Heipei

Last year’s big vacation took Katrin and myself to the beautiful US East Coast once more. We first went there in 2008, our first big vacation abroad. Back then I created a dedicated blog for our trip where I dutifully posted an entry for every day of our stay, including photos uploaded to flickr. I did the same thing for our 2012 vacation to the Canadian West Coast & Rockies. In the end, although blogging everyday while you’re on vacation was a lot of work, especially with spotty WiFi and different hotels every night. Still, the result was a beautiful and rich account of our time and we both caught ourselves reading the old posts every now and then, kind of like an online vacation diary.

This time I had decided against blogging in advance. The primary reason for me was that I have since started post-processing all of my photos and would not want to upload any of my shots on the road. And having a vacation-blog without photos is kind of dull, so the decision was an easy one.

Anyway, with enough time passed, me having crunched through all our shots and over the last weeks uploaded the most interesting ones to flickr, now is a good time to recap some of the highlights of this epic road trip.

New York City

We flew from Frankfurt into New York City on our first day. We had originally planned to stay there for a few days and then make our way north, but due to some work-related scheduling changes we would be heading south just a day later. But we had a few more days in Manhattan after our round-trip, which I’ll include here as well.

Anyway, New York City, the big apple, Manhattan and all the sights that have become so familiar after years of watching all kinds of TV shows. Neither me nor Katrin had ever been to NYC, in fact we had intentionally avoided the stress of the big city when we were in New England in 2008. But this time we were curious enough to get an apartment in the heart of Manhattan, in Chelsea to be exact. Arriving at JFK, we took an airport shuttle van downtown, our noses peered against the windows, glad we didn’t have to navigate the traffic on our first day there. Our driver was a little crazy and amped up, he even took us straight through Times Square. We were a little overwhelmed when we got the hotel but still went out for a few more hours to get a slice of New York-style pizza and got a first glance at the sparkling night skyline.

The next morning we got up early, since we only had until 6pm before we had to leave the city. So, true to our usual routine we made the most of it and spent the whole day wandering the city blocks. We started due south and headed for the financial district. Along the way we came through West Village, Washington Square Garden, SoHo and Little Italy. This small stretch of the city, noisy and sometimes somewhat filthy as it may have been, really made me appreciate why a lot of people love living in Manhattan. At the World Trade Center we saw the 9/11 memorial and like so many other people stared down into the bottomless pools where the Twin Towers once stood. After that we naturally took a quick stroll through the financial district before arriving at the southernmost tip of Manhattan at Fort Clinton.

We then went our our only subway-ride for the day which took us all the way up to East 86 Street next to Central Park and the Guggenheim museum. We walked a few blocks until we hit the Met and then made our way through the park itself. Like the rest of the city, Central Park was alive with people of all ages, but it still felt good to get away from the busy streets for a while. On the western side of the park we joined Central Park West, were apparently a huge climate-change rally had taken place earlier that day since the street was still cordoned off and completely deserted except for some retreating police cars. Standing in the middle of that 4-lane road in the heart of Manhattan was an experience to behold. We did a fair amount of additional blocks that day, seeing Rockefeller Center and Times Square. This was our first day in Manhattan.

On our return trip we had decided to spend two more days in New York since we didn’t manage to see everything we wanted to see earlier. This time we went with a much cheaper hotel in New Jersey (it was located right next to Holland tunnel) and then simply took the subway downtown. We arrived at the hotel late, so on our first night we only went into the city to get something to eat. After some searching we found a nice Italian restaurant which had a very small porch right on the sidewalk. After we sat down we noticed that we could see One World Trade Center in it’s entirety.

The next day we followed the advice of one of my colleagues and started out in the meatpacking district. There, the so-called “High Line” starts out. The High Line is a park on a stretch of elevated railway that was abandoned in the 1980s. At some point the citizens of New York started an initiative to properly develop this railway as a park, building stairs, walkways and planting all sorts of plants, flowers and trees. By now the High Line is almost 2.5km long and is a wonderful way to explore Manhattan, an absolute must-see if you ask me. Since you’re walking above street level it’s a more quiet experience, plus you don’t have to look out for cars all the time.

