Kzenon Überforward

I just bought a new Photoshop CS5 and Lightroom 3 online on the Adobe site. Heaven prevents that I ever have to do this again. I had one of the worst possible customer experiences possible. I felt so much like 1996. Running a monopoly for too long has obviously dampened Adobe’s need to deliver, well, at least decent service to its paying customers. If there was any alternative to the Adobe products (at least to Photoshop – and do not say GIMP!) I would surely be using it now.

First of all it is surprisingly hard to convince Abobe to sell me anything at all. I used, as I always do, the US site. Well, US, the Internet is supposed to be international I thought. Through a desert which stylistically needs an update anyway I navigated to the products I wanted and put them in the shopping basket. For the checkout Adobe wanted me to log in with my Adobe ID. I did that. And was refused. The reason? My ID is valid only for the German store.

This is bad since for some silly reason the prices in the German and the US store are different, even for identical products. I want, obviously, an US/English Photoshop since virtually all books and tutorials are English as well. I could buy that for a good price on the US site or for an overcharged price on the German one. I was willing to swallow even that and typed the adress of the German site in my Browsers’s adress bar. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s summer here. Finally. Kind of. That has, of course, a lot of disadvantages such as unbearable heat (we had close to 16 degrees today), sunburn (shone nearly one hour today) and general dryness (only 45 hours of rain in the last three days – the plants are suffering!). Then, on the other hand, there are the Dults and Waldfeste (traditional festivals) and there will be, finally, the Oktoberfest as the ending point of this season. After – and in case of the Oktoberfest which happens mostly end of September: before – a long and hard winter those festivals are a celebration of life, love, and beer.

People will wear colorful Tracht, the boys Lederhosen and the girls Dirndls which can be had in all colors and stylewise from straight laced to frivolous and where I personally and as a photographer prefer the latter option. Glorious times. And the best thing: they reappear each year.

Yesterday I had a very interesting conversation with a friend of mine who is – ironically – a real estate lawyer in America. We had a video call on Skype and he was doing some contract work sitting on the porch of his beach home. He is planning to abandon his office downtown soon – why would he want to pay the fixed cost of something he has no use for?

I do have a similar story. I always thought about moving my stock operations into a nice shiny loft downtown. It would feel good. And it would be of no use at all. I guess I’ll stay in my study and have my people working for me from wherever they choose to. I also do have no dedicated office as a lawyer – which I also happen to be.

The next big crisis in the US is the commercial real estate bubble. Why am I not surprised? Read the rest of this entry »

You may have noticed by the stacks of chocolate in the supermarket shelves: Easter is approaching rapidly.

Last year (actually a week after Easter – which is why I can show it only now) I prepared some pretty nice shots for the topic. In them the “Easter world” actually looks a bit more green than it will this year, at least in this latitude, since Easter will be so early this year. Ah, and by the way: this stock photographer survived the cutie-attack by three little girls in pink and white dresses and a flurry bunny. But barely so.

Anyway, if you have any need to shop for this or other Easter shots from this stock picture series you might want to check out my portfolio – which includes these pix of course .

The good thing about being a photographer is that you can do so many things – but you never have to be “great” in them, just “good enough” to be able to capture what’s going on.

In a wise move of strategic thinking I already shot the ski-pix for next (2010/2011) season in the Zillertal Alps with the kuhl bunch including a freestyle champion and Skihaserl. They did marvelous things like jumping in the air with their skies, doing loops and corkscrews while having a casual chat with their mother on the cell phone, then having two or three flips and landing the thing properly again in the snow. Amazing.

It is a pitty the weather was not very good and we had bad light (and thus pretty slushy pix) most of the day. Well, you can ski till Easter and there will be sufficient opportunity to do more of this I guess.

To come back to the “good enough” thing: I found out, that with skiing again, though I am a pretty looser in absolute terms, I am good enough to capture what’s going on. Same goes with swimming, diving, mountain climbing and parachuting. So wait for more kuhl sports to come…

PS: See more previews (that’s all it is!) of this series on my Facebook page. It’s new and still a bit experimental but will grow. Or so.

Indonesia, as such, is not a bad place to be. Even though a lot of things do not work as we mere mortal Westerners might think they should work and other things do not work at all there are small miracles that make you cheer and happy to be here. One of those is “Bintang Zero”, a “non-alcoholic malt” of “international quality” (or so the label says) which even the brewery does not dare to call “beer”. “Zero” gets raving reviews on ratebeer.com. Reviewers note that it is “not unpleasant as such, but very, very unusual” and analyze the aroma as consisting of “rotting pineapple with stale butter”. Others are less enthusiastic, remarking very wittily to be “glad [they] did not swallow it” or calling it simply “perhaps the worst beer in Indonesia, even cold”, which is probably true.

Small wonder I recently developed a knack for it. Lucky I am that the Oakwood Ranchmarket just opposite to our building has the drink in stock. Basically as the only non-alcoholic beer-like thing. The market for such things seems to be small in a overwhelmingly Muslim country where beer and wine is plenty. I shall not wonder.

I absolutely love looking at skylines. For some reason it gives my ego a better proportion to the whole than it usually has and strangely enough I very much enjoy this mixture of humility and transcendence. The theory (remember the punch cake) goes otherwise but I pretend not to know. Having been headquartered most of my time in Munich, Germany, where the local people voted to ban high-rise buildings, I did not have a chance that often.

So it is very fortunate that currently I happen to live in the 18th floor of a nice building with a view on Jakarta’s Menteng (I think, probably I am wrong) skyline. It is rainy season – and very much so – but still there are some clear days. As most skylines this one also is much more impressive by night but I still have to find a decent tripod somewhere an then shall come back to that issue.

My love will laugh with me before the morning comes. Or so Jagger thinks.

Having my autumn-retro-phase listening to classic rock I still cannot believe how unbelievably kuhl the Stones were in there heydays – and I also cannot believe how reluctant they were to learning to play their instruments properly. On the other hand: if you manage to do a song like “sympathy for the devil” that is simply not from this world, who then cares whether you keep the beat. That’s so for sissies.

I was not at the spot when it happened and my wife, who was, is very well. It feels a bit strange if you live just 200 m away from the scene of a terrorist bombing attack. The city is crowded now and my wife reports the way to the airport – where she is scheduled for a flight this evening – is jammed with cars because many people want to leave the town to relax just somewhere out.

The picture was not taken by me. By the way, you do not see very much. This is because of the smoke that blocks your view. The smoke is exactly where only minutes before a restaurant was in which a lot of people had a peaceful breakfast. Until the blast. To me it is very hard to see what makes people do such awful things. This is a rather lame statement and I know it but people died, I do not know why and I do not know what else to say.

Most microstock agencies employ some kind of level system. That means that contributing photographers will be “promoted” once they have reached a certain amount of pictures sold. At the “grand old agency” – that is iStock – the levels are called “canisters” and go from “base” (harmless) up to “black diamond” (elite).

I just hit diamond with my portfolio at iStock, the second highest level, which requires 25.000 sold pictures. Not terribly bad for a weekend shooter who started late in the revolution. I must confess, however, that only a short time ago I thought my whole life would suddenly change and I would feel distinctively different once I reached the semi-god level at iStock. But it just happened without much additional noise. I try to take this as a good sign though: I convince myself that I have outgrown the need for outside motivation and derive the pleasure and the high I get from the act of creating itself.

That is, I think, a very good thing.