595 - Junk: Everybody's Got Something To Hide

I said junk and I mean junk. I've had slightly better images on Friday, but I finally decided for this one, not for its aesthetic qualities (on a scale from 0 to 100 it would firmly score in the negative range), no, not for aesthetics, but because it reveals something. How so, you ask? By hiding, I say.

Vienna's southern train station, Südbahnhof, is is (and will be for years) a big construction site. I remember four images ("448 - Down In The Hole)", "525 - Too Much Of Nothing", "588 - SoFoBoMo - Progressing Pretty Well" and one earlier, that I'm too lazy to search for now, that have been shot at that place. I did it always on Fridays, as Friday is my traveling day from Vienna to Carinthia. I always shot them through this wire fence ... and now they have hidden the site.

Suddenly.

Unexpectedly.

Oh, I know why. It's because in two weeks Austria will be host to "Euro 2008", the European soccer championship. It always amazes me, how well organized this crime is. All newspapers are staunchly pro, as are all television stations. This is propaganda with an efficiency every authoritarian régime of the past, Nazis included, could only have dreamed of. Sure, the Nazis had similar results, and so had the Soviets, but they had to use force. Today the propaganda system is fueled by money only.

Ask someone on Austria's streets. People are at best indifferent, most are outright fed up with this "event of the year". Public and publicized opinion contradict each other strongly. Why? Money.

Euro 2008 is sold as a big event that will be beneficial to the public. The saying is, that restaurants and bars will profit hugely, and that it will have a lasting effect on tourism.

Maybe. So far I see that in the so-called "Fan Zones" everything will be controlled by the biggest European brewery Carlsberg (nobody will be allowed to sell a local beer), Coca Cola and McDonalds. The usual suspects, one might say.

And now they've hidden the construction site on Südbahnhof. Ok, ok, I stop my rant. Things are as they are, the world won't change because I find it disgusting, thus I could as well arrange myself with it. Uhh ... yes ... thank you, City of Vienna, that you spare me the view of holes in the ground and machinery, from now on I'll happily photograph white fences. But probably you'll spare me even that. You'll hopefully rent the white fences to advertisers. That's it. The only thing that's still missing. Advertising. And if at all possible, please do it for "Euro 2008". This city needs it. Advertising will make it a better place.

But now for something completely different.

SoFoBoMo.

Yesterday morning I was ready to give up. Not so now. I certainly won't finish before midnight, but I have reinterpreted the rules. As long as it is May, 31 somewhere on this planet, it will be SoFoBoMo. This gives me 11 hours more time. My deadline now is tomorrow, 11 am. At that time there will be no May any more. Hmm ... one could cheat and deny daylight saving time for probably another hour :)

Anyway, I've got to be back to editing now. See you tomorrow, hopefully with a book. Good Night.

The Song of the Day is "Everybody's Got Something To Hide Except Me And My Monkey" from the White Album. Hear it on YouTube.

594 - Warning: Junk Ahead

Every once in a while there is a new piece of equipment in my bag, this time it is a fisheye (Nikon 10.5mm/2.8), and just as always it will take me a while to come to grips with it. Only that this time it could take longer :)

Let's see: what have I learned today?

• There are too many things on the streets. This lens has such a wide angle, that you almost always include something that you don't want. Lesson: This lens is not for bicycles.


• Shooting architecture with a wide angle lens, I frequently try to let lines run into corners. Two is easy, three is common, four are the Holy Grail. Try that with a fisheye! It's funny. Lesson: This lens requires new aesthetics.


• Many of my images these last six months were taken with the Sigma 70/2.8, and I have found 70 mm (which is equivalent to 105 mm on my camera) to be a very useful focal length for a walk-around lens. Most of the time I am on well known territory and frequently I concentrate on details. A short telephoto lens is ideal for that, and today in the park it would have been ideal for this tiny furry animal that crossed my way, mistaking my camera for a nut. The fisheye was not ideal. Lesson: this lens is not for squirrels.


