alan little’s weblog

busy …

16th July 2008 permanent link

You may have pulled one too many all night debugging sessions if:

… you find yourself at home the next evening attempting to shave with toothpaste, and taking several minutes to figure out why it isn’t foaming very well. Ah, fresh minty burn.

Been busy lately, with (a) work and (b) another project that is taking up what would otherwise be my subway commute blogging time.

we all love photography now

7th June 2008 permanent link

Martin Parr, whose exhibition at Munich’s Haus der Kunst I found interesting a couple of weeks ago, has a guest blogger spot on The Online Photographer recommending photography books.

I discovered whilst visiting Mr. Parr’s exhibition that the Haus der Kunst also has a very good bookshop. Harry Gruyaert’s Rivages is fantastic. Note To Self: casually mention this to Wife some time before Christmas. I also saw another marvelous photography book – with Martin Parr as one of the featured photographers – that I’m contemplating as an ideal Christmas present for somebody I know is one of my three regular blog readers, so I’m not going to name it now. And, come Christmas time, I will now have bitterly offended and alienated my other two regular readers. Life is hard.

related entries: Photography

dead tree publishing

26th May 2008 permanent link

My wife says I’ve been posting too many pictures from business trips to India lately. But she’s not here this week so – ha! – more Indian business trip pictures coming soon. Meanwhile however …

I wanted to go for a walk at the weekend. Normally I would go the the Alps, but we had a lot of spring snow this year and last week was school holidays in Bavaria, so everywhere I wanted to go would have been either still under heaps of snow, or crowded out with people.

I went to the Bavarian Forest instead. I don’t know the area well, so I just picked the biggest blank bit on the map, near the Czech frontier, and headed into it. Turned out I was in a part of the forest where all the big trees were killed a few years back – not, apparently, by acid fog but by an infestation of bark-eating beetles. Interesting experience. Not depressing, exactly; the forest is recovering, there are still plenty of other living things and young trees growing. But eerie.

buskers

22nd May 2008 permanent link

Genuinely good buskers are rare, and a great pleasure when you do find them. I found these guys today on my way from the U-Bahn to the art gallery. They were playing the Usual Suspects for classical busking - Eine kleine Nachtmusik, bits of the Four Seasons – and playing them well and with enthusiasm. I enjoyed them a lot.

And of course I had my new carry-around camera with me. This isn’t the world’s best or sharpest picture, sure – but I’m beginning to understand what people mean when they say the Olympus DSLRs produce subtly nice colours in their in-camera jpeg processing.

related entries: Music Photography

cruel and unusual

22nd May 2008 permanent link

The parrworld exhibition turned out to be thoroughly interesting and worthwhile. Martin Parr is a very talented photographer indeed, with a very cruel eye indeed. I personally can’t imagine being motivated to go out and produce art every day, driven by the loathing Martin Parr appears to feel for the people he takes pictures of.

(Top marks to Haus der Kunst, by the way, for having an exhibition in a major gallery, featuring a very good picture taken recently in the nightclub in the basement of the gallery building.)

The exhibition wasn’t just Martin Parr’s pictures: it also featured his large collection of mostly political kitsch art objects, and pictures by other photographers – presumably ones he likes, or who have influenced him, or whom has influenced. Or any combination thereof. One that particularly blew me away was an English suburban townscape by a guy named Mark Power who I had never heard of before, although googling briefly now, I discover he is in Magnum, much published and so on. The picture in question is the left hand one in the third group of three in this review of Mark Power’s book. It doesn’t look like much in a tiny thumbnail like this, but believe me it does in a big gallery print.

This is the photographic ability I really admire, far more than the ability to make spectacular pictures of spectacular things: the ability to make spectacular pictures of utterly mundane things.

related entries: Photography

freedom

22nd May 2008 permanent link

I just dropped my family at the airport for a ten day trip to visit relatives in Russia and, whilst of course i’m missing them terribly already (etc. etc.), I’m (also) contemplating what to do next with my new and precious freedom.

