748 - Step It Up And Go

It's still Thursday, I am still on the train, and here is finally the image of today. I shot it on my way to the train, already inside of the station, standing on the stairs to the platform. I fooled around with focusing on the last step, the Sigma 50/1.4 wide open at f1.4, and when I heard a man coming up behind me, I waited until he was exactly in focus.

Well, that's it for today. Oh, and, one more thing: Nikon has released a firmware update for the D300. If you have one, this is not to be missed. They have added some features and corrected some bugs. Most spectacular is what they have done to automatic white balance. It was already good, now it is much better. It's not perfect, and if you want to, it is still easy to fool it, but I have seen some extremely good results under very difficult lighting conditions, mostly mixed light at night or in twilight on the streets. These were situations when the old firmware would definitely have been far off. In other words: Install this!!

The Song of the Day is "Step It Up And Go" from Bob Dylan's 1992 album "Good as I Been to You". Sorry, no video, no sample but what Amazon has.

747 - Starlight

It's Thursday, I'm on the train to Carinthia, one day earlier than usual, and I'll stay there for 10 days. It's time now to finalize the move to Villach. The apartment is mostly ready, I guess some more days of work and then it's over. Tomorrow, Friday, will be one of those dreadful shopping days. I have a big list of many tiny things that we found missing last weekend. This time it will be one rush and ... well, hopefully :)

The first image for today is of dried and painted poppies, for sale as decoration in a flower shop that I pass almost every day, at least when I'm not forced to take the Underground, either by rain or by my hurry.

The other two images were taken through a shop's window. This is a shop that sells exotic furniture, mostly Asian, and the shop is decorated with lots of colorful lamps in the form of stars. Most hang from the ceiling, one red star is positioned inside of a cabinet. That's what you see in the Image of the Day.

The Song of the Day is "Stella By Starlight", interpreted by the great Anita O'Day. I have it on her 1957 album "Anita Sings the Most" and on a live collection titled "Summertime". The latter has the more interesting version, but unfortunately I can't find it online.

Anyway. See her perform "Stella By Starlight" on YouTube, and when you are already at it, why not see another video, live from Newport 1958. Wow, she is simply breathtaking!

746 - Full Moon And Empty Hearts

I'm again a little late. It's 5am, Thursday morning, these are the images of Tuesday. I left work at 4:30pm, but since we have switched from daylight saving time last Sunday night, it's dark time of the year again.

The first image is actually a morning image. I really can't get enough of these bicycles, and this is a particularly twisted pose. This was one safe bet for an Image of the Day, and that's something I really like: knowing there is something to fall back. I gives me a certain peace of mind that can again spark creativity.

The second image is actually an old acquaintance. I remember having used this tattered mannequin in Neubaugasse at least three times now. I like the shop, it always displays nice colors for gray winter evenings.

I don't know if the Image of the Day would have been Image of the Day without the title. Searching for a song fitting one of the three images, I looked at this empty space, searched for the word "empty", and when I found "Full Moon And Empty Arms" on an obscure Mina album called "Summertime" (that I can't find online, even in the discography on her very own site) I first mis-read it as "Full Moon And Empty Hearts" - and fell in love. Later, when I found out about my mistake, I decided to keep it at that.

"Full Moon and Empty Arms" is a 1945 popular song by Buddy Kaye and Ted Mossman, best-known in its rendition by Frank Sinatra and based on Sergei Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2. Mina's recording is from an 1964 album "Americana", and to hear a one minute sample, please go to her own site, enter "full moon" in the search field atop, and then click "Play audio". You'll need a Quicktime plugin to do so.

745 - We Belong Together

These are the images of yesterday, Monday. Seems like bicycle day again :)

The first image was shot in the morning very near work. I see this tattered bicycle frequently, always fastened to the same sign post, but normally I am so in a hurry that I don't care to take a picture. Let's call this the Clean Image of the Day.

All the other images were shot in the afternoon, on my way home. I had left work early because I needed something done by another department, and I knew I would not get it before late in the afternoon. In fact, when I arrived home, I found a mail sent at 4:30pm, telling me that the job had been finished :)

All afternoon images were shot within a radius of maybe 500 meters and within 20 minutes. I love these moments of passion, devotion and concentration.

I am not really sure about the second image. I had stood there, photographing the fallen bicycle, the corner, the graffiti, taking a series of images, some with, some without people, and while I have a perfect image without, I really like this one. Yes, it is a little tight, feels a little crammed, but somehow ... I'm not sure. Let's call it the Busy Image of the Day.

I have my camera back, and most of all, I have my Sigma 50/1.4 back. I love the wonderful bokeh of this lens. I made some variations of number three, with more or less people in the background, and finally I settled with this.

All four of these images were on my list for the Image of the Day, finally the pair of bicycles turned out to be it. It was chosen. Not by me. It was chosen by the Song of the Day. It's the Ritchie Valens classic "We Belong Together", for the 1987 movie "La Bamba" interpreted by Los Lobos. Hear it on YouTube.

By the way: the right bicycle is a Puch, but what is the left one? Any idea?

744 - The Cross

In Saturday's post we saw that DxO 5.3 performs fine on the noise front, but it won't boost your D300 to ISO 25600. Well, at least it did not boost mine, I suppose it won't do yours either :)

In all that pixel peeping we have completely ignored what other things DxO can do. Today's image is old as well. I have not shot a single image today, not even test shots.

This one was shot in the cloister of the dome of Magdeburg, Germany, in early June 2006. Here is the original JPEG out of the D200. It does not exactly show my abilities at their best. It is tilted by accident, the subject, the cross, is hardly visible at all against the strong back light. This is clearly a case when I would have had to use a flash. I can't remember if I had been allowed to do so, maybe not, fact is that I didn't.