At the northern end of the High Line we visited the USS Intrepid museum (a Vietnam-era decommissioned aircraft carrier) which is packed with all kinds of different aircrafts on its flight-deck and its hangars. For the rest of the day we explored some more on foot, going to Grand Central Station, the New York Library and the Flatiron building. On the next day we only had a few hours before our flight from Newark, so we spent it in the Liberty State Park in New Jersey.

To sum up our New York experience, we were both positively surprised. Like with Paris, I had expected the city to be lot more hectic and filthy, and more cramped. But Manhattan turned out to be a very pleasant experience: Colorful, vibrant, diverse. Sure, you occasionally get hit with some unidentifiable smell and some street corners are bustling with tourists, but in general I have a much better understanding of what makes New York worth living for so many people. The restaurant and shops also have a big share in that. Needless to say we can’t wait to go back.

I was recently combing through boxes of old stuff from my childhood. One box was filled with old photos and negatives of 35mm photography film. Back then, you gave your film to your local photo shop, they’d develop it and then give you pouches with the developed prints and the negatives in it. I’m quite fond of these memories, but I rarely look through them anymore because it’s a little cumbersome. So I decided to digitize these photos.

I started out with an off-the-shelf dia film scanner, the kind you can get from Amazon for about €30-€40. It has a tray for a strip of 35mm film, a small display, and SD-card slot and a few buttons. You hit the button and then advance to the next slide. Unfortunately, the results from these scanners were abysmal. Not only were the photos JPEG-only, they were also low-resolution, not very sharp and showed strong compression artifacts. Not what I’d envisioned. A dedicated flat-bed film scanner was also out of the question, for these will easily set you back €200-€300. The big advantage of these is the fact that they will scan to high-res TIFF, giving you a lot of room to post-process the scans.

But I have two great cameras at my disposal, both capable of capturing high-resolution RAW files. So I started out devising a way to photograph the negatives in the most convenient way possible. Why scan the negatives instead of the actual prints? Well, the negatives should give you more dynamic range than the film and I was also missing a few prints from the pouches, while the negatives were mostly complete.

I built a simple cardboard box, cut a 35mm-ish hole into the side, set up my wireless flash and fixed a sliding-window contraption in front of the hole. The flash is diffused in the box using two sheets of plain paper, again, not the most professional way to do it but it works OK. I then experimented with my DSLR only to find that I had the wrong lenses for the job (a macro lens would have fared better I supposed). So I used the next best thing: My Fujifilm X100 with a macro-lens I still had lying around. In order to focus the negative I set my X100 to RAW and used the Yellow-channel black-and-white settings a preview mechanism. The ISO was set to 200, aperture f/8, shutter time of 1/500s and manual focus (1m-1.5m), with 4/7 power from my Yongnuo flash. In Aperture I had to invert the colors, crop and then continue with the usual postprocessing, including white-balance, contrast, etc.

Long story short, after some experimentation and some fiddling I was able to get decent RAWs of my negatives with little effort and no money spent. True, sometimes the negative bulge a little bit and the corners do get blurry, but the essence of the photo is very neatly transported from the negative into digital. It’s certainly not the best you can get from these negatives, and I suppose some people will look down onto this technique, but for a first quick run of digitizing my most import photos it was more than adequate. If I ever get around to buying a dedicated film-scanner I might repeat the procedure, but until then I can safely recommend my workflow. Let me know if you have any input on this or other techniques in the comments.

You might have noticed by following my flickr photostream that I went to the 31st Chaos Communication Congress late last year. The Chaos Communication Congress is the annual gathering/event/congress organised by the German Chaos Computer Club (CCC).

The Congress has a special meaning for me ever since I first went there in 2002 for the 19C3. Then, the Congress still took place in the “Haus am Köllnischen Park” (HAKP) and was a completely different kind of event. It was the first year I had my own Laptop and a PCMCIA Orinoco Gold Wi-Fi card, and people usually did not complain about either the lack of bandwidth or the unreliability and unprofessionalism of a lot of the services. The whole event had a very cozy and familiar atmosphere. Nerd culture (and acceptance of it) was not that widespread in daily life yet, so for some of the people coming there it seemed like the only chance to be among a large group of like-minded geeks. The first year my parents took us to Berlin, the next years we either drove or flew. Still in school, short on cash, we’d sleep beneath the desk in the Hackcenter, crash in some friends cheap hotel room or sleep in the back of my car. We nearly froze to death that year. We took showers in a nearby gym, a bunch of naked nerds in a school gym locker room.

