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Neat pics from my business trip 4 months late

Bern n shit




Swanky penthouse hotel and free shit




Quaint old shit








Slightly less nice place in Germany


Dreamliner business class was huge

SuperJail Warden wrote:

DesertFox- wrote:

Neat pics from my business trip 4 months late

Bern n shit

Very cool. Very clean too. I was in Boston recently and was amazed how clean everything is compared to NYC. Did you feel the same way coming from Chicago? Is Chicago dirty?

I've never been to NYC, but we have an engineer from there and my understanding is just that the city is dirty af. Trash strewn all over and the like. Chicago's pretty darn clean these days. The river used to be a monstrosity, but it's become pretty desirable.

I think I said before, but I was taken aback by just how much graffiti was in Europe. Bern and Frankfurt are major cities, yes, but even in the smaller ones there was always something sprayed on a wall. Quite clean, as you described, though.

DesertFox- wrote:

SuperJail Warden wrote:

DesertFox- wrote:

Neat pics from my business trip 4 months late

Bern n shit

Very cool. Very clean too. I was in Boston recently and was amazed how clean everything is compared to NYC. Did you feel the same way coming from Chicago? Is Chicago dirty?

I've never been to NYC, but we have an engineer from there and my understanding is just that the city is dirty af. Trash strewn all over and the like. Chicago's pretty darn clean these days. The river used to be a monstrosity, but it's become pretty desirable.

I think I said before, but I was taken aback by just how much graffiti was in Europe. Bern and Frankfurt are major cities, yes, but even in the smaller ones there was always something sprayed on a wall. Quite clean, as you described, though.

Athens was absolutely covered in graffiti when I went there. Beautiful city covered in blue spray paint. I don't understand fucking up where you live like that.

Went to France and Italy last October, longest vacation since I was in high school.
Flew into Marseille but the order of visit was Cassis->Marseille->Nice(w/4hr Monaco stop)->Florence

Cassis put down some new stone roads and every freaking turn a car would do made squeaks. Nice parks though


Marseille was fun, went to a soccer match and race. Poured rain that weekend though. Not many pics from the city the weather sucked and I also suck at photographing anything that doesn't involve a car.



Nice was lovely, mainly stayed in the historic area. Hotel was in this square.


Went to Monaco just to see it, place was pretty dead, saw the casino and walked the F1 track.
Last stop was Florence starting at Mugello for the Ferrari World Finals (Daytona did it better).



Went to the city for sightseeing and a soccer match but made the mistake of walking 26 miles in one day in the wrong shoes.



10/10 trip would do again, left out a lot of details.

I wanted to go to the UK this year but decided against it before covid happened glad I did.

it's perfect weather today, so i went up to the top of the terrace you can see in my last photo (above).

here's some views of my district, mapo-gu (one of 25 such).



'yeontral park' in hipster yeonnam. where i first moved to. it's a long-ago repurposed steam railway (an actual subway line now runs underneath). this heads north-west towards incheon airport (and north korea).



looking south, now, towards the han river. this is hongdae main street, the centre of nightlife and alfresco dining. always busy and packed. korean national assembly building, which is on the han river like the houses of parliament on the thames, in top-left.



looking south-east, this is hongik university, which gives hongdae its namesake. their top art school and which gives the area its demographic flavour. same national assembly building in top-right. the cluster of skyscrapers in the centre is yeouido, on the south bank of the han river, which is seoul's equivalent of a CBD/the city, and a bit of a corporate ghost town. nice parks along the river-side though. the social centres of the city are elsewhere, and the commercial centres too (i.e. gangnam). yeouido is mostly huge corporate headquarters and banks/finance.



looking east, now, on the opposite side of the terrace from the first picture. this is the same continued train line extending towards the centre of the city. you can see my house in the foreground with a red-tiled roof. this is the 'book street' i was talking about, a themed area full of bookstores and nice cafés and bars. plenty of rooftops and open-plan, street-level japanese izakaya joints.







north-east and namsam tower, on the north bank of the han river. probably the most iconic sight in old seoul, with the westerner/US GI-packed itaewon neighbourhood not far away. if you squint and look just right of centre, you can see the very top of lotte tower, the tallest building in south korea, some 10km away, in jamsil, the rich area bordering gangnam in the south-west. effectively the complete opposite side of the city to my -gu.



looking north, ansan mountain the foreground (yonsei university and their university hospital is nestled in the foot of it) and bukhansan national park in the background. two of about 12 hikeable trails and 'mountains' within an hour of seoul. really they are everywhere you walk. every street/prospect and open area tends to have perspectives which terminate in a view of mountains.



here's a neat zoom detail of monocultural, racist, fascist south korea. in the centre of this picture you can see a large buddhist temple. behind it you can see a large protestant church. to the left of centre, with the stark white compound, is the trademark asian aesthetic of the church of Latter Day Saints. god bless this country which admits of no western influences!

Last edited by uziq (2021-05-10 21:31:11)

Suggest working on your composition, you can take classes.

Dilbert_X wrote:

Suggest working on your composition, you can take classes.

i have a terrible and scratched camera on a 4-year-old iphone. i don't care enough about photography.

i'm actually making audio recordings of most of the places i visit. something i'm more interested in doing properly.

nice photos taken well on a DSLR are interesting and all, but the digital ones all end up on reddit with the exact same aftertouches and cyberpunk colour treatments, and the phone ones all end up on instgram as identical shots.

film photography seems great but i don't have the time or money for another hobby.

Photography school true story:

I was desperate to meet the class deadline on an album project. Ended up snapping a thoughtless photo of a rusty, abandoned crankshaft on a bunch of street gravel while I was walking about town like a gawping tourist (in a town that doesn't really get a lot of tourists).

It ended up on a print in the hallway. I'm still not sure why.

I think very little of my stuff outside of work-related is still on the internet. I took down what I could find. Most of my personal photos are on drives that aren't even currently hooked up.

I wouldn't recommend you sink $1500 into it, at all, when you're not uploading a bunch of crap to instagram, and photography isn't even your hobby. Your iphone is fine, maybe even better in some ways than some of the kit I used, and there are apps that can improve things even further. You're already an audiophile. Filling a big suitcase of photography kit is the last thing you need.

The iphone should a tool you can use right away. Enable grid mode, and you can play around with the rule of thirds while you're out taking a bunch of pictures anyway.

i mean that i’m never going to take good photos with this camera, so why bother? any night time or evening shots have giant and unfixable lens flares because of how worn the phone is.

and, surely my photographic device is an indication of my interest in photography. if i was even moderately interested in taking competent shots, surely i’d at least have the latest iphone gubbins with 3x apertures or whatever.

my pet theory with amateur photography is that there’s a bell curve. as people progress from amateur to intermediate, getting nicer and nicer cameras and more and more lenses, there’s a paradoxical effect: people’s photos become more and more indistinguishable. literally every DLSR enthusiast taking HDR photos and messing about in adobe light works takes the exact same photos. that’s because photography as a hobby is mostly about technology and gadgets, acquiring the latest and greatest, and is less often about individual expression or art. it’s incredibly, incredibly hard to overcome that bell curve effect and achieve a unique ‘vision’ and style.

a lot of my friends here have film cameras and oodles of experience. they are good photographers. i let them take the good photos of me. the arrangement works well.

With film I think I found a bit of a style.

Everyone used to read the same photography magazines, I guess now everyone apes everyone else on instagram.

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2021-10-18 22:08:14)