The Nikon 18-200 VR, the only lens that I had at that time, is nice, but it shows strong barrel distortions (well, actually something more complex than simple barrel distortions) on the wide end, and I even had to point the lens slightly upward to get everything into the frame. Not exactly ideal for an architectural shot.

DxO handled all that nicely. The 18-200 is a supported lens, thus all distortions were removed automatically, along with chromatic aberrations. Using Photoshop's "Shadow/Highlight" to lighten up the foreground would have produced halos, thus I would normally have used a curves layer with a luminance mask. DxO does this with one slider under "DxO Lighting". Basically they analyze the image, automatically isolate regions according to tonal value, and then apply contrast and exposure to these regions independently. This works really well and is extremely easy.

For the correction of tilt and perspective distortions I have used a simple tool where you paint a rectangle into the image and then drag the corners of the rectangle to indicate the desired correction. You can immediately see the outcome in a second window. I have first seen this in Paint Shop Pro and always missed it in Photoshop. You can choose to automatically crop the result.

Well, that's it for Sunday. This series of posts about DxO will go on as I discover things or find ways to demonstrate features that I like.

The Song of the Day is "The Cross" from the 2002 Blind Boys of Alabama album "Higher Ground". Sorry, no video.

743 - This Is A Test

Yesterday I did not shoot anything but some test images, none of them did I want to make Image of the Day. This is from the archives, an image from the crypt below the Dome of Speyer, Germany. I shot it with the D200 in July 2007, using the Nikon 18-200 VR at f8, ISO 1600 and 1/3s, handheld. I've converted it with DxO and added some local contrast later in Photoshop.

I am still in Carinthia, it's Sunday now and I have managed to install DxO 5.3 yesterday evening. We can carry on with the review.

Let me begin with a correction. In "741 - Just Another Day On Earth" I originally said that "what Adobe Camera RAW does and DxO seemingly not, is the automatic elimination of hot pixels". This is wrong. Yesterday I found out that DxO can automatically eliminate what they term "dead pixels", it's only not on by default, and it is hidden down in the options for noise reduction. Sorry for the false alarm.

In a comment to that post Nick Jungels said that

"Looking at DxO Optics, the noise performance seems very, very similar to running Noise Ninja. At least in my one comparison the pictures were virtually identical (as far as noise goes).

Have you compared the DxO versus any of these other noise reduction options?

At that moment I had not, this is what I want to look into today, and here is the image that we will look at in some variations and detail. You see now why I used an old image for the Image of the Day?

I made three versions of this image: At ISO6400 and correctly lit, at ISO 3200 and one stop underexposed, and finally at ISO 3200 and underexposed by three stops. All three images were shot handheld with the D300 and the Sigma 50/1.4 at f4. High ISO noise reduction in the camera was set to "low" (from a standard of "normal"), exposure times were 1/60s and 1/250s. Fairly normal values for low light street photography. Let's begin with a 100%crop:



You really have to click on the image for the 100% view to see the differences. Left is the result of Adobe Camera RAW 4.6, in the middle the same with Noise Ninja applied, and on the right is the output of DxO.

As to processing: First I have created the DxO image on standard settings, with the preset for high-ISO images applied. This produces stronger contrast, dark shadows, uses stronger noise reduction and also takes care of dead pixels. Then I have loaded the original RAW file into Adobe Camera RAW, without sharpening and with the exposure parameters set to automatic. Later in Photoshop I used adjustment layers to match this much lighter image to the look of the output of DxO. Basically I pulled all there was into Photoshop, and then toned it down, along with all noise. I think this is fair and as comparable as it gets.

There are quite some differences. Obviously the quality of Adobe Camera RAW without noise reduction is not really acceptable. There is a high level of noise, grain is coarse and we see much color noise as well.

Applying Noise Ninja made the image much better. This is not the detail that we expect from a 12 megapixel image, but for ISO 6400 it is the best that we can get without inventing detail.

DxO delivers a tad more sharpness, but that was to be expected as it did some sharpening and Adobe Camera RAW was set to do not. What's obviously better, is color noise. Noise Ninja took care of the high-frequency color noise, but some low frequency noise, i.e. big color blotches, remained. The difference is not dramatic, but it is there.



Looking at the differences at 200% is more revealing. DxO produces a very fine grain on pixel level, Noise Ninja struggles with color noise. Overall I'd say that the result of DxO is more pleasing, looks less like digital artifacts, but you really have to care about pixel peeping to get a kick out of it.



Let's do the same once again, this time with an image taken at ISO 3200, but underexposed by one stop. At 100% we see basically the same situation.

Please ignore the systematic tonal differences and the color difference in the dark tones. That's an artifact of my method. I simply was not able to exactly match outputs. Let's concentrate on noise instead.

Noise levels are slightly lower, the difference between Adobe Camera RAW + Noise Ninja and DxO is hardly visible.



At 200% it's pretty much a tie, but from the looks I'd prefer DxO again. The fine grain actually looks nice, not like typical digital noise at all. On the other hand: both are clearly acceptable.

Then I turned to the ISO 3200 image underexposed by three stops, effectively pushing the image to ISO 25600, and this is the point where DxO breaks spectacularly. I did not even include a 200% comparison here, it is obvious. DxO smudges away detail like mad. I have tried for quite some time to find settings that would improve the result, but to no avail. In fact, this seems to be the best it can do under these conditions.



And Noise Ninja? Still riding the waves. The result that it produces is unusable as well, but compared to DxO it does not break, it degenerates slowly.

What's the verdict now? If forensics is your job and you need to get the last information out of an image, even if you won't be able to use it for any aesthetic purposes, then Noise Ninja is your tool. In any other case DxO seems as good or better, partly depending upon your aesthetic preferences.