I have a couple of little projects planned for the house, but guess what: today is a public holiday in Bavaria. A quaint but irritating feature of German life is that everything is closed on Sundays and public holidays (with elaborate legal exceptions for, e.g., food shops in railway stations and – this is true – florists within a 500 metre radius of hospitals or cemeteries or on Mothers Day), so I can’t go out and buy the wood that I need for Project A.

I was also contemplating going into the office for a few hours. Sad, I know, but I do have a lot to get done at the moment and a bit of time without the phone ringing or people knocking on my door would be a bonus. Another quaint feature of German public holidays is my boss saying it would be fine for me to actually do some work today, but could the hours please appear somewhere else on my timesheet, because heaven forbid that the workers’ council should get wind of somebody who has a lot of work to do voluntarily showing up and doing it. If the Germans don’t start rethinking this kind of nonsense soon, the people who think there is no hope for the country will be right.

All these plans were in any case doomed when I drove past the Haus der Kunst on the way back from the airport and saw that it has an exhibition by Martin Parr. I don’t find Martin Parr’s work congenial – nor am I supposed to – but there’s no doubt that he’s a very talented photographer with a unique, if cynical, point of view. (At this point I am struggling and failing to come up with the right succinct English translation of the German word schief. Interesting.)

That, supplemented if necessary by the small but decent collection of Indian sculpture at the Ethnographic Museum just round the corner, followed perhaps by a spot of hanging out in coffee shops(*), should get me through the achingly lonely afternoon quite nicely.

(*) Lest I be misunderstood: unlike Dutch “coffee shops”, German coffee shops primarily sell coffee.

related entries: Photography

available darkness

19th May 2008 permanent link

Don’t use a flash out of respect for the natural lighting, even when there isn’t any.
Henri Cartier-Bresson

I like taking photographs in the dark. If I were really serious about it I would be saving up for the current high-ISO boss camera, the Nikon D3. From the reviews this sounds like the digital camera that finally overturns Kodak T-Max 3200 black & white film as the way to take photographs in the dark(*). The D3, however, is big, heavy and very expensive. I was interested to see if my new small, light, cheap Olympus carry-around camera would be at least adequate at night.

I would say it is, judging by the results of half an hour I spent standing at a busy crossroads in Pune one evening two weeks ago. The tiny little viewfinder is really dark at night, making composition tricky. The slow autofocus doesn’t help much either, and in theory the smaller Olympus sensor should be a stop or so less sensitive / noisier than a bigger one, other things being equal. But the results are, I would say, more than adequate. They’re sharp, with pleasing and accurate colour. They’re very noisy - not surprising considering I was desperately underexposing, in order to keep hand-holdable shutter speeds and avoid blowing the very contrasty highlights. But they clean up quite nicely with a bit of Noise Ninja in Photoshop, with a result that is probably slightly more grainy/noisy than I would have got with fast colour film, but with way better colour saturation and accuracy. I could never have done anything like this with a digicam. I don’t think I could have done all that much better with my D200, even allowing for brighter viewfinder, better autofocus and the fact that I have faster Nikon lenses.

(Always use flash outdoors in bright sunlight, by the way, unless you’re specifically aiming for a stark, high contrast black & white look. But do try to avoid it in all other circumstances.)

(*) “4–6 stops better than anything we had in the film days”, says Michael Reichmann.

related entries: Photography

digicam

17th May 2008 permanent link

My current main camera, a Nikon D200, is a spectacularly good camera and I’m very happy with it. I feel no pressing need for the slight improvements over it that the current second-from-top Nikon, the D300, offers; I will be sorely tempted by the nearly 25 migapixel, awesomely capable, huge and expensive D3X when it comes out later this year, but for the amount I’m shooting at the moment there’s no way I could even try to justify the expense.

I’m thinking in a different direction camera-wise at the moment. Both on my first business trip to Pune and meeting Michael Jennings and friends at a beer festival in Munich, it struck me what a cumbersome thing the D200 is to lug around when I’m not going somewhere primarily to take pictures. A big pro camera with big pro zoom lenses would be even heavier, and a lot of the time that simply isn’t what one needs. I’m thinking smaller.