• Although it was warm, light in the park of the imperial castle of Schönbrunn was rather flat. Often in such light I use a polarizer. Not today. Lesson: This is not a lens for situations when you need to use a filter.


• I tried some landscape images, and on the plus side, there was hardly any problem to get everything into the image. On the other side, it was hardly possible to NOT get everything into the image. Lesson: This is not a typical landscape lens.


• Having so much in the image hugely increases the chance to have something very bright and something very dark, meaning that most of the time you have extreme contrasts. Lesson: This lens is not for harsh light.

I'll let you know when I've found out what it really is for. In the meantime please be warned: To master this lens, I'll have to use it. Often. There may be junk ahead.

The Song of the Day is "Warning" from the 2000 Green Day album "Warning". See them perform live on YouTube.

593 - Controversy

With only three more days to go for SoFoBoMo and no book yet produced, God knows I should do anything but write about other people's posts on other people's blogs, but as things are, you have to either voice your opinion when the topic is hot, or nobody will listen.

Today, on Craig Tanner's Light Diary, I ran into a reference to a post by Joe Reifer titled "Going deeper may require more abstract excursions". Joe basically utters his frustration about the state of photography related blogs and the fact that most of them in his opinion produce junk.

He challenges us, to not ramble about questions in art theory that have long been decided, to not write endlessly about photography business as if photography taken online were a business, to not dwell on technical matters of how we shot a certain image, and to not write the seven thousandth tutorial about making sundowns more colorful in Photoshop. He challenges us to take our passion to extremes, to delve for the deep and the pure, and he supposes that

Your normal sources are not going to cut it. The internet is not going to cut it. This may take wandering around the middle of the desert for a few days to figure out. Maybe a few weeks. Probably longer.

There you have it. As someone guilty of most of that, am I offended? Not at all.

Do I feel the need to defend my position? Not really. I find the notion interesting. It resonates with my own doubts about what I do. Don't get me wrong, I am not particularly prone to doubt, but from time to time ...

Whenever I have written a really lousy post, whenever an Image of the Day is only some image of the day, whenever I have posted another Photoshop tutorial (did you know that about 95% of my visitors come for maybe 5% of my posts, and would you have expected, that all of them happen to be either Photoshop tutorials or posts about my Nikon D300?), always in these situations I ask myself, "Was this necessary? Did the world need that?".

It didn't, and yes, probably it was necessary. Jay Watson already pointed it out on his blog, that much of what we do in blogging is about exposure and fulfilling expectations. We post to get seen, and in a world of blind but literate search engines, we get found much easier when we write. That's one of the reasons why I always select a Song of the Day and mostly title my image after it. It's incredible how many people arrive from Google searches for song titles.

It's similar with my images. I know that some of them are quite good, and I know equally well that many are not. Do I care? Yes, I do, but I post them anyway. This is a daily photoblog, and the expectation is, that there will be a new photo every day.

Most of my visitors don't comment (which is a pity), but from the comments that I do get, I understand that nobody expects me to post earth-shattering images every day. I do what I can, and people seem to accept it.

And then: I can't remember having seen much earth-shattering art in my life at all. Most art does not shatter. It comments.

It comments on concepts, sometimes in a very precise way (much of what Ted Byrne does is of that type), sometimes rather vaguely, like commenting on beauty. And if it does not comment on concepts, then it may comment on feelings, reflecting the outlook of its creator.

Joe Reifer pointed to Roger Ballen as an example of a photographer whose art "blew his mind". I didn't know Roger Ballen, but I absolutely understand the notion. This is high-class Art with a big capital A. No doubt about that, and I am thankful for the link. I find Ballen's images disturbing, surreal, absolutely classic in their formal structure, even beautiful in their negation of traditional beauty ... and I can't imagine why he does so many of them and nothing else.

These images fascinate me, they hold me for quite some time, they are even one of the reasons why this whole topic drew me into writing another lengthy post, and producing them would be an interesting project, but producing nothing but them, would bore me to death.

