Two windows from a half-timbered house in Michelstadt im Odenwald. These days, this style of architecture is often redone in colour rather than in the customary black/brown and white but I haven’t seen one in terracotta hues before. Here is the whole house (as often is the case, difficult to photograph because they stand in narrow streets):
Linked to One Word Sunday: window.
Linked to Simply Snaps: Simply out of a window.
I took new photos of something old. Michelstadt is a quaint little town in the Odenwald, the lower mountain range to the east of the Upper Rhine Valley. The old houses, particularly the half timbered ones, are so well suited to monochrome photography because of their contrasting structures. These photos are of the town wall encircling the inner part of the town. I chose a filter, inexplicably called “bandicoot” in my editing program, which is not as stark as black and white, yet not as mellow as sepia.
This is for Cee’s Black & White Photo Challenge: Anything new.
Linked to Simply Anything.
In this part of the Odenwald, house fronts are often covered with wood shingles. In the old part of Michelstadt, they stand side by side with half timbered houses. I don’t know what the original colours were, but this one looked incredibly pretty in powder blue and white, the white flowers giving it almost a monochrome look.
Linked with Simply Garden.
These are allotment gardens, next to a little public garden or park in Michelstadt, Germany.
This is the remains of a toilet facility built by Romans in a villa rustica in the Odenwald in German. When it was built it was most probably not an outhouse as such but now it is as open as anything.
This is from more than a millenium later, in the ruin of a castle in Handschuhsheim near Heidelberg. Since it has no direct water access (unlike the Roman facilities) it was a lot less hygienic.
This now is from the 21st century: plastic and with a slightly humourous sign.
Finally, for my private satisfaction. The poster of a local wannabe politician with a sign that shows where I think he belongs.
Linked to Cee’s Black & White Photo Challenge: bathrooms, outhouses and port-a-potties.
The (almost) accurate quote from Goethe’s Faust describes it best. There is this side of me, enamored by the rolling hills of the Odenwald,
and then there is the other side, that loves the excitement of the city of Frankfurt with its highrise buildings and modern side of living.
And this is the compromise, I guess. A view from one side of the Upper Rhine valley, where I live, all the way across to the hills of the Palatinate (Pfalz), with the twin cities of Mannheim and Ludwigshafen on either side of the Rhine in between. The distance from the Odenwald to the other side is about 50 kilometres at this point.
This is linked to A Photo a Week: View.
A field, ploughed and bone dry, in the Odenwald, in Germany.
For more almond coloured photos, click here.
I never seem to be fast enough to be ahead.
For Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: Walks, trails and sidewalks. For more of these, click here.
In the Lautertal, a valley in the southern part of the state of Hesse in Germany, is the “Felsenmeer” or sea of stones. The geological processes which created this natural phenomenon happened almost 400 million years ago, over time erosion laid bare these boulders. Romans quarried them, and there are about 150 work pieces left from these times which were left behind.
For Cee’s Black & White Photo Challenge: rocks, boulders, stone. More rocky and stoney photos can be found here.
pictures imperfect blog 