But not too small. I find myself here on the verge of repeating what I wrote about small digicams two years ago:

I do have a little digicam, a Fuji F10 which I bought because it's supposed to be one of the faster-focusing and generally more responsive small cameras, and quite good for available light photography without flash. Supposedly. I still find it frustratingly slow in the kind of fairly low light indoor situations where I usually want to take snapshots. Its six megapixel picture quality makes reasonable small prints of my son for his grandmothers, but is nowhere near even a previous generation six megapixel SLR like a D70, let alone something more state of the art like the D200. The F10 is better than nothing, but if I were willing to lug my D200 around with me everywhere I would enjoy taking pictures a lot more, and get better pictures.

This is actually a big difference from the film days, and not one that is favourable to digital. A lot of small 35mm film cameras, including the little Yashicas and Olympuses I used to use, were (are) capable in the right circumstances of producing results every bit as good as professional SLRs. They had limitations – fixed lenses, slow autofocus and general lack of control – but the lenses were just as good as SLR lenses, and of course they used exactly the same sensors as their big brothers, in the form of bits of 35mm film. In most of the circumstances where you want to carry a small camera just in case, being theoretically capable of the same image quality as an SLR isn’t particularly relevant, but I did sometimes get some pretty decent pictures with film point’n’shoots.

The problem with small digicams isn’t lens quality. Plenty of them have good lenses. Small good lenses are easier and cheaper to make than big ones, and Fuji’s ability to make excellent lenses is beyond question. But the physics of small batteries and small sensors dictate that autofocus will always be slower, and pixel-for-pixel image quality will be worse. I personally have yet to take a good picture with a small digicam.

… none of which has changed, including – hey! – the exact same cameras that I still own and use (not much, in the case of the Fuji). And none of which means, as I also went on to say two years ago, that nobody can take great pictures with little digicams. Clearly lots of people can and do. But I don’t seem to be one of them.

So what to do? I want a camera that is significantly smaller and lighter than the D200, but a better digicam isn’t going to do the job. Olympus to the rescue, as it turns out, in the form of the (now) second-smallest DSLR in the world, the E410, on clearance sale at my local electronics superstore for €299 complete with a reputedly perfectly decent 14-42 (28-84 equivalent) kit zoom lens.

(Real Photographer Lawrence Ripsher talks more eloquently about the severe limitations of small digicams and reviews – and likes – the E410)

I find this amazing. Sure, the price I paid for the E410 is a stock clearance price because Olympus just started shipping a slightly improved and even (fractionally) smaller replacement model, the E420. Nevertheless: this is a ten megapixel DLSR for about a fifth of the price I paid for my D200 only a little over two years ago. The D200 is still a far more capable ten megapixel DSLR (I hope – if it turns out not to be it’ll find itself on ebay PDQ). The Olympus feels lightly built and delicate: I’ll have not be careful about throwing it casually in bags or coat pockets, or taking it out in less than perfect weather. Which is a serious limitation for a casual carry-everywhere camera, as is the fact that the slightly smaller sensor is generally reputed to have about a stop less low light usability. But if I seriously wanted an indestructible camera that can take pictures in total darkness [I do, I do] then I’d be back to thinking about the behemoth D3 that can shoot three stops faster than the Olympus, but weighs three times at more than ten times the price.

taking pictures of cameras: sad

Two weeks ago I was in India on business again, for the second time this year, and this time I only took the Olympus. First impressions: it’s a nice little camera. It's much less burdensome to carry around than the D200; it’s comfortable in a belt pouch, which the D200 very much isn’t. It has some drawbacks in comparison (as indeed it should at the price). Autofocus is slow and lacking in control. Highlights seem to blow out quite a bit more easily than the D200 – I haven’t done any like for like testing to confirm this, and shooting in the Indian midday sun is a challenge for any digital camera, but less dynamic range certainly would logically follow from the somewhat smaller sensor. Having to fiddle around on the screen to change shooting settings is slow and cumbersome compared to the dedicated buttons and switches that the bigger and heavier D200 has room for – although the Olympus menus are well organised which reduces the pain somewhat. The viewfinder is fine in daylight but terribly dark for night photography. But I like it. I didn’t buy it for “real” photography; I bought it as a super-digicam that is unobtrusive enough to carry around when I’m not primarily out to to take pictures, but capable enough that I can still take real pictures with it should the opportunity present itself. I think it will fill that niche pretty much perfectly.

