656 - Bomba O Non Bomba

If you are a photographer, you have read the recent stories about photographers being harassed for taking images on the streets. It seems to be particularly bad in the UK and in the US, here in Austria it's currently bearable. Remember "524 - For You Blue"? I took that image in a public bath. Granted, I used a small point'n'shoot camera in little more than a plastic bag, thus I may not have looked particularly dangerous, but it could as well have gone severely wrong. I didn't know then, and I guess in the UK I could have ended up in jail.

As comforting as things still are on this front, the overall climate of hysteria and xenophobia has not spared us. We'll be having general elections at the end of September, and - as always the last years - the main issue is the invasion of foreigners that we seem to suffer. Seemingly there are only two positions that the parties want to take: open xenophobia and weak defensiveness. Only two small parties, the Green and the newly resurrected Liberals, stand up openly against this kind of populism, but their voices are drowned in the never-ending waves of brain wash that are spewn forth by populist politicians and the yellow press. Tell me, is it really possible that this spiral can only ever go downward???

It wouldn't take very much to break the circle, would it? Some logic maybe? Well, without people of other nationalities we would not even be able to run this state at all. Not its economy and certainly not its health system. So what?

The Image of the Day, a lonely paper bag standing on the sidewalk, immediately reminded me of the other big hysteria of our times: terrorism! Sure, I did not believe that it contains a bomb, but even the very thought of it is perverse. We had a similar situation in the 1970s with some incidents of terrorism in Austria and especially Germany, but nothing compared to the witch hunt after 9/11.

Please don't get me wrong. I know what 9/11 meant to people in the US. Basically it was the first act of war on your home turf since Pearl Harbor, and there was a terrible count of victims and so forth, but now just have a look at some statistics on the pages of "Drive and Stay Alive". In 2001, the number of total road deaths in the USA was 42,196. That's more than 10 times the victims of the attacks, and these numbers stayed pretty constant over the years. What did the US? In an economically tight situation, they fought the most expensive war of their history, risked their international reputation by using methods of torture, and they didn't even get Bin Laden. Is that strange?

Well, it's so easy to criticize the powers when you are not even in a position to make their faults, but what about Europe? We try to keep out of military action (which I think is a good idea), but we blindly follow the American lead when it's about giving up our rights. CCTV cameras everywhere, total surveillance of all communication, a constant erosion of constitutional rights in the name of God Safety, we have all that. And, guess what, in Austria, as a small country, we had only about 1000 road deaths in 2001 and were down to approximately 700 in 2007, but we had ZERO victims of terrorism since the one or two in the 1970s. Try to divide that: gives quite a ratio!

What can I do? Certainly vote against xenophobia and populism, for freedom and rationalism, for democracy ultimately. Stand up, raise my voice. Gosh, it's so little, sometimes I'd like to despair.

Have you ever read Albert Camus' "The Plague"? If not, well, if I would have to recommend one single book, none more, a book to learn by heart and to literally become the book, just like in Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451", then I would certainly choose "The Plague" for its central message, that it is our damn job to carry on regardless.

Sorry for the overall depressive tone. It has to be said at times.

The Song of the Day is "Bomba O Non Bomba" from Antonello Venditti's 1978 album "Sotto Il Segno Dei Pesci". My zodiac sign actually. See the original video or a live version from 1983.

655 - On A Lonely Avenue

Science Fiction ages rapidly. Read anything from the 1950s and you know what I mean. Not so Fantasy, and that may be a reason why I ws always affected more by Fantasy than by SciFi. In fact I am quite sure I have not read any SciFi book in 20 years. Until yesterday, that is.

Yesterday, shortly after I took this image of a fence in Kaiserstraße, I went into a bookstore to find some Fantasy books. Their English section has quite a lot, but as most Fantasy comes in at least trilogies, it is rather difficult to find something complete.

For me, with books it's a little bit like with music: I know some names, and when I see a new book of one of my favorite authors, I normally buy it, even if I know that I am not going to read it at once. And it's not only that: I routinely scan the shelves for certain names. Katherine Kurtz is such a name, but the sequel to "Childe Morgan" is obviously still in the works.

Another candidate is of course Ursula K. Le Guin, and from her I have bought three books, two SciFi and one, "Voices", the second part of her Fantasy trilogy "The Annals of the Western Shore". One of the SciFi books, "The Lathe Of Heaven", is what I currently read. It is set in a then-near future, now actually in the past, but this does no harm at all.

