I know it has been a long time that I haven’t put any updates. But with lockdown and travel restrictions there wasn’t really a lot to blog about. I went to take pics around Cologne but other than that? Nothing… Live was really boring. Not seeing my friends, not going anywhere. Just hoping that it would get better eventually. Now I am starting to hope that soon we will have some kind of normal life back. For August I have a trip booked to Greenland and Iceland and for now I am pretty confident that this will finally happen. I miss travel a lot. ButRead More →

Yeah, I know that I still have to post underwater pics from Sulawesi… just don’t have the time right now to make the selection. Instead I have other nice pics for you. For quite some time I wanted to take a guided tour on the Cologne cathedral with the christmas markets. This year I finally was in time to secure the last space for the tours during that time… see the pics below… 🙂 Plus afterwards some pics of St. Alban which was illuminated in red while there was an event in the Gürzenich.Read More →

When we were in Iceland my friends were looking for geo-caches as they are geo-cachers and have done this for quite some time. I was thinking about starting this too and got registered a few weeks ago. Today I was at my sister’s and instead of taking the metro back home I walked and started to look for my first geo-caches. I am not yet used to it so my first took me about 20 minutes to find. But when I finally found it I was really proud of myself. Found 4 more plus one where I have to answer some questions (based on informationRead More →

I have been a bit busy over the past weeks. There might be some christmas market pics in the next weeks but not sure when I will have time to post them. Today I was at a concert in the Cologne cathedral. It was a special concert because it was a ’sing along‘-concert and everyone had to bring an instrument. My instrument was my voice. 🙂 We all had lyrics and music sheets. To be honest I didn’t really practice actually SINGING the songs I didn’t know but I listened to the melodies and they did sound familiar (mostly). So this afternoon we went toRead More →

This saturday I was lucky to have dutch friends whom I met in Norway last year coming to Cologne. We met in the afternoon and I did a tour with them showing them some of the sights and telling them some of the old stories linked to the sights as well. Of course we went to the Glockengasse too where they have rebuilt the 4711-house that has been destroyed during WWII. On the groundfloor there is a shop. My friends asked me how 4711 smells and walking close to the entrance I found that the smell came out the door. Once they went to theRead More →

This year carnival was a bit different… we mostly did the same stuff as usual but as opposed to prior years I watched part of the big parades on sunday and monday on the street as there were not nearly as many people around as usual. Here are some pics from the events. 🙂Read More →

I still have some blog entries to do but that might happen only after christmas. Sorry for repeating one pic but I like the Christmas-Light-Parade too much not to use it for my christmas card. I wish all of you out there a peaceful christmas (don’t eat too much 😉 ) and a healthy and wonderful 2016.Read More →

I have several blogs to catch up with the past two weeks… I have a lot of pics of different things as I went to Paris, had a great weekend walking over the christmas markets here in Cologne but the highlight has been the ‚Christmas Light Parade‘ – Lichtgestalten last sunday again. These pics are as they came out of the camera… we watched the parade twice and absolutely loved both times. It is a lot of fun for photographers but our two non-photographers loved it as well. 🙂Read More →

Yeah, I know, I haven’t been blogging much lately. But there wasn’t really a lot to show you… Today was great photo-weather so I took the camera to take pictures in an old port-area. They have remodelled the port to an expensive area and the architecture is quite unique… see for yourself.  Read More →

Well, this weekend I am tring to prepare as best as I can as my sister is getting married next week and I am the appointed wedding photographer. So in order to prepare a bit and find out what equipment I could use I went to a Wedding Photography Workshop. Groom and Bride were modells but they are a couple in real life too. It was an interesting day and I learned a lot of things. Here are some of the pics from the workshop…Read More →

Time flies and the first three days of carnival are already mostly over. Two more to go and it is back to work. Here are a few impressions from the last days… You can see some of the traditional costumes (they are basically the same but with different colours) which are imitating the uniforms of the prussian soldiers. Carnival in Cologne has a lot of roots in history, only most people don’t know it. Carnival is something entirely different from just drinking and trying to get laid. For us ‚real kölsche‘ it is about singing and dancing and having fun even with total strangers. TheRead More →

Today I went to a foto-workshop called ‚Cologne by night‘. We started in the afternoon to play around with some filters before it actually got dark. Unfortunately we were not really lucky with the weather. Grey skies mostly don’t make specatular fotos when you are expecting a nice sunset… shortly after dark it started raining too hard to continue so we took a break and fortunately half an hour later it stopped and then the air was much clearer than before. It was fun and I learned a lot…. Here are three pics from today…Read More →

Nach langer Zeit möchte ich mich mal wieder zu Wort melden. Ich hatte eine tolle Zeit in Indonesien, der Bericht wird auch irgendwann auf http://www.andreaonline.de zu lesen sein. Dann war ich im November noch eine Woche in Mexiko, wo ich eine ebenso schöne Zeit hatte, auch dieser Bericht wird irgendwann kommen. 😉 SOFORT kriegt Ihr aber jetzt Fotos vom vorweihnachtlichen Köln. Gestern hat es heftig geschneit und so habe ich abends die Kamera genommen und bin losgezogen. Heute wäre es zu spät gewesen, denn vieles war schon wieder weg. Hier ein paar Impressionen…Read More →

Last sunday we had our final lake event with the dive club. I didn’t go in since visibility wasn’t really great, it was cold outside and my tennis elbow hasn’t healed yet. Furthermore I didn’t wanna risk a cold since I am going to Bonaire in 10 days. Need to stay as healthy as possible since I wanna dive there. Hope I will not kill another camera under water… 😀 Here are two pics from the lake.Read More →

Jeez, time flies by so fast. The day with Susan and Josef was really great. They were especially surprised with the spaghetti ice that Susan didn’t know. Had a surprising and unexpected meeting with the cardinal of Cologne (I’ve never seen that guy in person before :d). And here are Susan and Josef… It was great to spend some quality time with them. I was supposed to go to Paris the next day which didn’t happen thanks to swine flu. 🙁 So I was another week at home and on friday evening we decided to go diving again on sunday. During that dive it becameRead More →

I celebrated my birthday with my friends (no, my birthday is NOT today 🙂 ). After the brunch was over, my parents went for a walk to walk off some of the food. When they came back my mom told me I absolutely had to get my cam and go take some pics. It had started to snow in the afternoon (which is not very common for Cologne) and they were already illuminating the christmas markets that are going to open tomorrow. So I grabbed my cam and my tripod and went with her. Unfortunately it was very windy which sort of ruined better pics.Read More →