Michael's Photo parade 2019
First published in 2019
In the past, Michael from Erkunde-die-Welt.de asked twice a year for the best photos of the past semester. He now changed the rules a bit, asking for the best photo of 2019, but the deadline for that is already in November.
As I still have quite some pictures to process and as the rules are not really strict, I decided to go for the best-of our latest trip around the BeNeLux states.
BeNeLux stands for Belgium, The Netherlands, and Luxembourg and as we live in Germany there's a good portion of that included as well.
Michael is setting up some categories and this time I'm going to follow them even you don't need to. Initially, he phrased it as an "either-or" but opening it up to an "as-well-as" a few sentences later. So, I decided to go for the latter (at least in most cases).
City or Landscape
Well, this trip was clearly a city trip. But we managed to stop at a small but beautiful waterfall in Luxembourg.
On the other hand, I have quite some city pictures worthwhile to show. This is an escalator in a Metro Station in Cologne.
Animal or Plant
Luckily, we changed our planned schedule and included the arboretum before leaving Rotterdam. So, I had at least a few pictures to choose from.
From the arboretum in Rotterdam, we directly drove to the Safaripark Beekse-Bergen. Even I took some better pictures here and also a few days later when we visited the “Adler- und Wolfspark an der Kasselburg”, I decided to show you this one of a group of lemurs - just because they are so cute.
Mountain or Seaside
Ok, here I have to quit. Seaside would have been an option in Belgium and the Netherlands, but the closest we got there was a harbor tour in Rotterdam. And Mountains in BeNeLux?
Foreign or Domestic
Puh, another category I struggle with. Where does domestic ends and foreign starts? Is it the hometown, the own country, or the continent - or is it more the culture and the type of pictures we are used to?
So here are two pictures, one from Cologne and one from Rotterdam. The first is clearly typical Cologne and the other one "something different" 😉.
Sunrise or Sunset
This was an easy one: Sunset! I always struggle to get out of bed for a sunrise picture and on this trip, I didn't find it necessary too. So here are two sunset pictures.
One showing the train station Liege-Guillemins in Liege. This is a great place to take pictures and I will definitely show you more in the upcoming weeks. The second one is from the port authority in Antwerp. Also a very interesting building and particularly interesting in the blue hour.
Black-and-White or Color
In most cases, this would have been an easy choice: Color.
But we visited two old ironworks during the trip (the Völklinger Hütte and the Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord) and both offered plenty of opportunities for lost-place pictures. For quite some of them, I decided to process the file twice - one in black-and-white and one in color.
So here are two examples from Völklingen:
Best-of
And last, but not least you have to decide on one picture to be “the best”. As always, this was not an easy choice, but I think this sunset picture of “Tiger & Turtle - Magic Mountain” in Duisburg is a valid candidate.
This is a landmark in the southern part of Duisburg and resembles a rollercoaster. Except for the vertical part, you can climb up and walk around.
