671 - Now You Say You're Sorry

I saw these two graces yesterday morning, I saw them today, and today it was about time to eavesdrop on them.

The title is a line from the Song of the Day, the Arthur Hamilton standard "Cry Me A River", originally written for Ella Fitzgerald. Boy, a song written for Ella, so her version must be pretty much the best, huhh?? Wrong. Nobody ever sang this song with more icy disdain than Barbra Streisand on her 1963 debut "The Barbra Streisand Album". Hear it on YouTube. On the other hand, Ella's version is, well, what can I say, it's Ella. It's only not the right emotion :)

Edit: Oh dear, I just found another version by Ella. Had to share this as well. WOW!

663 - Everybody's Talkin'

Two images for today and not more in common than technical data. I shot both images with the Nikon 18-200 VR at 200mm and f10. I still go "long". I even pondered about buying a new lens.

Of course this would be frivolous, considering that I bought the 85/1.8 only - what? - two weeks ago, but, to be honest, that was not what held me back. What really held me back were two things:

First, I have no idea which one. The Nikon 70-300/4.5-5.6 VR seems like a good idea. It is mostly considered a good lens, and it would buy me an equivalent of 450mm in a very light piece of plastic for a moderate price. But then, of course there is the Sigma 120-400/4.5-5.6 OS for not so much more. OS is Sigma's equivalent to Nikon's VR, Canon's IS and Tamron's VC. Oh well.

Or better the also new Sigma 150-500/5.0-6.3 OS?? Both of these lenses have not many reviews online, and what there is is rather less than favorable, but on the other hand, there is so much Sigma bashing on the forums with everybody complaining that these lenses do not compare well to pro grade lenses that are at least twice the price, my experience simply does not correlate. Yes, autofocus is off at times and frequently slow, but for the first problem I can compensate in-camera, and the second does not bother me. Apart from that, all my Sigma lenses are razor sharp. So what? You see, not knowing what you want can really hold you back :)

Second, this is even amplified by the fact that I do exactly know what I want, and that is really none of these lenses. The long weapon of choice is of course the Nikon AF-S VR 200-400mm 4G IF-ED, and what holds me back in this regard is only a tiny detail: €5720 for the cheapest offer. Uuhhh, and another detail probably: this beast weighs 3.275 kg. Right, with my camera body I would have to haul around about 4 kg. Well, at least you can't complain that you didn't get anything for your money.

OK, considering my confusion and the obscene price for my dream lens, it may not come as a surprise that I ended up buying nothing at all. Instead I went photographing (not a bad idea, really), pulled my meager 200mm to the limit, and that's what you get for today. A reflection of some old architecture in some new, this time in color (see "645 - The Price You Pay" for something in B&W), and a man on the street using his mobile.

It's not so long ago that almost nobody had a mobile. I remember 1996 when I got my first one, and at that time they were just getting cheap. Well, for some time I had two of them, and now I am back to one. Funny, for the still biggest part of my life I didn't have such a thing and I didn't miss it at all. So, these are the two fundamental technological advances of our time: mobile phones and the internet, and both are communication related. Seems like a pretty elementary need :)

The Song of the Day is "Everybody's Talkin'", a Fred Neil cover by The Beautiful South, released on their 1994 album "Miaow". See a TV version on YouTube.

657 - Here We Go Again

You know this guy? We had him in "377 - I Should Have Taken It As A Warning". I took this image on Thursday morning in bad light, actually I don't even know why I took it at all. In any case I definitely did not have the intention to use it. Then, yesterday on the train, it was the first that I looked at, and I thought, well, let's just have a look at it in Photoshop, just to see ... let's say I was taken away :)

The Song of the Day is "Here We Go Again" by Norah Jones and Ray Charles, to be found on the 2004 production "Genius Loves Company". Hear it 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.

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.

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.

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??

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.

634 - With My Eyes Wide Open I'm Dreaming

This is the second attempt at today's Image of the Day. My first choice, a nice sunrise, perfectly matching the cliché, had some technical flaws and, honestly, at this time of the day I don't have the nerve to do it again. It's always nice to have a backup ready, isn't it?

Well, the backup is another image of this morning, and it perfectly connects to yesterday's entry. This one was shot with the Nikon 50/1.2 at f1.2. It is a detail from a shop facade in Vienna's Josefstädter Straße, but with so extremely shallow depth of field, that it has become a complete abstract. This lens may be a beast to focus, but it sure was worth its money.

The second image is not a very elegant match, in fact the only two things that these two images have in common, are the street where they were taken and the lens that I have used. This second image was taken at f4, and somehow I like the asymmetric composition.

The Song of the Day is another one by Natalie Cole, and that's by chance as well. It's "With My Eyes Wide Open I'm Dreaming" from the 1999 album "Snowfall on the Sahara". The version that I have found on YouTube is not from Natalie but from Patti Page.

633 - Undecided

Cameras have a stunning potential to show us a world beyond our experience, yet we are so used to this fact, that it is interesting news to many people, when you tell and show them, that some of what they see on images can't be seen through human eyes. Much of Susan Sontag's collection of essays "On Photography" circles around this very topic of convergence between our perceived reality and the world of images.

One of the main culprits is the shallow depth of field that photographers can use to isolate their subject. The result can be everything from looking perfectly real, via deeply surreal, to completely abstract.

