A week ago, I returned from a trekking trip in the Solukhumbu region of Nepal. The pictures can be found in the following photo sets:

• Svayambhunath
• Durbar Square
• Dakshinkali
• Kathmandu - Monjo
• Monjo - Teshinga
• Teshinga - Mende
• Thame
• Mende - Monjo
• Monjo - Lukla
• Pashupatinath
• Bodhnath
• Patan

And with a little delay, I finished a page about the hikes I did in Austria's Dachstein region in 2004: Dachstein

Photographing high buildings gives you a picture where the left and right sides converge toward the top, making it look like the building is topling over backwards any moment.

Before digital photography, the only way to fix this were shift lenses. With digital images, you can fix the distortion, but that used to be a partly manual process.

Enter ShiftN. With the click of one button, it looks for lines which should be vertical, and modifies the picture to look like it was taken with a shift lens. Here is an example picture I took of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. Left is the original, right the version ShiftN came up with.

ShiftN is freeware. It is written for MS Windows, but runs perfectly on Linux, thanks to Wine.

And although the ShiftN Web site is in German, the program's UI comes with English texts.

Before stocking up on food supplies and preparing my car for the winter this morning, I walked around the empty parking lot of the Siemens Com headquarters. I was hunting for some photos for a Web site a friend is working on. Building 1756 is where we both started to work on ShareNet in March 2000, and building 1758 is where I currently have my desk.