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!

613 - Shiny Things

It is only now and only slowly, that I find the time to enjoy some of the books that came out of SoFoBoMo. One that particularly inspires me because of its wonderful fresh look on details "in between", is Esther Emma Jongste's "Colorful Daily Details". I'm loving it and it influences the way I see. Yesterday's telephone receiver (which is currently on Fine Art Photoblog) came out of that, and in a way today's image as well. After two weeks of fisheye images I enjoy being back to small details.

It's early in the morning now, I was too tired to post yesterday. Work is tough at the moment. When I left, light was already failing. I probably should have asked two guys, who were practicing bicycle jumps, if I could take some images. I would even have had my flash with me, but after 11 hours of work I could not muster the energy. Pretty silly though. I guess I could have gone away with some first class action shots.

Anyway. I decided for the slow route, and on my way home I took a series of images of the usual things, cars, street corners, graffiti and such. This closeup image of a car back light is what I liked most.

The Song of the Day is "Shiny Things", again from the great Tom Waits' Opus Magnum "Orphans". Take the time and hear into the sound sample on Amazon's site. The only thing I've found on YouTube was an arrangement for ukulele, but - hey, why not? It's a pretty little melody.

Bill Birtch and I are playing ping pong with these songs from Orphans, every once in a while he chooses one and then I do, but they are really that good. Oh, by the way, Bill has a pretty nice image of a bicycle over there. You know, I love bicycles :)

612 - Private Goes Public

It's a funny feeling, now that SoFoBoMo is over for me as well. I feel ... relaxed. The pressure is gone. Sure, I will go back once more and produce the physical book, but there is no deadline to that.

Do I feel tired? Do I need a creative break? Not really. I probably need more sleep, yes, but otherwise I feel as creative as ever. I guess the reason is, that I have not spent much time shooting, actually not more than six hours. Most work went into post-processing, and that, although tedious, was fascinating and interesting. After all, I have never before tried to create such a big and consistent body of work, much less from one shooting. In a way it was a similar experience to that of making the exhibition in January.

Yesterday night, on the train from Carinthia, I have tried my next book, some "Best of 2006/2007", just a compilation of the best images of the first 15 months of my blog, and although it was technically no problem, the result was rubbish. This is another lesson: I may have the means now to produce a book in very short time, but this is no substitute for a vision and for proper planning and design. Otherwise I may produce something in the form of a book, but it won't be a good book :)

Now for today's images. Actually I like both of them. The vandalized telephone receiver caught my eye because of the color and, even more so, because of the curve of the cable. I finally settled for the other image though. Austria is currently host to the European Soccer Championship, and today was the match Austria vs Germany. Thousands of people were on the streets, mostly on their way to one of the public viewing areas in the so-called fan zones, and what I saw in Westbahnstraße, was one of the funnier ideas. Some people had taken a TV set out onto the sidewalk, along with some furniture, and were viewing in public. Someone made a video, and they really seemed to enjoy themselves. Oh yes, Austria lost 0:1, but that was to be expected :)

The Song of the Day is "Private Goes Public", the last song on the European version of the 1992 Suzanne Vega album "99.9 F°".

611 - SoFoBoMo - Late But Done

Here we are, that's what I hinted at in my two earlier posts of today: The book is finished. Over the course of the last two days I have made the final touches to the images, finished some text that I had begun last Sunday on the train, produced the book in InDesign, created a PDF and uploaded it to ISSUU. I've also submitted it to sofobomo.org - let's see if it gets accepted. No way to deny it, the book was finished two weeks after the official end of SoFoBoMo '08, but at least it was done in less than a month, and that's what it was all about.

Paul Butzi recently posted some questions about the whole experience, so here are my answers:

• Was it fun? - Well, sure, of course. Actually I had expected it to be much more tedious and less fun than it was.


• What sort of things did you learn? - Oh, many. For instance that when you participate in a project, it is a good idea to start on time. Or that when you embark on a journey, you have to do it with all your heart. Or that thinking about a problem tends to diminish it greatly. Hmm ... all things that I would have known if it had been an IT project :)


• Was your experience pretty much what you expected, or it did turn out that doing the book was wildly different from what you’d pictured when you signed up? - I wouldn't say wildly different, but I have greatly underestimated the time that it would take to harmonize the images. In such a series of images, small differences in light are enough to make successive images different in the overall look. What the camera saw, can only be taken as an approximation. I have worked on all these images in Lab mode, and I am glad that I did so. It greatly simplified color corrections late in the process.