In my eyes this result is not disappointing, not at all. After all, Noise Ninja is one of the best noise reduction plugins on the planet, one of three or four tools that constitute the state of the art. That DxO plays in that league and maybe slightly tops it, is quite remarkable, given that noise reduction is only one card in DxO's game.

What about the price? Currently Noise Ninja and Neat Image cost around $70, Nik Software's Define 2.0 is sold by Amazon for around $80, while DxO Optics will cost you $170 or $300, depending on your camera. Thus you'll clearly have to need something else out of DxO's portfolio to justify the purchase.

We'll look closer into these things in other posts. Stay tuned.

The Song the Day is "This Is A Test" from Wendy James' 1993 collaboration with Elvis Costello Now Ain't the Time for Your Tears

Sorry, no sound samples, but looking for Wendy James on YouTube will give you some videos and an idea of what to expect.

742 - Same To You

This is one for Ted Byrne. Not much art on my side here and nothing about DxO either. The review continues as soon as I have it installed here in Carinthia (it's a pain over my slow and not very reliable connection), or otherwise am back in Vienna. Have a nice weekend.

The Song of the Day is "Oh, How The Ghost Sings" from the 1981 Lester Bowie album "The Great Pretender". No video, of course, but the sound sample at Amazon will give you an idea :)

741 - Just Another Day On Earth

These are images of Thursday. I took some in the morning and then late in the evening. All images were converted with DxO 5.3, but with the exception of the last, none was shot at particularly high ISO values.

Speaking of DxO, I'm just speeding through the documentation to get an impression of what a workflow with this tool could look like.

My first impression, just from working with the program without any consultation of the docs, was one of overall simplicity. There are two versions, a standalone program and a Photoshop/Lightroom plugin. I don't have Lightroom, thus I can't say how it's activated there, but in Photoshop you get into the plugin via "File / Import". Makes sense after all.

Once in the program, regardless which version, you are first presented with a file browser where you can select the images that you want to process. DxO is a batch/pipeline oriented program and employs a "Project" metaphor. A project can contain any number of images. Those get processed in a batch and the result is either that all images are opened in Photoshop (plugin) or get stored in a format of your choice, in the same or a different directory as the original (normally RAW) files.

As I said, I'm just now looking into the documentation. All images so far were processed in "experimental mode", and I can say that the user interface is intuitive and simple. You begin on a "Select" screen where you include images into your project, walk through a "Prepare" screen where you can specify how each image is to be converted and then start the conversion on a "Process" screen. On my quad-core processor, processing was two images at a time, we'll see what it does on a dual-core processor when I have installed it in Carinthia.

Speaking of multiple installations, the program has to be activated and activations can be transferred from one computer to another, but as far as I have seen, activation on at least two computers is permitted by one license. That's quite OK. The idea is to have it on one Desktop and a laptop. We'll see how that finally turns out for me, because I regularly use two desktops and a laptop.

DxO has one fully automatic mode, a lot of image presets, e.g. for slightly low or high key processing, one tuned for high ISO images, presets for different saturation/contrast combinations, etc, and of course you can set everything manually and save that as a preset.

Whatever you do on the "Prepare" screen, manually setting details or applying presets, it is always immediately displayed in a big preview that can be zoomed in up to 200%, thus you always exactly see what you do.

If you don't set anything at all, the image gets converted in fully automatic mode, and what that does is usually quite OK. It may not be your desired look, but so far it has always produced a usable result. Automatic processing includes geometry correction for supported lens/body combinations. Some of my combinations are supported, some not.

All of the images in this post were converted by the plugin version using presets. Then I have added further processing in Photoshop, but usually not much.

What Adobe Camera RAW does and DxO seemingly not, is the automatic elimination of hot pixels. This is a bit of a bummer, but no worse than Capture NX.

EDIT: Sorry for the false information, by now I have found out that DxO in fact can automatically eliminate hot pixels, it's only a tad hidden and not on by default.

One final thing that may be interesting from a workflow perspective: The standalone version of DxO can produce linear DNG files, i.e. DNG files that already contain a demosaiced image. These files can be processed by Adobe products and retain the flexibility of RAW files. I'm not really sure about the consequences, but this could mean that it would be possible to batch-convert all your files and e.g. apply only demosaicing and noise reduction. Anyway. We'll see soon.

That's it for today. This series of posts about DxO will continue as long as I learn useful things. Stay tuned.

The Song of the Day is "Just Another Day" from Brian Eno's 2005 album "Another Day on Earth". Hear it on YouTube.

740 - Tell Me You'll Wait For Me

OK, finally there's one image of Wednesday, almost plainly out of DxO 5.3. It's ISO 1600 from a Nikon D200 with Sigma 30/1.4, a combination that is supported by DxO for automatic lens correction. I think you won't be able to tell from this resolution (even if you click on the image for the higher resolution) how much better the RAW conversion is, especially compared to Adobe Camera RAW. Nikon's own conversions are slightly better but still inferior. I shall post some examples as we go along with a series of blog posts that will end up as a sort of review of DxO 5.3, but upfront I can already say that the examples on their website don't lie. The quality improvement is dramatic.

They achieve this by removing noise not after demosaicing but before, directly on the RAW data. This makes sense, because a conventional Bayer sensor uses a pattern of interwoven pixels, half of them green (where the human eye is most sensitive), and a quarter each red and blue. That means that the actual resolution of the sensor for green is half of what you'd expect from the pixel count, and for red and blue it's only a quarter each. Demosaicing is a process of interpolation, where the full resolution red, green and blue channels are reconstructed from the actual data in the reduced channels and from luminance information from the neighboring pixels of another color. Scary, huh? That's for precision.

