560 - The Magic Castle

It's Tuesday evening now and this is the image of Friday. I'm not exactly catching up, but I'm not falling further behind either. One gets so humble :)

Actually there was not much material and I was lucky finding anything at all. This image, taken with the Sigma 30/1.4, was shot when I had just arrived in Carinthia. As you may remember, my father had been in Vienna for two weeks, and we returned together, me driving his car. He's 73 after all.

Traffic was modest, all the accidents (two exactly) were on the opposite lanes, and so it was rather relaxed. When we crossed the border to Carinthia, even the sun came out. Unfortunately this didn't help me much, because driving on the highway you are at least as unable to take photographs as on the train.

In post-processing I have cropped the image to be symmetric, cloned out some distractions, and re-adjusted contrasts between sky and earth, mimicking an ND gradient filter. Basically that's it.

The Song of the Day is "In The Forest" from the 2004 Coral album "Magic and Medicine". Sorry, no video found.

559 - Obeisance

Let's carry on with last week, shall we? These are some of the images of Thursday. There would be some more, but it is obscenely late, I'm afraid I'll have to get some sleep :)

Oh, by the way, I have to apologize to all those whom I normally visit and to those whose mails and comments I failed to answer. I am very short of time at the moment, and even processing the images that I make costs my sleep.

The first image is one of a reflection in the back window of a car. This is something that I photograph every once in a while, because I like these distorted images of liquified architecture.

Number two is actually Jokerman Revisited. I went by once more, there were signs of work done, but basically he is still there. This time I took the image from another perspective, and then in Photoshop carried it a tad further.

Both of the last images were heavily manipulated in Photoshop, much further than I normally go, and in contrast to that, this landscape shot, taken in Vienna's vineyards, is only frugally enhanced. Actually I love this image. I think it looks much wider than it is. Would you believe that this was shot with an effective focal length of 75mm?

And then there is the Image of the Day. Some contrast and color corrections, some vignetting added, but otherwise this is pretty much what came out of the camera. Well, sort of. What I mean is, this incredible softness of the out of focus areas is solely due to the wide aperture at f1.2.

All images were shot using the Nikon 50/1.2. A remarkable lens, and did I mention that it is a beast to focus?

The Song of the Day is actually a soundtrack. It's the soundtrack to "Le Roi Danse" by Gérard Corbiau. The music is by one of my favorite baroque composers, by Jean-Baptiste Lully. See some fantastic dance scenes from the movie on YouTube.

558 - Good To Be Back

I'm five days behind! That's a First! As I reported shortly, we had a computer crash in Carinthia. The PC would not boot at all. On Saturday afternoon we bought a new PC in Klagenfurt, and installing it, that's what I did since. What a weekend!

It finally turned out it was the system disc. It may have had a head-crash, something else may have have happened and may have taken down the disc as well, in any case it's gone. Good news is that I have not lost any image data, bad news is that we lost some other important things like emails. We'll let a specialist try to recover the data. So far my theory is, that most of the drive must be OK, and that most of the data must be recoverable. We'll see and I'll let you know.

The computer in Carinthia still lacks some software for image processing, that is to follow next weekend. Today I wouldn't have been able to use it anyway.

These are images of Wednesday. I have processed them on the train. Originally I would have liked to do Thursday as well, but I was too tired, and some of Thursday's images need my full attention :)

I am still after those soft, blurry images, and over the course of the next days you'll see various approaches. Wednesday it was the Nikon 50/1.2. This is a manual focus lens and, honestly, it is a pain to use. On the other hand, in those cases when I manage to get what I want, I like what I get.

The first image is a detail of a carved pillar at the entrance to a Chinese restaurant. This is a place that I pass by very often, and I am attracted to the colors, especially on gray days. The environment is not overly beautiful, thus using a macro-like approach is probably a good idea. Of course this is no macro lens, not at all, but due to the extremely shallow depth of field, the look is not far from what macro shots look like.

The next image is one of my typical bicycle portraits, nothing new, and you may have seen the pose before. I still like the image, not the least for its colors.

The final image is a detail from Spittelberg, one of Vienna's more picturesque neighborhoods. I love the ivy and the mysterious oblique lines in the background.

The Song of the Day is "Good To Be Back" from Natalie Cole's 1989 album of the same title.

557 - Sarah

May I introduce my niece Sarah? She is a year and some days old, daughter of my sister Astrid and her husband Martin, and she is the delight of my father, who has spent the last two weeks working in Vienna and living with them. Yesterday we returned to Carinthia.