This is not a book about strange inventions, not a book about technology, just like all of Le Guin's books it is about people. In this case it is about a certain guy living in an overpopulated, run-down Portland at a time when pollution and climatic change have done away with the polar ice caps, the seas have risen and Oregon has even more rain than it already has in reality.

The guy, George Orr, gets psychiatric treatment, because he tries to suppress his dreams by drug abuse. He does this, because every once in a while his dreams "come true" in a very special way. He may dream of an alternate reality with an alternate history, and when he awakes, not only has the alternate reality become real, even history and the memories of people have changed.

At first his psychiatrist does not believe him, but then he begins to abuse George's dreams to actively change reality. About that and about the relation between psychiatrist and patient is this fabulous little book.

In a way that's not so very far from what we do in photography. We dream up worlds, and when we're successful, people believe in these worlds, they become "real". Yesterday's "654 - Don't Wait Too Long" is quite plausible for me, and that even though I know that it did not look that way while I was there. It could not even possibly have looked that way. Well, probably some off-camera flash would have done the trick, but is this different from Photoshop? You may get better quality, but essentially it is the same meddling with the reality everyone on location perceives.

Still, now that I have made this image, it is going to stay. The moment is gone and it did not even have any significance, but the image has started a life of its own. It is part of reality now, mine as well as yours.

Same with the Image of the Day. I shot it in the morning in blinding sunlight with extremely harsh shadows. For a long time I wanted to photograph one of these carts that postmen in Vienna use. While they enter a house, it stands outside on the sidewalk, and when you're lucky, the street is empty and you have time enough to compose an image. What came out of the camera did not satisfy me at all. The final result, a 17 layer job, sure does :)

The Song of the Day is the fantastic "Lonely Avenue", again from the 1958 Ray Charles album "Yes, Indeed!!". Hear it on YouTube.

654 - Don't Wait Too Long

Let's get colorful today, will we? These are the images of Monday. I left work early enough to go swimming.

The red alarm device is in the Underground. Sometimes I am a junkie for vivid colors. Give me a screaming red and my heart beats faster :)

The next image, the chair, is already in "Gänsehäufl", the biggest bath in Vienna, actually an island in the back waters of river Danube. Over time I acquire a nice collection of these images, because the chairs fascinate me every time I see them. For once, they are old. Very old. For twice, they are colorful and I see them always against a creamy white background. Finally: they are simple. Expect to see more of them.

The last image is the sundown over another back water, with some modern architecture. The image out of the camera was completely silhouetted. It's amazing what you can get out of a RAW file. These are two variants from RAW, a contrast mask and a saturation layer in "Soft Light" mode, basically the same technique that I applied to the Image of the Day.

The Image of the Day is from early in the morning. I was waiting for the tramway train and fooling around a bit with shallow depth of field. The post of a traffic sign, the only thing that could remotely be used as a sharp foreground, came out extremely dark, color was bluish and far off, and indeed I didn't even think about actually using this image. Only when I began to play with it in Photoshop did I see the potential.

The Song of the Day is "Don't Wait Too Long" from Madeleine Peyroux's 2004 album "Careless Love". Very nice. Here is the video.

653 - Too Marvelous for Words

Schmetterling, farfalla, mariposa, papillon, butterfly, ... It's interesting, in different languages some things have completely different names, just as if these languages did not have common roots. Butterflies are one of them.

The Nikon 85/1.8 is not exactly a macro lens and these images are cropped, but at least it is sharp and focuses precisely. I saw the two butterflies this afternoon in a forest, on my way to the lake. It took me 40 images and some patience to come up with these.

The Song of the Day is the Johnny Mercer standard "Too Marvelous for Words", this time sung, yes, sung indeed, by Oscar Peterson on his 1952 album "Romance (The Vocal Styling of Oscar Peterson)". Very recommendable, sometimes hard to get, at the moment a tad expensive, even if you get it used. Of course there's no video of Oscar singing, but I can recommend Ella instead :)

652 - Over The Hills And Far Away

No shallow depth of field today, no strange discs of light, just some images of Carinthia's nature, taken Saturday afternoon. I could have titled this entry "Of curves, hills and rabbits".

