ipernity: About CruisAir

41 years old, born on february 06, 1967
lives in Amsterdam, Netherlands
Βeta test since August 26, 2007

Where is CruisAir?

Hi there,

let me give you a short (well, I guess that's "relatively speaking"...) introduction of myself: my name is Guido, I am a 40 year old german and I live together with my dutch partner in life Jelle in Holland's capital Amsterdam - a happy gay couple :-)

I recently moved (or should I say fled?) to ipernity from flickr (I still have my flickr account with much more photos under the same nickname) but I guess I might settle here, though I haven't made a final decision yet. For now, read a little bit about me. I do admit, I copied myself from my flickr profile... ;-)

***MY INTERESTS***

I am not only interested in photography but also in civil aviation. I read magazines and books about airlines and aircraft. I have a special interest for airline catering and inflight service and inflight china.
I recently set up a flickr group for photos about the airport of Cologne which is also associated with a german language discussion forum about the airport called cgncommunity, please surf by if you are interested, we love to meet new friends!
Through pages like airliners.net I can make the link back to photography and I also like to spot airplanes a little with my camera and at a page like liladesign I get lots of inspiration for own concepts of airline designs: every now and then I try out something for my own (or someone else's) virtual airline in a (trial) online airline game called Airlinesim. By coincidence I also work for an airline ;-)

Besides airline design (I collect airline image brochures and printed airline timetables) I also have an interest for corporate designs and identities, lettertypes but also design in general. I admire beautiful architecture and can take endless photos of beautiful, abstract, strange or ingeniously constructed buildings, much to the boredom of my friend... ;-) I also have an interest for public transport. When I get to a new city I love to ride public transport, preferably a tram, but bus is also ok. I like trains and ships as well.

Speaking of ships: my friend's and my great passion is cruising... that is by cruise ship, just for the doubting minds ;-) Some years ago we took our first cruise in Alaska on a wonderful cruise ship, Celebrity Cruises' Summit and since then we've been bitten by the cruise bug. As our job can be quite stressful so we really love to relax on a vacation but still like to see things. Where to do that better than on a cruise ship?

As a standard feature I try to include a geotag to every photo I upload. I think it's a real nice feature to show others where a specific shot was made. That adds to the other available infos about the actual technical data of the photo. I hope you like this as much as I do. Please note that many of my geotags usually show the point from where the photo was taken not where the photographed object is. Where there is an exception to this rule I will try to mention it. Where the geotags are (still) missing I either cannot remember where exactly I took the photo or it does not make sense to add a geotag as the photo was e.g. taken on a ship somewhere on an ocean. If you find a photo and you think you might know it's location please drop me a note so I can add the geotag.

Recently I included a google.earth-link to all geotagged photos so you can directly fly to the place in google earth when you click on the link. I like that a lot and it's courtesy of roblog. Try it out and include it with your photos as well. It might not work all the time and you have to go to the respective photo page in order to see the actual link.

A very limited selection of my photos is now available as a fine art print. Follow the link and have a look yourself and feel free to treat yourself to a print of your favourite photo. If you cannot find your favourite please let me know and I will make it available to you at imagekind.

***MY PHOTOGRAPHY***

How did I get into photography and what do I like: you have probably already learned about my special interests in photography. I really like graphic(al), simple, basic architecture shots, reduced and/or abstracted to detailed views that not necessarily give "the full picture" but rather add to the "interestingness" of a photo. If you look at my favourites that I noticed at other ipernity users you will get a good impression of what I like.
On the other hand, I also like very colorful shots but preferrably with few but bright colors than with many dull colors.

What equipment do I use and what style do I have: I have a tendency to use my wide angle lens more than my tele lens. That's partly due to the fact that I consider my telelens not to be as good as I would like it to be (e.g. sharpness...). I'm still saving for a worthy replacement. I usually use a Canon 10D (by now already a digital "oldtimer") and in daily life I used to carry a Kodak 550 digital "point and shoot" but I switched to a Nikon Coolpix P5000. I really like to take architecture photos and I like landscape photos a lot. Besides that I make a lot of "standard" cruise ship photos, some less airplane spotting photos and the "rest" is the typical family stuff... Since I have been on flickr and now that I moved to ipernity I develop more interest in widening my horizon and try new styles and techniques, you guys here simply inspire!

I used to start taking photos, well, snapshots, as a child when I discovered an abandoned Voigtländer camera model in one of my parent's drawers... so I asked what it was (as it looked weird with a lens that needed to be folded away after use) and was allowed to make my first steps with it. Unfortunately it was a manual model so I had to figure out things like exposure time and aperture and the combination thereof myself. Learning by doing in the end worked out for me with reasonable results and I really liked this new hobby. So eventually I even got a new Minolta XG9 (I think that was it's name) for christmas, my first SLR including some (good) lenses. Some christmasses later I updated to a Minolta X700. Usually I made slide shots and I even managed to later own a pair of Kindermann slide projectors with which it was possible to make basic slideshows. Even though I started getting darkroom equipment to develop the films and photos myself I never developped a severe interest in doing this much. So I continued to shoot photos (still mostly slides) but they more or less went unseen into some drawers - I mean who wants to look at those infamous slideshows on a saturday evening...? :-) So, as time went by I made less and less photos, finally left home to live on my own and left most of my equipment with my parents. But after years (and my Minoltas now lying in some photocase, unused) my interest in photograpy awakend again as in my eyes the digital age now made photography faster, easier, cheaper. So I finally convinced my friend to spend some money to give one of those new digital models a try and so I went out to buy a Casio "point and shoot" to see if I would like it and how the quality would be. Even though compared to today's digital standards the Casio would compare poor I really liked it and started taking pictures again. Also the possibilities on the internet got bigger and better for showcasing your photos (basically, we're back to the slide shows, just digital... isn't it?...) and there it was again: my interest in photography! Finally I had enough money to afford a Canon 10D with a very good wide angle lens and a very basic tele zoom lens. I later added the Kodak, followed by the Nikon Coolpix to my equipment as I felt it was very convenient to carry a small digital camera at all times so I would never miss a good shot again... I really liked the Kodak, the only thing it lacks is an image stabilizer which would make it perfect in my eyes. That's why I later got the Coolpix which in my eyes has a much better performance in critical lighting.

Thanks for visiting me this time and please feel free to give any comments. I'd really like to hear from you. Please come back soon.

Best regards from Amsterdam,
Guido

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Here is the statistics part: where have I been, what have I seen of the world so far, who visits my site and this profile?

Let's start with a look at all my flights so far:

German speaking visitors can click here for the german version.

Since you cared to read about me, why not leave an impression for me from where you visited at my buddymap:

And now, let's continue and check out my visited countries:

create your own visited states map

create your own visited countries map

create your personalized map of europe

Here you can see from where in the world people visited my flickr profile site:

You are now marked on my profile visitor map!

and finally this statistic provides an overview of all visitors to the flickr photo page(s) in general: