas, I should say.
The last Christmas at home was in 2013. 2014 in Wellington and 2015 in Dunedin. Pretty memorable. This year’s celebration might become the least-routinely Christmas of my life…
You can say what you want about the Deutsche Bahn, but I like to make use of it. Either summer- or Lidl-special-offer-ticket, I saved a lot and got to all the far out corners of Germany in pleasant style.
As this time, to Rothenburg ob der Tauber.
Trier, Hamburg, Stuttgart and Berlin you know already, but this little settlement is not as well known. At least not for people who don’t browse the internet for the cutest cities in Germany.
International tourism is fully present in the remarkable old city and was, if not about anything else, only bearable because of the cold season.
I gave myself one day’s time and tried to capture the (Christmas-) wonder of the city.
At noon I walked though the gates of the city.
A remarkable specimen.
Looking at this, I got the meaning of a city wall back then.
This one shows you very exactly where you stand in the space-time continuum.
The ‘Plönlein’ is the most famous places to be photographed.
It went dark quickly, which I welcomed. A medieval city in full Christmas decoration, what more could a photographers heart wish for? 😀
Little children ask their mother, clueless: ‘What is he doing?’ and their mother has to explain to them that I am taking photos. Other voices you hear mumbling: Now he’s going at it. Oh, using a tripod!
Do a tripod and a bridge camera look fear-inducing in times of the ever-present photo smartphone??
Apparently they do. 😀
I can recommend visiting this fine city. It is that small that I have dashed from one end to the other several times. On the way(s) I of course took some rests to have some rustic meals and some cups of coffee. I will return here, that is for sure!