Let's begin with curves. All these images were of course made with the Nikon 85/1.8, although this time mostly at f8 or above. Weather was constantly changing, and this image has some "just before the rain" feeling. It did rain shortly after, but only for minutes. I took the image because of the way the compression played with the curves.

Following the curves of the street, we have a curving fence now. Again this is helped along by the slight compression of the short telephoto lens.

When I finally went swimming, I saw this rabbit in the grass of our parcel by the lake. He obviously had the feeling of being camouflaged and invisible to me. He seemed completely comfortable until I reached about 1.5 meters, then he ran away. Sorry, I did not want to disturb him. After all, he lives there, much more than I do :)

The Song of the Day, quite a nice match for the Image of the Day, is "Over The Hills And Far Away" from the 1973 Led Zeppelin album "Houses of the Holy". Hear it on YouTube.

651 - Night At The Station

Friday night, when I arrived at Klagenfurt's train station, I had no image yet, but I knew there are always long lines of bicycles, waiting through the night, hundreds of them, and that's what I took on. Nikon 85/1.8 at f1.8, 1/100s and ISO 1250.

The Song of the Day is "Night Train" from Rickie Lee Jones' 1979 debut album. No video, sorry.

650 - True Love Tends to Forget

These are images of yesterday, Thursday. As I have nothing for today yet and plenty of time at the moment (I'm currently on the train from Vienna to Carinthia, a four hours ride), I felt the temptation to use one of them for today. Well, I resisted. There is still time and I intend to get lucky :)

The Image of the Day was taken only seconds after I left my appartment, while still on the same floor. This is something I really believe in: One should never dismiss a subject on the ground that it has been used before. I had quite some Images of the Day made in this very staircase, and while I would not spend an hour shooting images here, a few every few days tend to be fun and the routine is productive as well.

The umbrella has not been arranged by me, it was simply there, someone seems to have forgotten it. As always when I have a new lens, I currently use the Nikon 85/1.8 almost exclusively, and as always with fast primes, I mostly play with shallow depth of field.

This image surprised me quite a lot in post-processing. The original out of the camera was dark and moody, but when I clicked "Auto" in Adobe Camera RAW, I found that I liked this light look much better. A comment on SmugMug, my photo hosting site, described this as "a very lovely shot", and indeed there is something serene in this shot that I did not anticipate originally. Well, some people may be disturbed when their images begin to acquire unintended sense, but I am a great believer in the process of discovery. I think it's honest. I believe that much of what we see as coherent in the work of other artists is only what has been arranged that way.

Let me conclude with two more images, the first one being a morning image as well. This is another product of Puch, the Austrian manufacturer of bicycles, motorcycles and cars, that I have already written about or its products shown more than once. Just like the car recently, these scooters were old-fashioned in the Seventies, but I remember having seen a lot of them in my youth, all of them in the posession of old men.

The last image is from the afternoon. This is a park along the street where I work, and there are always flowers. I tried to get a nice distribution of verticals and asense of depth. Nothing special, but I like it.

The Song of the Day, "True Love Tends to Forget", is from Bob Dylan's 1978 album "Street Legal". Funnily enough this was the first Dylan album that I bought. Hear the Song on YouTube.

649 - Big Rain Tonight

Ahh, these days that begin bad and then only deteriorate! I left home in the morning and already had to duck under an umbrella. It did only rain moderately, but nevertheless enough to make me fear for my camera, and then it grew worse the whole day. In the evening when I left work, it poured down again.

This is an image that I shot in the morning. The lens? Just like in the other two images of today, my new Nikkor AF 85/1.8D! That's what I finally settled for. Given that I have a fantastic Sigma 70/2.8 Macro, it is probably equally redundant as the 28/1.8 had been, contrasted with the 30/1.4, but, hey, it's not about logic, it's about fun.

So, what can I say about this lens? It's metal, it's robust, it looks good, it focuses fast, it focuses precisely, it has a nice bokeh and it is a bargain compared to the 85/1.4. The Image of the Day, the bicycle in the rain, is right out of the camera, the daylight image had its colors pushed, not more, and the night image of Volkstheater had all kinds of things done to it. All three images were shot from under an umbrella :)

The Song of the Day is "Last Night Was a Big Rain" from Sara Hickman's 1989 album "Equal Scary People". See a video on YouTube.

648 - Inbetweenies

Do you know that feeling? That feeling when it is time for a new toy? Yesterday I have hinted at something and today's image was made with a new Sigma 28/1.8. You know my images made with its wider sibling, the 20/1.8, and this one has the same amazing near-focusing capability.