These images are from my visit on Tuesday evening. I had already worked on them and uploaded them to SmugMug, thus I can post this entry. The other images of the week, Wednesday and Thursday, are unrecoverable at the moment, I will post them when I am back in Vienna.

The Song of the Day is "Sara" from Antonello Venditti's 1978 album "Sotto Il Segno Dei Pesci". The lyrics are not exactly what one would write about his baby niece, but Bob Dylan's "Sara" wouldn't have been better in this regard :)

See Antonello Venditti perform live on YouTube.

Hardware Trouble And Stupidity

It's Saturday morning now. The computer in Carinthia seems to have died a sudden death. Yesterday evening I wanted to begin working on the entry for Tuesday, suddenly the screen went black and this was it. Rebooting does not help. The computer seems to hang. I can't tell for sure, because it does not display anything. It worked only so long as to let me move my images of the last week from my portable hard drive.

"MOVE" is the word, yes. I can't remember ever having moved my data from the portable drive to one of my computers. I always copy. Well, this time I did not, and that means the images of Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday are now on a hard drive that I cannot access. I still have them in Vienna as well, but that does not help me at all at the moment.

At the moment I write from my laptop. I have everything I need for image processing installed, thus I could work on it. Grrrr .... what a mess!

Only A Placeholder

So many images, no time to work on them! I'll try to be back with the image of Tuesday this evening, and it should be possible to catch up over the weekend. Sorry for the delay.

556 - Morning Has Broken

I can't say that I had particularly much time today, but luckily I got this shot early in the morning on my way to work. It's again one of those fuzzy fore-/background images with only a tiny slice of reality in focus. I can't get enough of that at the moment. The incredibly interesting thing for me is, that you can create all sorts of effects, simply by moving some inches around. This time I used the Sigma 70/2.8 at f8 and 1/640s. The out-of-focus leaves are still pretty blurry, because I am focusing so damn near, but this time you have a vague impression of the city in the background.

I can't exactly claim that I planned the image that way. It's been more of an experiment, but in the future I know what I get at these settings.

The Song of the Day is "Morning Has Broken" from Cat Stevens' 1971 album "Teaser and the Firecat". See a very nice spring video on YouTube.

555 - Every Dog Has Its Day

It's almost a rule: I don't make good images when I am on a trip. I always feel the urge to document the places where I've been, and that's for a reason: of many past trips years ago I can only remember the places where I've taken pictures. Today we were in Friuli, Italy's north-east province. It's just a little more than an hour by car from home to Udine, Friuli's capital.

This particular image, the reflection of clouds in the water of a storage lake, was taken while still at home, and from there it only went down. It was a nice trip, but photographically I was completely uninspired. The dog barked at me when, in order to take a photo, I parked the car a meter from its fence. I kinda liked the tiny guy with the big ears. Of course the 20/1.8 was the wrong lens, because he wouldn't let me get as near as I wanted, but then again, the wide angle emphasizes its size and that's OK.

The image is further a good example of what you can do to the images from a modern DSLR. This was harsh light, I didn't use a flash (the tiny guy was frightened anyway), and the dog was mostly in deep shadow. After heavy Photoshop treatment the image is still good enough for a print.

The Song of the Day is "Every Dog Has Its Day" from Willy DeVille's 1990 album "Victory Mixture". Tell me you American guys: what's wrong with Willy DeVille? You get all his records here in Europe, but in the US you have to import him?? Sorry, no sound sample, no lyrics.

554 - Tenderly

Climate changes, that's pretty evident. It's even obvious for everyone but George W. Bush that those changes are man-made, but there is one thing that seemingly does not change at all: April is unpredictable.

When I woke up, it was cloudy, as soon as I went out, it began to pour down like mad, and then it was sunny for the bigger part of the day. Problem is, that I slept most of the afternoon, and when I woke up again and decided to go for some magic light ... it rained again.

The first image is from the morning. Like all other images of today it was shot with my only manual focus lens (well, apart from the Lensbaby), the Nikon 50/1.2. This image, like the other two, was shot at f1.2 for minimum depth of field. At this aperture the lens is still pretty sharp but soft, mostly due to coma, I think. This does not matter for portraits, one of the major applications of this lens, and it does not matter either, when the lens is used for extremely selective focus.

