630 - Oooh, What A Lucky Man I Was

Yesterday's food is from the can. I was short on time in the morning, and when I left for the train, the light was utterly flat and uninspiring. I could have delayed photographing to the evening, but on the other hand I had plenty of time for post-processing while on the train.

I always carry a bunch of files with me in a folder "TODO", and for lack of anything better to do, I began processing some of them.

The decaying house front is not far from where I live. When I am late and take the way to work via the Underground, I always pass by, but this particular image was taken about a year ago, in the afternoon. I used my Nikon 50/1.2 and was on the way to a concert where I wanted to use this fast lens.

The next image, a garbage can in Mariahilfer Straße in Vienna, was taken last August with the then new Sigma 20/1.8. It was early morning on a bright day with blinding sunlight, and I liked the contrast between the modern design and the traces of ... uhmm ... neglect.

The final image, the Image of the Day, is from that Sunday morning in Florence/Italy when I was photographing with my friend Ted Byrne. This image was taken while Ted was on the other side, making the first image that he posted from Florence.

This is one of those images that I always wanted to process. I tried it one time and did not particularly like the result, so it went back into the "TODO" folder. Much to Ted's annoyance I took all my images that morning from the tripod and I really took my time. Just as I was satisfied with the framing, a white car drove by to park in front of these poles, right in my image. I pressed the shutter only a second before. The sidelight is from the car's head lights. While the original would have been nothing but a failed attempt, this side light makes the image, and that's also what was so hard to bring out in post-processing. I was just a lucky man :)

The Song of the Day is "Lucky Man" from ELP's 1970 debut album "Emerson Lake & Palmer". See something like a video on YouTube.

629 - Electric Ladyland V

Time for another installment of my "Electric Ladyland" series. This time we are in Vienna, the image is from today (caught up!!) and again I don't fight the ever present cables, the wires that keep our civilization running, again I use them. Apart from that I may have added some slight enhancements in Photoshop as well. I can't help it, it just happens some times.

The second image is from the morning. That's what I originally wanted to present as Image of the Day, before things got out of control :)

As always in this series: The Song of the Day is still "Have You Ever Been (to Electric Ladyland)" from Jimi Hendrix' 1968 album "Electric Ladyland".

628 - I'm Waiting For The Man

I had processed these two images of yesterday right in time, but this time SmugMug had thwarted my plan to catch up. They had a longer outage last night (my night that is) during which no images could be added to the site.

I took both of these images yesterday afternoon, on my way home through Lerchenfelderstraße, one at the corner Lange Gasse, one at the corner Kellermanngasse. The bicycle fastened to the railing was only a question of composition, the other one required some thought :)

The Song of the day is "I'm Waiting For The Man" from the classic 1967 Velvet Underground "Banana" album. See this video or that. Why exactly this song? Honestly, I have no idea :))

627 - Mon Vieux Joseph

As I said, this was a very short intermezzo in Carinthia. I took the train down on Monday afternoon, and today, Wednesday, I returned to Vienna early in the morning.

Of course I was swimming, albeit much too short. On my way to the lake, I took the first image, two blades of spelt (as I found out on Wikipedia), using the somewhat inelegant but extremely effective "machine gun" approach. Of the 11 surviving images, this was the one that I liked most. Talk about industrial image making :)

Technically I have converted the image in Capture NX, because I liked the original approach of the camera and would have had a hard time to mimic colors and contrast in Adobe Camera RAW. The only thing that I did in CS3 was sharpening.

The other two images are from the break between the two parts of the concert. The Clemencic Consort gave Carmina Burana, and it was just as great as I had expected. See this video for a sample. In the Gothic church of Maria Saal we had the slightly nicer environment though :)

I am quite sure that the Saint on the glass window holding the infant Christ is Joseph, thus the Song of the Day is "Joseph" from Georges Moustaki's best known 1969 (what a year!!!) album "Le Meteque". Hear it on YouTube.

626 - Gotta Travel On

After yesterday's somewhat lengthy post, I'll keep it very short today. This is the image for Monday, you see, instead of catching up, I managed to get even two days behind now :)

Monday afternoon I left Vienna for a one-day intermezzo in Carinthia. We had concert tickets for Tuesday evening. On my way to the Underground, I regularly pass this building, Justizpalast. You've seen it in "141 - Memories of Summer", in "336 - Split Decision / Up In The Sky" and "154 - The Triumph of Parliamentarism" was taken from its roof terrace.