Unfortunately not all was wine and roses. Wide open, at low light, I found it's contrast severely lacking. I mean, I expected it, but not to this extend. In this regard the 20/1.8 fares better.

I originally bought this lens as a wide-but-not-so-wide street lens with macro capabilities. Being able to focus near, is one of the two things that I miss with my Sigma 30/1.4. The other thing is bokeh. What the 30/1.4 does to off-center out-of-focus point lights, can be more than harsh. On the other hand, contrast of the 30/1.4 is fantastic, even wide open. I may come back to the idea and get the Nikon 35/2.0 at some later time. This time I have traded the Sigma 28/1.8 in for a completely different lens :)

The Song of the Day is "Inbetweenies" by Ian Dury & The Blockheads. The compilation that I have is not readily available any more, I suggest you get "Reasons to Be Cheerful: The Very Best of Ian Dury & the Blockheads". Hear a sound sample from some live concert on YouTube.

647 - Out In The Street

Again two images made with the Sigma 70/2.8, one sharp from front to back, one not. I shot the images some minutes before I entered a shop and ... but that's a story for tomorrow :)

The Song of the Day is "Out In The Street", again from Bruce Springsteen's 1980 masterpiece "The River", and this time I have a video.

646 - Harley Heaven

I've spent this weekend working in Vienna, and last night, Sunday, when I left work, it poured down like mad. My first idea was to take public transport, but I finally resisted the temptation. I mounted the Sigma 30/1.4, took the umbrella out of my Lowepro Rover AW II backpack, secured its rain cover (AW means "all weather"), and off I went. Mostly caring about the camera, I was slightly wet upon arriving home, but I had quite some nice images. What finally made it is this one, a Harley parked in the rain.

The Song of the Day is "Harleys & Indians (Riders In The Sky)" from the 1994 Roxette album "Crash! Boom! Bang!". Sorry, no video, but last.fm has a sound sample.

645 - The Price You Pay

Back to normal again. Amazon has recovered during the night and SmugMug is also up again. Sorry folks.

Last morning, when posting Friday's images, I'd almost posted these two as well. Uhmm ... being days behind obviously tends to weaken my memory ... or so :)

Anyway. Here we are with something old reflected in something new. This image, taken late Saturday morning, just minutes after the Image of the Day, shows the building where I work. I chose a B&W conversion with this bluish tint for increased drama. You may agree or not, some will certainly not. But for those I have the Image of the Day, a brightly colored triptych celebrating monetary opportunity and numeric decline :)

The Song of the Day is "The Price You Pay" from the 1980 Bruce Springsteen double album "The River". There is no original on YouTube, but plenty of covers like this one.

Service Interruption

No, no new image at the moment. SmugMug, my image hoster suffers from an outage of Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3), their storage hoster. S3 has been dead for at least three hours now, and it looks like it will take them at least another hour. Oh bummer!

644 - She Is Still A Mystery

Black and white again. This is the image for Friday. A woman on the street, that's for sure, but ...

The Song of the Day is "She Is Still A Mystery" from the 1967 Lovin' Spoonful album "Everything Playing".

643 - Here's That Rainy Day

Thursday was rainy. I took some mediocre images in the morning, while it was still dry, and some more interesting in late afternoon in pouring rain. I don't have the time to process all of them, but this is one of my favorites. Again I use a more or less out of focus background and a sharp foreground, and this time it is a variation on the concept of "601 - Rainy Day in June". The lens used is the Sigma 30/1.4, and it took me some attempts to find the ideal aperture of f4. Here we have just enough definition in the background to vaguely recognize people and umbrellas, and enough blur to keep the image timeless and general.

The Song of the Day is "Here's That Rainy Day". I have it on "Magic Voices", a seven CD collection of all records made by the Singers Unlimited. Unfortunately I have no sound samples, but of course YouTube has plenty of other versions.

642 - Steppin' Out

This is an image of Wednesday afternoon. It was a hot, sunny afternoon and I went along a big street near work. The dream images of Tuesday morning still linger with me, and although I don't try to force anything, I still do mostly verticals.

There are new convex metal devices mounted on the lamp posts along many of Vienna's streets. They hold advertising posters for cultural events, and I have used one of these things like a wall. The reflection from the white building on the left provides a nice light source. I've used the Sigma 70/2.8 at f8 and 1/800s. Boy, speak of enough light! I am so near to the focus point, that even at f8 there is enough blur on the background to achieve the effect that I wanted.

