681 - The Meaning Of Life

Paul Butzi recently wrote about the sources of meaning in photography. He was inspired by a comment Seth Glassman made about another of Paul's posts, that one inspired by a third post on Doug Stockdale's blog (don't you love the blogoshere?).

Paul is mostly concerned with the fact that, while it is difficult to give a single photograph precise meaning, a series of photographs condenses and focuses meaning, and the more so, the longer the series. This is quite obvious but important to keep in mind.

One side topic were the sources of meaning, and Paul writes

But I still think that the meaning was in the scene before I photographed it, would have been in the scene even if I hadn’t strolled along, and was not placed there by me.

which finally was the reason for me to chime in. In a comment I already wrote

I think it’s fundamental to note that the whole concept of meaning does not make sense without communication, even if the communication is only between you and yourself. Meaning is either shared meaning or it is not at all, and when you think about it, that has quite a tail of consequences, e.g. that meaning can’t simply reside in configurations of objects. It needs a thinking mind.

and that's exactly where we need to go into some depth today.

What is "meaning"? Does a stone or a tree mean something? Does a book or an image? And if they meant something, to whom would they mean it? To me? To you? To everybody? And if so, would they mean the same to everyone? And if so, why? Or if not, why not?

Let's begin with some observations. Some days ago we had the matter of women wearing headscarves, centered around an image of a most probably Turkish woman. While looking up the correct term on Leo, I came upon a (german) discussion in their forum, where a fellow Austrian mentioned, that in his youth (whenever this was) in Burgenland, the most eastern province of Austria, neighboring Hungary, married women were more or less required to wear a headscarf. The way he says this makes clear that it is not the case any more. Thus we can say that the headscarf, worn by a woman at that time in that place, carried the designation "married", and I guess nobody will object when I call this a "meaning".

Let's look into that further. A headscarf is a piece of cloth. They come in all sizes, colors and designs. The same piece of cloth, not worn by anyone, certainly does not carry any designation at all, it does not mean a thing. But even in that particular configuration the meaning is local to a place and with time it has changed or vanished. If you ask me, these facts don't portend well for a concept of "meaning" that's inherent to objects or even configurations of objects. Thus, from now on, I take it as given, that "meaning" is assigned.

There is more to learn from this example. Upon first thought it would seem that at least there and then this meaning has been universal. Everybody seems to have known it, but even that is only correct for members of that very culture. Someone from, say, the US would not necessarily have "got" this meaning, at least not without having been told at least once.

Now, this is important: meaning is not universal, but it can be shared, and this is done via communication.

Is meaning shared easily? Does shared meaning automatically mean equal meaning? Even that is not the case, and you see it at once when you just have a look at Ted Byrne's comments to "677 - A Stranger In Town". We talk about "left" and "right" as political concepts, but it becomes instantly clear that Ted and I "mean" different things by that. We are certainly able to communicate, and with some exchange we can easily adjust our meanings, at least temporarily, to meet at common ground, but this is not instant at all. We share the exact symbols but only approximate meanings.

To me this again hints strongly at the individual human mind as the source of all meaning.

What does all this mean for art, and there especially for photography? Is it a problem that meaning is always subjective, and that even in a rigidly defined system like a language (well, it's not math, but certainly much more precise than photography, right?), even in such a system, meaning is neither automatically available nor instantly shared? Does this take away from our expressive power? Does art suffer from vaguely defined meaning?

I believe it does not. Let's again look at an example. This time it is one of the most ugly pieces of architecture in Vienna, a so called "Flakturm", meaning a massive tower built during WWII as a base for anti-aircraft artillery. Vienna has six of them, and because they were built to withstand all allied bombardments, they are practically impossible to get rid of. Now, one of them, the one in Esterhazy Park in Vienna's 6^th district, has been used by the American concept artist Lawrence Weiner for an art installation. It was painted white at the top, lit at nights, and it carries the monumental inscription "Smashed to pieces (in the still of the night)".

Weiner's installation is certainly recognized as art. Let's look at the most important part of it, the only one that has survived and is easy to see for everyone, the inscription. Ask anybody on the street what that is, up on the tower. You will most likely get "Art" as an answer. Depending on the person it may come with a derisive smirk, but nevertheless the art aspect is generally recognized and agreed upon. Why? And what is the exact meaning of this installation? Is there such a beast at all?

