Heipei

I like to surprise myself (and you, fellow remaining reader). This is the first of many posts in which I’ll show some highlights of the last few months. It starts with our honeymoon.

June 2013 – Tuscany

In the last post I told you that Katrin and I (finally) got married, in May/June 2013. While there were some tense and stressful moments leading up to the weddings (civil and catholic), all of that was soon but forgotten. The wonderful summer we had last year, getting married, celebrating with all of our close friends, the honeymoon are memories I will cherish for a long time to come. You can view all of the photos on Flickr.

For our honeymoon, Katrin and I decided to go to Italy. We usually visit big cities or go hiking on vacation, so Tuscany promised to be something a little bit different. Since this was our honeymoon we had done the unthinkable and booked the four hotels for the ten days in advance. We managed to offset that conservatism by taking the car to our first hotel in Levanto (Cinque-Terra), which is a 1100km drive from Aachen. We had played with the thought of staying in Switzerland for one night, but in the end we simply headed out early, only stopped twice and managed to get to Levanto in one day’s time. Levanto was nice, a very dense and lively city without an overwhelming amount of tourism. The landscape around Levanto however paled in comparison to the rolling hills of Tuscany.

Our next hotel was in Castellina in Chianti in the heart of Tuscany. Words can’t describe the beauty of the landscape and the old villages and cities, so I’ll let photos stand for themselves. We stayed at a small hotel a kilometer into a remote dirt road. The landscape, the atmosphere and the food each night were simply sublime.

During the days, Katrin and I took trips to cities in Tuscany, most being within a one-hour drive. We saw Siena, Florence, Lucca, Montalcino, Montepulciano, San Gimignano, Castiglione della Pescaia and a lot of other small villages along the way. Most of the time we did nothing except stroll through the town endlessly. Sometimes we tasted (and frequently bought) the local wines, and we usually had Caprese at least once a day.

The last hotel we stayed it was in Castiglione della Pescaia, a small coastal city with an incredibly beautiful old city/fortress and an endless white beach. This place was a break from the inland locations we had seen up until then, but it was still unmistakably Tuscany. Our days were spent at the beach (unless it got too hot) and at night we strolled into the city and had dinner at one of the excellent restaurants.

So, unless the photos didn’t make it completely obvious: This was probably the most beautiful vacation we have taken to date. Katrin and I were simply blown away by the beauty of Tuscany and will surely return. Yes, Paris was really nice, and British Columbia is something completely different, but in terms of simply enjoying the pleasures life has to offer, there is no better place than in front of a plate of local cuisine, with a nice red wine, in the historic center of a Tuscan village.

It’s really tough to get back to blogging after a long absence. But I spend so much time (pointlessly) consuming on the Internet that I miss the days when my main focus was actually creating stuff, be it text, photos or code. I’ll try to improve! I’ve started another (static) blog over on heipei.github.io which will focus exclusively on my more nerdy endeavors.

The big one …

Well the biggest piece of news is probably that Katrin and I tied the knot and got married this summer. After a lot of stress and time-consuming organizations we were happy to celebrate our wedding with a lot of our dear friends and family. The photos from the epic parties are still not quite there yet, but the samples we already saw were simply amazing (we can only recommend our photographer Christina which did an excellent job). We had a huge party after our civil marriage and a smaller party with only close friends and family after our catholic wedding in Aachen. The weather played along just fine, more than can be said for the rest of this summer. The help and encouragement we received from our friends, family and our fraternity brothers / sorority sisters gave us a lot of strength.

… and two small ones

The other thing that managed to sneak in amidst all of the stress we had this spring/summer were two lively and insubordinate little cats by the names of “Buffy” and “Telefonmann”. It is certainly a lot more demanding to take care of someone other than yourself, especially in the case of these two cats which always seem to be hungry. But the joy these two little creatures give us more than makes up for any additional effort. Pro-tip for cat-owners: Get a roomba!

Photography

I talked a lot about the difference between my EOS 60D and my Fujifilm X100 and have spent countless hours editing shots and contemplating on selling the 60D for an X-Pro1 or X-E1. In the end I came to the conclusion that the only thing most of my average shots are missing is and interesting composition and the necessary amount of post-processing (more for the 60D than for the X100), both of which are faults of the photographer rather than his gear.

By now I have moved to shooting RAW almost exclusively for my 60D and just spent an eternity editing some 550 shots from our honeymoon in Tuscany. In the end the effort was worth it, even more so because I learned a lot about sane defaults when developing from RAW and which kind of look I want to achieve. I will do a separate photo post once I selected a few good shots, stay tuned.

As much fun as we had during our only winter-hike this season, I really hope the white season does not return. We’ve had enough cold and way too few hours of sun. So, enjoy these photos, may they be the last frigid ones for a while.

We went for a walk behind the Aachen Westbahnhof (a major freight rail station) where they are currently tearing up the old railway tracks to make room for the new Campus West of RWTH Aachen University. Since this is a construction site, we went on a sunny Sunday morning. To be honest it is not that interesting and you have to walk about a kilometer to get there from the street. Still, in terms of photography there are some interesting subjects to choose from. You can also tell that I’m getting more comfortable with post-processing my photos each day. Although I’m not a big fan, I occasionally use presets which emulate specific kinds of analog film.