I had the Sigma 30/1.4 mounted, and when I saw the light/shadow pattern caused by the shadow of a flag falling on the wall, I decided to get very near and use extremely shallow DOF. Well, in fact f4.5 was what I ended up with, and even with that I was already at 1/4000s. In hindsight I like it better as it is anyway. Any shallower and the image would considerably loose depth.

The Song of the Day is "Gotta Travel On" from Bob Dylan's much despised 1979 album "Self Portrait". On youTube I have not found it by him, but as this is an old standard, there are other versions, for instance this one.

625 - Who Cares?

So I wanted to talk about creativity, right? It was all induced by a post on Paul Lester's blog and the discussion that resulted from it. Please go there for the whole thing, but basically I've argued that creativity is not the thing to care about, productivity is.

Creativity is the outside view of a productive artist, answering to the inputs from a source of inspiration, busily producing art.

What does that mean? It means that creativity is something to be observed by non-creative people. It is not a category of any importance to the artist. Creativity is an indirect by-product. If you constantly produce, and if your productivity answers to the inputs of your source of inspiration, then you can't be other than creative.

Creativity was one point in Paul's post, artistic growth was the other, but it is again the same thing. Constantly produce, and you can't help but grow. It's automatic. It's one of the few things in the world that are free and that we don't have to worry about. Being thankful, yes, worrying, no.

Let's get back to the definition of terms. What's a "source of inspiration" anyway? Well, whatever inspires you. I mean it in the widest sense. For me it's the visual world. My surroundings. I am a visual type of person. I see, capture, work on that, and the outcome may be either art or a failed attempt, but in the beginning there is always some visual input.

Other artists may be different. Some may be inspired by music, literature, other art, but for me it's normally raw sensory input. Well, that again can be on a very abstract level, like some lines or angles, an isolated color or some other details that most people wouldn't see. With enough practice you become pretty good at seeing.

It is also not so that I blindly respond to every input at any time, no, I may use a filter. One such filter is the choice of lens. Normally I leave home with one particular lens mounted, and most of the time I don't change it during the day. The lens works as a filter, it causes me to look for a certain category of things.

Another filter, one that was effective when I made the first two photos, those of a street scene in Vienna, another such filter is a concept. Here it was the concept of consciously trying to capture "along-the-street" and "diagonally-across-the-street" views. It's something that I have been on the lookout for during most of the last week. The idea is to slow down on the streets, stop in places where there are no "sights", look for the "in-between" things, denying the view that there are "sights" scattered around with nothing in between. See "Oasis in the City" on Marti Jeffers' blog "My View" for a discussion on "in-between-ness".

I don't know if these two images are art and, honestly, I don't care. This "project" if you will is an attempt to see my own city with fresh eyes. I concentrate on something that I have not done in a while, and looking at the images that result, Saturday's "624 - It's OK To Listen To The Gray Voice", Sunday's street scenes that you see here and so many others that I don't show because they either had some flaws or I simply did not have the time to work on them, looking at these images I am amazed to discover views that I must have seen before, but can not remember. All that is fresh and exciting.

What's so exciting about two street images that look almost the same, you may ask. Well, it's that they are adequate solutions to two very different problems. In fact, that's something important. The subject is not what an image is about. Yes, these two images have mostly the same subject, a crossing of Neubaugasse and Neustiftgasse in Vienna's 7^th district, but that's not the what they are about. The first image is about an urban canyon, a meandering street, a fan-like roof line in the background, and about some details that you unfortunately can't see at this resolution, even when you click on the image. You would need a big print for that.

The second image is not about a canyon. You know now that it was taken at roughly the same place, but from the image you can deduce the other side of the street only by looking at the shadows. They hint at buildings, but there is no way to tell what kind of buildings that are. The curving, diagonal movement of the street is important here, but it is broken up by verticals. I have included the posts in the foreground to take up the dominant vertical movement.

You see, these are images with roughly the same subject, but they are about completely different things. In both cases I have responded to my source of inspiration. I did it both spontaneously and with a plan in mind. The plan allowed me to restrict my attention to those aspects that I wanted to trigger my spontaneity.