The only sensor type on the market that does not use such patterns at all (some by Kodak and Fuji use different patters or variations) is the Foveon sensor used in Sigma's cameras, although at the price of much reduced actual pixel resolution. Those pixels upscale well, but an image resolution of 2640x1760 (4.6 megapixels) does not look so sexy today. That impression is further marred by a light sensitivity that's slightly below today's standards.

But let's get back to Bayer sensors and the process of demosaicing. We've seen that the actual image is reconstructed from greatly incomplete data. I'd even say much of it is invented. Of course this technology is not new and the algorithms are fairly mature, but it is also clear that at high ISO noise starts to spread out. When neighboring pixels are used to reconstruct the exact color channels per pixel, then noise in those neighboring pixels comes into the equation. This sums up, and the result are ugly blotches of color or strong de-coloration as a consequence of noise reduction algorithms.

This is where DxO sets in. They reduce noise on the original pixels before they get combined in demosaicing. Therefore the noise in one pixel does not spread out to neighboring pixels. What exactly they do and how they do it is not known to me, is most probably patented or secret, but the results are clearly better than everything else that I've seen so far, producing very fine grain without much loss of detail and without much loss of color at high ISOs.

It's really like a camera upgrade, i.e. the improvement is about the amount that you'd expect by going from one camera generation to the next. The Imaging Resource has quite a lengthy interview where these things are explained and where a D700 image is shown, taken at ISO 6400, underexposed by 3 EV and pushed to 51,200 equivalent. Crazy? Yes, but surprisingly there is still usable output.

The Song of the Day is "Tell Me You'll Wait For Me" from Ray Charles' 1959 album "The Genius of Ray Charles". Sorry no video, but Amazon has samples.

No Images But A Toy

Sorry, there's no image of yesterday so far. I have some candidates and don't yet know what to make of them. That's not the point though. DxO released the demo for release 5.3, and that's what I've been fooling around with since. With this release they have finally fulfilled their original promises for version 5. The RAW converter is awesome!

I have never seen better night shots at ISO 1600 from a D200, and what I've seen at ISO 6400 from the D300 (I tried some of the images that I shot in B&W) is spectacular. More to come.

739 - Dirty Old Town

This morning was the first morning with fog here in the city. This means we're headin' for a fall gals! I've made some pictures of a foggy park, they are even not so bad, but I'll spare us the cliché. It's autumn, summer's long gone and that must suffice.

This is an image that I shot on my way home. It is not the first image that I've taken of this venerable motorbike, but it is the first that gets published.

The Song of the Day is "Dirty Old Town" - not the David Byrne song from "Rei Momo", not the Rod Steward version, no, it's the Pogues that who have it on their 1985 album "Rum, Sodomy & the Lash". See the video on YouTube. This is a true classic, you don't want to miss it :)

738 - Map Of The Stars

Super Stupid Things To Do^TM.

What about some of that? Uhhh ... what could I come up with? Wait a minute ... yes! That's it. Traveling with a bag full of lenses, but leaving your camera behind! Oh dear, I've left my D300 along with the Sigma 50/1.4 in Carinthia, only to be recovered on Friday.

There are two roads from here :)

Probably I'll never get a better excuse for buying a D700. On the other hand, reason tells me that I currently spend so much money in that moving adventure, that I'd better not.

Normally I'm strictly adverse to listening to reason, but this time I did. When I sold my D200, almost a year ago, I secured the option to borrow it back should need be. Then I had thought of the D300 being sent in for service or such, but now it comes handy as well.

Here we are. Today's images were shot with a D200. It's still an incredibly capable camera. Apparent differences are the LCD and the much more sluggish scrolling in full zoom, but when I had it, I did not miss any speed. It's only that the D300 is much faster and you get accustomed to that.

Both images were shot within five meters distance where Burggasse meets Sankt-Ulrichs-Platz and I'm quite pleased with both of them. The leaves were not arranges, but I admit having removed some peripheral distractions, most of them physically while being there :)

The Song of the Day is the incredibly beautiful "Map Of The Stars" from Melissa Etheridge's 2007 album "The Awakening". Make sure you see her perform live on YouTube.

737 - Take Me Home Country Road

Today was a sunny Sunday. I was out taking photographs for about an hour, and although the idea was originally to make typical autumn landscape images, in the end, whatever I did, I did not like the colors, they always looked banal and I decided to convert this image to B&W with a rich, brown toning.

I have only one one version of the Song of the Day, "Take Me Home Country Road", and that's by Israel Kamakawiwo'ole on the 1993 release "Facing Future". Hear it on YouTube :)

736 - Dawn Is A Feeling

Oh dear, that's a ride! I sit on the train from Carinthia to Vienna, and the only car with electric current is one of these pre-mobile-phone-era cars that are almost perfect Faradayan cages. My internet connection is so flaky that it took me almost an hour to move this image to the proper gallery, assign keywords and write five lines!

Anyway. This is an image of Saturday morning, just befoe the sun came up, shortly before the fog rose. The rest of the day was work in the new apartment in Villach.

It's funny, but we seem to have problems avoiding politics these days. Ted can't keep his fingers off Sarah Palin and I have to come back to the recently departed Austrian master populist Jörg Haider.

Saturday was the Day of Jörg Haider's funeral, and whatever you have read about the Carinthians worshipping him: it's true! I hate to admit it, but Carinthia has fallen into a collective hysteria that I have never seen before. What they do is nothing short of creating a new Saint. Looking at it from a distance this may seem interesting and peculiar, a local phenomenon that meets astonishment even in Vienna, but from the perspective of a Carinthian-born thinking man it is absolutely disgusting.

It is bizzarre to see how fast history is re-written, how fast it is erased that this man's strongest talents were to agitate the stupid against the weak and to spend our money with both hands.

So now, that's our new Saint: a reckless politician who died drunk in his car, speeding at at least 142 kmh trough the fog. What a model for our youth! And still: people seem to love him! I can't understand it. What is it?