I am not a big fan of big projects. I enjoy doing some of this, some of that, from time to time circling around one subject (bicycles are one of them), without forcing myself, always trying to keep this a passion, not a job.

My own Art is what happens in that process, what gets fueled by my joy. I produce it because I feel an urge. I offer it to everybody who will care to look, but if only a very few did, like it was for a long time in the beginning, I probably still would do it. I do not rely on my Art economically, and that frees me of having to make compromises, gives me the opportunity to explore dead ends, the opportunity to try and to fail. I wouldn't want it otherwise, and that is a kind of purity that I miss with much of what many "names" in the Art scene produce, all those luminaries who have "found their style", as the euphemism goes for "have found something that sells, and stick to it".

Purity and depth cannot be forced. They must be found, and I fully agree with Joe that deserts may help in this regard :)

I further agree that risks must be taken. I am not so sure about his examples though. Yes, Ballen is a photographer who wanders the disturbing realms of dreams, but this is not risk, this is mainstream since almost 90 years. He does so in a very convincing way, and had he one book in that style, I would be amazed. Seeing that all his work repeats that same recipe, I can't see the depth any more. The repetition uses the effect up, the work freezes into an empty pose.

I firmly believe that passion is the key, and that in order to find the purity and the depth, we have to wade through shallow murk at times. There is no way around it, neither for the artist nor for the visitor. Nobody can produce a masterpiece every day, but if you don't try, if you are not productive, it won't ever happen.

This image is funny. Somebody had written "KILL", and someone else had corrected it to "KISS" later. Doesn't it bring in an interesting aspect if I tell you that the whole original text said "KILL ALL RACISTS"? Sure, killing is not my thing, but kissing?? Ambivalence is everywhere and art is always a comment.

The Song of the Day is "A Thousand Kisses Deep" from Leonard Cohen's 2001 album "Ten New Songs". Hear it on YouTube.

592 - My Eye On You

I hope you don't mind a big eye looking at you :)

This is another found image, this time today in the afternoon, at my way from work. I began early today, at 6:30 am and left work only at 6:00 pm, but thanks to daylight saving time (Oh how I love this!! Why can't we have it all year?), I was still able to get some sunny images.

Sun or not, I finally ended up with this: an oval window in a door, some reflections and some warmly lit stucco inside. Like so many times over the last six months I used my Sigma 70/2.8. What a great lens for walking around and capturing details!

The Song of the Day is "My Eye On You" from the 1983 Bette Midler album "No Frills".

591 - Somebody Changed The Lock To My Door

I saw this in the morning at the door to a second hand shop in Josefstädter Straße. What drew me in, was the pattern of gold and warm, dark green. Is it coincidence that I read the essay "Melancholy Objects" from Susan Sontag's "On Photography" right now?

The Song of the Day is "Somebody Changed The Lock" from the 1972 Dr. John album "Dr. John's Gumbo".

590 - Thru And Thru

I had only half an hour for shooting today, thus I took the car, drove slowly along until I found a meadow with a nice mix of flowers, and there I took some images of bees and another variation on the theme of photographing through some kind of blurry foreground.

I love this image because the view through the grass and the near flowers on a group of flowers in some distance produces a totality that, even though it does not reflect what we see through our eyes, nevertheless reflects my feeling that flowers are everywhere at the moment. It is an immersing view.

No news on SoFoBoMo. I'm in for some real stress this week :)

The Song of the Day is "Thru And Thru" from the 1994 Rolling Stones album "Voodoo Lounge". See them live on YouTube.

589 - The Vanishing Act

This is the result of another day off of SoFoBoMo. We were in Slovenia, about 90 minutes from home, and we came to see a fascinating phenomenon, a lake that's only there in winter and spring. In summer it completely dries up, only to re-appear half a year later.