I have pondered about the title for a long time, and I finally found what it reminds me of: it is like stepping out of a building into a sunny, to some degree uncertain future, but still certain enough to follow your way with confidence. It's an optimistic image :)

The Song of the Day is "Steppin' Out". I have it on "John Mayall - Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton". Hear it on YouTube.

641 - Series Of Dreams

Remember the dream, or shall I say, the series of images that flashed through my mind when I woke up last morning? Remember that I told you about it in "638 - In The Grove""? When I went to work yesterday morning, I was constantly on the lookout for vertical compositions that had elements of those dream images.

Of course I did not find anything that even remotely matched what I had seen, but given that I was in Vienna's streets, it did not come unexpectedly that there were neither flower-strewn beds nor sailing boats around. That was not what I was looking for anyway. I was looking for structural similarities, and what I found was vague at best.

Here are five vertical images that have been shot with the dream images in mind, plus a fancy car and another vertical that I could not resist to take when the sun went down. I present these images in unedited form, and I do that for two reasons: firstly, I was too lazy to edit seven files, and secondly, this is not about any single image, this is about a series, inspired by a dream.

The images are mostly in the order they were taken. What I was after, was roughly a pattern of vertical stripes in the background, and a foreground that covers the lower third of the image, but in an asymmetrical way. The Image of the Day was my first attempt. Compared to the dream of the bed and the window, the relation between foreground and background is inverse: here the background is sharp, my hand, used as an impromptu foreground is out of focus.

This does not matter for my purpose, but I believe that one of the two should be out of focus. All images were taken with the Sigma 70/2.8, mostly wide open, to provide for a shallow depth of field.

While working, I found this base concept inspiring, although I did not stick strictly to it. Most images keep only the verticals, and the foreground is replaced by part of the sidewalk, asymmetry provided by the perspective.

What's the point of all that? For me it was interesting to see these dream images at all, and trying to respond to them was only natural. Why do I share it? Sure, this is as "work in progress" as it could possibly be, but in a way I think this is interesting. It's more or less a kind of unfiltered visual thought.

Now for something completely different. I often photograph and write about bicycles, and many of them are products of the former Austrian company "Puch". I had almost forgotten that they had also made cars, but when I saw one on the streets, I simply had to take an image. This is a "Puch 500", basically a licensed "Fiat 500". I have never sat in such a car, much less driven one myself. They were almost extinct before my time.

The day ended with wonderful late sunlight, and I had to record this as well. This is the view through my living room window in Vienna.

The Song of the Day, "Series of Dreams", is the last song on the 1991 official "Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3". The song is from a collaboration with Daniel Lanois and U2, as far as I remember. See the video on YouTube.

640 - One More Night

I left Carinthia on Sunday evening and arrived in Vienna half an hour after midnight. Is an image shot at that time an image of Sunday or an image of Monday? In "639 - Midnight Riders" my answer was a resounding "Sunday, of course!", but today I feel "Monday, probably" would be an equally good answer. Am I opportunistic or what?

This image was taken only minutes after the one posted for Sunday. Actually I like it better, although the SmugMug crowd thinks otherwise.

The Song of the Day is "One More Night" from the 1969 Bob Dylan album "Nashville Skyline". I have no video by His Bobness, thus a cover will have to do.

639 - Midnight Riders

It's funny, at the time of writing, this image is #3 in the list of my most popular images on SmugMug, my image hosting provider and photo community. It's an image that I took Sunday night when I arrived in Vienna. I think there is nothing particularly wrong with this image, in fact I liked it enough to make it Image of the Day, but of the images of the last days it is certainly not a favorite of mine. I see it as a filler, and it's success is probably a sign of a certain randomness. Some images get picked up by the crowd, some don't. Actually, the longer I think about this image, the more I feel the urge to crop from the right :)

The Song of the Day is "Midnight Riders" from the 2007 Patti Smith album of cover versions "Twelve". You may like her version or not, but if not, there is always the original by the Allman Brothers Band.

638 - In The Grove

Oh Goodness, I'm hopelessly behind. These are some of the images of Saturday.

