tim.jagenberg.info

… enjoy the end of a long day.

My submission for the weekly photo challenge at PhotoFriday.com, you can find it as entry #204.

The Setup

Overall I used three flashes, two YN560 and one FL-36R:

• A DIY salad-bowl beauty-dish with grid provided the overhead main light, casting some soft shadows.
• One flash was positioned behind the glass and shaded in a way, so it only hit the steam above the glass.
• The last flash had a make-shift double-slottet blind, providing a narrow accent light from the front:

After a number of interesting presentations on engineering design in at the IDETC09 conference in San Diego and a successful talk highlighting our paper, we ventured on towards our final destination, Las Vegas.
The first few days we rode along the back country roads of southern Arizona, where we saw the true “Heart of America”, small villages in vast beautiful landscapes offering simple lodging and typical healthy American food (the choice between sandwiches and burgers ).
 

The next days we used for some touristy locations such as the former Route 66, the obvious Grand Canyon (with some thunderstorms!) or the less overrun Antelope Canyon. Especially the latter was truely amazing, as one is crawling through a narrow rift with the sun shining in from above. In page we were pretty lucky: As this weekend is the famous Labor Day Weekend, where it seems all Americans explore their own country, all motels in Page, AZ were totally booked out. A friendly receptionist at one of these motels connected us to a local guy, renting out motel-style rooms for a reasonable price.

As I am writing we are on our way to the Zion National Park and are staying in Kanab, which is also dubbed “Little Hollywood”, as many Western movies where shot here.

So far for now, the last bits of information will be posten from home.
Cheers, Tim

As a friend of mine was singing at the local Strawberry Festival, a whole group of us went there to check it out.
The festival was held at the farm of a farmer in Weiterstadt, close to Darmstadt. A sunday afternoon crowd of mostly elderly and kids gathered in a big marquee and enjoyed a variety of dishes based on asparagus or strawberries.The Jazzband “Focus on Jazz” performed many ever-greens and also some less well known tunes. Overall they were really good, very professional musicians. Because of this, I got the impression, that the band was quite a bit overqualified for the crowd.

After the band, an asparagus peeling competition between some local “celebrities” was set up and moderated by a very distinct entertainer from the area. While the contestants were peeling away, she was singing behind them in a very strong hessisch dialect.

The “grand finale” was reached, when a dancing group of some girls from a local school presented their very enthousiastic routine:

Overall it definately was a very interesting and diverse Sunday arvo!