Phenomena like this are not uncommon in Slovenia. Geologically this is a karst landscape, porous limestone full of caves and underground rivers, rivers that come out of a cave, only to vanish in a canyon some miles down, coming back to the light of day somewhere else.

We plan to come back some time in August for the other side of the story. It must be interesting to see the boats lying on the ground when there is no lake at all.

Or maybe that's not completely true. Some parts of the lake seemingly don't vanish completely, or if they do, they do it so late, that no grass grows where the water leaves. These parts are covered by a thick layer of dead reeds, an ideal place for small spiders. Wherever you tread, there are hundreds of them.

We finished the day with a trip to the peak of a nearby mountain. There, at 1114 meters above sea level, is a restaurant with a fantastic view on the lake below. This last image was taken from the forest road up the mountain.

The Song of the Day is "Vanishing Act" from the 2003 Lou Reed album "The Raven".

588 - SoFoBoMo - Progressing Pretty Well

Funnily enough, having stress and no typical photo opportunity at all, that's always a catalyst for me. In the morning, after having written yesterday's entry, I had no time to take images, and in fact I arrived at work literally at the last minute.

I had already decided to skip image taking for today, when on my way to the train I looked through this fence.

Vienna's southern railway station is one big construction site for the next years. You have already seen some images from there, and today, looking through this fence, I saw the signs reading "VIENNA SIGHTSEEING".

Is that bizarre? In all this disorder, in all this chaos, in the middle of a place that's as unattractive for tourists as it can get, there is a lost piece of touristic infrastructure. And in front of that ... flowers. Well ... that's pretty, I thought.

There was not much processing needed for the Image of the Day. It was the first thing that I did on the train, and then I began to process more SoFoBoMo images. I managed to do five of them while on the train, and this brings the score up to 22. On the other hand, it's a week now since I shot them, and there is only one more week to go. Still no idea how to make a book.



The Song of the Day is "Pretty" from the 2003 Beautiful South album "Gaze". See a live version on YouTube.

587 - The Tower

Yesterday I took a short break from SoFoBoMo editing. I went to a local park and tried to realize a concept that had been in my head for some time: Wide angle landscape images with tarot cards in them. The idea was to bring in a surreal element via the juxtaposition of reality and the symbols of the Major Arcana.

I failed miserably. I cannot remember a session that produced so much unusable rubbish in years. This image, although sub-par, is the only that I could even think of using. Well, let's forget about it :)

The Song of the Day is "I May Be Wrong, But I Won't Be Wrong Always" from the 1968 Ten Years After release "Undead".

586 - SoFoBoMo - Editing Till Daybreak

This is an image that I made Wednesday morning. I had risen early to write Tuesday's entry, and this is what it looked like, out of my kitchen window. Well, sort of. I had seen the strong color contrast between the artificially lit window frames and the blue outside. I took some images, and when I felt satisfied, I went to the computer and found ... the memory card already in the card reader. I had taken the images into the internal buffer, and when I turned the camera off, they were gone. Oh well, there's a first time for everything, I guess :)

Of course, when I returned to the kitchen, the light was gone. What you see here is a careful and thorough reconstruction of what it would have looked like when taken earlier. No problem, just a little work with color temperature, color relations and tonal values. Why easy when you can have it the hard way?

SoFoBoMo progresses. Not in wild strides, but it does. Still, I'll have to speed up now. The problem is, while some images come easy, some really need attention. This one, for instance, took me three iterations until I was satisfied with the distribution of light. Now I feel it's perfectly balanced, but that's after more than an hour of work.

Another problem is the forest light. I want a wide variety of colors, but there must still be a green cast. I need to control contrasts and I want nice vivid saturation, but without being gaudy. See the problem? Here we have the result of another two hours. And still I have no idea of how to make a book :)

The Song of the Day is "Daybreak" from Lisa Ekdahl's 2002 album "Heaven Earth & Beyond". No sound samples from Amazon, but at least a commercial with part of the song on YouTube. A nice song and quite fitting, as I see day break while I write these very words.

