Alexander T. BlumenauWelcome to PhotoScapes.eu – my photographic travel blog.

So who am I and what is this website about? To give a brief answer to the former question: I am a photography enthusiast who enjoys to travel – be it overseas, or shorter trips starting right at my doorstep in Germany. My favourite way is independent and flexible travel, self-organised – sometimes alone on my own, sometimes with a companion, or in a small group. I love exploring a country or region with a backpack and a tent, far away from noisy civilisation, but I nevertheless also appreciate the luxury of a hotel room and good breakfast once in a while.

The main intention of this website is to tell friends and strangers about my travels and other activities I consider interesting and share a selection of the images taken. To some of you it might serve as a source of information or inspiration when planning their own travels, for others it might allow a kind of virtual travel by scanning through the articles and images – others again might just have come here to satisfy their curiosity what I did and saw on that last vacation. In any case I hope you will enjoy your visit.

So how did it all start? Following my early website of 1996, which merely included a small photographic section of old scans from prints and slides, in the year 2000 I finally set up my first website dedicated to travel and photography. On this site I would add a new small album each time I came back home from travelling.

The website went through its first complete re-design in early 2006 – including a shift from plain HTML to PHP. The technological changes were accompanied by a swing from the rather simplistic design of the early sites to an almost baroque appearance with lots of graphical skins on the website of 2006.

After another 6 years had passed by, I felt that the old design was too distracting from the images. Also, being built from scratch with a home-made database, it did not meet modern standards in maintainability any more and had to be replaced. Furthermore, I felt the need to differentiate better between a pure gallery to present outstanding images in categories, and a blog-style website including illustrated descriptions of my travels. Hence the idea of this new website and a separate new gallery was born. For some details and illustrations please read this article: Website evolution 2011

Alexander Blumenau