Twin City Photos

Or Bayerische Staatskanzlei in German. Walking around after dinner on a recent trip to Germany, I found this historic building at the end of the Hofgarten on Ludwigstrasse in Munich.

Taken a while back in Munich at the Hauptbahnhof.

The street musicians in Munich always impress me. Most of them are very good entertainers, and the quality of their music is top notch. This guy was no exception. I suspect he had a fair amount of classical training on the violin judging by how well he played the fiddle. He was also very funny. For some reason he looked familiar.

I never get tired of Munich, and it’s a short flight (well relatively short compared to other places) from Atlanta to boot.

No pun intended. This is the Olympic Village in Munich. Some may remember the tragedy associated with it, during the 1972 Olympics. If I were to try to think of a defining moment for the birth of modern day terrorism, this would be it.

Restaurant near the Marienplatz in Munich, it was mostly empty when we sat down for dinner. All the ‘Reserviert’ signs though made it clear that the place was going to be pretty busy after we left.

Back from Germany and back in the local time zone (slept till 4:30 this morning, yeah), finally getting around to posting again. This is one of the pedestrian walks leading up to the Hofbräuhaus, a required stop for any trip to Munich. We did miss the Octoberfest, but there was plenty of Octoberfest beer left, in many places drawn from wooden barrels. There’s just no describing the flavor an authentic Octoberfest beer has. Lets just say my first beer back home was a bit disappointing.

This photo was taking with my new 70-200mm f/4L image stabilized lens, hand held at 1/25th sec at 70mm (about 110mm if you include the crop factor of my Xti), focused on the ‘Fan Shop’ sign. I’m pretty pleased how the IS works. My choices were an f/2.8 or f/4 with IS (f/2.8 with IS was a bit steep). The IS gains you about 3 stops vs the 1 stop. Seems like a good choice.

We ended up with a BMW :) as a rental car, and I got it up to 220km/hr (almost 140mph) on the way from the airport to Munich, before I ran out of open road. The speedometer went up to 260, maybe next time we’ll have a little more road.