The second image, a blossom on an apple tree, shows the same qualities. Depth of field is extremely shallow, light is soft. And then there is the Image of the Day, and it exemplifies how I like to work with this lens: I go very near, as near as the lens allows. This is not a macro lens, much to the contrary, as an older design its minimum focusing distance is somewhere in the range of 50cm (around 1 1/2 feet), but going as near as it gets ensures minimum depth of field. Focusing is pretty painful at f1.2, and it is more so at that distance. Most of the time I need between one and three shots until I'm satisfied.

If at all possible, I try to get something colorful in the foreground, Whatever it is (in case of the Image of the Day only some more blossoms), it will be rendered completely out of focus, a mere cloud of color, and so will be the background.

The Song of the Day is "Tenderly" by Billie Holiday. I've got her version on the collection "Solitude: The Billie Holiday Story, Vol. 2". Hear it on YouTube.

553 - Straight Up And Down

It's Friday. As I write this, I'm on the train to Carinthia, and as on so many Fridays, I have no substantial image. On the other hand, I have just worked on the cover images for a CD. Remember "462 - Congeniality"? At that concert I had shot more than 300 images, using Wolfgang's Nikon 80-200/2.8, and now that a CD is coming out, I was asked to supply the cover images. On the back cover will be the empty room after the concert, and on the front a detail of a saxophone. We don't show musicians, because the CD will cover the best of four concerts of different bands. The actual image on the cover will be a square crop of the lower part, here I show the original composition.

I'm pretty satisfied how well the sax comes out. The image was shot in extremely low light at 200mm, f3.2, 1/100s and ISO 5600. For that it's rather smooth :)

Regarding the Song of the Day, my choice of music here on the train is restricted to what's on my IAUDIO X5 60GB music player, and unfortunately I have not much Jazz on it. Still, "Straight Up And Down" from Eric Dolphy's 1964 album "Out To Lunch" will do, will it? No video, sorry, but Amazon's sound sample is actually quite good.

552 - Take A Ride

I've got to keep this really short, it's morning and time to get to work.

I loved this image when I took it, but working on it proved extremely difficult. I could not find a balance between the bright colors of the lights in the background and the muted brownish, muddy tones elsewhere. I tried different temperatures, but when the dark of the background looked right, everything else fell apart. I tried a B&W conversion with a mask over the lights, but that was even worse. It looked badly colored and plain ugly. And then it occurred to me: this is a B&W image!

The Song of the Day is "Take A Ride" from Hazel O'Connor's 1998 album "5 in the Morning". Sorry, no video.

551 - Recordare

After the vivid spring colors of the last days, let's get a little more muted, shall we? I have been on St. Marx Cemetery today. It was a gray, windy day, with only traces of sunshine very late in the afternoon. This cemetery is out of use since 1874, but it is open to the public and it boasts the grave of none lesser than Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. In reality, only 17 years after his death nobody knew where he was buried any more, and I guess the place marked today is as authentic as the average Saint's relic, but as with Saints, this has never stopped people believing.

I was rather late, only three quarters of an hour before closing time at 5pm, thus I didn't even bother looking for Mozart. I was looking for the angels.

Angels? Yes, angels. Statues of angels are very common on old graves in Vienna. Of course they get much photographed and therefore this image is hardly original, but actually I don't care. If I did, I would have to stop photographing in Vienna at all, and not only in Vienna, actually in every place where people photograph, which probably comprises 150% of the beautiful places in this world :)

The Song of the Day is the "Recordare" from Mozart's "Requiem". Of the six or seven versions that I have, I have chosen Jordi Savall and his orchestra "Le Concert des Nations", but I guess this does not matter as much as it matters with baroque or earlier music. On YouTube you may hear (among others) the Symphony Orchestra of Ljubljana under Vladislav Tchernushenko, and they do it quite as well.

550 - Beautiful Surprise

It must be spring, I have no other explanation. I am not a typical macro shooter, but now, out of four pictures in a row, we have three macros, and don't forget that on Sunday we had that sun drenched yellow moss as well.

This morning it was sunny, but a little bit windy and not too warm. Well, I was not bothered by having to wear something over my T-shirt, but it is amazing how much movement you have in everything that grows. Though the flowers and the blossoms on the trees and shrubs don't really sway in the wind (it was not that windy), you see sort of a fast micro-movement. The nearer you get, the more everything moves.