related entries: Photography

mahatma gandhi road

9th May 2008 permanent link

People who were cremated and had their ashes scattered on the waters of a holy river clearly don’t “turn in their graves”, so: in an irony that doubtless has Mahatma Gandhi swirling in the Ganges, the main upmarket shopping street in many Indian cities is called “M G Road”.

M G Road in Pune, I only noticed last week on my third visit there, has modern glitzy shopfronts; but if you look above street level, many of those shopfronts are tacked on to ramshackle and charming Pune old town buildings.

related entries: Photography

mango season

9th May 2008 permanent link

I’ve spent a total of about six months in India, spread over eight calendar months, October to May. That’s winter (October to February, approximately) and summer (March to June) accounted for; the monsoon is still on my to-do list (especially “landscape photography during”).

Summer is the mango season. I love mangos. When I was in Mysore in February and March 2002, the guy at my local fruit & vegetable store kept telling me they would be coming “next week, sir”, but they weren’t. At the beginning of April in Pune this year, I read in the paper that the early season mango harvest was bad, and saw – and ate – only one mango the whole week. Last week they had finally arrived in large numbers.

In the early days of the Mughal court – originally and predominantly Persian / Afghan / Central Asian – developing a liking for mangos was apparently regarded as “going native” to a dangerous degree. This (iirc) from Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors, Lizzie Collingham’s history of Indian cooking as experienced, and influenced, by foreigners. The Portuguese in Goa appear to have had no such inhibitions, judging by the fact that the most prized early season mango variety in India is called the Alphonso.

Indian mangoes are small, and one normally buys them in boxes of a dozen. I took one carefully packed one box in the centre of my suitcase to bring home. In departures at Mumbai airport I saw an elderly Indian gentlemen whose entire luggage appeared to consist of a stack of mango boxes taped together. Perhaps they were emergency supplies for a nephew working in Europe – my Indian colleagues in Germany are amazed what garbage the mangos in supermarkets here are.

airborne random trivia

27th April 2008 permanent link

Blogging in a SwissAir Airbus 330(*) somewhere over the Arabian Sea. In about an hour, for the third time I shall land at Mumbai airport and immediately(**) leave the city. I really ought to actually visit the place some time, it being supposedly one of the world’s great vibrant cities ’n’ all. I told a colleague who comes from Mumbai that I am afraid to go there having read Shantaram(***) and Sacred Games. Oh don’t worry he said, the gangsters only shoot each other. Mostly.

What do the local papers lead me to expect? A good week for reading Indian newspapers: they are full of the great national controversy about lewd, scantily clad cheerleaders in the new national cricket league Brian Micklethwait and Michael Jennings are so excited about(****). For purely cricket-related reasons in their cases I’m sure. I couldn’t care less about cricket. In other hotness-related news, Pune – which had pleasantly mild weather three weeks ago – is apparently now in the grip of its second highest ever recorded temperatures. Sounds like an excellent time to stay indoors and watch cricket.

(*) Note To Self: think twice before flying business class with SwissAir or in a small Airbus ever again. Food, comfort and entertainment in Lufthansa big planes are vastly superior. On the other hand, Lufthansa arrives in Mumbai at two in the morning, whereas I picked this flight because Swiss gets in at ten in the evening. Maybe reconsider tomorrow morning when I’ve had the chance to appreciate the extra four hours sleep.

(**) There’s actually nothing “immediate” about leaving Mumbai. Even at the dead of night, you have to drive for nearly an hour from the airport to get clear of the outermost new housing developments.