Whatever your source of inspiration is, if you constantly observe it, you will find a stream of ever changing input, sometimes more, sometimes less changing, but if your work is based on that, your productivity will always be creative and you will continue to grow. The only way to avoid it, is to stop listening to your input.

That's what happens when artists "find their style". Nonsense! That's a euphemism and it should read "find something that sells and that they stick to for the rest of their now non-creative lives".

Style is another thing that an artist must not worry about. Mind, I don't say "need not", I say "must not". It's another thing that should be left to be perceived by others from the outside. It's not your concern. An observable style will result from busy productive work, it's also automatic, it's also free.

Basically these are two sides of a coin. When you are productive and listen to input, then you will be perceived as creative, because you respond to an ever changing world, and thus your art is ever changing as well. On the other hand, the experience that you gain by busily producing, will allow you to make shortcuts, to re-apply partial solutions that you have found to be appropriate for certain partial problems. An attentive viewer will recognize that, will see you invariably take a certain direction at a certain crossing, probably most of the time take the other at another crossing. That's really what style is all about and why it is so absurd to try to appropriate someone else's style:

From its very nature style is a verb. It is a way of doing, of acting, that is directed by personal and artistic experience. Other experiences, other style. No way to copy that, and why should you want to? You don't have other people's experiences, you have your own, and they are worth to be used.

The Image of the Day is simply funny. A battered sign across, telling van drivers to mind the height of the arch. Obviously nobody cared.

The Song of the Day is the Gershwin tune "Who Cares". Ella or Anita? That's a little bit like Beatles or Stones, huhh?? I prefer Anita on her 1955 album "This Is Anita". Any live recording by Ella could change that though. Give me a hint if you know of a good one.

624 - It's OK To Listen To The Gray Voice

Ted won't say so, certainly not. Sorry Ted, even I did not intend to do B&W today. It just happened :)

The Image of the Day is from yesterday afternoon, and what attracted me were of course the reflections on the street. The other two images are from the morning, the first 50 meters from home, just in front of where I shot "622 - Stormy Weather". I had already posted it in a color version, but somehow I was not satisfied.

When I did the second image, I also tried color, but there was not much to begin with, mainly shades of reddish earth tones, and so I tried B&W. I frequently do that, just to see how it looks, and normally I revert to color, but in this case B&W did well, because it emphasized the already abstract nature of the image.

Frequently I tone B&W images, and most of the time I use the actions from ePaperPress. That's Tom Niemann's site, the guy who brought you PTLens. While PTLens is a commercial product (but the price tag of $15 is more or less symbolic for what this program does and how well it is supported), the Photoshop actions for toning are free. Try them, they are great.

As I said, normally I use these actions, lately I tend to tone myself with a Gradient Map layer over the B&W conversion layer. I did so this time, and playing with colors and the gradient's mid-point brought exactly the tonality that I've had in mind. As a result, I copied these B&W conversion layers to the other two images, adjusted tonality, but let the tone intact. There you have it. Three identically toned images, all shot with the Sigma 70/2.8, none originally intended for B&W, all victim of my curiosity :)

I really wanted to talk about creativity today, but, sorry, these images got in my way. I also wanted to post one more entry with my the images of today, but that won't work either. It's already past midnight, maybe I get two entries posted tomorrow. We'll see.

The Song of the Day is "It's OK to Listen to the Gray Voice" from Jan Garbarek's 1984 album of the same name. No lyrics, only saxophone :)

623 - High Summer

It's high summer again, and this year time seems to run on a frenzy. We had mixed weather so far, much rain lately, and work is a little bit over-represented in my life at the moment. I have stayed in Vienna for the weekend and will be off to work in some minutes.

Enough of the rant. I love these long days. I think one should spend all his life on the summer side of the planet. Although I leave work late, I always catch some daylight. This is the image of Friday, taken in Burggasse, in front of a former cinema. The light was blinding and I love the shadows and reflections on the ground.

Tonight I'll really have to go back to my normal schedule. It feels different when you post about an image that you have taken only hours ago. The emotions are much more present. I'll also have to write some words about creativity. Stay tuned. I'll try hard to be back in the evening.

