Private homepage – Hans-Georg Michna
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Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.
Choose one of the albums below. Click on a small picture to see it enlarged. Then click on one of the three navigation links at the bottom.
The larger picture files are in the format 870 x 580 pixels (3 : 2). Due to sometimes poor web browser scaling you may have to experiment a bit to find the best size of your browser window, but first try to make it as wide as possible. The single big picture should automatically scale to height. You can also try to set it to full screen (for example, press [F11] in Internet Explorer). Please let me know if you have particular problems with a particular browser.
These photos can be purchased as higher-resolution scans and even as the original slides. If you are interested, please send me an email. All photos are subject to copyright.
How did I make these? Please see the technical details at the end of this page.
These photos are here mostly for documentary and personal purposes. When I first came to Africa, I had the idea that I should not take photos, but instead take in the experience only.
Only years later I recognized that this idea was utterly stupid. When I planned this extreme voyage, I bought a little, cheap Agfa camera, so I would at least have some documentary photos to assist the memory later. The results were accordingly dismal, as you can see here. I was inexperienced in photography, I used poor film material, and the camera was bad and got worse—it increasingly overexposed all photos. The only good thing that came of it was that, when I looked at the miserable photos after this voyage, I fully recognized my mistake, turned myself around entirely and bought my first real camera, a Canon A1, later to be followed by two cameras from the Canon EOS series.
My first photography teacher was Ralf Menzel, to whom I am very grateful. He taught me the fundamentals and set me straight on my way to a more ambitious photographer. But this came later, the photos here were still done during my time of ignorance.
If you want to look at the photos anyway, please go ahead, but don't blame me, you were warned. I got more seriously into photography only at around the time when I went to India (see below). The photos in this chapter here are heavily post-processed to increase contrast and color saturation. Some of them therefore look odd, but I didn't take the time to edit them individually.
The entire voyage took three months. My friend Rudolf Nottrott and I bought the aeroplane, a Reims Rocket, a French license of and very similar to the Cessna Hawk XP, a four-seater with 210 hp and a constant-speed propeller. Its name and callsign was Kenyan: 5Y-ATO. We had the rear seats taken out for this long route and replaced with a 200 l extra tank that allowed us to fly non-stop for 12 hours and about 2,000 km.
My thanks go to Rudolf. Without him this voyage would have been very tedious and risky or impossible. But together we took turns at the controls, and one could fly while the other navigated.
We left Nairobi in the morning of February 1, 1980 and followed this route:
Nairobi (Kenya) – Entebbe (Uganda) – Kijura (Uganda) – Kasese (Uganda) – Bangui (Central African Republic) – Douala (Cameroun) – Lomé (Togo) – Accra (Ghana) – Abidjan (Ivory Coast) – Monrovia (Liberia) – Freetown (Sierra Leone) – Banjul (The Gambia) – Dakar (Senegal) – Bamako (Mali) – Timbuctoo (Mali) – Gao (Mali) – Tamanrasset (Algeria) – Oran (Algeria) – Tanger (Morocco) – Madrid (Spain) – Paris (France) – Cologne (Germany).
Early Africa photos - Flight across Africa, through the Sahara, and to Europe
These photos were made during a three day stopover in Cairo, Egypt, on my way back from Nairobi, Kenya. In fact, I decided spontaneously on my flight on Egypt Air via Cairo to Europe to spend a few days in Cairo. I asked the cabin crew, and they said that it should be no problem.
In September 1982 and the following months I worked in India for the GTZ, together with my friend Rudolf, who can be seen on some of the photos. During and after the work period we travelled extensively in central and northern India, and I later continued on to Kashmir and Ladakh.
Some exotic photos came into being already during the flight to New Delhi, which leads over some of the most incredible landscapes on our planet.
New Delhi is an impressive and very lively city. I particularly liked the freedom to move anywhere during day and night without fearing for my safety, because there are people everywhere, and the Indians are not an aggressive people.
I have never seen a building more beautiful than the Taj Mahal. We arrived there in a full moon night and spent a long time just sitting at the entrance and looking at it.
India 3 – Agra and the Taj Mahal
Fatehpur Sikri was an incredibly beautifully conceived and designed city. Unfortunately it didn't last long, because the designer forgot something essential—a sufficient supply of drinking water. The city was built on a hill, and apparently the difficulty of toting water up every day finally led to abandonment. So we tourists can now walk through the eerily empty streets and look at the beautiful architecture with awe.
India 4 – Fatehpur Sikri, the lost city
We took the bus to a holy place where one of the Ganges tributaries flows down from the Himalayas.
Our next work assignment led us to the twin cities—to Hyderabad. We found the city beautiful and pleasant. One of the highlights was a modern temple built recently by an architect who is well known in India.
India 6 – Hyderabad – the twin cities
One day we made a car trip to a very old temple that is, very unfortunately, falling apart. We walked through the hallways, fearing that it might fall on us, but the many pillars were still holding and keeping the beautiful statues accessible.
Our third workplace was Bombay (since renamed to Mumbai), the business center of India. Greater Bombay is a huge and very densely populated city. Among many other places I visited the red light district, Falkland Road, and learned that the prostitutes can spit very far and throw wet rugs when photographed. One specialty there is to hold young prostitutes in cages, many of them from Nepal and other east Asian countries and some of them far too young for that job.
When it suddenly began to rain, I went into a back building and found some men playing the board game of Carrom, remotely related to billiards, and, of course, took a photo.