(***) Update 1st May: liking Shantaram doesn’t come under the heading of “only recommending books about India written by Brits” because (a) Gregory David Roberts isn’t a Brit, and (b) it’s a bestseller in India too, as I discovered today in Landmark Books in Pune. Not only that: in the paper yesterday I read about a real-life character on the colourful fringes of Mumbai’s criminal world. There is a new journalistic cliché for people like this. They aren’t “Dickensian” any more, they’re “like something out of Shantaram”.

(****) Update 3rd May: Brian is still excited, but as it turns out Michael disapproves.

two by two

20th April 2008 permanent link

Family trip to Munich zoo.

I suppose I could have claimed to have taken these in a park on the outskirts of Pune three weeks ago. Only people from Pune, and people who know that only South American monkeys have long prehensile tails, could have called my bluff. General knowledge from information placards at zoos is a wonderful thing – did you know polar bears are so well insulated that they are invisible to infrared sensors?

related entries: Photography

seven million gorillas?

20th April 2008 permanent link

Michael Jennings photographs me in a beer tent at Munich’s Frühlingsfest last weekend; I photograph Michael Jennings (and mess up my white balance. Don’t use flash if you can possibly avoid it, except outdoors in bright sunlight).

I like to maintain regular social contact with my fellow bloggers. I had dinner with Michael Jennings in London in (I think) 2003, and lunch with Michael Blowhard in New York in 2005. (I said “regular”, not “frequent”). If any Indian bloggers would like to recommend a good South Indian restaurant in Pune the week after next, I’m up for suggestions.

moving beyond stretching

16th April 2008 permanent link

… if you aren't on your edge, the chances are good that your mind is wandering.
Steven Barnes on yoga asana practice

for some people – me, for example – being at some kind of personal physical limit seems to help with the focus.
me on yoga asana practice

related entries: Yoga

in spite of the gods

9th April 2008 permanent link

Currently reading …

One aspect of India’s economic growth and transformation in recent years is rising prices. English language books, which a few years ago were much cheaper than they were in the west, are now about half the price or more. Nevertheless I spent a happy half hour in Landmark Books in Pune last week.

Part of the loot was Edward Luce’s In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India (the cover photo is of the English edition; the American one looks boring). Edward Luce knows far more about India than I do, having lived there for years rather than months and being married to an Indian lady. He is impatient with dewy-eyed hippies who imagine India is some kind of mystical-metaphysical paradise, and rightly so. I personally think yoga is a huge contribution to world culture – I hope this won’t surprise anybody – but India isn’t only yoga, any more than Europe is only Beethoven. If you want an affectionate but clear-eyed outsider’s look at what’s really going on there these days, this looks like it’s probably the book to read.

I’m not far into the book yet; I hope I don’t end up agreeing with the amazon reviewer who thinks it starts well but is ultimately disappointing.

“Without question the best book yet written on the New India”, says William Dalrymple, and Mark Tully rates it highly too, so why should you care what I think? Go ahead and read it, if you’re at all interested in the subject.

So, do I only recommend books about India written by Brits? Nope. I talked about Vikram Chandra’s hugely enjoyable Mumbai gangster novel Sacred Games last year. I also read Edward Luce’s friend Ramanchandra Guha’s India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy last year. I found it dry and overly political (one can’t complain that this isn’t clear from the subtitle), but nevertheless, it's informative and makes it clear just what a fragile miracle India’s democracy is.

related entries: Music

india, india

6th April 2008 permanent link

Just back from a week long business trip in India. Mostly in Pune, with a day in Delhi. Very productive from a professional point of view and I had a great time, but the days were filled with doing business and in the evenings our Indian business partners took their duty of hospitality to guests very seriously. I had no time at all to get out and just wander about with a camera. (I did take lots of pictures of confidential business meetings; since I have no interest in losing my job they won’t be going anywhere near the internet)

I don’t think I got more than five hours sleep any night for the whole week, and now I have a touch of jetlag on top of that, so any kind of coherent joined-up writing is out of the question. Here instead are a few random jottings about impressions of India now versus India six years ago.