• What aspects of the whole thing were frustrating? - Only the time before I began, but that is only because I did not even really think about it. I presumed, a project would naturally spring into existence and was angry that it didn't.


• What aspects were most rewarding? - Browsing the finished book on ISSUU. Apart from that, well, I think mostly that I learned so many things, and that nothing turned out hard at all.


• Having participated this year (regardless of whether you finished it or not), would you ever want to do it again? - Yes, absolutely. The next time I will know how to approach the hardest part, i.e. finding a project, and I will have no problem starting when everybody else does. In fact I can't wait until next year, I will do at least one other book this year. Maybe it will be the "Naschmarkt" project that I have written about in the book, that means staying in a place, the biggest market place in Vienna, for a whole day and taking photographs from the time people arrive and get their deliveries, through the whole day, until at night the place gets cleaned up. We'll see. Maybe I'll do a "Best of 2007" and a "Best of 2008" as well. With the templates that I have, making a book that's structurally similar to this one, should not take more than two hours, at least for the PDF.


• Do you have suggestions about ways to change things to make it more successful/fun/educational/rewarding for participants in future SoFoBoMo events? - Not really. Thanks to you all and to your efforts this was as painless as it could be.


• What resources did you find helpful? - Paul Lester's "book in an hour", Some of Gordon's links, the hints pointing to ISSUU, and of course the free Blurbs templates on The Art of Engineering. I still had no more than cursory looks into the InDesign training DVD that I've bought.


• What aspects of SoFoBoMo were positive surprises? What aspects were disappointments? - Positive: I had no idea that it would be so simple to make a book. Master pages and the "place gun" in InDesign, these are real time savers. I had an incredibly simple layout though.


• How about that fuzzy month thing? Did that work for you, or not? - Obviously not, but that's nobody's but my fault. Starting so late completely disconnected me from most of the social experience, and I won't do that again. Still, even if it was a very solitary job, it was great to do it. Would I change the rules for next year? Well, probably we could reduce the fuzziness to 2 weeks, like Paul Lester suggested, but on the other hand, it seems to have worked for most participants. No, I'd keep it. It's a nice quirk :)

Here we are. And now? Was that it??

Not really. I have a PDF and a publication on ISSUU, thus the formal requirements for SoFoBoMo (apart from the time frame obviously) are fulfilled, but of course I want to get this beast printed on real paper. Many people seem to have gone the Blurb route, so that's probably what I'll do as well. I guess that's a job for the next weekend.

And then, of course I'll put my template up for download and maybe write a tutorial about what I've learned. This may not be much, but I think I have quite a good process now, at least for this narrow application. After all, when I looked at my book this morning, I found it too small for my taste. It took me about an hour to completely re-create it from scratch at a bigger size.

That's it for today. Here is the book. Enjoy!

The Song of the Day is "Late Show" from the 1986 Laurie Anderson album "Home Of The Brave". See the video on YouTube.

610 - Near To You

Yesterday we had rain most of the time. I only went out on the terrace and made some macro images of leaves, but that was OK. I was busy anyway, and I wouldn't have had time for hunting motives. The reason? See it this evening :)

The Song of the Day is "Near To You" by the great Nina Simone. I have it on a fantastic sampler called "The Tomato Collection". Not the best thinkable quality overall, but what a collection of songs!

609 - Machines R Us

Today is Sunday and I have three entries to deliver. Well, it's for a reason that I'm late. You'll see :)

This image is from Friday morning. You know, the main problem when photographing details with a fisheye is, that it is almost impossible to get rid of the environment. Go as near as you want, everything around you is still visible. It bends further back, it moves further to the edges, but it is still there. Here I have solved the problem by cropping.

Post-processing was a matter of controlling contrast and keeping the colors fresh. I am not sure if this is the optimum, but I guess I could have done worse. This is really one of the most tenacious problems with the fisheye, and I can't stress it enough: the enormous field of vision almost always includes something overly bright, thus hitting the right exposure is much harder than with a normal lens. I don't know if you follow the discussion about RAW vs JPEG over at The Online Photographer, initiated by Ctein and followed up by Mike, but shooting with a fisheye is only one more reason to shoot RAW. You need every headroom that you can get.