585 - SoFoBoMo - No Progress On A Rainy Tuesday

Forget about yesterday. It was a rainy, gloomy day, I had supposed to make big strides in editing SoFoBoMo images, but instead I lay down early (just for an hour) - and slept till morning. Thus: no progress.

This image was shot down from out of my living room window. Yesterday that was all creativity that I could muster. Forget about yesterday.

The Song of the Day is a Blues. It must be. "Rainy Tuesday" from the 1963 Alexis Korner album "Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated". A video? You're kidding!

584 - SoFoBoMo - Slow Down

Niels Henriksen of "My Camera World" today asked me to make the "additional" images on the blog a bit bigger, e.g. double their size. Well, I admit, on a 24" monitor they come out a tad small. The problem is, what I use here are sizes that get automatically generated by SmugMug, my image host, upon upload. The thumbnails are the smallest size, but the next size, "small" is already three to four times bigger. That's too much. On the other hand, creating the images at sizes fitting into a 200x200 square and uploading them myself, that would take me much more time than I can afford. Sorry Niels, I've tried, but "small" makes the page look horrible. As I see no easy solution, I'll to keep things as they are.

SoFoBoMo progress is slowing down. I have processed only three images tonight, one of them here for your pleasure. What I do at the moment is making all basic adjustments of color and contrast, clone things out, apply vignettes, re-light parts of the scene to support flow, and some things more. I will certainly have to come back to some images though. Later, when all these basic steps are done (before end of the week), I'll get back to colors and try to create more of a consistent "look".

As regards my daily photography, today that was restricted to my way home from work. Vienna is a beautiful city, and "Spittelberg", the historical center of its 7th district, even more so. The first image is of an alleyway partially obscured by the branches of a tree. Like all other images of today it has been taken with the Sigma 30/1.4, this one at f1.4.

The next one is the image that I originally wanted to take as Image of the Day. It's part of a lattice in front of a window of a historical building.

Finally I decided to take the chairs instead. They better fit the title of today's SoFoBoMo report. Oops! What's that? Titles choosing images??

Like the alleyway this image is an unprocessed JPEG right out of the camera. It has a slightly greenish cast that I easily could have removed, but that's what the light is in this old, mossy backyard. Sometimes a cast is not a cast but simply atmosphere :)

The Song of the Day is "Slow Down" from India Arie's 2002 album "Voyage to India". No video, sorry.

583 - SoFoBoMo - Processing On A Rainy Day

Rain was forecast, rain was to be expected, rain it did. Who could be upset? In fact, I very much appreciated the time, because sifting through 140 images, not to find one single Image of the Day but to identify and process as many as possible, that's quite a task. As already mentioned, I use Lab processing on all these images, because there's really a need to drive the different shades of green apart. I am not really sure about the colors yet, I may get back and make final adjustments later, but that's easy in Lab.

So far the session looks good to me. I have just counted, and even when I'm really conservative, I can come up with more than 35 usable images. Still, I'll allow myself the luxury to go back next weekend. There will be different light, I may use different lenses or at least I may be in a different mood.

Seems like image making is not my problem. Stringing them together ain't either, because as I have outlined in my kick-off post, the order is already given by the sequence of places along the path. What troubles me, is only that I have no idea so far of how to make a book :)

Today's Image of the Day is not from the SoFoBoMo session, it's genuinely from today. Employing the Sigma 70/2.8, I have ventured into the garden, well, more along the wall, just as far as the roof would still cover me, and this was the only flower in reach :)

The Song of the Day is "It Feels Like Rain" from Aaron Neville's 1991 album "Warm Your Heart".

582 - SoFoBoMo - The First Attack

Yesterday, after my first SoFoBoMo shooting trip, I was too tired to do much with the images at all, much less posting a blog entry. I had tried to realize concept #3, a real trip along a route, and I did it in a gorge in the southern mountains of Carinthia, the so called "Tscheppaschlucht".