People always adored his frank way of saying things that superficially resembled truth. He was daring. He is the only Austrian politician who was ever seen bungee jumping, one of the few who ran the New York marathon, he was a friend of Lybia's dictator Gadaffi and he visited Saddam Hussein shortly before the US made an end to his régime. He was rich, independent, knew how to use the media, and in all that he made everybody think he was one of them.

Unbelievable? Yes, but that's how it was, and though he certainly had liked to live on, what happens now would have pleased him. It's pretty depressing that someone like him should triumph even in death.

Sorry for the rant, we instantly get soft again :)

The Song of the Day is "Dawn Is A Feeling" from the classic 1967 Moody Blues album "Days of Future Passed". Hear it on YouTube.

735 - A Place Aside

This is an image of Friday morning in Vienna. I already did one similar image some days back, and this time I'm quite satisfied with the outcome. The red of the traffic light in a distance complements the main curve nicely. Post-processing was much more conventional than yesterday, consisting mainly of saturation layers in various blending modes, most importantly "Multiply" for the highlights, and some vignetting.

The Song of the Day is "A Place Aside" from Beth Orton's 2006 album "Comfort of Strangers". There's no video available, but at least Amazon has sound samples.

734 - Fall Like Rain

Thursday was gloomy in the morning, and in the night when I left work it poured like mad. I had stayed a little longer in the hope it would stop, but it got only worse. One more time of shooting from under an umbrella.

The second image suffers from a weak composition, but I liked the red umbrella, and when I had decided on composition, the subjects were gone. People! Can't they hold their stance until my work is done? :)

The Song of the Day is "Fall Like Rain" from Eric Clapton's 1998 album "Pilgrim", one of his weaker albums. But judge for yourself on Deezer.

733 - Blue House

This is a house in Vienna's Lerchenfelder Straße, and composing this image was more than awkward. What made me try it was the red accent of the flowers. Immediately above there was white, bright sky, just to the right of the flowers a "For Sale" sign, and my position was restricted because I couldn't possibly stand in the middle of the street. Apart from that I had the Sigma 50/1.4 mounted and did not want to change for one shot. Under these circumstances I am quite satisfied :)

The Song of the Day is "Blue House" from Marcia Ball's 1994 album of the same name. The Rolling Stone has a review of the album. Sorry, no lyrics. Rhapsody has a Marcia Ball page, but it is US only. I suppose you could hear it there. For the lesser among us there is always the sample on Amazon.

732 - Happy Birthday II

Another year round! These are two images from Tuesday, the actual birthday, and I'd like to thank all my readers. Some of you have been with me almost from the beginning, some for a long time, and some have joined only lately. I hope this will go on and you will continue to come in for some visual food.

Janine was so kind as to give me a present, a funny, crazy birthday bicycle found in Amsterdam. Can you imagine a bicycle jumping with excitement?? Head over to her blog to find out :)

The Song of the Day is again Stevie Wonder's "Happy Birthday", originally on the 1980 release "Hotter Than July". The video on YouTube that I've linked to last year has been removed, another one is not available in my country (Gosh, this industry is so stupid!) but of course there are countless other versions like this concert video.

731 - Pretty Flower in Your Backyard

OK, here we are with the images of Monday. With the exception of the last, I shot them all in a park just 200 meters from work, and as always lately I used the new Sigma 50/1.4.

It was the last chance to capture some rays of sun. There is a playground with many children as well, but for obvious reasons I kept to trees and flowers. Oh dear! What a world!

It's interesting: the longer I take photographs, the more it is clear to me what I suspected from the beginning: that my kind of photography is not bound to locations. It is bound to a state of mind.

It is kind of an emptiness, but not in any negative way. It is an openness without purpose and direction, it may be what Mark Hobson, "The Landscapist", calls "pure seeing".

Experience is also a factor. Yes, it's without purpose and direction, but in that state of mind I run on autopilot, follow my instincts. I wander around and only see, but experience helps a lot.

And then there is the fractal nature of things. Everything in nature is fuzzy. Look at a tree. Try to describe its shape. Oh no, not the shape that you have come to identify as a tree when you were a child. I don't ask you to describe the shape of the concept "tree", I ask you to look at any particular tree of your choice, and to describe its shape. Complicated, huh?

So is everything in nature, and it get's only more multifaceted when you begin to change your point of view. Get back to the tree. Again, not the concept, the one from our last exercise. Look at it, and while you look at it, slowly walk around. It does not matter in what distance, it does not matter if clockwise or counter-clockwise, it is only important to look at the tree.

Now tell me: how many shapes does it have?

The Song of the Day is "Pretty Flower in Your Backyard" by Leadbelly. I have it on disc 45 of "The Ultimate Jazz Archive". Hear a sample here.

Progress, No Images Yet

I have all my data (with the exception of the files of last Monday) back and installed here in Vienna, I have Photoshop up and patched, have my image database Imatch, I even have some images for yesterday, but it's too late now to post them. After work, promised.

730 - The Garden Of The Faithless

Three posts in a day? Promised: I'll keep this very short and apolitical, OK? I'm back in Vienna, I have all my images with me again but still no Photoshop installed. Oh my!

This is an image from today. I went into the garden and took some images of the Cherry tree that just now has wonderful colors. I'm afraid it will have lost its leaves by next weekend.

The Song of the Day is "The Garden" from the 1999 Faithless album "Sunday 8pm". Hear it on YouTube. There are no lyrics, it's instrumental :)

729 - The Witch Is Dead

Only days ago, in "716 - The Last Rose of Summer", I talked about the outcome of our general elections and the political resurrection of Jörg Haider, the man who single-handedly created right-wing populism in Austria - and now he's dead. I heard the news on Saturday morning when I talked to my father. Sometime around 2am he'd had a terrible accident with his car, and he died on the way to the hospital.