The Song of the Day is "Machines R Us" from the 2001 Faithless album "Outrospective". No lyrics, none necessary :)

608 - On The Street Where You Live

Oh my, for two weeks I had nothing but fisheye images. It was time for a change, and what a change it is. You can't imagine how incredibly relaxing it is, to be back to the Sigma 70/2.8. I took this image while sitting outside of a bar, drinking a good glass of "Starobrno", a really fantastic Czech beer - and I was feeling fine :)

The Song of the Day is "On The Street Where You Live" from "My Fair Lady", interpreted by Mel Tormé on "Mel Tormé Swings Shubert Alley". See him perform live many years later on YouTube.

607 - Let There Be More Light

I had some other nice images yesterday, and I was already willing to throw this one away. I had shot it at 8:11pm, when I just had left work. The image was badly lit, with a nice sky, but overall way too blue. It had some comic-like look, charming in a way, but still, I had already deleted it when I finally decided to take it back, load it in Photoshop and see if it has any potential. 14 layers later the Image of the Day is what I got. I like it :)

The Song of the Day is "Let There Be More Light" from the 1969 Pink Floyd album "A Saucerful of Secrets". Hear it on YouTube.

606 - Made In Portugal

It's not over yet. I'm still struggling with this lens and most of the time it wins. My ratio of keepers is terribly low these days, and this is also nothing more than another lukewarm approach. I promised you junk, didn't I? :)

The Song of the Day is "Fado Português De Nós" from Mariza's 2005 album "Transparente".

605 - One More Round

This is the image of yesterday, Monday. I'm a little bit behind my schedule, because yesterday evening I was too tired for anything, and today I spent hours visiting portfolios. You may have seen that Fine Art Photoblog looks for one or two additional photographers. We had a total of 44 submissions, which is absolutely incredible, and at the moment we are busy casting our initial votes. This is not only a lot of work, it is painful as well. You simply have to narrow the selection down, and with so many quality portfolios it is not possible to do everybody justice. See for yourself (scroll down for the portfolio links).

As I said, at the moment we cast initial votes, five each, and the top-ranked portfolios will be discussed further. I'm sorry that this is such a lengthy process, but at the moment we are seven photographers on four continents and in six time zones. Communication can be challenging under these circumstances :)

Yesterday saw no progress in book making, neither will there be today. I'll rather write another blog entry.

The Song of the Day is "One More Round" from Bette Midler's 1990 album "Some People's Lives".

604 - Hiding In The Shadows

Well, that's really nothing special, but more was not possible today. I drove over to Keutschacher See, swam a little, and on the wayside, when I drove through a forest, I found this flower, hiding in the shadows. Basically the same recipe as yesterday. Apart from that I was editing SoFoBoMo images. Goodness, that's tedious.

The Song of the Day is "Hiding In The Shadows" from the 1999 Peter Green Splinter Group album "Destiny Road". No lyrics needed, it's an instrumental :)

603 - The Garden Of Earthly Delights

Landscapes with the fisheye, that's still elusive for me, but using it in the typical wide-angle style with a prominent foreground works quite well. This image was taken at the entrance to our parcel of land at Keutschacher See, the lake where I normally go swimming and where I did so yesterday. Btw, this is a "Philadelphus Coronarius" or "Mock Orange" shrub :)

The Song of the Day is "Garden Of Earthly Delights" from the 1989 XTC album "Oranges & Lemons". Hear it on YouTube.

602 - The Day That Jackie Jumped The Jail

Sometimes you've got only one chance. This is the single image that I shot on Friday. I took it on my way to the train, just as I went up the escalator from the Underground. After the gloomy darkness below, I suddenly saw a blue sky and a flash of strong yellow. I did not think about it, I just raised the camera and, without any conscious effort, got this, just in the right split-second.

I combined three versions from one RAW file to cope with the enormous contrast, but otherwise I could have taken the original composition as shot. That I still cropped it, well, I saw the chance to get some lines int corners, and I simply couldn't resist. The original was not bad, but this one is even stronger.

The Song of the Day is "The Day That Jackie Jumped The Jail" from the 1991 Deacon Blue album "Fellow Hoodlums". See them live on YouTube. The song is in the second part of the video.