Monday, September 19, 2011

Photos from Dresden and Paris

Travel-wise these past few months have been very dull around here. Since my return from Madrid at the beginning of July I spent the entire so-called summer in Upper Austria and Vienna. Now in the first half of September I finally had a chance to travel a bit as I attended the DeLFI 2011 conference in Dresden, Germany where I presented a paper about OLPC before heading to Paris, France to attend Sugar Camp #2, a 3-day gathering of OLPC and Sugar volunteers.

In Dresden I really only had one evening and half an afternoon to wander around the city so there weren’t many opportunities to take photos. As a result the corresponding Flickr album is really quite thin.

dresden Frauenkirche in the dusk

In Paris I had more time to snap photos (album), first of all to document and share what was going on at Sugar Camp #2 and secondly because I stayed an extra day to be able to visit some places where I hadn’t been on my three prior trips to the city. One place which was very high on my agenda was Père Lachaise cemetery where famous people such as Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde, Edith Piaf, and many others are buried.

paris Jim Morrison's grave at Père Lachaise cemetery

This was also the first time that I exclusively relied on my Nexus S Android smartphone to take photos. Even though I actually had the small Canon IXUS 100IS in my back bag the convenience of quickly being able to share the photos was a major advantage of the Nexus S. I have to say I was also pleasantly surprised by the quality of the images. The IXUS 100IS would have certainly been able to take better shots under difficult conditions but overall the quality of the phone camera photos are really good enough.