Shelby's Basketball

Shelby's team played a basketball game this evening. Girls' basketball is just getting started here (boy's basketball is VERY established) so there aren't a lot of teams, not a lot of games, and many of the girls are just learning. The team they played was bigger, older, faster and had obviously been playing together a while. Still, Shelby's team looked much better than their previous outing a month or so ago. Practice 3 days a week must be paying off :)

Shelby on Defense



Shelby on Offense

Cooking, Bosnian Style

Today was a busy day. There was a little group of us that got together a couple times to learn some Bosnian terminology related to cooking. We especially went over recipes for Bosnian pita (pie). Specifically the spinach (zeljanica), ground meat (burek), potato (krompiruša) and zucchini (tikvenica) versions of pita. Today was the culmination of those gatherings. We were shown how to make not only the fillings, but homemade phyllo dough (jufka). I tried my hand at rolling it out and stretching it thin. I think with a little bit of practice I may get the hang of it.

Making the Phyllo



The Results - Zeljanica

Wormland

A reflection of the Glockenspiel on the Marienplatz, Munich.

Glockenspiel - Marienplatz Munich

A Commanding View

This morning we walked up to the Bijela Tabija (White Bastion) the fort-like structure in Vratnik above Sarajevo to the east. The view of the valley and Miljacka river leading into Sarajevo from the east, and the view of the city itself is fabulous. It is easy to see why they built the walls and fortifications there. Today was another gorgeous day in the low 60's and clear blue skies...except for the dense nasty yellow-brown haze of pollution that hung over the city.

Soiled Blue Sky - Sarajevo BiH



Looking Toward Pale - Vratnik Sarajevo BiH

Back to Skakavac Waterfall

This weekend the weather was wonderful. Blue skies and temperatures in the low 60's. Still, yesterday I took the kids and friends up to Bjelašnica skiing and snowboarding. They say it was getting a bit slushy when we left a little after 1:00. Today I walked up to Skakavac Waterfall again. This time with a friend who is visiting. She used to babysit Carl and Shelby about 12yrs ago. She "ran" into Shelby on the internet, Facebook I think it was. When she found out we were here, and she was relatively nearby (Germany) on an exchange program, she decided to come down for a visit during school break. So we've all been having a good time the past week or so.

I'm relearning, and learning some new stuff with my new lens as is evident in the first photo below. I've already taken my share of boring wide shots, and am trying to deal with how the light can change drastically across the frame, especially at 16mm focal length. This first photo was taken from the trail head back towards town with the snowy mountains near Bjelašnica in the far distance. It is just a quick 3 minute mock-up in photoshop, because I had to do the sky and distant mountains on a vastly different curves layer than the foreground and closer in hills. The second two photos were taken with my 70-200mm at the base of the falls near where I took the photos in last summer's Skakavac blog entry. The veil of ice up the cliff was impressive. The bridge in front of the falls was buried in ice and the railing crushed. Chunks twice the size of basketballs occasionally fell down while we were looking and taking photos...we were pretty careful to stay out of range.


End of the Road, Looking Back - Skakavac



Ice and Mist - Skakavac Waterfall, Sarajevo BiH



Ice, Mist & Moss - Skakavac Waterfall, Sarajevo BiH

Cruisin'

I thought of these photos from our cruise last summer for a few reasons...they are examples of when I could have used my new lens if I had it at the time (shot at 24mm, could have used wider), they are on the list of images I never really processed (where it says "cruise - ship") that sits next to my computer keyboard, I happened to be thinking about cruises and last, they were in the folder I happened to click on when I opened ACR-Bridge to look for a photo for this blog.

Our next cruise will be just the two of us for our 25th, hopefully an Alaskan cruise on CruiseWest. The CruiseWest ship will be far smaller than this Carnival monster, Fantasy.. These are two different views of the "Grand Spectrum".

Glass Elevators in the Grand Spectrum - Carnival Funship Fantasy



Grand Spectrum Piano Bar - Carnival Funship Fantasy

Field of Dreams

My wife gave me a new lens, a combination Valentine's and birthday present. It's a Canon 16-35 2.8L II. My first ultra-wide in a while...it will force me back to good composition or I'll bore you all ("all" is being used loosely here) with "grand vistas" that aren't so grand. Here's one of the first few photos I took with it tonight walking home from Shelby's basketball practice...16mm, f/4 1/4 sec at ISO 3200 hand held.