I’m aware that this is not a scientific like-for-like comparison – I’m sure six years ago it was already possible to spend a week going from air-conditioned upmarket hotels to air-conditioned tech company offices in air-conditioned company cars in big cities, just as I’m sure it’s still possible now to spend weeks attending yoga schools in charming small towns where most of your local acquaintances are very traditional brahmins.

There is a huge construction boom. Driving out of Mumbai on the Pune highway you go through miles and miles of new upmarket apartment developments. Lots of heavy goods traffic on the road in the dead of night, much of it construction steel. The price of construction steel has doubled in the past twelve months. There’s such a shortage of experienced building labour that employers are starting to have to treat and pay building workers decently. This last of course is a Good Thing.

The vehicles on the road are far more modern than they were. Mostly locally built modern Japanese small cars and motor bikes, where six years ago ancient Fiats, Morrises and Enfields dominated. There are still motor rickshaws still everywhere, though – even bicycle rickshaws in the outer suburbs of Delhi – and their drivers still live in slums in between the upmarket apartment developments and state of the art business parks.

Traffic in Pune is pretty heavy, but not as bad as Bangalore was six years ago. I’m told Bangalore is worse now. Traffic in Delhi is downright efficient, even though we were there during according to local papers the heaviest April rain in years.

I manage to fit in minimal yoga practices in my hotel room in the mornings, but have to time to get out and see interesting yoga-related sites in Pune. I subsequently figure out on google maps that the Iyengar Yoga Institute is in a part of town we drove through every day to get to the office, but I didn’t see it. My acquaintance with the Osho Ashram is limited to a drive by the front gate at the dead of night.

Compared to Mysore, Pune has no monkeys and astonishingly few cows and temples. This is probably more of a climate / culture / small town versus big industrial city difference than a 2002/2008 difference. I’m told there are dates on which devout Hindus have to make devotional offerings of food to cows. In Pune on these days people drive around for ages looking for cows to feed. In Mysore you would just open your front door and there would be one right there in the street.

Considering this was North India at the start of the Indian summer and supposed to be hot, the weather everywhere was mild and pleasant. Supposed to be low thirties (celsius) in Pune, but there’s a pleasant breeze all the time and it doesn’t feel hot. Hardly any mosquitos. Thirty six in Delhi the week before we arrive, apparently, but the day we are there it’s twenty and raining heavily, which is not supposed to happen in Delhi in April. No mosquitos there either.

North Indian food is very good, but in its rich restaurant version twice a day it gets heavy pretty quickly. I still prefer South Indian.

I’m not a fan of upmarket luxury hotels, but the Imperial in New Delhi is pretty amazing.

easterwinter

23rd March 2008 permanent link

You could choose to spend the day before your 47th birthday thinking “shit, I’m nearly fifty. How did that happen?”. Or you could choose to spend it on a mountain, most of the day going down a blue slope with your family: your son grinning from ear to ear the whole time(*) and shouting “Daddy, again!” every time you arrive back at the lift; your wife after a while deciding short blue runs are boring and she’s going off up the mountain to do a three thousand foot red run, arriving back at the easy slope a surprisingly short time later, sweaty but smiling. While wife & son are having breaks you head off up the mountain yourself into still-falling fresh snow for a couple of hours of the best on-piste snowboarding you’ve ever done.(**)

After spring skiing in February, the week before Easter the temperature in Germany and the Alps dropped fifteen degrees with big dumps of fresh snow. We headed out at short notice, this time to Zauchensee and Wagrain. These are part of the biggest connected ski area in Austria and definitely don’t come under the heading of small/funky ski resorts, unlike the other places I’ve been this winter. Big and commercial doesn’t have to mean impersonal, though, as we learned when we told our bed & breakfast landlord that we needed to hire skis for our son. “Oh” he said “then you need to go to Sepp”, and hailed a passing friend to hop in our car and take us to Sepp’s shop.