The idea was, to simply follow the trail along the creek. I ended up with a five hour walk and 140 images taken. Enough for a book? Probably, but I will return anyway. Almost all images were shot with the Sigma 10-20, mostly at or around 10mm. In hindsight I'd like to have more with other lenses. You know, any lens brings with it a certain way of seeing, and I'd like to explore some different angles before I call it a book.

Processing will be done in Lab mode, using a "Man from Mars" for color correction. The images were originally shot at "Cloudy" white balance. I did not trust the automatics with all that yellow/green foliage. Conversion in Camera RAW was done to 5000 Kelvin / +10. That's a nice base for the Lab manipulations afterwards. Overall I try to keep processing conservative.

The Song of the Day is "The First Attack" from the 1987 Proclaimers album "This Is the Story". No sound samples but what Amazon has. Sorry.

581 - SoFoBoMo At Last

It's Friday, I'm sitting on the train, and here is another bicycle portrait. In a comment, Ted Byrne recently asked me to present my images of bicycles in some kind of collection, on a separate web page, in a photo book or something like that.

Well, I've already thought about that, and it would have been an interesting SoFoBoMo project. Trouble is, that SoFoBoMo rules require at least 35 images shot within a 31 day interval between first of April and last of May (that's what Paul Butzi, who invented SoFoBoMo calls a "fuzzy month"). 35 good bicycle images, that's quite a lot to be shot in a month. That would have required finding more than one bicycle per day on average. Suffice to say that I gave up on the idea.

I registered on Paul's SoFoBoMo announcement page, but ever since then I've held back. I lacked a project. Part of the problem is my weekly travel from Vienna to Carinthia and back. Now that I think of it, bicycles wouldn't have been such a bad idea. You find them in both places :)

Another idea was to photograph portraits of strangers on the train. After all, I spend eight hours a week traveling, and most of the time I could ask someone. Let's see, that's four weekends, probably five if I position the "fuzzy month" well, though creating the last images in the very last days would mean to severely press my luck. What if I didn't find anyone on the last weekend? OK, that means four weekends, nine images per weekend, and that could mean at least three people with three images, but better two images per person, probably 17 people and a self-portrait as the last image. Still, quite a lot, probably manageable, but I soon found out I had another problem: On most weekends I need that travel time to catch up with my daily blog!

Finally there is the fact, that I am not even excited by the idea. It would have been an interesting project, but probably not for me. I enjoy having silence and peace on the train, I enjoy working here, and when it's busy in the compartment (just as it is now), then I hear music. Sacred music by Mozart at the moment. You see, I'm probably not the type for this kind of assignment :)

Still, reading Paul Butzi's blog, Paul Lester's and Gordon McGregor's (all three have finished their books by now), seeing the SoFoBoMo site, and not having a book of my own, that's unsatisfying, to say the least.

There are only two weeks left now, I still have no project, not a single image, the only thing I have is an InDesign training DVD that I've bought, eight hours of training and I've seen not a single minute so far.

Anyway, this lack of a book is nagging me. I was already sure to give up (oh that bitter taste of defeat!), when I thought about it again today, and suddenly I saw the whole idea of a project from a new angle.

It's hard to find unrelated objects of a kind, at least 35 of them in one month, and then take good images of all of them, images that also combine to a meaningful sequence. It's even harder when you have a day job, and my weekly travels contribute to the problem. I can take landscapes on weekends, but in Vienna I do mostly street photography. How do you select a common kind of object?

So what, did I think today, if I don't spread picture taking at all? What if I select a single day in Vienna or in Carinthia and do all my photography in that one day? Impossible? Maybe, but probably not if I re-think the concept of a project.

A book, regardless of type, literature or photo book, is by its very nature a sequence. What if I center the project around a naturally sequential concept?

So what is sequential? Order? The passing of time? A journey? Life?

Every book is a journey and so is life. That looks promising. I still have no clear vision of what I want to do, so let's inspect some options.

