While hiking around the Garmisch area, by far the coolest animals we met were these cows. They were roaming around the fields on a public road so I decided to take my tele-lens and get some photos – from a distance. But as soon as they saw me, they charged at me like a herd of zombies and had me surrounded pretty quickly. 

While I've met cows and other farm animals while growing up, I still find them really fascinating–and sometimes a bit scary–to be really close to. Luckily these girls were more interested in our company than our flesh or brains. After getting to know each other a little bit, and some one sided licking, we and these gentle monsters parted our ways.

The next day, after hiking at Eckbauer, we decided to try our luck with Alpspitze. We woke up to a similarly foggy morning and the weather report showed no signs of clearing skies. 

After a spooky cable car ride in total greyness, we reached the top and started our descent. On our way down we walked past many, what must have been, picturesque spots but only saw the grey fog that surrounded us.

Even though the weather wasn't what we had hoped for, we enjoyed the hike as we had good company, food, and the entire mountain to ourselves. 

About one third down we left our little mark on the side of the mountain <3

Few weeks back we visited my brother and his girlfriend in Munich. Our original plan was to go straight to the Oktoberfest, but before getting stuffed with beer and pretzels, we decided to do little mountaineering.

We booked a hotel at the top of GraseckBahn, and before settling for the dinner, walked to the top of Eckbauer. The weather wasn’t the best for sightseeing as we could barely see each other. The fog was actually so bad that we didn’t know we’d reach the top until we almost walked head first to the lift station.

From the past three weekends we've spend two on our summer cabin. I really love going there to spend some time with the family, hiking in the woods, enjoying the lake and just being outside. And it doesn't hurt that we always try to make something nice on the grill.

Here are some photos from the past two visits.

​We got lucky this year as we got to spend the May Day with clear skies and sunshine. Even though the air–and especially the wind–was still cold, it was way better that the predicted rain.

I took my new Zuiko 75mm/f1.8 ​lens out for a test and these are few of the photos I took at Havis Amanda.

Hopefully everyone has recovered by now!

Two weeks ago the weather in Helsinki was absolutely perfect! During the weekend, the weather gods decided to bless us with one of those rare ​winter/spring days when it's still freezing but there's no wind, no clouds, and the sun is shining.

We decided to take full advantage of this rarity and headed out on the ice with Fire. The coast of Helsinki is just perfect for these kind of day trips. ​

The low night temperatures had kept the ocean between the small islands frozen, but the warmer weather had opened up the open waters. This allows you to walk on ice almost up to the waters edge.

Fire was fully enjoying the day out. He loves exploring new places and never gets tired of walking out on the ice. He got his shepherding mojo out and ran loops around everyone he could find on the ice.

​As you can see, we weren't the only ones out on the ice. There were guys playing hockey on the ice, skating, skiing and just wandering around.

The funny thing is that five days later, the area in the photo above was just open water.  

Spring!​

​It has been pretty quiet here recently as I've been moving my site from a self-hosted ExpressionEngine setup to Squarespace 6.

I'm currently in the last stages of moving everything over, finalising things and making sure all the links and such work.

As I was moving everything, I also made some minor updates to the UI and the visual look of the site. I've also added some nifty new functions – thanks to Squarespace.

If everything goes well, I'm looking to launch the new site during the easter break.