After the 19C3, the congress moved to the much larger “Berliner Congress Center” (BCC), just a short walk away, but completely different in terms of size and location. Now situated right next to the central Alexanderplatz, with huge windows looking out and huge lecture halls, this felt like a very sudden step up compared to the old and worn-down HAKP. Projects like a GSM network, reliable Wi-Fi and other amenities kept being added, making it an increasingly professional yet still whacky event. Me and Flo kept going there for the 20C3, 21C3 and 22C3. At the end, it had already gotten a little bit crowded, so it was no surprise when the event was moved yet again, this time to Hamburg, where it has been taking place for the last few years. After I started studying in 2005, I never went to the Congress again, always happy to be at home at the end of the year (did I mention that the C3 takes place right after Christmas).

This year, I made the decision to visit the Congress once more, after the crazy stuff I’d heard from the last events. So I found some friends, packed up the car and we made the drive to Hamburg. I had booked a hotel this time, some things do change after all.

We arrived late on December 27, the Congress already in full swing. We got in and I was immediately overwhelmed by the sheer size of this new venue. It took some time before we found people we knew and got the place figured out. The next three days were a wonderful blur of meeting old friends, having a beer, seeing how all of these wacky projects had matured over the years and actually visiting some of the awesome talks in person rather than just watching the recordings at home.

The Congress had matured. Everything was amazingly well organised, there were people responsible even for the seemingly irrelevant details. Keep in mind that this is an event which is run purely through volunteers and without any corporate sponsorship. Yet, and this is what makes it so special, even though the Internet worked flawlessly, the talks were very professional, recorded, live-streamed, on-time and well moderated, the Congress hadn’t lost its edge. One glimpse into the vast dungeons of the Hackcenter was all that was needed to remind you that it is still one of the strangest get-togethers of hackers of all different orientations. There were people hacking on operating systems and programming languages, political and human rights issues and also a lot of hardware-related projects. Some of the more obscure things I saw were huge knitting groups and 3D-printer enthusiast which advocated a dildo-printing workshop. Through the Hackcenter, large plastic pipes delivered capsules via air pressure, rumored to be carrying recreational drugs as a sort of real-world Silk Road. To make the picture stranger still, there were also some very analogue activities, like people brewing coffee and tea and a kids-corner since a lot of the nerds had produced offspring in the meantime.

Last but not least, the Congress now had its own party cave, a room so in tune with the vibe of the event that my jaw literally dropped when I went there for the first time. In this room, volunteers had arranged a bunch of fullsize shipping containers, light and sound installations and an authentic wooden bar to get drinks. The DJs were performing in the middle of the dancefloor, flanked by oversize towers of ear-blistering speakers. And people were actually dancing!

I left the Congress exhausted but very happy. I had met so many old friends and gotten to know some new ones. I saw talks of cutting-edge research and hacking up close, and I had a grand time. The whole event filled me with energy and joy to be part of such a vibrant and open hacker scene like we have here. 32C3, here I come!

The post with details about our 2014 US East Coast vacation will take some more time, I’m still busy uploading the best photos to flickr in small batches.

There was is one photo that stands out though, and I knew it was special the second I took it. This was when we were leaving the Adirondack Park (New York) towards the Canadian border. It was the height of the Indian Summer, with lots of people stopping on the shoulders to take photos of the foliage. We had stayed in Lake Placid and stopped a few times while still in the park on our way out. One of those places was Saranac Lake, where there is a small parking lot next to a boat landing site. So I took the photo below and did not have to edit it one bit. I posted it to flickr (and a few flickr groups), and lo and behold, it quickly got a lot of views. It got so many views that it was featured on flickr explore, an automated list of the 500 most popular photos on flickr for each day, woohoo.