Let's look at the text itself. There is a strong tension between the concepts of "smashed" (which implies noise) and "still of the night" (which does not). This tension is what we feel as surreal, and surreal means there is no obvious, inherent meaning at all. Neither of the two fragments of this text is surreal, both could be said to have meaning, but the combination is surreal and in that surrealism it is void of meaning. It's easy to see that just that property makes it art in the first place. It is art because it is ambivalent. It is art because it can work as a receptacle for all kinds of meanings that we like to project on it.

In the end it does not seem to be a problem that we photographers have trouble forcing our images to have an exact and universally shared meaning. Much more than a weakness, it seems to be a strength. Art's power lies in ambivalence. There is nothing to worry about.

The Song of the Day is my only one with the word "meaning" in its title. It is "The Meaning Of Life" from the Monty Python film of the same name, available with lots of other famous songs on "Monty Python Sings". Hear it in the intro to the movie on YouTube.

675 - Dexter Rides Again

Black & white, the last refuge of the color blind, as Ted likes to say. I don't do it very often, but sometimes it is a no-brainer, for instance when there is not much color to begin with.

I shot these two images yesterday morning on my way to work, and the interesting thing is, that I had something totally different in mind. I wanted to use the long lens to capture the hundreds of cables above our streets, long rows of light fixtures dancing in between. In fact I did and the images were not even bad, at least workable in any case, but then this image of a bicycle rider came in between, and somehow everything else paled.

Does this happen to you as well? That you go out with a certain goal, determined to concentrate on a certain kind of subject, and then the unexpected happens? What do you do? Do you give in as I did?

For all who don't like B&W, here is something in color. Although, it's graffiti on a garage door, and some people don't like graffiti either :)

The Song of the Day is "Dexter Rides Again" by Dexter Gordon. I have it on disc 84 of "The Ultimate Jazz Archive". I even found a sound sample. It's the background music to a video about "HAM Radio:PL-259 Installation Made Easy and FUNny". Oh well.

664 - So Long

Yes, I've done it. This image was shot with the Nikon AF-S VR 70-300mm 4.5-5.6G IF-ED. Wow, what a name :)

It's not more than a test image, simply a boy on rollerskates, speeding past me on the sidewalk. This was only minutes after I'd bought the lens and, to be honest, I have not used it for anything really useful since. I intend to make a point though.

The general tenor about the 70-300 is, that it is quite a good, slightly overpriced lens, not overly sharp on the long end, and certainly not wide open, so let's see if this verdict is justified.

This particular image was shot at 300mm and f5.6, i.e. wide open. I simply pointed at the boy and pressed the shutter. Later, in Photoshop, I've cropped from the sides to a square.

If you click on the thumbnail to the right, you get a 600x600 pixel 100% crop of the image. It's a crop of the JPEG that I saved in Photoshop last night, thus there is some sharpening, but please believe me, it is about the same amount that the camera had applied, it's only that I have thrown away the original JPEG. Now, what do we see? There are stitches of the seam, there are single hairs, there is some texture in the shirt, well, for me this looks pretty sharp. Pretty damn sharp, I'd like to say. Add the fact that the lens focuses very fast, and you can imagine that I am happy as a puppy.

Remember yesterday's confusion? Why did I resort to this lens? More than one reason: First of all, it was the cheapest candidate. Quite a good reason if you ask me. Second: it was by far the lightest. The two Sigmas (120-400 and 150-500) weigh 1.750 kg and 1.910 kg, that's more than double the Nikon. The Nikon AF VR 80-400mm 4.5-5.6D ED, another stabilized alternative with seemingly good optics, slow autofocus and a notoriously unusable tripod collar, is only 60% heavier than the 70-300, but it costs triple. The "Weapon of Choice", the Nikon 200-400, is obscenely expensive and with its 3.250 kg is unusable for street photography.

Here you have it. Given my constraints, the Nikon was definitely the best choice, and it performs a good deal better than I had expected, in fact it is quite impeccable. Due to nine rounded blades, even the bokeh is pretty attractive.

Another thing you may notice is, that this image is square. I rarely do square images. The butterfly two weeks ago was, and there may be some square images at times, but they are exceptions. Well, recently I've seen lots of squares on two blogs: Ted Byrne's recent works are mostly square, and the other master of the square is Mark Hobson, aka "The Landscapist". I have asked both for their reasons to shoot square images and for their method of composing for the square while using a rectangular viewfinder.

Let me make it clear: I like the results of both, in fact both have produced some masterpieces. Just look at "Dixie #10" or "Framing", and when you check out Mark, don't forget his new "Shore Light" site! It is only that I really enjoy the process of composing through the viewfinder. I wouldn't mind a square viewfinder and then I would compose squares, but as it is, I rather use the given format than accepting an intermediate step.