I could let time pass, but stay in one place. Well, that's fine for a year, with seasons, different weather and all the small changes that happen in a year, that may even make an interesting book. Probably this could even be done in a city like Vienna, standing at a busy corner. Something like "From Dawn Till Dusk". It needs a busy, interesting place with much variability during the day, some luck, and it could well work. "Naschmarkt" comes to my mind. It's the biggest market in Vienna. People begin working there at sunrise, and at night it ends with a big cleanup. I'd have to ask the shop owners, but I am quite sure most would agree.

What about an abstract, conceptional journey from far to near? Think about a forest seen in a distance. Now the same forest, a little nearer, nearer still, a group of trees at the side of the forest, a single tree, a branch, some leaves, a single leaf, part of a leaf, concrete to abstract. If this is not enough to yield a minimum of 35 images, I could use the same concept for two, three, maybe four such "journeys" and make these parts of the book. A forest, a mountain, a village, a river. "Inspections". Nice title :)

What about a real journey? Well, rather a short trip, I guess. Something like walking from one end of Vienna to the other. If I carefully plan my way, I'll hardly have trouble finding interesting places, but even if not, if I have to use something "unrelated" for part of the trip, then it will still be related, simply by the fact that it is there, on my route.

I have not decided yet, but it is clear that I better do something this weekend in Carinthia (that would be Sunday, I think) or during the next week in Vienna, though that would almost certainly need a day off from work. In any case I have to have the images ready before next weekend. That will leave me eight more days to produce a book. Crazy? Sure. Funny? Certainly! Possible? I have no idea :)

It seems like SoFoBoMo is not over yet. Stay tuned.

The Song of the Day is "At Last", and the version I mean is the one by the ever so fantastic Mary Coughlan. It's on her 2002 album "Red Blues". Of course I have no video, but there is one of Etta James' version. It's different, but it will give you an idea. While Etta James is very much Rhythm and Blues, Mary Coughlan is strictly Blues. Well, both are great and it's a great song.

580 - Two of Us

These are the images of yesterday, Thursday. Not exactly my most productive day, but nevertheless I could take some images on my way home.

Both images for today were shot with the Sigma 30/1.4, my most-used lens at the moment. It's funny, at any time I have such a lens that I keep on the camera almost all the time, and that I return to quickly, after I have been forced to change. The 30/1.4 was hardly used at all for almost half a year, now it's back in fashion.

The first image, the flowers, was more of a safe image to fall back, should everything else fail. These flowers grow in a park that I pass by when leaving work. I have no idea what they are called. Anybody?

When I had already given up searching, shortly before I arrived home, I saw what you see in the Image of the Day, a twisted wooden stick in front of a local flower shop, in extreme side light, lit by the low sun.

I took two exposures, one horizontal, one vertical, and when I inspected them later, none was satisfying. The horizontal had this very delicately curved shadow that vanished in the corner, but it lacked the light stripe at the right side. The vertical had this stripe, but the best part of the shadow was missing and the lower part of what was left of the shadow was plump.

What you see here is a combination of the two images, made using Photoshop's "Auto-Align Layers" and "Auto-Blend Layers" functions. Both are new in CS3 and they are one of the many reasons why it's a good idea to upgrade, even when you have a camera that is supported by an earlier version. In my case, with my Nikon D300, I didn't have the choice anyway. As an incentive to upgrade, Adobe chose to make Camera RAW 4 incompatible with CS2 and to not support new cameras in Camera RAW 3 :)

The Song of the Day is "Two of Us", of course from the 1970 Beatles album "Let It Be". See a video on YouTube.

579 - Boulevard Of Dreams

I don't crop my images very often out of their original composition. I do crop, yes, but mostly to take care of a slight oversight, correct a sloppiness of execution. I don't normally do something like what I've done here.

The reason for it is, that I see a randomness in any format. Sure, there are proportions that please the eye more than others, but once the proportions are set, you only have the problem of using this frame to cut out a piece of reality, isolate it, make plausible the claim that this is a piece able to stand on its own, a piece that has its own, independent meaning. You make this claim at the time you take the image, and it may have merits or not, but if it has not, you have failed initially.

