Time for some film photos again! Over the next few days, I’ll be posting some photos I shot during the Christopher Day Street Parade (Gay Pride) here in Cologne, circa June 2004.

Another one from the archives. This is a friend of mine in whose room this photo was taken. He had asked me to take some photos of him and as he was a willing subject I experimented a bit, with this being one of the results.

I had been wanting to post this for a long, long time but every time while post-processing I would hit a wall, unhappy with what I got. But today, I managed to get something decent.

As you can see from the exif data this is a photo from last month. I revisited this today and I tried out some variations of it in b/w as the color seemed to be taking away the attention from what I thought worked in this photo. To make a short story much shorter I ended up liking it in this version. All I did was to use almost only the red channel and a tiny amount of the green channel while converting it to b/w. Lends it a slightly dramatic tone I think. What do you think?

This is the second in a series of three photos. These were taken on my Dynax 5 film SLR. The place is the coffee shop in the wonderful Ludwig Museum for Modern and Contemporary Art here in Cologne where I had gone with a friend to see a Henri Cartier-Bresson photo exhibition right after he passed away. Yes, these photos are more than one year old and yes, I was still caught up in the brilliance of Cartier-Bresson’s photography when I took these photos!

This photo unlike the one yesterday looked better in b/w. I like the way the two people are lost in their individual worlds, completely oblivious of their surroundings.

This is the 100th photo on this photoblog so I thought I’d do something different today. This was taken by a friend of mine almost a year ago when I was in India. The person in the photo, if in case you have not guessed already, is me. This photo is the closest in spirit to the title of this photoblog (as well to the title of my home page on the domain). I shall let you make your own interpretations of that last sentence. The photo is, of course, heavily post-processed. Nothing special, almost everything was done using the simple filters and effects available in Picasa by me.

This is my Russian friend Katya. She had asked me to take a photo of her when we had gone to the Christmas market, a little more than a week ago. As I clicked the shutter some guy entered the frame…grr! I did take a couple more shots but I liked this one the best, in spite of the inadvertent entry. What do you think?

Luckily, this photo was not lost in the hard drive crash as I had processed these and stored them in a separate location. Oh, and a very Happy New Year folks!

Disaster seems to have fallen in love with me. The day I turned in my 5D for repair I came back home to find that my external hard drive had crashed. To make matter worse I had failed to backup my most recent photos, numbering around 150. I tried to recover, but as my luck would have it I could recover almost everything else except for my photos!

This is one of the three original (RAW) files I managed to recover. Oh well, I hope my luck in the new year will be better. On that note I’ll sign off for now. Here’s wishing you all a Happy New Year. Hope the year ahead will be good for you. See you next year!

Eighteen times I breathed, in your arms, waiting for your answer. Eighteen times I cried, on your shoulder, overwhelmed by my desire. Eighteen times I laughed, on your chest, watching your silly faces. Eighteen times I died, in your words, overcome by sadness.

(Perhaps the last of the recent series of photos from my trip to Berlin last year. Again shot with my Dynax 5 film SLR. This is an installation in the Ku’damm area of Berlin near the Europa Haus.)

There are quite a few photos that I shot with my Dynax 5 SLR scanned but sitting idly on my hard drive for a long time. I was too lazy to visit them and do the necessary post-processing. But today that changed. Here is something from a trip to Berlin a little more than a year ago. ‘The Wall’ is of course the (in)famous Berlin Wall. This is fragment of the Wall left behind at the Potsdamer Platz, one of the most dynamic and interesting places in the world, architecture wise.

A rough translation of the text on the wall, ‘At this place, in 1989, was the first opening made in the Berlin Wall’.

This is from last week and it was a late evening shot so it came out nicely blue. But I was curious to see how it would look in black and white so I played a little with the channel mixer in PS and I kinda liked the result. So here it is. All I did was increase the red and green and keep the blue low so the sky in the backgrnd is blown and the branches stand out starkly against the white backgrnd. Let me know what you think of the result.