Ted answered my question in a comment to "Street People '08e", and when I interpret it right, it is mostly a mix of nostalgia and a sense of rebellion against the dictate of a certain German engineer :) Ted discovers his squares after the fact, while working in Photoshop.

Mark dedicated his "ku # 531 ~ it's hip to be square" to answering my question, and for him it is a preference for the tighter composition and for the way that the square leads the eye. Mark explicitly composes for the square and says that it is only a matter of practice.

Here we are. This image was less than a snapshot and had no recognizable composition at all. Cropping to a square may have salvaged it at least a bit.

Expect more and better squares from me in the future. The two guys got me hooked :)

The Song of the Day is "So Long" from Sopie Zelmani's 1998 album "Precious Burden". See a live version 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.

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.

621 - Right Place Wrong Time

Leaves are falling??? Sorry guys, that's the wrong time. Up the trees again please, I'll tell you when you're due :))

We have storms here in Vienna these days. Well, nothing that would overly impress our friends in the US, but for a mountainous country like ours they are pretty strong. This image is from Wednesday morning, I'm still a day behind schedule.

The Song of the Day is "Right Place Wrong Time" from the incredible Dr. John's 1973 album "In the Right Place". Hear it on YouTube.

613 - Shiny Things

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

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

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

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

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

571 - Them There Eyes II

This is an image that I shot on Tuesday. I couldn't post it that day, because my ISP had severe DNS problems. I could resolve most websites, but www.blogger.com was not one of them. Bad luck. The next two days I had no time at all, now it's Friday afternoon, I sit on the train again and try to catch up.

While post-processing this image of an old Volvo, I thought that the method is very simple, takes hardly any time and is so versatile, that I should probably make another tutorial. Here we go:

This time we look at the incredible power of a frequently underused feature - blending modes. What is a blending mode anyway? Well, that's basically the method Photoshop uses when displaying a layer that is on top of other layers. The most frequently used blending mode (and the default) is "Normal". Basically that means that the top layer hides the layers below. Pretty as you would expect it. Think of it as a stack of playing cards. You can see the top card, but nothing below.

Even in "Normal" mode we can make some interesting things. We can attach a mask to the top layer, and by painting on the mask with black, we can hide the layer partially (mask it). It's a bit like cutting away parts of the top card in the stack. We can also lower the opacity of the top layer from 100% to, say, 50%. Now you can see through the top layer like through a colored plastic foil.

Both of these techniques, masking and opacity, will be used, but we will use it on layers of more exotic blending modes.

Let's first begin with a look at the original Volvo as the camera has recorded it. I always shoot "Large RAW + JPEG Fine", which on my D300 means to use the full 12 megapixel, record the sensor data as a RAW file and to additionally produce a JPEG file of the same size and the best possible quality.

This image, the JPEG from the camera, is obviously meant to be about the headlight. I have used my Sigma 10-20 at f4, went very near and focused on the glass. With a lens this wide and with a maximum aperture of f4 (note: maximum aperture = minimum f-number), you have always a big depth of field, but when you focus near enough, you'll still get some background blur. That's what I was after.

As regards exposure, the camera has done what cameras set to matrix metering tend to do. The exposure is pretty leveled out. There is clearly detail almost everywhere in the car, only the reflexes in the headlight are partially burnt out, but that still looks pretty good to me. The house in the background is perfectly exposed but ugly, and although the sky is much too light, it seems to hold detail as well.

I want this to be about the light. As the image originally was, the light was in an awkward position, neither centered nor on a third. I wouldn't want to center it anyway, so let's put it on a third. The Rule of Thirds is no hard rule at all, but here it does well. In Camera RAW I crop in from the left and a little from below, a tiny bit from the right, and at the same time I make the image boring and flat. I do this by using a linear tone curve (medium contrast is the default) and letting the automatics set exposure, contrast, etc.

I don't always crop in Camera RAW. Normally I do it in Photoshop, and sometimes even at the very end of processing. In Photoshop I also choose the option to hide the cropped area instead of deleting it. Then I can always go back with "Image / Reveal All", and that without reverting the other steps made in between. Here cropping in Camera RAW is OK, as I exactly know what I want.

For the next steps I want to have another layer, basically the same, but with even less overall contrast and instead much increased local contrast. This is the layer that I want to use for blending. In order to get such a thing, I duplicate the background layer and use the PhotoLift plugin on it. See "492 - Roughly About Sundown" for more about that. Alternatively you could also use a curves layer to lower the contrast, and then unsharp mask with a high radius and a low amount (well, to get this effect you'd need more of a medium amount). This is not as convenient as PhotoLift and takes some experimenting, but it works quite well. See how we get detail in the sky now. The look of this layer is almost like many HDR images are, unnatural and comic-like. As it is, this layer is still in "Normal" blending mode.

