Exhibition and Sale in Germany

For those who were thinking about buying one of my pictures, you have the chance to do this now. Starting today I have an exhibition in Limburg, Germany. The name of the gallery is "Galerie auf der Treppe" which means "Gallery on the stairs" and is located in the (very) old part of the city, which has a lot of historical sights and is a hotspot for tourists. Right now you can find five pictures there and it's going to be at least two more. Special thanks goes to my father who came up with the idea and worked with me on this.

The latest news are:
The pictures were in the shopping windows starting this morning and in the evening they were sold out. A person came in and simply bought them all. He agreed to wait with picking them up until new prints are ready, so the shopping windows won't be empty. I'm flattered!
Could someone take a picture of the windows for this BLOG? That would be great.

Stu Stu Studio

This is regarding the studio shoot I talked about earlier.
I think I spent the first hour doing nothing than experimenting with the lights and kept improving the lighting almost till the end of the shooting. As a total newbie I was apparently challenged - don't expect anything close to perfection. It's so different from street photography which I always compare to hunting. You walk a lot around, you explore, and you also need to be lucky. In the studio everything is set up and there is no parameter the photographer can not adjust. Very powerful, very commercial, very not so exciting.


Tuesday is Halloween!!

I got an email from Jeanne Flemming today. Since I'm receiving a press pass for the Parade (I wrote about it earlier), I got press information, too. Let me use this to put you a bit more into Halloween mood. But first my German readers need to learn some uncommon vocabulary. At least this is what I had to look up. You cannot get into Halloween mood when searching a dictionary, you learn this first! :-)

ember - gluehende kohle
hearth - feuerstelle
rekindle - wiederaufleben
gourds - kuerbisflasche

This year's theme is:
------------------------------------
The Village Hearth
In Celtic times, folks celebrated the last night of Autumn by gathering around a communal fire and then carrying home embers from that fire to rekindle each hearth in the village. Villagers carried the glowing embers in hollowed gourds. From this rite of renewal was born the enduring symbol of Halloween, the Jack-O-Lantern.
Today, the Villagers of the Halloween Parade still take their coals from its communal fire, The Parade, to rekindle its spirit in their own hearths throughout the year. Each improbable story, each other-worldly mask, costume, and each spontaneous step of the dance is an ember, a piece of the collective made personal.
------------------------------------

The Official Village Halloween Parade Puppeteers--Superior Concept Monsters- have created a Giant Cauldron attended by Jack-o-Lantern Giant Puppets and hundreds of smaller Lanterns to enact this ritual of the communal made personal.

Another picture from last year.

Studio Shoot

Yesterday I got a call from Donna L'Oren. I will put my foot into a photo studio for the first time this Sunday. The mission is to shoot pictures which will be used for the packaging of their products. I'm very happy about this opportunity. Even I read a lot about it and considered already getting some lighting equipment myself, my practical studio experience equals zero. I'm sure afterwards I will have a better understanding of things. This will also help me to decide what lighting equipment to get for myself.

fluck.com

I'm very happy about having my last name as a domain. But even I'm proud owner of fluck.de, I kept an eye on fluck.com which was (if I got it right) something like a stud farm in the Netherlands. So on very rare occasions I checked this site out to see if it's still around. Guess what, I was very lucky that I went on this site right after it was expired. The previous owner didn't renew his contract and snapnames.com was ready to start an auction in case more than one person would be interested in getting it. Naive as I am, I was silently hoping that nobody noticed that fluck.com became available so I could get it for just 60 bucks from SnapNames *sneaky sneaky*. An auction lasts three days and right after it started I saw a list of 35 people participating the auction. The price went up to $410 after the first hour. The whole thing turned out to be a battle between two parties and none of them was me. The fact that the auction time gets extended for another five minutes whenever a new bit comes in, made it quite entertaining to watch. I don't know yet what you will see when visiting fluck.com in the future, but I can tell you already that the owner paid a thousand dollars for it.