Private Activities and Hobbies of Karl Riedling

With a working day of 12 or 14 or even more hours, it is not a disadvantage if work is fun (fortunately, it mostly is for Karl Riedling), and if you can make your profession your hobby (or the other way round). Nevertheless, there are rumours that there is life outside the University; this page attempts to give a little insight into that part of Karl Riedling's life.

Among Karl's hobbies, hiking is the first to record; hiking as high (well, around 2500 metres) and as long (maybe seven hours or a little more) fitness, weather, and Karl's wife Eveline - by the way, a member of the (predecessor) Institute) until December 2003 - permit.

For the small boy who is buried deep inside every engineer playing with trains (or, possibly, with trams), preferably on a scale of 1:1, is a must. The beneficial events of photo excursions offer ample opportunities for another hobby of Karl, photography, which has resulted in a meanwhile well-filled special website.

Some of Karl's hobbies have been "borrowed" from his wife Eveline. He carries them out in a genuine symbiosis with her, as the "man behind the camera": There are old churches and monasteries, preferably in Gothic or even Romanesque style. In a joint production, with photographs by Karl and a compilation by Eveline, they have created two books and two DVDs, which are, among others, available at Eveline's online monastery shop (programmed by Karl, of course).

And there is a common interest in orchids: Eveline's tropical orchids are reason enough for the photographer in Karl to rejoice, particularly at the documentation of detail-rich blossoms hardly the size ot the nail of a little finger (by the way, all orchids shown here have grown under Eveline's "green thumbs"); on the other hand, there are plenty of domestic orchids that give opportunities to hunters and collectors (of photographs, of course!), and occasionally stimulate sporting actions.

In case it should not have become clear yet: Karl's major hobby is photography. (There are occasions when he utters between his teeth, "It's only a hobby, only a hobby...", if time has gone well beyond midnight during processing of photographs...) In addition to orchids, churches, monasteries, and railways, Karl takes pictures of everything that happens to get in front of his camera's lens (and occasionally even looks interesting): mountains, rivers, lakes of all sizes, trees, shrubs, flowers, and the wildlife that visits them. Combined with suitable photographic equipment and annual season tickets for a variety of zoos, Karl's affinity to larger-sized cats leads to a rich harvest of photographic documents of remarkable encounters. And if you are not really careful, you can have Karl take by storm - with full photographic combat equipment - conferences or receptions, or he pushes himself to the front at weddings as an unofficial photographer.

Helmut Newton, the renowned photographer, is said to have stated, "The first 10,000 pictures are the worst." There is hope: Considering the fact that the count of digital photographs collected in Karl's (of course self-made) photo database has exceeded 190,000 in August 2017, Karl has passed that mark a while ago...