Only in rare cases I initially frame an image in full knowledge that I will crop it to, say, square, framing it for cropping from the beginning. Normally all other cases are essentially failures. Sure, something can often be done, some of it by cropping out of the original composition, but most of the time this still tastes like failure, and rather than cropping, I go out and take the image again. My ways are and my life is, that this is frequently possible and feasible. Then I go out and try framing again, doing it until I have what I intended or am satisfied that there is no proper solution.

Not so here. I was satisfied with the original. There is only a tiny crop from the right, that brings the strong verticals more on a third, but otherwise I have not touched composition. What I have done by cropping is the application of new proportions, cinematic proportions, proportions that tell the story better than others. I don't do this very often.

Why do you crop? Do you? And if not, why not?

The Song of the Day is the excellent "The Cutter" from Echo & The Bunnymen's 1985 album "Songs to Learn and Sing". Enjoy the video on YouTube.

578 - Twisted

Bicycles fascinate me. Well, you wouldn't have guessed :)

It's easy to see why. A bicycle has a very simple architecture. Straight lines in the frame, ellipses as wheels, and then there are these wonderful curves in the cables of the brakes. Take these simple lines and some lines of pavement, a wall or other such elementary pieces of architecture, and you can do all sorts of geometric tricks with them. And then there are these angles that bicycles take, when leaning against a wall or a signpost. It always looks somehow cool and ... twisted?

The Song of the Day, "Twisted", is from Lambert, Hendricks & Ross 1959 debut album "The Hottest New Group in Jazz". I even found a video on YouTube. The divine Annie Ross, accompanied by Count Basie on piano. Not shabby!

577 - The First Day Of Summer

Today I was swimming. Not in heated or thermal water, no, in a lake. Today was the first day of summer.

Photographically I can offer you ferns. The only alternative would have been another landscape, and not even a good one :)

The Song of the Day expresses my hope for a good season. It's "The Longest Summer" from Pat Metheny's 1992 album "Secret Story". YouTube has the video.

576 - All The World Is Green

That's just another pretty landscape for Sunday. I was up to something different, but things did not work out as intended. I'll see into it today.

The Song of the Day is "All The World Is Green" from Tom Waits' 2002 album "Blood Money". See him perform live on YouTube.

575 - A Ray Of Light

It's Sunday night now and I write the entry for Saturday. Saturday afternoon I was out photographing for an hour, nothing special, only some wide-angle landscapes, but the really spectacular thing was, what I saw when I returned home.

Situations like these are really impossible to photograph. The dynamic range exceeds everything that sensors or film can record, yes, it exceeds even the range of the human eye. I had made two exposures, one with a completely burned out sky and a second with most of the sky intact, but everything else pretty lost in darkness.

The two exposures were from slightly different points of view and impossible to combine. I've decided to use the second one, the dark one. This is a 14 layer job with 8 distinct masks, but ultimately I think I made it. It's pretty amazing what enormous reserves the RAW files of Nikon's D300 have.

The Song of the Day is "Ray Of Light" from Madonna's 1998 album of the same title. See the original video on YouTube.

574 - Light Out Of Darkness

Normally I don't do this. I've already shown this portrait as a second example in the tutorial for Tuesday, "571 - Them There Eyes II". On the other hand, this was not the Image of the Day for Tuesday, and the image was actually shot on Friday, as an example for an utterly badly lit portrait, a worst case example, thus the timing is OK, because this is the entry for Friday. And then, apart from the fact that I had nothing better, I am also pretty damn proud of what I've achieved here :)

If you are curious now and haven't read the tutorial yet, just follow the link above.

The Song of the Day is "Light Out Of Darkness" from Shirley Horn's 1993 album "Light out of Darkness (A Tribute to Ray Charles)". Sorry, neither video nor lyrics are available.