Walking up Koševo street from Veliki Park, Sarajevo center, you pass four cemeteries on your way to the Zetra sports complex. First on the west side of the street is the Catholic cemetery, then after Ciglane market, also on the west side is the Orthodox cemetery and adjoining it, the Muslim Cemetery - Koševo Šehidsko Mezarje. As you get to Zetra, the east side of the street has hill with the Koševo cemetery and its lion. From what I can tell, the Catholic and Orthodox cemeteries have graves dating back to about 1900, but they quickly filled up with victims of the war and siege in the mid-90's and so a bigger cemetery was built further out. Some day I'll get some photos of it. Anyway, this photo is of the Muslim Cemetery, Šehidsko Mezarje and the great majority of the graves there are casualties of the war...how many dreams died in this war...we'll never know.

Field of Dreams - Koševo Šehidsko Mezarje, Sarajevo

The Hike

Something made me think of this photo I took over Memorial Day weekend last year. It was probably because I saw the Green Visions hike leader (the guy with the red back pack) at the kids' school last Wednesday night. He was finishing a presentation to the middle school parents about their class trip which Green Visions will be doing. The older kids, mine include, will be visiting Romania, mostly Transylvania...I'm jealous.

I'd messed with this photo before, but never really finished it. The wall of water hit us before we made it to that first clump of trees on the left....The hike in general was wet and cold, but somehow a lot of fun. It is a beautiful area with mountain meadows full of flowers.

Hiking Behind Bjelašnica - BiH

More from Munich

Here's a photo I took in the Glyptothek. They have a pretty incredible collection of Greek and Roman sculptures including busts of Homer, Medusa and the Roman Emperors Augustus and Nero.

Sculptures in Glyptothek - Munich

Miracles

While driving up Münchener Straße on the way from Rosenheim to Munich, just a bit north of Bad Aibling you will see a little twin steepled church on the right hand side, a few hundred yards down a side road. The little sign says "Weihenlinden". The village basically consists of the church, a gasthaus, and a few farmhouses. It is so small, it is a suburb of Högling (pop. ~180). Although not much at a glance, the church, Wallfahrtskirche Weihenlinden, is really worth a little bit of time. On the outside, down each side, long alcoves contain colorful painted murals depicting miracles that occurred in the surrounding area. Battles miraculously won, the injured healed, the drowning saved, the blind made to see...heaps of miracles illustrated and annotated (auf deutsch). The inside of the church is ornate, with paintings on the ceiling, fancy pulpits and a dark alcove designed to resemble the crypt of Christ. Here are a few photos, the first one is a scan of of slide I took back in 1996. The others are from last weekend's trip.

Dawn - Wallfahrtskirche Weihenlinden



The Miracles at Wallfahrtskirche Weihenlinden



Ceiling Painting - Wallfahrtskirche Weihenlinden

Road Trip!

We took a quick "road trip" up to Munich on Friday and we were back in time to see the Super Bowl (about 12 midnight our time) on Sunday. The weather was great, the German food was great, the air was clean...in short we remembered why we liked living there so much. So I now have another 200+ photos to go through.

Saturday we went to Königsplatz where we went through the Glyptothek and the Classical Art Museum across the way which was running a feature on the myths of Troy. We stayed right at Karlsplatz, the walking area, and walked the couple blocks to Marienplatz and then on to Hofbräuhaus for dinner on Saturday night. Sunday we went through Nymphenburg Palace before making the 11 hour or so drive back home.

At some point, you'll get to see a selection of photos from the Munich portion of the trip, but in the meantime. here is a photo I took on the drive home Sunday. It's a castle, Burg Hohenwerfen, that grabs your attention as you drive the A10 autobahn between Salzburg and Villach.

Burg Hohenwerfen with the Austrian Alps

Počitelj - UNESCO World Heritage Site?

This will get long so you can skip ahead to the photo if you must :)

Unlike high schoolers in the USA, out here in the rest of the world, one sometimes has to travel to a different city or even country to take the SAT test for college. The nearest test for this cycle was in Mostar. So instead of making a 2-3 hour drive first thing this morning and then actually finding the test site before 8 am, we opted to drive to Mostar on Friday evening and spent the night. This ends up making it rather expensive for just a test, so while Shelby and a friend of Carl and hers took the test, Carl, Elesa and I took the opportunity and a little time to check out the surrounding areas and enjoy the sunshine and fresh air (neither of which is available on any regular basis in Sarajevo this time of year). At this point, we've seen Mostar enough and we will end up back at some point anyway.

First we drove about 30 minutes or so to Hutovo blato, a bird sanctuary. We were pretty disappointed...in our minds we were comparing it to Australia's Kakadu Yellow Water and Guatemala's Monterrico Biotopo. No such luck...3 domestic looking goose things and a glimpse of some type of raptor, maybe a Short-toed eagle???