These images were shot under the impression of his death, and the death of such a powerful political figure is certainly worth some thoughts. Jörg Haider was the most controversial of Austria's politicians after the second World War, certainly one of the most talented and intelligent, comparable only to Bruno Kreisky, the socialist former Chancellor who once called him "the Nazi boy", but who was definitely aware of his talent.

Haider was demonized and adored, he was charismatic like no one else in the last 25 years, he was a man who reached for the stars and ultimately always failed. Although I disagreed with almost all that he ever said, even I have to admit that there was greatness in this man, even if it did not lead to anything good.

What exactly was the character of Jörg Haider's populism and why did he polarize that much? Well, it is important to recognize that he always talked in a way that people wished all polititians would talk like: straightforward, plain, open, direct. He addressed people's fears and worries, and at the same time he had the talent to make them accept him as one of them, pretty regardless of the actual crowd, whether he was in a country inn or at a meeting of CEOs.

Along with that unfortunately there was a darker side, most certainly a remnant of his upbringing, and although I suppose that he would not have tried to reinstate the classic Nation Socialism, even if he would have been given the choice to do so, he sure catered to that audience. Here's a quote from Wikipedia:

In 1991, in a debate in the regional parliament, a speaker attacked Haider's plan of reducing unemployment payments for people seen as "freeloaders", calling it forced work placement reminiscent of Nazi policies. Haider replied, "It would not be like the Third Reich, because the Third Reich developed a proper employment policy, which your government in Vienna has not once produced."

The german word that he used was "ordentlich", of which "proper" is not a bad translation, although it does not cover all aspects. In "ordentlich" there is order, correctness and a strong implication of approval. You don't call things "ordentlich" when you don't believe in them.

There was more of that by him and much more by his immediate followers. Reinhard Gaugg, one high-ranking member of his party, the man who carried Haider on his shoulders when he became leader of the party in 1986, in a putsch at the Freedom Party's convention in Innsbruck, when asked to give an association with the word "Nazi", replied "neu-attraktiv-zielstrebig-ideenreich" (new, attractive, determined, imaginative).

Haider's greatest triumph came when his party was second strongest force after the elections of 1999, and when in 2000 they went into a coalition with the conservative People's Party, again something that produced an uproar throughout Europe. Taking Haider's party into a government was seen as a breach of the cordon sanitaire against coalitions with right-wing extremists. In practice it quickly demonstrated how amateurish and contrary to their public image these politicians acted, and after only a short time of scandals the party broke apart. Haider continued with a new party in Carinthia where he had a large number of followers, and the original Freedom Party was taken over by some H. C. Strache, only a bad copy of Haider, but successful nevertheless.

And now? Will the world change? Will Carinthia, will Austria change? Will there be an end to quarrel? Will there be an end to the practice of making immigrants scapegoats for whatever is wrong in this country?

Unfortunately it is not so easy at all. Jörg Haider introduced a new kind of politics, something that had not existed before but that now has become an integral part of the Austrian political life. He has lowered the inhibition threshold and he has made things acceptable that should never have been made even thinkable, certainly not in a country with our history, a country that should know better. The witch is dead, but there is no return to Kansas.

The Song of the Day is "Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead", the song from the Wizard of Oz, given Haiders much hinted-at homosexuality, fittingly interpreted by Klaus Nomi, one of the first prominent gay victims of AIDS, a man who died at about the time that Haider's rise to power began. I have it on "Encore!", a collection from 1983 that I then bought on vinyl and later on CD. Hear the song on YouTube.

728 - At The End of the Day

This weekend I came to Carinthia one day earlier, not for fun but for work. You can only get done so much on Saturdays, and this weekend we needed to buy a lot of things. Thus I spent the whole Friday - and it was a wonderful, sunny day - in shopping malls. Nine hours of shopping! Some people seem to enjoy it, at least that's what the advertising for those shopping centers tells, but - honestly - I don't.

Both of today's images were shot within some minutes at and shortly after sundown. The Image of the Day is the wall of the last shop that I visited. I came out and imediately saw that I had only about two or three minutes of golden light left, certainly not enough to go for any other place. I took some architectural shots, this is the best of them.

The other image, well, that's how the day ended after nine hours of shopping. Fitting, in a way.

The Song of the Day is "End Of The Day" from Beck's 2002 album "Sea Change". Hear him perform live on YouTube.

727 - The Gang

This is the last batch of images that I processed yesterday on the train. Both were shot in the morning. The bicycles in the Image of the Day stood in front of a school with attached kindergarten in Vienna's Josefstädter Straße. I found that they had something ... cool, a kind of adolescent charm and recklessness. I instantly thought of a gang.

The other image is of some shop for exotic furniture. They advertise end-of-summer sales (furniture??) in big letters written over their windows and they have two banners, one orange, one light green outside, along with the dark green of the wood. I go that way almost daily, it's a short distance from work, and I have tried for quite some time now to put that impression into a photo. It's a little awkward to isolate from the surroundings, but I guess I've made it this time. That's what there is, that's the essence, that's what catches your eye from a distance, even when the surroundings would not.

The Song of the Day is "First Of The Gang To Die" from the stellar 2004 Morrissey album "You Are the Quarry". This is a song about youthful, reckless heroism, a story about some young Hector, who was "the first of the gang with gun in his hand and the first to do time, the first of the gang to die". A story about one who "stole from the rich and the poor and the not-very-rich and the very poor" and a story about one who "stole all hearts away". It's a story of love, crime, tragic heroism and ridicule. It's a song about all the richness of life.

There are at least five versions on YouTube, I suggest to begin with the original video :)

726 - City Of Gold

Here we are with the images of Wednesday. Not much shooting, not many results, you may guess that my mind was preoccupied with other concerns. The Image of the Day is a morning image, a rather abstract architectural detail, and the flowers are from another flower shop. They were the last image that I shot on Wednesday, only meters from the shop where I then bought the new computer.