Normally I like to set my shutter speed as low as it gets. This can be very low with wide angles or my stabilized 18-200 (1/30s on the long end is quite common, 1/60s if I have a shaky day), or more in line with the usual recommendation of one over the effective focal length. For the Sigma 70/2.8 Macro that I am again back to, I use 1/100s, which perfectly fits the effective length of 105mm. This lens is so incredibly sharp, I really don't want to lose anything due to motion blur.

Guess what, it did not suffice today. I had to go to 1/200s, Auto ISO put me at ISO 800, and that was only at f4. Of course I could have used my macro flash, but of course it is in Carinthia, and of course I wouldn't have used it on my way to work anyway. I don't like to scare off people with something that looks like a laser gun.

Macro shooting is always interesting, because you never know what you get. In this case I was quite surprised by the outcome. These are really tiny yellow blossoms on a brownish brush and I had not much hope of getting anything special. Well, automatic white balance was completely fooled by the colors. These images were taken on a sunny day, in the shade on the underside of a brush, from memory I'd suggest 5500K would be about correct, the camera missed that big time and selected 3850K. No problem, that's what RAW is for, right? Right, only that I actually liked what I got. In fact I liked it so much more than the boring reality, that I decided to keep it that cool. Now here we are. In macro shooting there's always a surprise.

The Song of the Day, "Beautiful Surprise" is from India Arie's 2002 second album "Voyage to India". Hear it on YouTube.

549 - Lilac Wine

Yesterday morning (yesterday? Well, it's Tuesday morning 5:30 now, I have just woken up) when I went to work, I still had the Sigma 70/2.8 Macro mounted from the weekend's macro sessions. Boy, did that lens feel good on the street! It's that combination of a short telephoto lens with the incredible control of depth of field. I absolutely love using this lens wide open.

In the end I have only worked on this single image. There are some others that would be worthwhile (and that I would have taken anytime on a lesser day), one that I'll try again because of too tight framing, and a gorgeous bicycle that was unfortunately marred by litter on the ground that I failed to see and remove. What's wrong with Photoshop, you ask? Well, have you ever tried to clone behind the spokes of a bicycle's wheel? Believe me, there are selections you don't want to make :)

The Song of the Day is "Lilac Wine" by the great Nina Simone. I have it on the collection of her Philips recordings "For Women". Hear it on YouTube.

548 - Part Of The Machine

Today I have two yellow images, one a macro shot of some moss in our garden, the other a part of a machine that is used for constructing or repairing railway tracks. You know those machines that are train wagons themselves, yellow and black like a wasp, sprinkled with red details and warning and information signs of all sorts, signs that are completely incomprehensibe to the uninitiated.

The Song of the Day is "Part Of The Machine" from the 1987 Jethro Tull album "Crest Of A Knave".

547 - These Ain't Raindrops

Or are they?

What do you do on a rainy day? Well, I mount a macro, take polarizer, tripod and umbrella, and go out into the garden. Boy, is this Sigma 70/2.8 sharp!

This was the first time that I fooled around with manual focus and Live View. Neat. For macro shooting I can't think of anything better.

The Song of the Day is "These Ain't Raindrops" from Percy Sledge's 1994 album "Blue Night". Sorry, neither lyrics nor video.

546 - Gli altri siamo noi

This is the image for Friday, but it was not taken yesterday. Yesterday was one of those travel days. No time to take pictures in the morning (at least nothing worthy), no time to take pictures on the way to the train (I've tried, it was better but still not good enough), and then for almost the whole time on the train I saw the most spectacular weather outside. Fantastic light, dramatic skies, I could have taken hundreds of images, and instead I sat there, sub-par images loaded in Photoshop, trying to ride dead horses. Goodness, that's tough!

Fortunately I have a folder titled TODO on my hard drive, and there I found this image that I always had wanted to work upon and that I never actually had. It's from my trip to Florence, Italy, where I met Ted Byrne. See here on my blog (read in reverse order) and there on Ted's (reverse as well). And while we're at it, here are some more images of that day, images that I have not even processed yesterday, images that I have shown on the Radiant Vista forums, but never on my blog. Hope you don't mind when I throw them in :)

Back to the Image of the Day. There is always the question of whether it is ethically acceptable to show images of beggars or not, but this is not an image about a beggar, It is about the shadow of power looming over the outcast, it is about being a stranger in a world that does not welcome you, it is about being outside, about being rejected as "The Other", but as an old song says: sooner or later we are the others, or in Italian, "tanto prima o poi gli altri siamo noi".