I also found a young Parsi boy who helped me get into a closed compound with two Parsi-inhabited skyscrapers, climb through the very low uppermost floor of one of them, filled with pipes and technical installations, and finally onto the roof to take photos of the Towers of Silence. The Parsis do not bury or incinerate their dead. Instead the lay them out on those towers to be eaten by vultures. The photos show two of these towers, one of which was in use and filled with skeletons. In the maze of pipes and installations I lost the boy. I was lucky not to be thrown down from the roof for desecrating the place of the dead, and I did eventually find my way out and down again.
Some photos from the flight back to New Delhi.
One of the unforgettable highlights of my time in India was the temples of Khajuraho. They are covered with an incredible number of very beautiful reliefs and statues. Some of these are erotic and show quite creative postures of people making love. Particularly impressive I also found the facial expressions of the statues and reliefs.
India 10 – The erotic temples of Khajuraho
On my way to Ladhak I stopped over briefly in Chandigarh and had the good fortune to stumble into a theater play. I couldn't understand anything, but I enjoyed the expressive play, the colorful costumes, and the audience, particularly the children who were absolutely absorbed by the play and did not even notice my camera.
India 11 – A brief visit to Chandigarh
I flew to Leh, the capital of Ladakh, in the Himalayas, which is 4 km above sea level. It took me a few days to adapt to the incredibly thin air, but from then on this turned out to be one of the most intriguing places I have ever visited. It is culturally very similar to Buddhist Tibet.
In these mountainous countries it is common for a woman to marry two or more husbands. I was impressed by the striking self-confidence of the women of Ladakh, which expressed itself in the way they walked, looked, and behaved, different from the more common patriarchal countries.
A particular characteristic is the gompa, the Tibetan monastery, of which there are many in Ladakh. They are usually on mountain or hill tops. Typically a firstborn son inherits the ground from his parents, but younger sons often end up as Buddhist monks and spend the rest of their lives in a gompa.
Then I walked some way through Ladakh and finally took the bus from Kargil down to Srinagar, Kashmir. The bus ride was spectacular and frightening, because looking out and down from the window caused instant dizziness. These mountains are high, and the road winds its long way down the very steep slopes.
Srinagar was a very interesting city. I moved into one of the big, comfortable, and beautiful houseboats on Lake Dal and spend most of the free time moving across the lake and through the many channels reaching right through the city. I think Lake Dal is a wonderful place to spend an interesting vacation, relax, but still see exotic and beautiful things all the time.
India 13 – Kashmir, Srinagar, and Lake Dal
On my way back I passed through Amritsar and visited the Golden Temple of the Sikhs, one of the modern religions of India. A baptized Sikh is required to wear the 5 K (see also here) at all times.
India 14 – Amritsar and the Golden Temple of the Sikhs
So how did I make these pictures? I took the photos mostly on Kodak Ektachrome 100 through various cameras, the first serious one being a Canon A1, later to be followed by two cameras from the Canon EOS series.
Now I have begun to scan them, using a Nikon Super CoolScan 4000 ED (also known as LS-4000 ED) and the Nikon SF-200 slide feeder.
Most of these slides are under glass, and I was worried that that would create huge problems for the autofocus of the scanner. Also many of the slides have developed some dirt or outgrowth on the glass, and a lot have some dust inside the glass.
As it turned out, the scanner has a technology called Digital ICE 4, which detects dirt by means of an additional infrared sensor and automatically retouches the pictures to make all of this foreign stuff disappear.
Initially I didn't believe that this was possible and didn't even activate the function. Big mistake! It works incredibly well, and I actually rescanned many of the slides soon, after discovering the function.
Also my worries about the autofocus proved largely unsubstantial. Quite to the contrary, this scanner doesn't have much of a depth of field, so having the slides in glass is actually a boon. Unfortunately the autofocus sometimes fails for no discernible reason, but rescanning those unsharp slides almost always solves the problem.
The slide feeder is, of course, required for any significant number of slides, because scanning one slide at high quality can take anything upwards of 2 minutes, depending on the settings and particularly the multiple scan noise reduction feature, which I have so far not used.
I have scanned the initial batch of slides at half the max resolution, i.e. at 2,000 ppi. Doubling the resolution to the native capability of the scanner—4,000 ppi—does yield some additional information, but not enough to warrant the much larger files. An uncompressed full resolution scan yields a 60 MB picture file.
A typical 4,000 ppi scanner is unable to reproduce the full information of a sharp 35 mm slide. In theory 4,000 ppi comes close, but since the optics are more expensive than the sensor, no scanner manufacturer in his right mind would design a scanner with optics that make full use of the sensor. In practice you'd have to buy at least an 8,000 ppi scanner, possibly even higher, to get the most out of a good slide, but that's outside my financial pain tolerance.
The web pages are generated by IrfanView 3.95. It uses a very simple, straightforward method to generate the pages from a few templates, which I adapted for my purposes. If you like these templates, you can dowload them as http://www.michna.com/photos/thumbnails.html and http://www.michna.com/photos/frame.html.
I experimented quite a bit with the scaling, but found no simple solution short of using Javascript, except this one: The frame pages scale each photo to 90% vertically and simply center it horizontally. The user is required to stretch his browser window enough or scroll side to side.
However, the scaling was problematic, particularly when the browser was switched to full screen on a 1024 or 1152 pixel wide monitor, but forgoing full screen or using lower or even higher resolutions yielded reasonably good picture quality. It is a pity that the browsers only use crude algorithms for picture scaling, nothing as good as a Lanczos filter, but I couldn't change that.
Therefore, in 2008 the normal computer screens are big enough, so I have since stopped the scaling altogether and show the photos in their web resolution. Users with small screens may get scroll bars.
Enjoy!
Private homepage – Hans-Georg Michna
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