In Altenmarkt where we were staying there are three big ski shops on the high street. Sepp’s isn’t one of them. In a town that is a major centre of Alpine skiing, Sepp’s is Nordic Sports, a cross country specialist operating out of what appears to be a converted living room and garage on the edge of town. You have to respect a man who goes against the grain. He has decent Alpine kit to rent too, at decent rates, and is clearly a professional. After one look in his workshop I decide it’s time for a new wax job on my snowboard. Cross country guys live and die by wax.

Sure enough, next morning my board is better than new. Three years of scratches and dents, some of them deep and embarrassingly diagonal, have disappeared under a coat of wax so deep and lustrous I can hardly see where they were. Sepp charges me ten euros. I’ve paid two or three time as much for inferior jobs at bigger places.

I don’t do commercial plugs very often, but here’s one: if you’re ever in the area, you should rent your kit or get it serviced at Nordic Sports in Altenmarkt.

(*) Especially the bit where you call to him “ok, now let’s go a bit faster” then promptly fall over.

(**) There are those who would say “good on-piste snowboarding” is an oxymoron. They are more proficient snowboarders than I am.

gemütlichkeit

19th March 2008 permanent link

In my previous snowboarding career, my friends and I tended to look down on German ski resorts and preferred to drive the extra hour or two to Austria. German resorts, we thought, were small, had unreliable snow conditions and antiquated lifts. In particular they have lots of drag lifts, which we as beginner snowboarders were afraid of. All these things were and are true; last week at Spitzingsee I was well and truly frightened by the sight of the Rosskopf (Stallion’s Head) lift, the steepest and fastest t-bar I have ever seen.

Nevertheless. This year I have been to:

• Hoher Bogen: a tiny and utterly obscure resort in the Bavarian Forest on the German-Czech border. It’s the lowest altitude ski resort I’ve ever been to and has barely a thousand feet of vertical drop. The snow was marginal in January – long since gone now. My friend and I did every run on the “mountain” on a two hour lift pass while our families went to ski school. We enjoyed ourselves.
• Alpbach: which admittedly is in Austria, but it’s small and obscure by Austrian standards. Very pretty and a lot more relaxed and friendly than other Austrian resorts I’ve been to: gemütlich . Not a huge ski area, and here again the snow conditions were borderline - artificial over hard-packed old snow; icy on the mountain, very wet by early afternoon in the valley. But there was enough to keep me interested, and my family loved it. We’ve booked to go back next year (hoping for better snow).
• Spitzingsee: I’ve known for years that Spitzingsee has a reputation as one of the best of Munich’s little local ski resorts. It turns out to fully live up to its reputation for being, as we say in Germany, klein aber fein. The snow the day we went was perfect, right after we had mediocre snow all week in Alpbach. The landscape is beautiful, the runs are nice and there look to be enough of them for the place to stay interesting for a lot more than one afternoon. The guy at the ski shop was friendly, helpful and gave my wife a great deal on a set of end of season used rental gear.
• Wallberg: a strange little place, whose strangeness is of a kind quite typical of Bavaria. It is a ski resort with one ski run. There’s an old (1950s) cabin lift to a restaurant at the top of the mountain, from which there’s a toboggan run, what looks like some prime ski-touring territory judging by the number of tracks heading off into the back country, a couple of little training lifts used by the local ski club … and a former world cup downhill run. The northern foothills of the Alps aren’t very high but they’re pretty damn steep in places. A friend of mine – very experienced skier – says this is the scariest ski run she’s ever done. I couldn’t try it due to lack of snow (the day after we had the only good snow of the year at Spitzingsee; you never know with German ski resorts. We went for a walk instead). I’d like to give it a try one day, but I’ll wait for lots of nice soft fluffy snow.

These quiet little places have their charm, I am discovering. I used to like the big glacier and high mountain resorts in Austria, but so do thousands of other people. These days I don’t need thousands of feet of black runs and off piste to keep me challenged and amused. And my family certainly don’t(*).

Alan’s Snowboarding Blog? We’ll see. Probably not. The winter, what little we have had of it this year, must surely be nearly over by now. In any case, if I want to blog more about boarding then I can see I’m going to need to get good enough at it to feel safe carrying a camera. Posts like this need pictures.