"City Of Gold", the Song of the Day, was written by Bob Dylan, and on the Soundtrack of his 2004 movie "Masked & Anonymous" it was interpreted by the Dixie Hummingbirds, who also have it on their 2003 album "Diamond Jubilation: 75th Anniversary". Hear a sample on last.fm.

725 - Who By Fire

In a comment to "723 - The Morning Fog III" Deb jokingly remarked that the image was not tilted. Interestingly enough it was, although only slightly and to fight an optical illusion that would have made a perfectly straight horizon look like running out. You know what I mean, the variant that looks accidental.

Well, the tilt is back and with a vengeance. These are images from Tuesday, the day my computer died. Yesterday I had almost posted them unprocessed, but now that I see them after some Photoshop work, I am glad I didn't.

At the moment I'm on the train to Carinthia, having processed eight images in the last four hours, and now I'm beginning to catch up on the blog entries. The titles are found, the music clips as well, thus you'll get two more entries tonight.

What's the state of affairs? Well, the new computer is up and running, but this morning I've taken the new terabyte drive out once more. It is now in my bag to be filled in Carinthia. There is still no Photoshop, IMatch image database or any image related software on the new computer. This will eat up my evenings when I return to Vienna.

The Song of the Day is "Who By Fire", originally from the 1974 Leonard Cohen album "New Skin for the Old Ceremony", but the version that I want you to see so badly is from a TV show in the late 1980s. Head over to YouTube and see and hear a once-in-a-lifetime performance.

... time passes ...

You know, some days are better than others - and some plainly suck. Trying to get my eight images from the laptop to the desktop computer I found that WiFi failed for whatever reason, my portable hard drive is still in Vienna and my CF card seems to have died as well. Talk about a series :)

Sorry, it's 2am now, no more posts today, I am too tired. See you tomorrow with hopefully at least two posts.

Computer Trouble

No, you won't get a new image today. Neither yesterday's nor anything from today, but please let me whine a little!

I could have tried to find out what's wrong with my computer, but it was ready for a major update anyway, thus I've bought a new one today. It's a standard HP computer with a nice Core 2 Quad 9550 CPU and a weak ATI graphics card. 4GB memory, a 750GB hard drive and Windows Vista Home Premium 64bit.

Well, I've expected Vista to fly on this hardware (here in Vienna I had an Athlon XP 3000+ before), but, honestly, it does not. Yes, the Desktop effects are instantaneous, but so they are on my Ubuntu, running on an Athlon XP 2000+. Everything else is pretty slow. Booting Vista on this considerably faster hardware does not feel faster than booting Ubuntu on the seven year old processor. Apart from that, Vista is the same old Windows that it ever was, with all its stupidity.

An example? Add a hard drive. Physically, I mean. Now boot your computer. You'd expect ... something, anything, but nothing happens. OK, you know that in Good Old Windows you'd have to find the management console, would have to select to manage disks, and there you would have found your disk. Same here. Well, it was not too hard to find. I selected the new disk, right-click, menu, new partition, select a drive letter, answer some questions that may well be unanswerable for any newcomer, say "Finish" and ... get scolded that of course I should have had initialized the drive first.

OK. Now that was stupid of me. I had not remembered the correct sequence! Well, now back to the menu that you get with right-click and ... it's not there. Nothing about initializing! Stupid me again. Of course it's the menu that you get when you not right click into the rectangle that symbolizes the drive, but on the label to its left! What else?

In less than a second the drive is initialized, and only now can you create the partition. Of course you have to click through the whole wizard again, again answering its questions. It could have remembered, it should have done so, but it certainly did not :)

And so on. Sorry for the rant, but I feel better now. I suppose I can post Tuesday's image tomorrow from the train. I travel into the weekend one day earlier this week. It's a four hour's drive and if I am lucky, I may even manage to get more than one post done. See you tomorrow.

724 - Deep inside your Dreams

Let's get on with the new Sigma 50/1.4, will we? These are the images of yesterday, Monday. Now, what do I do with this lens? Well, just like with most lenses, I go for shallow depth of field :)

On an APS-C sensor, 50 mm are a nice focal length for portraits, and in fact this is an excellent portrait lens. In this image of my friend Erich I focused on the near eye, and that's pretty much all that is sharp in this image.

The pumpkins are a morning image, taken in exactly the same spot as "711 - Autumn's Here", in front of a flower shop in Lerchenfelder Straße.

It's Tuesday evening now, and although I have some images for today, you won't see them today and maybe not even tomorrow. When I came home, I found that my computer had died, thus there is no Photoshop today. I write this from a Linux system on my second PC, but of course I have no Photoshop CS3 on Linux. I'll take the Laptop home from work tomorrow, and if I manage to do so, I may have a new computer by tomorrow evening, but I already shudder from the thought of installing all my software. Oh dear!

The Song of the Day, matching the dream-like scene in my Image of the Day, is "Deep inside your Dreams" from Lisa Ekdahl's 2002 album "Heaven Earth & Beyond". Hear it on YouTube.

723 - The Morning Fog III

Today I rose with the sun (quite easy at this time of the year), watched the red come up on the mountains, took some photos, and when the fog rose, I went to bed for another hour.

The song of the Day is once more "The Morning Fog" from Kate Bush's 1985 album "Hounds of Love". Honestly, it's that good. Hear it on YouTube.