Umberto Tozzi is well known for his poetic lyrics, but it is much well known that Giancarlo Bigazzi, with whom he had a long collaboration from the mid-seventies up to the 1991 release "Gli altri siamo noi", was a driving artistic force. About this song Bigazzi later said that Tozzi had written neither a single line nor note. They ended up in court, and such is human nature, that this is neither uncommon for long-standing artistic collaborations nor for friendships or marriages.

Anyway. The lyrics to this song are quite challenging in the Italian original, and although there is an English version of the song, it is very much different, thus I'll try it with Irene's translation to German, translated to English by me:

I have never been lonelier than this,
but at night I wish it would be Monday soon,
to go out with the others and paint the town.
With the others, trapped in themselves, the others
who open up in the sun like the flowers that dress
when they wake up, when they go out, when they go away,
when they arrive.
We are like those shrouded angels,
the eyes in their faces like mirrors,
because the others are us.

Walls tumble under the breath of an idea,
Allah or Jesus, in a church or a mosque,
We are the others, but here on this same way,
like cowardly heroes, we leave behind what connects us
to those who wait and ask themselves why they were born
and suddenly die.
Maybe they are swallows, leaves from Africa,
who smile at us in melancholy,
and all of us are victims and hangmen,
sooner or later we are the others.

When they sing, when they cry,
the others are us.
When they're born, when they die,
the others are us.

In this world we are the others.

We stay in comfortable deserts
of apartments and tranquility,
far away of the others,
but sooner or later we are the others.

In this now so small world
we are the others.

We are the others
between Indios and Hindus,
between youths in drugstores who don't carry on,
Working class families, forced on vacation by robots,
gypsies from the east in ghettos on the outskirts.
All of us are victims and hangmen,
sooner or later we are the others.

Amazonia,
South Africa,
the others are us,
when they shoot,
when they hope,
the others are us.

In this world we are the others.
In this now so small world
we are the others.

Bigazzi, Tozzi or what, I find this quite impressive, don't you? See the video on YouTube.

545 - He Likes The Sun

I like this image a lot. It is impossible and at the same time it conveys what I meant to see. In high-contrast situations like this, one often resorts to HDR, and that's perfectly OK. With the new version 3.0 of Photomatix Pro it is even feasible to shoot bracketed exposures hand-held, because the automatic alignment algorithm can now cope not only with shift, but also with rotation. That's all well, but I didn't bracket in the first place, so all I had when I began post-processing this image, was a single exposure, and on the version from the camera the bicycle had gone almost black.

Well, this is a good example for the leeway we get from using RAW. By combining two different versions from RAW with a PhotoLift layer for enhancement of local contrast, I was able to create a tonally very rich image with a healthy looking histogram. And ... hey, it even gives me the feeling that I had when I was there!

That's what I call success. A successful image is foremost an image that is what I want it to be. You see, my success may not be your success, but that's fine as well. This is the success of the maker. I make the image, I must have fun with it in the first place, or else there will be no images any more :)

But now let's turn it the other way: What's your criterion for the success of an image? I mean, for me it's easy. I have been in the situation, I have taken the exposure, I have processed the image, and thus it is a very tight relation, a very direct experience that makes me like my images or not. You on the other hand have no intrinsic relation to the image at all. If you like it, what makes you like it?

The Song of the Day is "He Likes The Sun" from Tanita Tikaram's 1988 album "Ancient Heart". No clip on YouTube. Sorry.

544 - You Can't Always Get What You Want

A mixed bag of impressions, that's what I have today. The first two images are again experiments with the concept of strongly blurred foregrounds. A small park near my workplace has contributed the flowers, another park just on the other side of the road the tree. I really like to play with this kind of images, because they show the world in a way that we usually don't see. Basically you can use that effect to construct all kinds of strange worlds full of mystery and color.

The next image, taken only 50 meters from the tree, could not be more different. This is the backside of Volkstheater, one of Vienna's most prominent theater houses, specializing mostly on 20^th century drama. The contrasts were extremely harsh and I'm pretty satisfied with the conversion to B&W.

Finally there is the Image of the Day, a plastic tray in front of a second hand shop, with some books and a separator, obviously intended to be used with LP records, but no records are there, only this piece of fiber board with "Rolling Stones" written on it. Well, I guess you can't always get what you want :)

And of course that's the Song of the Day. It's originally from the 1969 album "Let It Bleed". YouTube has quite some versions of it, for instance this really ecstatic one.

