Festival of Lights

I have posted a bit on the Festival of Lights already, and on thursday the 15th I got out with my photocamera. I had found a leaflet about the festival somewhere, with a map and short description of the locations which were specially lighted.
The picture on the left is of the Berliner Dom, where a big projector flashed images on the front. Great thing was that these images were made specially for this building, and were aligned to the contours of the Dom.





On the left is the projection installation located at the opposite side of the Lustgarten.










Staatsoper unter den Linden photographed from the norteast side, with a powerful spotlight projecting the trees on the walls.
Not having a tripod means using lamp posts and dustbins as stands - and freezing your hands of in the meantime.
This is where my trusty old Powershot A95 with its all-manual controls and rotating screen can still deliver some beating to the modern all-automatic with huge-but-fixed screen compact cameras.





Next pictures are made on Unter den Linden, all the trees were lighted. Vattenfall (whose power plants are all over town) must me making millions.


















At the backside of the Dom, on the bank of the Spree. The DDR museum is located under the sign. Picture on the right shows the projection on the backside of the Dom, which was animated.













Everywhere strong spotlights were lighting the sky and moving around, with the Television Tower as central point - five or six spotlights rotating around it and colored lights shining up. From where I lived - especially from the Elsenbrücke, the city could easily be made out with a large glowing blob of cloud overhead and multiple spotlights crossing the sky. I wonder how much these spotlights look like those located on the Flak Turms searching out allied airplanes looked, sixty-five years ago...

Alexanderplatz S-bhf and the Television Tower.











Not all was about ligthed buildings, the two pictures underneath on the right show some kind of "light gallery", the utmost right picture shows a piece depicting the Berlin Wall, but made out of UV-fluorescent material. Very nice.
Picture on the left shows how tall the Fernseheturm really is - top is out in the clouds.

Bang Bang Club

It sounds like another kitkatclub with lots of, erm, banging, but it's a small indierock club right at Hackescher Markt. Actually, it's located under the rail tracks, so besides the drum and bass guitar vibrations, you often feel a deeper rumble coming from a train passing over your head. Picture on the left is the Hackescher Markt S-bhf from the outside, lights are probably because of the Festival of Lights, more on that at the end of this post.

As I checked last.fm again for inspiration for the evening, the most popular and interesting event seemed to be a shoegaze/dream pop gig with Malory, a german band. After checking out some songs online (which were pretty convincing), I decided to go and shelled out the 10 euro at the entrance (after walking around for ten minutes looking for the place).

Foreprogram was Come to Hannes, a young guy with his guitar and laptop and voice. Cool and everything well worked out, with the laptop taking care of whatever background instruments (drum, guitar, electronic beat) needed and he singing and playing his guitar live. Short rap performance by a friend of his as well, which was a nice diversion. Nice visuals as well.






Then came Malory, which was excellent with some proper hair-raising solid-guitar-soundwave climaxes, complete with projections. Cool stuff, and real "shoegazing" indeed with the band members staring at some indefinite point on the ground about two metres in front of them.

Small audience, about 50 people.






Berlin has since tonight or last night started its Festival of Lights, which means lots of famous landmarks are specially illuminated with projected texts, moving and colorshifting lights, lasers and spotlights... Even the Park Center shopping center close by has joined the festival, check out the picture. There will be special events as well, off course with "light" as central theme.
Damn, the more I come closer to leaving this city, the more it has to offer.