Here are a few photos I shot last night. While I was hoping to have some time to get some long-exposure shots of fireworks it turned out that this year the police actually enforced the prohibition of fireworks on the city area, resulting in a rather visually unimpressive New Years eve. It was mostly just huge crowds people and annoying firecrackers, so I didn't quite get the nice shots I hoped for. In any case, I had a nice time at a party before and after trying to get photos, so I can't complain!

The State Opera in Vienna during New Year's eve

Fireworks near Heldenplatz.

One of many ambulances that I saw that night colors the fog blue.

Polaroid cams. They have them.

Red ruffed lemur doesn't care.

We got to see blue-eyed lemurs

Squirrel monkeys pretty much everywhere!

The most adorable lemur family

Baby lemur!

That's how close I got (Photo by Henrieke)

Yeah.

If anyone likes lemurs a lot, I absolutely recommend this place.. It was really amazing

Exactly on time, the shuttle launched, and a few seconds later we got to hear the loud engines and see the bright exhaust and after a minute the shuttle was out of sight already. It was AWESOME

Blasting off! (Photo by Chris)

Me, watching it go off (Photo by Henrieke)

There were also some horseshoe crabs watching! (Photo by Henrieke)

After the launch we went to a restaurant for 3 hours to avoid the worst of the traffic jam, and even after that we were stuck in the traffic jam for a long time.. ALOT of people went to see the launch apparently.

22.02.

My brother brought me to the Vienna airport where I first ever made use of the wheelchair service. You get treated like a first class-passenger without paying more! Someone rolled me around, I didn't have to wait at security check, I got my own personal taxi to the plane and was the first to board. Also they made sure the 2 seats next to me were free so I could lie down! Another good experience with British Airways!

I finally met up with Henrieke at the airport, we made our way to our couchsurfer and tried to get to an exhibition about extinct animals in time, sadly the subways aren't very fast so we missed it. We went to the Parlament instead and enjoyed a nice city view, here are some photos:

Big Ben

London Eye

We spent the evening half-asleep at our host, Iain, who was creating a new song with a friend of his. It was really interesting to see (or more like hear) how a song gets made.

I got a few gifts for her, first one was a book about our U.S. Trip:

It looked like this and contains 100 pages photos and drawings from me and various people. (A huge thank you to anyone who contributed!)

The second present didn't work out. I wanted to bake a Sachertorte and put a chocolate Kiki on top.

At first I made a Sculpey model over a drawing. (As seen in the first photo).

Then a cast with Alginate.
Then I painted it from the inside with 3 kinds of chocolate. Sadly the Alginate didn't like the chocolate.
Other than that I gave her a giant pencil, a derpy dinosaur plushie and some Victory Seeds.

What I got from her was awesome aswell!

An orange Spaceferret sculpture
He's exploring the tortoise land.

We chatted a bit, and I got this awesome drawing from him:

And another one for Henrieke:

A pile of huge old cellphone batteries

Me on said Pile

Chris, getting drunk on a really old train.

Also, a parma wallaby:

I also had a chat with one of the flight attends who told me about his trips to everywhere in the world and requested us to draw something into his notebook.
Sadly only Henrieke took photos and I have no CF-cardreader, so I'll post them later.

Instead, enjoy this photo of me reading the new issue of sparkle world

Also, the arrival in chicago was awesome as we had the most beautiful view on the city centre:

3 hours until the flight to San Jose, and we're looking forward to having some sleep in a real bed.

For this trick you will need a lens with big aperture, like f1.8 or f1.4, otherwise your custom aperture and the internal aperture will overlap (or you need to make yours really small). I used an old Nikkor f1.4 manual focus lens.

Cut out any shape you want out of a opaque material and put it directly in front of your lens - voila. It looks like this:

With this, I created the following cheesy shots:

This way you can create nice backgrounds for your christmas shots.

This was one of the locations..

Katharina in front of an old train.

We also did some shots inside. Lighting was nice at that time, we used some halogen lamps inside (which made it even hotter, argh!)

Another one.

And best of all, me

Red Panda

Coati

Ring-tailed Lemur (Lemur catta)

Still, I bought Dia Film yesterday and reanimated my parents old EOS 500.. With a full-format camera the 50mm lens I bought in Australia makes much more sense too, and I'm curious how the Dias will turn out.

Thanks to: Bonnie, Tom, Eliza, Romana, Aussie, Borko, Nathan, Michael, Duncan, Christine, Nathan, Christopher, Rose, Kaz, Jake, Nick, Damian, Rhett, Gai, Jon, Nick #2, Djota, Jess, and everyone who I forgot

Yesterday I did nothing special, just walked around in Sydney, spent most time in Starbucks, sketching.
The day before I've taken a tour through the Cascade Brewery in Hobart (they make the best beer in Australia):

Cascade Brewery

I also met Babette from Germany there, who was the only other Visitor from overseas there.

Me and Babette in the Visitor Center, fake Thylacine and Brewery in the Background

Babette had to leave for the next tour soon, I stayed a bit and got lots of free beer (at 11:00 in the morning). Almost missed my next Tour because I forgot about the time.
I still made it back to the center and catched the Bus that took me to Bonorong Wildlife Park. The Park itself was great, but the Tour reminded me why I hate guided Tours. We only had one hour there, so I split apart from the group to get to see the Quolls (Eastern and Spotted-Tail). The other visitors only saw Koalas and Wombats, because the Tourguides obviously didn't know they only had 1 hour.

Eastern Quoll, who preferred to sleep long.

Tassie Devil

Kangaroo Joey

After it the Bus took us to Richmond, which seems to be an Attration because of very old Buildings. Boring old Buildings. I would have preferred to stay in the Wildlife Park, but a combined tour was the only Option available.. I've seen the oldest Church in Australia there, which looked quite nice, but not nice enough to waste your bandwith with it.

I'll post all Sketches I did in Australia on Friday!