Two of them are experiments in B&W conversion, and I think that the process is simple and works well. Basically the idea is to use the new B&W conversion layer in CS3, use its presets (high-contrast red, high-contrast blue, maximum black, maximum white, ...), just concentrate on parts of the image, limit the conversion with masks, and overlay another filter for another part, again masked, until everything is B&W.

In both images the upper part uses the high-contrast red preset, while the lower part uses high-contrast blue, and in case of the farmhouse there is even some maximum black in between. Finally I have applied toning with a gradient map and overlayed some blur, restricting blending to parts of the tonal range. Hmm ... that's probably stuff for a tutorial.

The two B&W images and the Image of the Day were taken with the Sigma 70/2.8 Macro. I love this short telephoto lens and, funnily enough, I even seem to dream in this kind of images. Just as I woke up (it's Tuesday, 5:59 as I write this), I saw an image before my eyes, and I know, when I ever want to take it, I'll use this lens. The image faded as my conscious mind set in, and thankfully I managed to remember it. It was a bedroom window or rather a door to a terrace, shot as a vertical across the bed, focus was on the bed, there were flowers on the bed and in the background I saw a person, very much out of focus, just recognizable, probably opening the door.

The composition was very vertical in the upper part, parallel lines, the person being one of them, occupying the left half of the upper two thirds, the right half being the lines of the door frame and some curtains. The flowers in the foreground lay asymmetrically, higher on the right side. Just as I was trying to analyze this image (or at least to not forget it), an image of a yacht harbor flashed up. Boats and masts, a similar composition, divided in asymmetric halves in the upper part, the lower part holding it together in a balanced way.

What that means? No idea. Things like that don't happen regularly to me. In fact they normally don't happen at all. Seems like a rather interesting kind of inspiration to me :)

Let me leave you with one final image of Saturday. We were dining on the terrace of a restaurant, and just after the main course, I turned my back, looked across the street and saw this spectacular evening scene. I took some images with the Sigma 10-20, some with the 70/2.8, but what I like most is this fisheye image. Landscapes with a fisheye? Sure. Just keep the horizon in the middle and it will be straight. Of course you don't only get a spectacularly big sky, you'll also get a lot of boring foreground (at least here it was boring) but that's easy to fix with a crop from below.

The Song of the Day is "I had A Dream" from Ray Charles' 1958 album "Yes, Indeed!!". A video is supplied with the lyrics. Admittedly it's not Ray Charles, but it's not shabby either. So who are Bob and Clive??

637 - Painted From Memory

These are the images of Friday. It took me two days of pondering about a half-written post to come to the conclusion, that I can't make rhyme nor reason of it. I finally threw it away.

What's remains are three images of Friday morning, that depict old things neglected (like this rusty, dusty door to a cellar), old things carefully restored (like the Russian motorbike), or things that are not old at all but were produced to look old ("retro" is the term, like my fan). For me there is a deep satisfaction in photographing old things, but in talking of that, I ought to make distinctions as to the kind of old I mean.

Gothic cathedrals and ancient monuments are like landscapes to me. They are beautiful, interesting, they may cause my mind go off dreaming, but intrinsically they rarely move me. What moves me, are old things that I can relate to. Things that were made before my time, just not centuries, more like a life-span or two. I mean things that would have been there in my childhood, things that would already have looked old then.

In a comment to 633 - Undecided, dkwett suggested that what we capture in a photograph isn't so much a vision as a memory, and while I don't think that this is generally true (or if so, then in a very subtle way), I guess it is the key to the sentiments that I talk here. These are images painted from memory.

In all these images there is a part of myself, only sometimes it is more literally so, as sometimes there is a self-portrait hidden within :)

The Song of the Day is "Painted From Memory" from Elvis Costello's 1998 cooperation with Burt Bacharach. Hear the song on YouTube.

636 - All Day and All of the Night

It's Friday, I'm on the train, on my way to Carinthia, and these are two images of late yesterday afternoon.

Bicycles are one of my favorite subjects, and this double-portrait was my second bet for an Image of the Day, just in case #1 would not work. Turns out it did, at least for me, although everyone on SmugMug seems to ignore it :)

"Einfahrt Tag u. Nacht freihalten!" is German and means "Keep entrance clear all day and all of the night", thus "All Day and All of the Night", the 1964 second hit single by The Kinks is the Song of the Day. The recent "Ultimate Collection" is a very good compilation that I can recommend. Hear the single version and a live version on YouTube.