01.25.08
Posted in Culture, Media, One World, Science, Travel at 11:27 pm by thomas
Thanks to MapSkip it’s not really much of a secret anymore that I am permanently fascinated by maps. I always loved to look at maps, trace routes across them, read the foreign-sounding place names… As a young boy I spent many hours traveling across the beautiful, large maps in my parent’s world atlas, imagining myself in all those exotic places.
If you are an unreconstructed map-fetishist like me, you will love this site: strange maps
This site is a treasure trove of very unusual maps with very thoughtful descriptions and I found it to be quite an inspirational place for the tired creative mind.
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01.23.08
Posted in Culture at 10:37 pm by thomas
I haven’t been talking about books for a while… Here is a great book that I’ve just finished: Shinjuku Shark by Arimasa Osawa.
This book has been published in Japan seventeen years ago and launched the career of Osawa as one of Japan’s premier mystery writers. It is now for the first time available in translation and it is a very intense and realistic police thriller that puts the reader right into the action and shows parts of the underbelly of Japan’s society that is usually not open to foreigners.
I really enjoyed the detailed description of the police work and the lead character is a very memorable police man that is willing to bend the rules and fight crime on his own terms.
It is worth to remember that this book is now almost eighteen years old, since some of the situations in story would play out very differently in a world full of cell phones. But the crime and its resolution is still as valid and fresh as the day the story was written and I very much recommend this book to readers with an interest in crime fiction and Japan.
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01.16.08
Posted in Photography at 12:56 am by thomas
Here is another picture from the last day of 2007 at San Francisco’s Baker Beach – this time with my Kodak Duo Six-20.
This is one of the main reasons I fell in love with the old Kodak medium format folders – they are so light that I can easily bring two of them along for a walk. They are small, easy to carry and very robust cameras that can take a beating, and with a little patience and practice one can get beautiful shots on medium format film out of the 60 or 70 year old glass…
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01.12.08
Posted in Photography at 7:50 pm by thomas
On the last day of 2007 we took a walk on Baker Beach below San Francisco’s Presidio. The sun was out for one last appearance in the old year and the afternoon was glorious with clear skies and almost no wind – which is unusual for our area.
The sun was very low in the sky and lens flare was unavoidable – especially with my “new” Kodak Vigilant Six-20 f/6.3. Yes, I already had a Vigilant, but with the f8.8 lens, and I had a suspicion that my problems with that camera were connected to the cheap-ish lens. So it was time for an upgrade.
I’m honestly not sure yet if this f/6.3 lens is any better, but I will run more film through the camera to find out. Click on the picture for a larger version.
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01.11.08
Posted in Books, Culture at 1:03 am by thomas
The Guardian has a long-standing special section with portraits of writer’s rooms. I’m fascinated by this collection and I can’t get enough of the writers describing their own office space and desks.
We all seem to have very different needs to get into a creative zone and to work on something that we have to create in our minds out of nothing. And professional writers are pretty much the endurance champions in creating new things. They spend many hours every day staring at a wall or a bunch of pictures or out the window. They write and read a lot and their desks usually show the traces of this work with piles of books and papers scattered everywhere.
The writer’s rooms collection is an interesting window into the minds of these writers and I can only recommend checking out those messy desks… makes it so much easier to put off cleaning my own desk. 
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01.09.08
Posted in Photography at 1:26 am by thomas
Late last year we had a few very foggy days here in San Francisco and on that specific morning the fog sat like a fluffy pillow on top of Nob Hill. It was eerily quiet with almost no cars on California Street and while I stopped to take a picture of Grace Cathedral an empty Cable Car rattled into the scene like a ghost from another time.
Taken with my Kodak Duo Six-20 on Ilford Delta 100. Click for a large version.
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