Above/featured: “Göttin” (goddess), by AlfAlfA, also known as Nicolás Sánchez, for One Wall 2017. Photo, 17 Jun 2025 (P15).
In continuation of high spirits and enthusiastic support of leading choices, I’m very grateful to significant time spent:
Above: Museumsinsel U-Bahn station entry-exit ‘A’. Photo, 17 May 2025 (P15).
The Berlin U-Bahn metro station Museumsinsel adjacent to the world renowned Museum Island is located on the U5 line which connects the city’s central station (Hauptbahnhof) with Alexanderplatz and the city’s eastern neighbourhoods. Construction for the station began in 2012 and lasted over 8 years. For the station interior at track level, architect Max Dudler was inspired by Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s 1815–1816 design of the stage for the Mozart opera “Die Sauberflöte” (The Magic Flute). For the appearance of the Queen of the Night, Schinkel imagined a large dome-like space like the overhead starry night sky. Over each of the two tracks in the U-Bahn station, Dudler designed a dark blue barrel-shaped vault embedded with thousands of white point-sources of light.
The fully-completed U5 extension from Hauptbahnhof to Alexanderplatz opened to the public on 4 December 2020, which at long last connected the Hauptbahnhof with Berlin’s U-Bahn city transport system. The Museumsinsel station on the U5 line opened on 9 July 2021. In addition to the city’s bus network, the station now allowed visitors to use the U-Bahn metro to reach the Museum Island complex, inscribed by UNESCO as World Heritage Site in 1999.
Artist and architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781–1841) has his “fingerprints” on many of the city’s early- to middle 19th-century architecture, including in the immediate vicinity of the station the Neue Wache (New Guard House), Schlossbrücke (Castle Bridge), Friedrichswerder Church, Bauakademie (Building Academy), and the Altes Museum (Old Museum).
Above: “Wrapped Reichstag 1995–2025” light show.
In 1995, the artist duo Christo & Jeanne-Claude carried out a bold but contentious project by covering Berlin’s landmark Reichstag parliament building. Plans for the project had taken over 20 years, even though the artwork had always meant to be temporary and all expenses had been covered without corporate sponsors. Over 5 million visited in a period of 12 days in the summer of 1995 to look at the undulating “silver dream” in the German capital city. The timing was ideal. After reunification of the two Germanys in 1990, the new home of the federal parliament would be Berlin’s Reichstag. Renovations to the building began in the autumn of 1995 with the federal parliament opening in the spring of 1999.
From 9 to 22 June 2025, the Reichstag building was illuminated nightly with a light show in a 30-year anniversary tribute to the famous 1995 artwork. In a 20- to 30-minute cycle, the light-show appeared to first envelop the building in silver fabric. The fabric cover flapped in artificial breeze, before the cover lost its shape and fell onto the ground at the base of the building. The free-of-charge light show began shortly after sunset at about 930pm and continued until 1am. Whatever Christo and Jeanne-Claude chose to cover and transform, their art works posed questions of perception, origins, shape, functionality, and permanence.
• DW: Germany Arts
• Visit Berlin
Above/featured: Morning light in San Francisco’s Financial District. Photo, 29 Mar 2025.
The Fujifilm X70 mirrorless fixed-lens prime camera has added a lot to my approach to photography for projects in both domestic and international settings. To satisfy my curiosity about Fujifilm’s analog-film simulation (film-sim) recipes, I’ve provided examples of X70 images with the following recipes:
•  CineStill 800T
•  Ektachrome 100SW (saturated warm)
•  Fujichrome Slide
•  Kodachrome 64
•  Kodacolor
• Kodak Color Negative
•  Kodak Platinum 200
•  Monochrome Red
What follows are images made with the “Portra Sunset” recipe, which Yon Pol describes in their YouTube video.
This recipe is for X-Trans II sensors and the built-in availability of “Classic Chrome”. The settings on my X70 are:
I assigned this recipe for an “all-purpose or daytime” setting as 1 of the 7 camera’s custom presets. The following JPG images are “almost” straight-out-of-the-camera; only minor adjustments to brightness level and a crop to a predefined image size have been applied, with no corrections to colour, contrast, geometric distortion, or rotation.
Just like the Kodachrome 64 recipe, Portra Sunrise uses the Classic Chrome film-sim in-camera setting that produces accentuated reds and an overall orangey-flavour. Blues seem more “subdued”, until foreground objects are illuminated against a clear blue sky. There’s more “diffuse washout” when I point closer to the sun. I imagine I’d get similar results with the Standard Provia film-sim under a clear sky with higher dust- or smoke-content in the atmosphere.
Above: WN_31 at the corner of Ballgasse and Rauhensteingasse, 9 July 2024 (P15).
Don’t worry: it’s not 1529, nor is it 1683, and there are no bands of marauders on horseback arriving for a large and lengthy siege. This also does not include anything from outside the Solar System. Instead, this is about a human artist and their little creations sprinkled throughout the Austrian capital city. In fact, I’d claim their “invasion” has already succeeded.
When a wae lad was I, the video game Space Invaders was a kind of dawn, an opening to a brand new world. The lasting effects snuck into many aspects of life, including the time I dedicated to the learning, pursuit, and practice of science. In time, a video game about a battle to ward off waves of little aliens required the purchase of a large bulky black console, accompanied by a large bulky black joystick with a big red button. In the decades since, the technological leap into the first-quarter of the 21st-century means that Space Invaders is available as an online web-application, easily called upon anytime on demand.
In Vienna, the sight of little aliens prompted immediate personal curiosity, and I spent parts of three consecutive summers wandering the streets to find as many possible little “visitors”.
Fotoeins Fotografie 