Then we went to spend some time walking around Počitelj. Along the way, we came across an interesting old bridge similar in design to the very famous bridge in Mostar, and I stopped to take a couple photos. I'm sure one of which will someday make it here (especially once I remember the name and some of the details:)

Počitelj is an interesting looking old town built into the side of a hill. The first thing you notice is the castle/fort that sits up high on the edge of a cliff. It also has a neat bell/clock tower (minus the clock and bell). The town was heavily damaged during war and it is still undergoing a lot of reconstruction (although, according to the plaque, the bell and clock were long gone years before). There were men repairing a stone roof today. According to our Bradt guide book and a lot of web sites, including some decent Bosnia-Herzegovina ones such as this, Počitelj is on the UNESCO World Heritage List. However, when I go to the list itself, I can find no such reference. So I'm left wondering...are all those other sources wrong? is the UNESCO World Heritage site wrong or not up to date? Was it taken off the list? Has it applied to the be on the list and not been officially added yet? I mean what is the deal?

Here is a typical postcard shot that I took. The clock tower is in the foreground on the left and the fort (Sahat-kula), dominates the background up on the cliff. Also making a small appearance, the minaret of Hadzi-Alija Mosque on the right and a dome of the Sisman-Ibrahimpasina medresa in the lower left corner.

Počitelj - UNESCO World Heritage Site?



Oh, and Shelby reports that she thinks she did especially well on the math portion of the test...

Looking the Other Way

Exactly a year ago today there was an awesome sunset that Ryan and I watched from the balcony. This evening we had another neat sunset (unfortunately Ryan is not visiting this time) and I looked to the east and took this shot of the "castle" as I call it.

Sarajevo Sunset - 20 January 2008

Hanging In There

A little bit of fall is hanging in there trying to make it to spring....

Lonely Leaf - Veliki Park, Sarajevo

Flamingos in the Rain

I didn't get good subject isolation of the chicks, (and haven't come up with a realistic looking method of doing so in photoshop) but I still sort of liked this photo taken last summer at the Cincinnati Zoo. I liked the circular ripples in the water, I like the details in the front chick's feathers/down and I like the way the adult flamingos frame the chicks (two on each side in the un-cropped version, but the front one on the left is a butt shot and the butt is not sharp at that:) The grey chicks just don't stand out against the background enough...which I guess helps protect the little guys from predators. I'd give it a 6 out of 10 on my made up on the spot scale. Also, why does it always manage to rain when we get a chance to go there???

Flamingo Chicks - Cincinnati Zoo

Two More From Last Summer

Went looking at some more of my photos from our time ashore in Mexico during our cruise this past summer. The first photo, the walls of stone, is a three image HDR which I used mostly just to bring out some details in the top flat portions of the wall.

...and they lifted many stones (Neil Young - "Cortez, The Killer")
Chacchoben Mayan Ruins - Mexico



While with this second photograph, I used photoshop's ACR lens correction function "vignetting" to actually add vignetting (the darkening of the corners caused by light fall-off, poor lens design, too many filters etc) for creative effect to add emphasis to the center of the photo and to the steps receding into the distance.

The Jungle Takes Hold - Chacchoben Mayan Ruins, Mexico

A Bit of Color

After a pretty ugly week with lots of fog and slightly warmer weather, the fog was totally gone today and the temps made it into the mid 50's. Town was packed with people out and about. That's not to suggest it was nice and sunny though...just much better than it has been :)

This afternoon I found a list I made in August of "photos to process" that had fallen behind my desk. Most of what was on that list would still be on the list if I were to make it today. Most of our summer vacation photos are still on the list...the cruise, New Orleans, Indianapolis, Cincinnati Zoo...I did complete the Judo photos though! The list prompted me to go back and have a peak, the color here immediately caught my eye...hopefully it will catch your eye too.

Trinkets -Chacchoben, Mexico

Boring Photos???

I don't know if I am (or was) in a slump as far as creativity goes or what, but for some reason as I try to finish up the photos from our September trip through Dalmatia, my Krka National Park photos generally strike me as boring. Something just seems to be missing. Anyway here is one I forced myself through tonight...I certainly don't consider it a masterpiece :)

Krka At Dusk - Croatia

September Was a Bit Warmer...

This is another photo of the waterfalls at Krka in Croatia. It was a lot warmer there, then...than it is here, now :) This is also a photo that I've taken a couple tries at to get right. It may still need some work.

What I ought to do though, is hike back up to the Skakavac waterfall this weekend and get some photos of it all frozen. It has been below freezing here for about a month, with today's temperatures only making it to the upper teens (Fahrenheit). It would be a cold hike.

Krka National Park - Croatia

More Snow

It snowed some more over the New Year's holidays...but a number of the walls around town have elaborate paintings on them. The paintings and graffiti can really add color to what can be a drab and dreary time of year.

Park Art - Sarajevo