One of my serious New Year’s resolutions for 2017 is to get better at balancing work and life. Work is a constant, intense but ok, so not so much to be done at that end of the equation. So, I need to change the other side, life. As the project god was nice to me and gave me a project in Frankfurt, the preconditions are good to get life up to speed a little. No regular travel times, no packing bags, no getting up eeeeaaaarrrllyyyy on Mondays, no time wasted at airports and in taxis; that is good for a start. Did I mention sleeping in my own bed…? Sooo nice.

Well, to get started on the “life” side, I scheduled some fun things. As one other resolution is to get more input and learn new things, I enrolled in a workshop on night photography (well, two workshops, actually, but the other one will be subject to a later post) which took place in Frankfurt’s Botanical Garden (Palmengarten), where an exhibition called “Winter Lights” (Winterlichter) was up and running. Several artists from all over the world have contributed by designing the light installation, resulting in trees on fire, gigantic illuminated flowers, and light illusions of all kinds.

In principle, this is photographer’s heaven…

Well, in principle. I had to realize that I might need some more practice to fully explore the abilities of my camera and / or my eyes and / or my brain – whatever it is preventing me from taking the photo I clearly have in my head and just capture it on the SD card. I am not amused about the outcome – which now should motivate myself to get up to speed with my camera and make practical use of all the things I know in theory.

At least I withstood the cold. I had put on my arctic gear, which is, at the first place, a pair of Caribou boots which are meant to be worn at down to -40 °C cold days. I think it was around -8°C that night in Frankfurt, but the boots served me well. If you have seen an elephant with a camera stomping through the city center in a Friday night recently, this was me.