The Song of the Day is "High Summer" from Van Morrison's 1999 album "Back on Top"

622 - Stormy Weather

This is certainly no great photo, the yellow reflection to the left is much too distracting for that, but it does one thing very well: it accurately shows the light that caused me to take it in the first place.

Technically this is not an HDR image. It was made from one RAW file by combining three different versions, using luminance masks, "Blend If" sliders, an extra layer in "Soft Light" blending mode and a photo filter.

I could probably have found a better composition, but I was in a hurry. I crouched in the middle of the street, sheltering myself and the camera from the heavy rain with an umbrella, using a short time when there were no cars. Pretty inconvenient :)

Here is one more image with the same Sigma 30/1.4 lens. I kinda like it, though neither my artistic contribution is overwhelming, nor is it that of the graffer. Sometimes I wonder. I can understand what someone could get out of making graffiti, at least a certain kind. Some graffiti are art, even if Ted disagrees :)

But where does this trend to use stencils come from?? Why do people do that? There is nothing at all artistic in it. Even a monkey could do that. Why bother? Do you have any idea?

The Song of the Day is "Stormy Weather", one of my most favorite songs, a Harold Arlen composition, this time interpreted by Ethel Waters. I found her by chance, searching for versions of "Stormy Weather", not knowing that it was actually her signature song. Well, it's probably excusable, she was slightly before my time :)

I have it on a compilation of recordings from between 1931 and 1934, but that does not seem to be available any more. Instead you could probably get this one called "Am I Blue?". Hear it on YouTube.

621 - Right Place Wrong Time

Leaves are falling??? Sorry guys, that's the wrong time. Up the trees again please, I'll tell you when you're due :))

We have storms here in Vienna these days. Well, nothing that would overly impress our friends in the US, but for a mountainous country like ours they are pretty strong. This image is from Wednesday morning, I'm still a day behind schedule.

The Song of the Day is "Right Place Wrong Time" from the incredible Dr. John's 1973 album "In the Right Place". Hear it on YouTube.

620 - In Heaven She Walks

Hmm ... why is it that I always feel like a rabbit with a stopwatch lately? Well, we're still a day behind, this is only the image of yesterday, Tuesday, and I confess, I had my troubles with it. Originally I had taken it because of the shadow to the right, and I have several others of that, with or without feet. This was a vertical, and I really liked how the shadow went on. The problem was, that the big foreground, the feet and the direction in which the woman walks did not play together. Radically cropping from the bottom, almost to a square, finally did the trick.

The Song of the Day is once again from one of those generally disliked Stranglers albums. It's "In Heaven She Walks" from the 2002 release "Written in Red". Sorry, no lyrics, but at least a video on YouTube.

619 - An Afternoon Walk

Sometimes it is much trouble coming up with a single good image, and sometimes the trouble is, that I have so many that are quite nice, but not a single one that really stands out.

This is what we call a Mofa. That's the abbreviation for "Motorfahrrad" or "motor bicycle". This is an old one and it is a Puch. We had quite some of their bicycles so far (just check out my collection of Bicycles, a lot of them are Puch), but they have made motorbikes as well, some bigger, some like this one. I remember, when I was a child, the postmen used them. Well, that was at the end of the sixties, early seventies.

Monday afternoon was very hot and I slowly strolled home, taking one of the routes that I especially like on such hot lazy afternoons. It leads through one particularly sleepy part of Vienna's 8^th district. This is neither a historic region nor a shiny one, much of the architectural body is from the 1920s/30s, it seems to have been heavily bombed in WW2 and hastily mended in the fifties, but even that is now some time ago, and this part of the city has the charm of a place where people live but are quite not there. In fact that may well have been on that hot afternoon. I guess everybody but me was swimming :)

Originally I had wanted to stay at work longer, but I was still tired from my late-night arrival from Carinthia, and instead decided to go home. For part of the walk I used the Sigma 70/2.8, for the other part the Sigma 30/1.4. Both are among my favorite lenses.

Sometimes I wonder what people think when they see me standing or crouching there, and sometimes they even tell me. Just as I was taking an image of ivy on the garden side of a house (i've omitted it here), an old man came by and said "What are you photographing here? The ivy? But that's everywhere!".

