Before my sweetheart and I went to Sweden for a two-week relaxing holiday in August this year, I had honestly never looked into the geographical particularities of the area around Stockholm. All I knew was that they have a lot of water and boats there. I was familiar with the skerries and the tens of thousands of islands towards the open sea, but I wasn’t aware that this was repeated west of Stockholm in the fresh water of Lake Mälaren.

We like to combine sightseeing with relaxation, so we chose a cute little house on Lake Mälaren in Kungsberga, about 40 minutes from Stockholm. It was far enough away from the hustle and bustle of the city, yet close enough to make day trips in comfort. The area really has a lot to offer, not only Stockholm, but also the fortress in Vaxholm, the old Viking town of Birka, the open-air museum in Södertälje, and many, many other small and large attractions.

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3 October is a public holiday in Germany: Unity Day. As it fell on a Friday this year, my wife and I had a relaxed 2.5-hour journey to Stuttgart to see our favourite band, DISTURBED on their 25th Sickness Anniversary Tour. What we didn’t realise, however, was that Europe’s second-largest folk festival, the Cannstatter Wasen, was taking place right next to the concert hall and our hotel.

The Schleyer Hall alone has a capacity of over 15,000 concertgoers, and there weren’t many seats available, but the Wasen had to be closed briefly in the evening because there were already over 75,000 revellers on the site! What crowds…

But we seized the opportunity and went to the Wasen before the concert, with MEGADETH as the opening act, for a ride on the Ferris wheel, bockwurst and beer… and then again for a second round after the concert. So late in the evening, it was disturbing to see what alcohol does to people, but the sea of lights was spectacular from a height of 60 metres. I’d like to take a look at the electricity bill…

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In my hometown of Wiesbaden, they say, After the wine festival, autumn is just around the corner. That was only recently, so I am trying with a heavy heart to mentally prepare myself for the dark season.

But this weekend, there’s no sign of that yet. It’s 28 degrees Celsius, and the flowers and insects are going for it. Everything is blooming, buzzing, and humming, and Thomas is busy working in the middle of it all.

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The last days of July in Germany were marked by lots of rain and wind, and the nasty weather continued into August. Not that I noticed much of it, as I was in Sweden with my girl, but I kept getting weather warnings for Wiesbaden on my smartphone and we weren’t completely left out in the north either.

Just as we got back home, the sun popped out and the temperature shot up to over 30 degrees. This weather seems to be sticking around and shaping up to be the vibe for August.

The back and forth seems to have taken its toll on Thomas’ garden, as some of the flowers are already looking quite bedraggled. But it could also be that their time is simply over… You know I don’t know anything about plants… I just take pictures of them :)

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Photographs like the one illustrating this article would not be possible without the play of light and shadow. However, the emphasis here is on light. Without light, there would be no photography for me. Although I have a flash for my cameras, I never use it and could actually sell it.

Now, I really enjoy spending my weekends in my neighbor Thomas’s garden, photographing his passionately cultivated flowers and other plants and their visitors. My only problem is always: WHEN do I go over to get the best light, because the garden is behind the house facing northwest, which means that in the morning the house casts a thick shadow over the garden, and it’s only in the afternoon, when the sun has moved a bit, that the light comes in a little lower from the side and it’s worth taking pictures. The two large trees on the western side of the neighbor’s property and the different positions of the sun throughout the year don’t make it easier for me to choose the right time.

Yesterday, I coincidentally came across a video on YouTube about shademap.app … and the web app solves my problem in a very elegant way.

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From the beginning of this blog in 2019, it was possible to comment on articles on the site. Initially, this was done with Disqus, but for reasons I won’t go into here, I replaced it with Utterances after less than a year. This worked well for me because the code for my blog is not only publicly available on GitHub, but is also hosted on GitHub Pages. After a while, however, I removed this from the code as well and focused entirely on Webmentions and Fediverse syndications, which ultimately resulted in the development of my Mentions-United solution.

Yesterday, I had a little chat with @jsstaedtler on Mastodon about comment forms, syndication, and the like, and that brought my to-do of integrating a comment form back into my focus, because Johann is right about the following: Offering interactions ONLY via syndication and Webmentions does not work for users who do not have accounts on these platforms or do not run Webmention-enabled blogs. There should be something for everyone.

Since this is a static blog, my first thought was certainly to use one of the numerous comment platforms such as Formspree, Formspark, GetForm, Static Forms, FormSubmit, and whatever else they are called, but I would really like to avoid this new dependency, and I don’t see the point in paying $15 a month for a simple comment function that hardly anyone will use anyway. My bad experience with Disqus is enough for me. Now, some of you will say, “Wait, wait… XXX only costs $5 and YYY is free,” but my requirements have changed over the years: I don’t need old-school emails about incoming comments, which is what almost all of these services send, but rather a platform where comments are stored with a moderation function and from where I can pull them into my site via an API and a Mentions United plugin.

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The credo of my photography has always been “Colors and Shapes.” The more unusual and colorful, the better. I prefer small snapshots of life with lots of contrast and color, where my sweetheart always asks, “What is he shooting now?,” and is amazed by the result. Of course, large, epic landscapes are always part of it, even if I always have to make compromises in terms of photographic knowledge, equipment, and time. People, on the other hand, have never really been in my focus, even if there have been one or two good photos along the way. Interestingly, when I was editing, human scenes always benefited from leaving out the colors completely and letting the little story in the photo come to the front without being distracted by colors. The exact opposite of my usual credo.

During my two-week vacation in Portugal in May, I naturally indulged in colors and shapes again, as you can see in my posts Colorful Portugal - Grande Lisboa and Colorful Portugal - Algarve, but wherever I went, I also looked for exciting human (or similar) moments and tried to capture them. This resulted in 60 Black & White photos that are worth seeing, and I would like to share them with you.

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