It's been a month since my last post and I wish I could tell you that something interesting has happened since then, but it hasn't. Instead I'll give you some photos I took during the past couple of days around my hometown. It's been snowing like crazy, on & off for the past month, and I just HAD to use the opportunity. I am a vivid postcard sender over at Postcrossing and I am always struggling to find nice postcards of any of the cities in my area, so I decided to make some myself and sent a big order to Moo.com a few minutes ago.

To make it a little bit more fun I used some rather atypical sights - our area is mostly known for its industrial heritage, coal mines, factories and the like, but most people don't know that we have another kind of culture here: castles! We actually have a lot of them, not big, but pretty, and I am basically using Postcrossing to promote our area - Germany's "Ruhr Area" - especially since we're the "Cultural Capital of Europe" this year!

So without any further ado, here are my favourite shots. Most of them have been manipulated using HDRtist, a free Mac software that'll let you create HDR like photos VERY easily. Try it, it's fun

So, updating the blog took a bit longer than I thought - completely my fault, because I managed to screw up all my thumbnails and I had to edit every single uploaded picture to get them back. The good thing: I got to learn a bit about Wordpress 2.9 image editing features all the while watching my Buffy marathon

As you can see I also needed a new layout - I loved the old one, but it was kinda keeping me from posting, especially when I didn't have a picture ready to go with the post. So now you're looking and something completely hand-coded by me - which probably means you might encounter some errors LOL I'll probably tweak the site here and there a little bit over time.

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In preparation of, well, Christmas (yes, it's only six more weeks!) I decided that for this year's Christmas Card Exchange I want to make some cards myself, so I started taking photos. And to take nicer pictures, I built myself a little lightbox, much like this one here.

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I've been running around my neighbourhood with my camera the other day. I love this season, the weather, the light. The leaves were on the verge of turning, but not quite there yet. All of these were taken about 5 minutes from our house and then run through my current favourite little playtoy: Camera Bag, a program that'll recreate the coloring and feel of old-time films and photos. (more...)