Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Getting Inspired at the Naturkunde Museum

Because Miss Mia and Baby Li love it and it's only a quick U-Bahn ride away (and it only costs 6 Euros to get in), I've been spending a lot of time in the Museum für Naturkunde these days (The Museum of Natural History.) The museum is in an amazingly colossal, somewhat creepy Victorian building (but then I find most Victorian things kind of creepy...) and beautifully done, so I always liked it well enough. But still, the place also seems kind of, well, dated; I mean, I could be wrong, but I just don't think taxidermy is the wave of the future. After the fourth visit or so, however, I realized what amazing photographs you could take there. There are so many intense subjects mainly in front of neutral backgrounds. The only problem is you would need a tripod for most of them because the light is so poor. I asked one of the security ladies if I could take photographs with a tripod and she told only if I had a special pass. But photography in general is allowed. Today Jasper and I went there with the babies and I brought my camera along just to see what I could do. Like I already imagined, many of the photographs were too blurry, but some of them did turn out. Here are a few of the ones I like:





Still, I definitely don't feel like I'm done with the place inspiration-wise. I think I will find out what it takes to get this "special permission" pass to use a tripod. Maybe it's just a formality and not anything that costs any or much money. We'll see...

2 comments:

  1. The photos you included here are terrific! I agree that taxidermy is not the wave of the future. But I recently went to a more new-fangled natural history museuum, one with animatronic animals and humans that made noises or spoke as you walked by...and I vastly prefer the dark, dusty, outdated taxidermy! Even if it makes me a little sad.

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  2. Thanks Karen. Animatronic animals and humans. Ok, taxidermy is definitely way better than that. That almost sounds like Natural History meets Disneyland!

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