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My Big Passion:
Photography

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Last modified: April 15, 2006


Even though it still contains a lot of images, this page is not being maintained anymore. See the new style Travelogues for more up-to-date photography.

The picture to the right was taken by my father in 1975 I think, after a wasp stung me in the face. As you can tell, I have a serious allergy. If you are now laughing like a zebra (or Cameron Diaz, same thing), please remember that I wasn't like laughing back then at all :-) Now I often look similar to this when I am at places such as Florida, Norway or Queensland because of the zillions of mosquitoes. And after seeing this picture in its uncropped version, I decided at a very tender age that I would not leave it up to my father to document our travels :-)

This way it happened that from my young days I spent a lot of time outdoors taking pictures (and being attacked by insects; I have some sweet blood, you have no idea). Initially I pursued this passion at my father's expenses with his P&S. Later I made him buy a Canon T90 with some fine lenses (a camera which he never really understood, with all its buttons). Unfortunately, as I grew older, I had to pay for it myself... So it came that all my money goes to travel and camera equipment (currently Canon EOS). Being in the "working world," I make enough money to buy the steadily more expensive toys which one really needs (you know) but don't have the time I used to have to actually use them :-(

 In Spring 1996 I started traveling with a laptop computer, making brief daily notes which I later turn into a travelogue. I then post it together with many images on the Web, such as the Australia, Yellowstone, Scotland, Arizona and New Mexico, Mono Lake, Shuttle viewing in Florida or Joshua Tree travelogues. The result can be found as a brief, not too serious travelogue with some of the pictures I took. The other picture pages (listed below) are older and not really up-to-date.

This liberal usage of time was very consistent over my Stanford years: during my Senior year, people asked me whether I take any classes at all, since I spent all of my time either sleeping or in the field / photo lab. Yes, I was taking classes (I was a CS major, you know), but nothing was as exciting as sending one roll of film after another through my camera. During my last graduate year I even took off to Australia...  Unfortunately, while the San Francisco Bay Area may be really cool for computer geeks like myself, personally I prefer it lush green and thus make frequent trips to Oregon or similarly green places.

Here in the SF Bay Area, it usually rains till March, and then not before November. I have heard many people who love California as a photographic wonderland, but for me the summer is just way too long and especially too brown for my taste. That's why I selected to do night photography as my portfolio both in 1995 and 96, since then all you need is a B&W film and you don't see the details... Of course this is just a part of the truth :-)

But then, when I can I travel, I get as often away from here as I can, mainly home to Switzerland and around good old Europe. In general I visited more than 40 states of the US of A. There I saw different strange buildings or even funny animals. Results then end up here on my various photo pages.

All of the images here (except when noted otherwise) are from PhotoCD, which gives great quality. Some of the images have been processed; this has been done exclusively with the TIFFany image processor for MacOS-X.  Click on an image in order to load a 1-Base PCD jpg representation. All images are Copyright 1987-1999 by Stan Jirman.

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