I really like the lines and the simple structure of this heliconia. The growth pattern of the spoon-like bracts allows for simple scaling and no matter how large they become, they won’t block each other’s growth. When a heliconia blooms, the actual flowers grow out of these bracts.
Happy Mother’s Day!

We saw this Coast Horned Lizard (Phrynosoma coronatum blainvillii) on a hike at Mount Diablo State Park. His tactics to avoid detection seemed to have been to alternately hold perfectly still for a while, and then to sprint a foot or two towards a better hiding place when he thought we weren’t looking. Between the small stones his camouflage worked really well and we found it very difficult not to loose him after his sprints. After 5 minutes he finally disappeared into the bushes next to our trail.

Another shot from Big Sur. When I took this shot we were sheltering behind a rock from the wind and sand that blasted everything around us. This rock looked as if it got blasted quite frequently. This shot is a long exposure of 30 seconds and you can see the softness that the moving grains of sand add to the foreground, a bit like the spraying waves do in the background. I also took some shots at 1/8000s to see if I could freeze it, but the swirling sand still only left blurry traces on the chip. At these speeds the sand gets everywhere: my eyes still hurt from its grinding force and I’m still finding it in my camera bag and my shoes. And no, those aren’t the real colors.

Below you see two people walking by, trying to protect their faces from being sand blasted.

A Stellar’s Jay (Cyanocitta steller), who adamantly demanded to get some of our peanuts. We met this guy at Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park where these jays, but also crows and what sounded like pheasants were on wakeup-call duty. The vocal expressiveness of these jays was quite surprising: sometimes they sounded like annoyed toddlers, sometimes they were clearly rallying their mates, and their wikipedia page states that they can also mimic hawks to drive away other birds from their feeding grounds.

Last week I had the opportunity to shoot an incredibly patient but excitable model: Max. She’s a boxer-shepherd mix and it was just pure joy to work with her.

I saw this pair at Fort Funston yesterday. Quite a few birds played with the hang-glider but this seagull had taken the most interest in the strange red and white bird. Later I heard that hang-glider pilots like this spot at the coast because there are often strong winds coming in from the sea that hit a steep cliff. This cliff deflects the air stream upwards and creates stout updrafts, so that the hang-gliders can stay up for hours at a time. Ravens also seemed to like this spot and were doing wild aerial acrobatics, showing the big, stiff bird how it is done.

I saw this female black-tailed deer in Alum Rock Park in early November. She saw me when she stepped forward from behind a bush, and fortunately paused briefly before she vanished into the bushes in the back, which gave me just enough time to get this shot. Seeing her big eyes made me understand where the expression “doe-eyed beauty” comes from.

I took this picture yesterday on a photo hike in the Oakland Redwood Regional Park. I liked this scene because the tree’s thick branches leaned towards the bench, which made it look like the tree was trying its best to provide a nice, shady roof for tired wanderers.

Another picture from Market Street in San Francisco. A long-exposure photograph is a great data-collection tool. It can reveal how much interaction there is with any given subject: the more people are in a given area the stronger their traces become in the picture, or the longer people stay in one spot the more solid their features appear. In this case, no-one was interacting with the homeless person that was rolled into a blanket behind his wheel chair. Yet, a few people passed by so closely to him that they nearly stepped onto the pizza box lying next to the wheel chair.

I took this picture yesterday on Market Street in San Francisco. Usually people ignore beggars and panhandlers, and pretend that they are invisible. With this shot I wanted to show that people in need are a fixed part of the daily life of every society and especially in San Francisco. To someone begging for money the stream of people walking by must seem like an army of ghosts, in the sense that the rushing masses don’t want to interact with them.

Last week we went bouldering in Yosemite National Park. Well, my friend Cyril braved the cold and bouldered, while I took pictures. We had anticipated that it would be chilly, but we hadn’t expected to see so much snow. When it said “Snow chains required” at the park entrance, we thought about turning back. However, when the park ranger at the gate said: “You should be fine with winter tires. It’s up to you!”, we gave it a try and made it to Yosemite Village in no time. There weren’t a lot of boulders free of ice and snow, but we found a couple on which Cyril could warm up and try out some moves.

We found out last week that the bay area can become quite cold at night.  The drop in temperatures turned the humidity in the air to small ice crystals and covered everything with a sparkly layer of frost. I took this picture on a scouting trip to the Blue Oak Ranch Reserve shortly before the sun melted all the ice again. I liked the contrast between the big spikes of this plant and the tiny crystals that formed on them.

Taken on the 4th of January at the Marin Headlands. The trace was produced by about 10 cars and a couple of bicycles going up and down on Conzelman Road over the period of 5 minutes and 15 seconds. In the back you can see parts of Berkeley on the other side of the bay.

The Golden Gate Bridge and downtown San Francisco at sunset yesterday. When I watched the light change and I saw these warm colors, I realized how much I look forward to the summer with its mild evenings. Now we still have the disconnect between the colors and the chilly temperatures when the sun goes down. Well, I’m definitely getting spoiled here. When we arrived in California I was truly happy that the temperatures were above freezing, and now it cannot be warm enough.

This shot is also from Pomponio State Beach and would not have happend without Pleuni pointing this boy out to me. Thanks a lot, my love! When the sun was setting, temperatures dropped below 45 ºF/7 ºC, but this boy was just playing tag with the waves, oblivious to the cold.  Well, he wore a beanie.

It’s wonderful that children don’t have the same prejudices/anticipations/expectations as many adults, me included. They can so easily challenge the status quo, because they don’t know that there is one.

