Monday is Saint Patricks day, where all Irish communities around the world celebrate one of the patron saints of Ireland. The San Francisco Bay area has a large Irish community and hence Saint Patricks Day has always been celebrated with fanfare.

Yesterday San Francisco kicked of the St. Patricks Day Celebration with a big parade. I took this chance and tried to capture the spirit of the day.

See some of yesterdays pictures in my St. Patricks Day in San Francisco Gallery.

One of my favorite places in California is the Sierra Nevada. Unspoiled Nature and left alone by tourist crowds it is a photographer's heaven. During the hot summer months, I usually try to avoid those places, but spring and autumn are wonderful for exploring Eastern California.

I have recently added a new gallery entitled Ghost Towns of the Sierra Nevada. These pictures used to be part of my Highway 395 Gallery, but this gallery is growing too large already. There are still a few ghost towns left for exploring. I added some pictures of Silver City. The city is a collection of old stuff and old buildings brought together from other real cities. I guess they are doing a good thing, claiming to have saved all this stuff from decay. The attention to detail is fantastic. I would not mind paying again for another tour. Remind the person at the entrance to show you his "ghost pictures."

The only mistake I will not be making again is to stay in Ridgecrest. I think officer B. will have to find another victim to stick his traffic tickets to. If you drive through any city in the area, you should be very aware of the cops, as tourist traffic is a major income source for these cities and the cops down their pride themselves in how many tickets they hand out year. They are so proud that they even announce this on big billboards.

Last week I spent an enormous amount of time updating this Website. It is the part of being present online that I like the least as it involves hours of work without much of a visible result. I finally updated the underlying CMS framework to a newer version, and since I had made many customizations, I had to spend some time changing the programming of the new version to suit my needs. The gallery system I use works completely different now, so I had to do some patching there too. I am usually a lazy updater and a later adapter, since I use so many functions that are not always available on the bleeding edge. If anyone really cares what it takes to run a site, I can add a few pointers later.

The main reason to go through with this now was actually the fact that I need to organize the data better. Finding articles has become harder as this website grew, so I have added all those tutorial links to the front page, in an effort to improve access, and I have added some auto discovery links at the bottom of many pages. It is just the first step, but I am making great progress now that I finished the programming work.

I even found time to upload a new gallery yesterday. I still have a long backlog from recent trips. I did upload some pictures of White Sands National Monument in New Mexico. I hope you enjoy the new gallery and that you come back next week for more.

I will also start to write a few new tutorials soon. As always I am open to suggestions on what to write.

We shot many photos on our year-end trip. I have begun to upload the first batches of photos to my USA West Galleries.

I have added a new Gallery for Canyon de Chelly National Monument. This was a unique experience and one of the most beautiful parks I have ever seen, mixing unique Navajo archeological sites with wonderful landscapes and wildlife.

Another amazing place was the False Kiva (shown in the picture above) we found in Canyonlands National Park. This is another archeological wonder situated among one of the most beautiful landscapes.

Ever since my Peru Trip, I have enjoyed taking photos of ancient ruins in amazing settings. Seeking them is a great pleasure and adventure.

I will keep uploading more pictures during the next couple of weeks, mainly in my USA West Galleries.

With the help of Dani (of TripGalleries), I have written an article on Native American Sites in the Soutwest. Its a great resource if you are interested in finding out more and to see some of the things I will be uploading soon (among many other).

Defying conventional wisdom, we printed a wall-sized picture of the Golden Gate Bridge.

When Boris contacted me 3 months ago, he sounded desperate.  He had a special request and not much hope of getting it met. Boris wanted to have a wall-sized print of one of my pictures. He wanted to print one of the pictures he found on this website at 128x100 inches. At first, I was puzzled and I asked him to confirm his request. I guessed that he was German, so I translated his request into metric units for confirmation.

After confirmation, I suggested some of my large-scale stitched images as an alternative solution, but Boris knew exactly what he wanted and stayed firm in his request. I therefore discussed the potential outcome of resizing the desired image with him. We quickly dismissed the possibility of re-taking the shot, due to the cost and the unknown outcome. Atmospheric conditions in San Francisco are not predictable.

We focused on the more predictable issue of upsizing the original image and on print quality. After explaining that even an 8.2MP file of the Canon 20D is several times larger than the highest HDTV resolution, we concluded that it has to look better at those giant dimensions too. You need to see a 72” HDTV at full resolution to know how good these look at 2 Megapixels (1080p).

A good-looking result was also our goal. Boris had already found a specialist in large-scale printing and left it to them and me to figure out the potential of success. I suggested working with CCS Digital on a test print, a slice of the upsized image at full resolution.

After experimenting a bit with different upsizing methods, we settled on a result that Boris ordered from CCS for review. One week later, I had the order filled. Gaining a better understanding of the limits of printing, satisfying a customer and my own curiosity made it a worthwhile effort.

I asked Boris for a picture of the result and permission to write this article.

View a new gallery of Street Photography from Europe.

On my recent trip to Germany, I did not feel quite as comfortable photographing people as I did in San Francisco. I was not sure how people would react, so I took a slightly different approach. I kept a little bit more distance between myself and my subjects, trying to look as inconspicuous as possible. Therefore, the style of the photos looks a little different than my previous street photography attempts.
Overall I mainly did landscape and cityscape photography. I am still working on the Galleries before I can release them.

Probably owing to the discouragement of people I was with, who would not understand why someone would be interested in photographing strangers, the material was rather thin. I still managed to put together a Gallery of 27 street photos for your enjoyment.

I am even happy with some of them, like the picture of the young couple featured in this article. The scene could be taken right out of an advertisement spot, probably for a phone company or a perfume.
As usual, people didn't take notice of me, although I was a lot more nervous.

We have now scanned and uploaded the first reel of my Dad's Bolivia Photos to the store. I am still working on streamlining the process. Now that we almost finished moving in to our new place and with the holiday season coming, I should find the time.

One day I went through my Dad's attic and ran across his collection of several thousand slides from years of business travel. I still remember vividly how he used to give presentations in my school, captivating my classmates with his stories. Back in his days, business travel used to be a real adventure. Our country was poor and travel restricted. Sometimes reaching a destination for him consisted of a week of hair-raising journeys, making for first-rate stories. Now his slides were collecting dust and fading away in the depth of time, eaten by acids and humidity.

Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, we can now preserve his photos. Last year I purchased a Nikon Coolscan Slide Scanner , hoping he would be able to digitize his work. It turns out that the computer needed an upgrade as well. When I visited my parents this year, we worked on the scanning process a bit, but I will still have to put together a computer system.

Being separated by almost 10,000 miles does not make things easier for us, but we finally managed to scan some test cases. Eventually my Dad will have the tedious task of scanning a load of slides, while I just need to run some Photoshop actions on them, or so I thought. It turns out, that most pictures will need some individual attention as well, to fix some blemishes caused by the ravages of time.

I am looking forward to digitizing his photos and going on a journey through time, comparing the old and the new. I will visit some of the places and compare photographs. This should be a fun project.

You can find some of his Bolivia Slides in my Store. (Smugmug offers me unlimited storage)