722 - Saint James

Yesterday began with the mountains coming out of the fog and me shooting a panorama. I tried to merge the JPEGs in Photoshop, but what I tried to do to the sky led to pixelation. Merging the RAW files, on the other hand, made my computer go out of virtual memory. Hmm ... 32 RAW files are no slouch, me thinks. Well, I'll show it to you when I find out how to do it :)

This image is from the afternoon. After a whole day of work I spent the minutes of late sun in the supermarket near my new home, but who says that you can't make a nice image after actual sundown? It's just another bad match for a 50/1.4 though. My 50/1.8 for a quarter of the price had done it just as well.

This is Sankt Jakob im Rosental, Saint James in English, a village on one of the countless pilgrimage routes to Santiago de Compostela. The Song of the Day? Of course "Saint James Infirmary", on my disk interpreted by Dr. John on his 2004 album "N'Awlinz: Dis Dat or d'Udda", on YouTube to be seen as a collaboration of Dr. John and Eric Clapton. Mmmm .... Tasty :)

721 - Autumn Leaves

Cliché? You bet, but what would you do with no images made in the morning (somehow I always manage to get into a hurry on Fridays) and a short way of only 500 meters above ground to find one?

I guess I'll find better uses for my new Sigma 50/1.4, but here we are, the first image taken with it :)

Did I really need this lens? Sure enough I did not. There is nothing wrong with my Nikon 50/1.8, to the contrary, it is small, light and cheap (all that is the Sigma not), and its quality is excellent as well. If I really want something faster, then I always have the manual Nikon 50/1.2, so what the hell did I think???

Uhhh, this is not a rational thing, you know? I always lusted for a 50/1.4 with autofocus. Autofocus is such an elementary thing and such a necessity with today's viewfinders (admittedly less so on FX), that I rarely use manual focus at all. For macro yes, but otherwise? Not really.

The current Nikon 50/1.4 is not an option because it is to be replaced in November by a new design, and the Sigma was there. Both have about the same price and all reviews of the Sigma so far have found it to be the best 50/1.4 on the market, regardless of brand.

My impressions? Focus was off like with most of my Sigmas. Dialling in an AF compensation of -15 did the trick. This could well be the fault of my camera, because half of my lenses, although most of them Sigma, need exactly -15. The same lenses that need compensation now, did fine on my old D200. Anyway. This was a matter of 10 seconds, but it could be an issue on a camera without AF compensation. In doubt try before you buy.

And after compensation? Sharp as a razor, even wide open. Autofocus seems reliable even in low light, at least as long as you stay above the minimum focusing distance. Failing to do so, I had one of two false positives.

Speed is OK, I found no hunting or pumping. I have not loked into bokeh systematically, and I doubt that I'll ever do, but the reviews on the net have all pointed out that this is a major strength of this lens, and so far I have no reason to disagree.

Just one more thing that I should mention: I did not use a polarizer in this shot although I suppose I should have had so. As a result there was a lot of glare on the ground. A saturation layer in Multiply blending mode, and blended into the light tones, then selectively painted in with a mask, did wonders here.

The Song of the Day is "Autumn Leaves" by Nat King Cole. The anthology that I have is not available any more, thus I recommend the 2000 collection "Unforgettable". Hear the Song on YouTube.

720 - Runnin' Blue

I made these images in the morning, using the Sigma 30/1.4, a nice lens, slightly on the big side, but still a tad smaller than the Sigma 50/1.4 that I bought today. I guess you will see more images at 50 mm soon :)

The Song of the Day is "Runnin' Blue" from the fourth Doors album "The Soft Parade", without doubt by far their least popular album, for a reason, but I have a hard time trying to be objective when it comes to The Doors. They were simply so good. Hear the Song on YouTube.

719 - I've Done It Again

Do you know the feeling of being really tired? Really not wanting to say anything, wanting to shut up, lay down and sleep? Well, I'm really, really tired, so please bear with me :)

This is a morning image, one of the few, the only one that I would consider.

The Song of the Day is "I've Done It Again" from Aaron Neville's 1989 album "Show Me The Way". Hear the whole song on Deezer - and please tell me if you have trouble hearing it. After all Deezer is a French service.

718 - All Red And Green

Remember "706 - Carry That Weight II"? In a comment Ted asked me to not only show the bikes but also the riders.

Well, last morning, immediately after I had left the tram, I saw these two guys passing by, newspapers in their baskets, I remembered Ted, tried my luck and even got sort of a decent shot. Gosh, that's not easy. You can't plan anything ...

... or maybe you can. Of course I know some spots now where lurking for some minutes would almost certainly produce a result :)

Only meters on I found this ribbon on the radio antenna of a parking car. Must have been to a wedding, although at weddings the ribbons are normally some variant of white.

All images today were made with the Nikon 85/1.8, a lens that has been severely underused yet. The riders were shot at f8, this from minimum focusing distance (which is about a poor 80 cm) at f4, the others wide open at f1.8.

There are three reasons why this lens did not get enough attention so far. One is that I bought the Nikon 70-300 VR only two weeks later, and of course the 300 mm were more spectacular.

The second reason is, that this lens shows strong purple fringing (like many old Nikon designs seem to) when used wide open and in extreme contrasts.

The third reason is, that in terms of focal length this lens is not very far from the Sigma 70/2.8 Macro, but the Sigma is the by far better and much more versatile lens.

So, why on earth do I use the Nikon 85/1.8 at all?? Well, I like variety, and used for what it's good at, this lens can produce remarkable results.

The Song of the Day is "Red Ribbon" from Mary Coughlan's 1990 album "Uncertain Pleasures". Amazon has no sound samples, but I found the whole song on Deezer, an online music service that I did not know before. They let me hear the whole song, and in contrast to Pandora or Rhapsody they let me hear it although I am not a citizen of the United States.

It's a French service and their music search is currently more than a little flaky. So far I have not registered with them, because I can't currently see what the benefit would be and their terms of use are displayed in French. Anyway, I could hear the song, that's what counts and I hope you can hear it too.