We celebrated the beginning of 2013 at Pomponio State Beach and were welcomed by a beautifully breezy surf and nice waves crashing into the rocks. I really enjoy being at the shore, and especially at this one, because it has such strong contrasts.

Everybody seems to be doing it: the reflection on the past year. So, here is mine: 2012 has been an incredible year.

I know, everybody seems to say so. Somehow we are better at remembering the nice parts and suppressing the bad things. But try as I might, I cannot remember a negative thing about 2012. There have been big changes in our lives, but they were good changes. Some of these are reflected in my favorite images of 2012, which you can find on my new Favorites page.

We moved out of our apartment in Somerville, Massachusetts, and put all our things into storage. We spent two months traveling Malawi, Uganda, Kenya, and Ethiopia, visiting family and friends. We worked there with amazing people and projects. And we eventually finalized our move to California. The Bay Area is an incredible place, with a high variety of types of people, landscapes, climate conditions, and animals. We are slowly settling into our new lives and will keep you posted on the small and the big things…

Thank you very much for following my blog and a Happy New Year!

Getting lost is a good thing, at least for me. Well, not if I have an urgent appointment, of course. If I have time, I enjoy taking the little paths and to explore the side routes, which lead me to unexpected views and places. If I don’t have a particular destination in mind, I walk more slowly, pay more attention to my surroundings, notice the little things, and in this case the big ones, like the Zuiderkerk (the southern church). This view is close to what Monet saw when he painted Zuiderkerk in Amsterdam in 1874. Like with many other old buildings I am amazed by what the master builders and craftsmen managed to construct so many generations ago (the Zuiderkerk was built between 1603 and 1611).

The level of protection from erosion that helm grass (Ammophila arenaria) provides for dunes is incredible. This European beachgrass is an invasive species in the United States, but in the Netherlands it is actively planted wherever land needs to be protected from the sea through dunes and sandy beaches. In unprotected spots the strong winds quickly blow away the sand, but helm grass catches quite a bit of it through reducing wind speeds close to the ground and its six to nine meter long roots fix sand to the dune and  maintain the dune’s structure.  This shot was taken at the beach near Castricum.

The authors of the Amsterdam City Guide put it aptly: “When it comes to traffic, you might as well call Amsterdam the Rome of the north for its weaving, seemingly lawless mass of whizzing bicycles, driven by skilled madmen who at any other time might be loving friends.” Of course, I love biking, but when I am strolling around in Amsterdam I suddenly find myself at the receiving end of bikers zooming past me. Then I remember my time as bicycle courier and the one rule for pedestrians: move predictably, i.e. continue on your current trajectory. It works .

The last one for now from Vienna. By now we have made our way back to the Netherlands and over the next two days I will be exploring Amsterdam. Currently, it’s raining outside so I took shelter in a nice cafe with free wifi.

This shot was also taken on Kärntner Straße in Vienna. The dog seems to be so irresistible to the woman petting it that the mannequin in the shop window needs to take a look, while the boy looks like he is used to people walking up to his dog and murmur: “Such a cute little dog.”

One of my first attempts of street photography. This was taken on Kärntner Straße, Vienna’s famous shopping street. I like the picture because of the contrasts: the woman in red, having an animated discussion on her phone, and the picture of the happily dancing woman in the shop window; the blue in the back, usually associated with feeling down, on a personification of happiness; and the political colors of the U.S., where red is currently trying to find out what went wrong, with blue celebrating the re-election of their candidate. But I like it also because the woman in the back seems to be patting the girl in front on the shoulder, as if saying: “Don’t take it too seriously!”

The back of the beautiful Vienna State Opera building. Now you see what I mean by curly bits.

A long exposure of the mumok, the museum of modern arts in Vienna. I really like Vienna, don’t get me wrong, but after the overwhelming exposure to classic buildings with their statues, figurines, gargoyles, columns, domes, and odd flowery pieces, the smooth outer shell of the museum of modern art calibrates my vision back to normal and lets me appreciate the curly bits of architecture again. But it takes a while. Hence, after a day in the inner city, spending an hour taking pictures of the mumok is basically a must, if the hotel bed seems to be too far away for a lie down instead.

I really like the baroque charm of the museum for natural history in Vienna. This shot was taken in its main stair case. The museums earliest collections were begun more than 250 years ago and it opened to the public in 1889. In science we are very careful about giving credit. At the time of the opening of the museum, this didn’t just mean that your name appeared somewhere on a publication. No, they also put up statues and paintings of the important contributors.

This ram was grazing next to the house we rented to spend a weekend with all of Pleuni’s cousins at the north-west coast of the Netherlands. The Dutch weather didn’t fail to surprise us by switching from being crispy cold and bright on one day, to being dramatically stormy, sprinkled with bouts of heavy rains, on the next. I took this picture while being blasted by strong winds and envied him for his thick fur, in which he seemed to be completely oblivious to windchill.

Another shot from the Point Reyes National Seashore. I like the soft, dispersed light that filters through the fog. After hiking along the Tomales Point trail with only low shrubs and grass left and right, I came back to the Pierce Point Ranch and only then I noticed these trees, as they provided such a big contrast to the landscape I had been in for hours before. The Pierce family must have planted these trees, either for timber or fuel, or just for the comfort of having them around. I don’t know what connects us with trees, but somehow I find being close to them comforting. To see their massive structures and to listen to the sounds that the wind makes when it rushes through their leaves and branches satisfies a need in me that is very different from the side that lets me program, analyze complex structures, or visualize data.