Shallow DOF is an effect that I absolutely enjoy using. Probably I should take my time and label all those images on the blog. I suspect they will amount to something between 50 and 100 by now.

I have long wondered about how to title this Image of the Day. For me it is somewhere in that surreal middle ground. The point of view is so low, that there is some aspect of being caught inside. I am not sure if this is positive or negative. Then there is the vaguely recognizable row of windows, quickly fading into a nondescript mist. There is a kind of gray warmth outside, but it does not give me a cozy feeling. Uncertainty? I don' know. I am undecided.

The Song of the Day is the old Jazz standard "Undecided", and the only version I have is on the 1993 Natalie Cole album "Take a Look". Hear another version by a Czech Jazz band on YouTube. Not bad. Not at all bad :)

630 - Oooh, What A Lucky Man I Was

Yesterday's food is from the can. I was short on time in the morning, and when I left for the train, the light was utterly flat and uninspiring. I could have delayed photographing to the evening, but on the other hand I had plenty of time for post-processing while on the train.

I always carry a bunch of files with me in a folder "TODO", and for lack of anything better to do, I began processing some of them.

The decaying house front is not far from where I live. When I am late and take the way to work via the Underground, I always pass by, but this particular image was taken about a year ago, in the afternoon. I used my Nikon 50/1.2 and was on the way to a concert where I wanted to use this fast lens.

The next image, a garbage can in Mariahilfer Straße in Vienna, was taken last August with the then new Sigma 20/1.8. It was early morning on a bright day with blinding sunlight, and I liked the contrast between the modern design and the traces of ... uhmm ... neglect.

The final image, the Image of the Day, is from that Sunday morning in Florence/Italy when I was photographing with my friend Ted Byrne. This image was taken while Ted was on the other side, making the first image that he posted from Florence.

This is one of those images that I always wanted to process. I tried it one time and did not particularly like the result, so it went back into the "TODO" folder. Much to Ted's annoyance I took all my images that morning from the tripod and I really took my time. Just as I was satisfied with the framing, a white car drove by to park in front of these poles, right in my image. I pressed the shutter only a second before. The sidelight is from the car's head lights. While the original would have been nothing but a failed attempt, this side light makes the image, and that's also what was so hard to bring out in post-processing. I was just a lucky man :)

The Song of the Day is "Lucky Man" from ELP's 1970 debut album "Emerson Lake & Palmer". See something like a video on YouTube.

629 - Electric Ladyland V

Time for another installment of my "Electric Ladyland" series. This time we are in Vienna, the image is from today (caught up!!) and again I don't fight the ever present cables, the wires that keep our civilization running, again I use them. Apart from that I may have added some slight enhancements in Photoshop as well. I can't help it, it just happens some times.

The second image is from the morning. That's what I originally wanted to present as Image of the Day, before things got out of control :)

As always in this series: The Song of the Day is still "Have You Ever Been (to Electric Ladyland)" from Jimi Hendrix' 1968 album "Electric Ladyland".

627 - Mon Vieux Joseph

As I said, this was a very short intermezzo in Carinthia. I took the train down on Monday afternoon, and today, Wednesday, I returned to Vienna early in the morning.

Of course I was swimming, albeit much too short. On my way to the lake, I took the first image, two blades of spelt (as I found out on Wikipedia), using the somewhat inelegant but extremely effective "machine gun" approach. Of the 11 surviving images, this was the one that I liked most. Talk about industrial image making :)

Technically I have converted the image in Capture NX, because I liked the original approach of the camera and would have had a hard time to mimic colors and contrast in Adobe Camera RAW. The only thing that I did in CS3 was sharpening.

The other two images are from the break between the two parts of the concert. The Clemencic Consort gave Carmina Burana, and it was just as great as I had expected. See this video for a sample. In the Gothic church of Maria Saal we had the slightly nicer environment though :)

I am quite sure that the Saint on the glass window holding the infant Christ is Joseph, thus the Song of the Day is "Joseph" from Georges Moustaki's best known 1969 (what a year!!!) album "Le Meteque". Hear it on YouTube.

626 - Gotta Travel On

After yesterday's somewhat lengthy post, I'll keep it very short today. This is the image for Monday, you see, instead of catching up, I managed to get even two days behind now :)

Monday afternoon I left Vienna for a one-day intermezzo in Carinthia. We had concert tickets for Tuesday evening. On my way to the Underground, I regularly pass this building, Justizpalast. You've seen it in "141 - Memories of Summer", in "336 - Split Decision / Up In The Sky" and "154 - The Triumph of Parliamentarism" was taken from its roof terrace.

I had the Sigma 30/1.4 mounted, and when I saw the light/shadow pattern caused by the shadow of a flag falling on the wall, I decided to get very near and use extremely shallow DOF. Well, in fact f4.5 was what I ended up with, and even with that I was already at 1/4000s. In hindsight I like it better as it is anyway. Any shallower and the image would considerably loose depth.

The Song of the Day is "Gotta Travel On" from Bob Dylan's much despised 1979 album "Self Portrait". On youTube I have not found it by him, but as this is an old standard, there are other versions, for instance this one.

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 :)

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 :)

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.

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 :)

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.

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".