543 - Jokerman

On a construction site in Kaiserstraße, very near to where I live, I found this charcoal drawing on the wall of a building being demolished. A Jokerman, once drawn by a hopeful young revolutionary, and this reminds me of Ted Byrne's current blog entry, "Quarry", where he muses about salavging "something that soon won't be anyplace but in an image". John Henry Mills or the Jokerman, one will wither with time, one will be torn down with force. There are stories behind both, and though the stories will be lost, these images remain, and they will begin to tell their own stories.

"Jokerman" is the opener (and I think it was the hit) on Bob Dylan's 1983 Return-From-Jesus album "Infidels". See it on YouTube.

542 - The Show Is Over, Say Good-Bye

Welcome to the second edition of "Fine Art Explained".

Every once in a while I write a Photoshop tutorial, and that can be for one of three reasons: I could have found an interesting technique that I like to share ("448 - Down In The Hole" is such a case), I could have found an interesting tool or plugin (in "492 - Roughly About Sundown" it's PhotoLift), or I feel that I have found an interesting solution for an originally unspectacular image, something that I am proud of. In the latter case I simply show how I develop an image from ground up. That's "Fine Art Explained", and "511 - Gasoline Alley" was the first example.

Yesterday was a drab, cold day, and I left work early, heading not west, towards home, but east into the city's center, the first district, the part that was walled from medieval times until the walls were torn down under Napoleon Bonaparte.

Near the northern border, near the channel that comes in from river Danube, is a gothic church, "Maria am Gestade" (Saint Mary by the Waters), and from its western facade there are stairs down to a small place called "Am Gestade". This is our stage. Here I took an image of a man walking down the stairs, here I made a series of photos, trying to capture the spirit of the place.

I had to wait some time until the place was empty, but I used the time nevertheless, making image after image, looking for something that would work. I finally settled with this image: Nikon 18-200 VR at 18mm, 1/100s and ISO 280. Much of the stairs in the foreground, a door and the yellow lines, in the background the curving row of houses that leads into the unknown. No sky. This image and the image of the man walking down are JPEGs straight from the camera.

Whenever I am at that point, I ask myself: "What's wrong with this image? What is too much, what is missing?". Here the answer was clear: the expanse of the place lacked contrast and most of all a focal point, a center of interest. OK, I thought, maybe I can use the man.

I opened up the image of the empty place in Adobe Camera RAW, applied some basic adjustments there, and then loaded the second image, the image of the man, converted with the same parameters, into another layer. There was a gully to the left of the man, and I used that to rotate, resize and skew the top layer. This was easiest when I set the opacity of the top layer to 50%, so that I could see the gully on both layers. Moving, rotating and skewing took its time, and, as you can see, the result is not perfect.

The reason is, that the images were taken with different focal lengths and different perspectives, but after I had applied a black mask and by painting with white on the mask revealed only the man, it did not matter at all. The man had neither hard edges, nor did he have to have a certain alignment to any edges in the image. Organic forms are very forgiving in that regard.

You see, I have combined two images, and one of them has been scaled to less than half its size. The result of this scaling is most certainly an increased relative sharpness of the scaled-down image. In this case it was not so pronounced, but had it been, then I would have had to slightly blur the man now.

The next image shows a small but important step. I have cleaned up the image and removed unimportant but distracting details. The most obvious is the glaring puddle in the background, near the right edge. It's extremely high contrast, and the eye is naturally attracted to high contrast. Some smaller specks of litter on the stairs and some near white points in the far background also had to go, because they were in positions where I absolutely did not want to lead the eye. Basically the idea was to make the man the single most important focal point, and everything else, even the door included, his arena.

There is not much difference in the next image. I have selected the yellow of the stripes (Select / Select Color Range) with a narrow range (fuzziness set to around 50), and then added a "Hue/Saturation" adjustment layer, automatically taking the mask from the selection. Here I added a healthy dose of saturation to the yellows, making them pop. In another "Hue/Saturation" layer I have desaturated some already very saturated reds in the far background. I did this, knowing that I would add global saturation later, and I wanted a level ground for all colors.

