As you can see in the picture accompanying this post, the shopping area of the city was welcoming us with a nice big illuminating sign - a perfect test to immediately check if just taking a picture with a smartphone would lead to an acceptable result. If you know that this picture was not edited in any way and no filters were applied and that the smartphone is one in the under $300 range, I am inclined towards a definite yes.
The trip turned out to also be quite educational for me, as I found out, from the other attending Local Guides, a number of highly interesting things about various places in the Bochum city center. One of them was the architecture award-winning underground railway station Bochum Rathaus Süd, which now has some very nice 360 images on its Google Maps entry (if you explore them, you will even see the 3 attending Local Guides captured in the images). The color effects in the walls are very nice to see, as they change from one color to another every few seconds.
I will definitely revisit that place in daytime to make some other pictures, as the building has a very particular way of bringing daylight in: on the surface there are a number of ‘prisms’ with glass that is intentionally fractured (a passer-by could easily mistake that for vandalism) to introduce light into the underground construction. In the picture below, showing the Bochum city hall - also not so bad for low light conditions and a relatively cheap smartphone - you can see one of those prisms.
The most amazing moment of the evening was definitely the fact that during our visit of the station, I was able to catch a picture of Star Trek’s Starship Enterprise!
Just kidding of course, it’s the entrance hall of the railway station, but you will have to admit that it does have a futuristic element to it.
Another interesting fact I learned during the meet-up is related to the shopping center called Drehscheibe, which is German for turntable. Turns out this name is derived from a predecessor of what we now know as traffic lights, which you can still see hanging above the streets.
Unfortunately attempts to add this so-called Heuerampel to Google Maps as historic landmark have not been successful, so the 360 pictures taken there are not visible on Maps.
We also visited Das Labor, a center for education that also is a hackerspace or makerspace (in case you were not yet aware: that’s a brand new POI category for that). As Das Labor was already on the map, you can now also see some 360 pictures that were taken at the entrance there.
On our way back to the car, the final surprise was a perfect illustration of the fact that in everyday life you so often just rush by elements of beauty without even noticing them.
This last picture was taken in a shop that I have driven by already hundreds of times without realizing it was there: an amazing antique cash register that stands out immediately when you walk by the brightly lit shop during the evening hours.
