church | Fotoeins Fotografie

St. Peter and Paul, Reichenau, Bodensee, Lake Constance, Konstanz, Baden-Württemberg, Germany, fotoeins.com, UNESCO, World Heritage

Fotoeins Friday: St. Peter & Paul Church, Reichenau

The city of Konstanz is located in southwest Germany on the shores of Lake Constance within sight and ferry to neighbouring Austria and Switzerland. With Südbaden bus 7372 from Konstanz, Reichenau Island is an easy daytrip getaway to beautiful lush and tranquil surroundings. One of the most important historical locations on the island is the Saint Peter and Paul Church. As one of the oldest churches on the island, the original church was built and inaugurated in 799 AD/CE shortly after Bishop Egino’s arrival from Verona. The present-day church was built in the 11th-century at the same location after the original was demolished. In 2000, UNESCO inscribed Reichenau Island as World Heritage Site.

I made the photo above on 22 September 2017 with a Canon 6D, 24-105 glass, and the following settings: 1/400-sec, f/16, ISO500, and 105mm focal length. This post appears on Fotoeins Fotografie at fotoeins.com as https://wp.me/p1BIdT-bM8.

450D: 75000th photo in Kutná Hora, Czech Republic

3 August 2013.

With the weeklong travel-writing course in Prague completed, my new friends and I embark on a daytrip from the Czech capital city to Kutná Hora, some 70 kilometres to the southeast; here’s how we planned and made the trip by train.

I’m pleased and relieved my five-year old Canon EOS450D (XSi) camera continues to “hang on” during my return visit to the Czech Republic. I keep “flipping” or “rolling over” the four-digit image number counter; I’m in the tens of thousands, undoubtedly a big number for camera exposures or shots.

The “kostnice” or Ossuary, also known as the “Bone Church”, in Kutná Hora is all at once a surreal, unsettling, and fascinating experience. With ossuary defined as “a container, space, or room into which bones of dead people are placed where available burial space is scarce”, bone heaps from an estimated 40,000 skeletons were put into methodical use as ornaments inside the church. The decorative arrangement of bones began in the 16th-century, and what appears now has been in place since the end of the 19th-century. Moreover, a document from their information office states:

” … it (this place) is not a celebration of death, but it symbolizes the equality of people in front of the throne of God.”

While the following photographs mark an impressive milestone of the 75000th exposure on a single camera, I have to think the images are an ominous prediction about how little time my camera has left.

Kostnice, kostnice Sedlec, Ossuary, Beinhaus, Bone Church, Kutna Hora