Compared to the JPEG from the camera, I had already increased mid-tone contrasts a bit in the RAW converter, but I really wanted strongly increased local contrasts, making the textures come forward. At the moment my tool of choice is PhotoLift, a plugin that allows a broad range of manipulations of local and global contrast. See more about it in "492 - Roughly About Sundown". I used +80% local contrast, -20% global contrast, -10% brightness and +20% saturation, and the resulting layer has an opacity of 50%. Basically this is experimentation. Use what looks best.

The tonal foundation was better now, with the bulk of the image shifted more down into the mid-range, and with a healthier distribution. Next I added some standard adjustment layers: a levels layer for setting black and white point, a curves layer for mid-tone contrasts, both in luminosity mode. Then I pushed saturation quite a bit. The result looks punchier, less muddy. You see it best in the wall textures, but I admit that the effect is subtle.

Such forceful contrast manipulations tend to make the image look unnaturally sharp and grainy, and in many cases I add something that I call a "Neutral Blur". This is an Orton-like effect, but without the glow. You get it by copy-merging the stack onto a new layer, duplicating that layer, setting one to mode "Multiply" and 60% opacity, the other to "Screen" and 100%, and then blurring the multiply layer with radius 5 and the screen layer with radius 30. Group them and set the group's opacity to 50%.

This "Neutral Blur" is exactly that: neutral. It does not change overall tonality and it does not affect colors, but it gives the image an aura of substance. It's hard to explain and in these screen shots it's certainly hard to see as well, but when you try it for yourself, you will immediately recognize it.

Of course the image has again lost punch now, and here I normally apply some high pass sharpening with a radius between 1 and 2, here like most of the time 1.5. This again brings back the punch without looking unnatural or sacrificing the "substance" gained through the blur.

Remember my warning concerning compositing and that one may have to blur a strongly shrunk layer? Well, something similar had happened in the meantime. The increased local contrast of the PhotoLift layer, together with the high pass sharpening, had produced a trace of a halo around the man. Thus I copied the high pass layer, inverted it, masked it with black and painted in the mask with a small white brush along the man's contours. Perfect. The halo was gone. If this wouldn't have sufficed, I could have clipped a levels adjustment layer into the inverse sharpening, thereby increasing its effect.

Now we're almost there. I added a vignette to accentuate the focus and finally sharpened the image in Lab and with an edge mask. A vignette is something that you see in many if not most of my images. It helps to direct the eye and it adds drama to the scene. Depending on the scene and the strength of the vignette, this can be quite some drama :)

So far the workflow was very reasonable and now comes the sin: I was not really impressed with the image, and I decided to remove the gully. Eeek! A pixel-bearing cleanup layer on top of all these adjustments! Ugly. But ... I did it. I was too lazy to redo sharpening, blurring and high pass sharpening. It was late and it was only meant as an experiment, just to see how it would look like.

Well, it made a world of a difference. Suddenly the man perfectly worked as a focal point. I had not recognized it all the time but, as useful as the gully had been while compositing, as distracting it was now.

For your reference, this is the whole layer stack again, only the group with the neutral blur not expanded.

The title of this image is a line from the Song of the Day, "Take A Bow", from Madonna's 1994 album "Bedtime Stories". Maybe that's only me, but I can't remember ever having seen a better music video. A marvelous piece of art. See it on YouTube.

Oh yes, two more things: I have done what I normally don't ever do, I have changed an Image of the Day. I had been very unsatisfied with "539 - Heading For the Light". Head over and compare for yourself.

The other thing is this image. I made it shortly before the Image of the Day, not far away, and it is another 16 layer job, but that would be a different story.

541 - Helpless

Not my most photographic day. I've installed ESET Internet Security on two computers and tried a memory upgrade on two laptops. Well, ESET was a full success, just like on my computer in Vienna. Getting rid of Norton Internet Security and installing ESET was almost as effective as a processor upgrade. Highly recommended.

The memory upgrade did not go so well. I've bought 2 GB for a notebook that has 512 MB installed, the memory is faster than what came with the computer ... and it didn't work. I tried it then in my own notebook, same game, slightly faster memory, same result. Either I have bought defective memory, or notebooks are very much more sensitive to mismatches in memory timings. I've never before had problems with too fast memory. Oh well.

This image is from my 5 minutes photo session in the garden. That was it :)

The Song of the Day is Neil Young's "Helpless", but not from "The Last Waltz", not from "Unplugged" and not even from Neil Young: Patti Smith sang it on her 2007 cover album "Twelve", and someone on YouTube has illustrated it with images from Wim Wenders' "Der Himmel über Berlin". Not the worst combination.