He is right, and that's exactly the way most people run around. Ask them what they've seen, and you get a "Oh, nothing special". That's wrong. Everything is special around us, everything is unique, so are our lives, and if we fail to see and recognize it, then we fail to live at all.

The Song of the Day is "Lazy Afternoon" from the fabulous Holly Cole's 2003 album "Shade". Sorry, no lyrics, not even sound samples, Amazon does not like Holly or Holly does not like Amazon. I don't know. There is no video on YouTube either, but it's still the Song of the Day. You have to believe me :)

618 - Melancholia

It was hot today, very hot, and on my way to my favorite lake, I took this image from out of the car. Post-processing took some time and involved a selectively masked and overall subdued B&W layer, some cloning and rather traditional burning. The result was not unlike yesterday's image, but in the end I've added a strong saturation layer that brought almost all color back. Still, a little bit of the B&W character remains, and that's what I want.

Yesterday's image was really the result of a desparate experiment, but I feel that there is potential in this technique. I mean, selective B&W is cheesy, you know, these bright blue eyes in othewise B&W faces, but this is promising and you may see me walking that route once in a while.

The title? I have no idea, it just feels right :)

I'm on the train right now and with only a limited selection of music, and apart from that I can only slightly remember a song that has the word "melancholia" in it, but probably not in the title. Therefore I have simply searched for something on Google, and I have found this: a video on YouTube, titled "Melancholia", and attributed to Led Zeppelin. No doubt, that is Led Zeppelin, I know the song, but they have nothing called Melancholia, I've checked the track listings for all their albums on Amazon. Googling for text fragments finally revealed that it is "Since I've Been Loving You". I have it on a 4 CD box set called "Led Zeppelin", but it is really from "Led Zeppelin III". Well, whatever you choose, you can't go wrong.

617 - Fading Memories

This barn is part of a farm in the southern Carinthian mountains. The original farm house still stands, and to its left there is a big new guest house. I don't know if the barn is still used, I suppose so, but I guess in only some years it will be a memory. Let's keep it from fading away.

The Song of the Day is "Not Fade Away" from the 1964 Rolling Stones album "England's Newest Hitmakers". See them perform live on YouTube.

616 - The Water

This morning I have fooled around for more than an hour with the only image of yesterday that could have been usable, but finally I decided to drop it. A dead horse is a dead horse, no need trying to ride it. Instead I present you another SoFoBoMo image, and this is the image that determined the style of my book. I had already processed more than fifteen images when I tried this one, and the result changed it all. This is one of the reasons why post-processing took me so long: after this image I had to re-work everything that came before.

The Song of the Day is "The Water" from the 2007 Feist album "The Reminder". See her live at YouTube.

615 - The Light

Funny image, huhh?? Well, I like the effect. This involved some weird tricks like overlaying a layer that was generated by "Filter / Stylize / Find Edges", major pushes in the color department and a lot more. I was inspired to do this for two reasons: the reflection patterns in the tiles looked interesting and, more important, the highlights looked completely burnt out. I just had a discussion with Paul Lester about RAW vs JPEG, and if ever an image was a good example for why I shoot RAW, this is it.

Well, I've done all sorts of violent things to this image, don't get distracted by the graphic syle. The point is, when you look at the lower right corner, there is nothing but white. Everything is clipped and gone. In RAW it took me just an exposure correction of -2.5EV, the details were back and the image was back in the game. But of course, Paul and I do completely different things to our images, and with the kind of shooting he does and his gentle style of post-processing, he won't ever stress an image like I do here. In the end it's quite simple: do what you need and what's enough to reach your goals.

The Song of the Day is "The Light" from the Stranglers album "Coup de Grace". Hear it on YouTube. Judging from the reviews on Amazon, "real" fans seem to dislike this album passionately. Well, I don't :)

614 - Rattlesnake Shake

Wednesday I've been working almost until 11pm. I took some images while on my way home, but post-processing them was absolutely out of the question.

It's interesting: the fisheye gets absolutely familiar now. for a time I have used it exclusively to get into it, but now I keep returning when I am in the mood. Yesterday I was.

The Song of the Day is "Rattlesnake Shake" from the time when Fleetwood Mac still was the Band of the great Peter Green. "Then Play On", their 1969 album is one to absolutely have. Wanna know why? See here or here. Oh well!