(*) although my son probably will all too soon if we keep this up. At Spitzingsee we saw what appeared to be an extreme off-piste skiing class for seven year olds: a little ski-school style crocodile of them, happily following their teacher off into the woods underneath the steepest part of the chairlift. Locals, presumably.

rediscovery

18th March 2008 permanent link

Twelve years ago, in the midst of and in reaction to some major turmoil in my life, I gave up rock climbing. Climbing had been one of the major loves of my life for a decade and a half before that, but I felt it had contributed to the hole I thought I was in, so out it went. I don’t miss it; it’s a wonderful activity, but so are lots of other things. Yoga for example, which I took up directly afterwards.

Three years later I moved to Munich; most of my friends there went out snowboarding at weekends, so I did too. Driving down the autobahn on the way to my first outing, before I even knew anything about how snowboarding was going to be, I realised a large part of what I had been missing terribly from climbing wasn’t climbing; it was the just cameraderie of being in the car with a bunch of friends, heading out to the mountains on Friday night.

So for two winters I was a snowboarder. We were almost entirely self-taught and doubtless nowhere near as good as we thought we were, but we could go more or less where we wanted to do on the mountain. I wasn’t fanatically in love with it – it seemed to be bad for my yoga, which was more important to me – but a couple of times I experienced the flying in powder snow sensation, and that really is ecstatic.

Then I spent a winter in India, then I became a father. I got out boarding once or twice a year, most years, but if you do something as little as that you can’t do it well enough to really enjoy it, and I didn’t miss it much.

Now my son is nearly five, the age at which kids normally start skiing around here. A week’s family holiday with friends in Austria was fun. The week after we got back there was even new snow in the Bavarian Alps, for the first time in months, so we thought we would venture out again for a Saturday afternoon to a little local resort called Spitzingsee.

This was purely a family day out, and that is a different thing again from heading out to the mountains with a bunch of friends. Particularly when my wife and son are very much beginner skiers and I am a barely intermediate snowboarder. Previously we’ve always been out with friends who are experienced and capable skiers, well capable of helping beginners who get into difficulties. A good adult skier can just put a kid between their skis and ski down more or less anywhere; once I even saw a guy skiing with his daughter tucked under his arm. Whereas even good snowboarders, which I’m not, are severely limited in their options for helping skiers. Imagine, then, our dismay when the baby lift at Spitzingsee turned out to be closed and, after we’d walked back up the baby slope a few times, my wife didn’t feel confident enough to make it down a blue slope to the nearest t-bar lift. Nor did I have any idea how either an adult beginner or a snowboarder was going to make it up a t-bar lift with a small child.

Our options at this point appeared to be: walk up and down the baby slope half a dozen times until we were all sick of it then go home, or take the chairlift to the top of the mountain where according to the map the only ways down were red (intermediate) runs. My wife wanted a bit more time on the baby slope; my son and I were bored and ready for adventure. Into the chairlift. What’s the worst that can possibly happen? At best a long and humiliating walk down the mountain at the first hint of anything steep or tricky; at worst an appearance in the paper as an example of irresponsible parenting.

But no. Spitzingsee turns out to possess quite possibly the easiest “red” run in the Alps. With good snow conditions (and the snow that day was lovely) it’s no problem at all for sufficiently brave beginners – of which it turns out I have two in my family. I am immensely proud of them and we had a great time. I even grabbed a couple of chances to play on slightly more challenging runs while they were resting.

(So I have still only had to walk down a ski piste once, during a total white-out in a snowstorm on the glacier at Hintertux in February of my second snowboarding winter. It was worth it. The next day my friend John and I were the first down the valley run off the end of the glacier, putting first tracks through a metre of fresh powder courtesy of that storm. Just like in the movies.)

photography quotes

17th March 2008 permanent link

Cartier-Bresson got by with one lens … and Sebastiao Salgado uses three. You need more?
Mike Johnston

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