Next we set the blending mode (that's at the top of the "Layers" palette, left of "Opacity") to "Multiply". Eeek! That's much too dark! On the other hand, the sky is nice, the ugly house is mercifully lost in the shadows, and maybe the darkness would do nicely as a vignette.

Let's add a mask now, and then let's paint with a big, soft brush and the color black on the mask. Where it's black, the layer with the mask is hidden. Let's do that on and around the headlight. Ahhh! Much better. The problem is only, that what we have revealed, is still the boringly flat original background.

What do we need now? Basically we want our contrast back, and along the way we want some more colors as well. We don't want it everywhere, we only want it on the headlight, or in other words, we want it where we have painted with black on the mask. I simply duplicate the top layer, change the blending mode to "Soft Light", and then invert the mask. Voilà! A little sharpening with an edge mask, and that's the Image of the Day. Here is a shot of the layers palette.

What have we done? We have set a strong focus in the image. This is now really about the headlight, nothing else.

Of course the same result could have been reached in a number of ways. There is always more than one way to do things in Photoshop, but I think two layers, that's not too shabby. The point is, that it really pays to know about blending modes and what you can do with them.

This is the image that inspired me to write about blending modes, but compared to the original image, the effects are still subtle. Let's look at something really dramatically bad, and let's try to change it into something usable.

Today I've asked my friend Erich to sit for a really bad portrait. I wanted something terribly lit, an image with a light background (a window), the face looking into the room, being fully in shadow. This is a worst case scenario, something that I would normally avoid under all circumstances, and if I couldn't avoid it, I would use a flash. Still, sometimes such an image is all that we get. It has either been taken by someone else who didn't care, or we had the choice to take it or get no image at all. The first image is straight from the camera. We have extremely harsh contrasts, the background is partially gone and we still don't see details in the face.

The first step is again to convert it in Camera RAW into something flat. The real reason behind this is to incorporate all detail that we can get. The result is even less attractive. Now let's do some blending.

We begin with "Multiply" again. But, wait, what do we blend? For the last image we have used a pixel bearing layer with increased local contrast, but this is not always necessary. You can blend any layer, even adjustment layers. Thus we add a curves adjustment layer, don't bend the curve at all, and only set the blending mode to "Multiply". This has the same effect as duplicating the background and setting the result to "Multiply", only the curves layer takes much less space in the resulting file. But this is not only more efficient, we could even manipulate the curve to fine-tune the effect. No need to do it here, but it's good to know that we can. The effect on the background is OK, but of course we want to paint in the mask to reveal the face. This is what the image to the right shows.

Let's add another curves layer to lighten up the face. I duplicate the "Multiply" layer, change the blending mode to "Screen" (which strongly lightens up) and again invert the mask. Now that's dramatic! For the first time we see the face.

That's positively the right direction, but I want more light. One way would be to duplicate the screen layer, but doing so still does not give enough light, and even worse, the contrast in the face is deteriorating. Let's try another blending mode.

Basically there are three groups of blending modes that work well in such situations. One group darkens the image. "Multiply" is the most frequently used mode of them, "Color Burn" and "Linear Burn" are also useful. A white layer in one of these modes is neutral and does not change the image.

The second group lightens the image. We have already seen "Screen", "Color Dodge" and "Linear Dodge" are others. A black layer in one of these modes is neutral and does not change the image.

Finally there are modes that increase contrast. Light portions of the upper layer lighten the image, dark portions darken it. "Soft Light", "Overlay" and "Hard Light" are the most useful modes in this kind of post-processing. A mid-gray layer in one of these modes is neutral.

What we need here is first some more light, and trying the lightening group shows that "Linear Dodge" does quite well, although we need to dial back opacity to 80%. The first attempt at a mask was a copy of the mask for the screen layer, but then I decided to use a strongly blurred version of that. Furthermore I have painted in the mask to tone down some highlights that would otherwise have burned out. "Linear Dodge" preserves more contrast than "Screen", but it also tends to be aggressive to extreme highlights, so be careful.

The next step is to increase contrast. We don't need much, but some contrast we do need. The most gentle mode to increase contrast is "Soft Light". "Overlay" and "Hard Light" would be next, but for this particular case, "Soft Light" at an opacity of 50% is OK.

Originally the face was in complete shadow and we had no clue what a correct white balance would be. Now though we see that the face is too yellow. The camera was on automatic white balance, and in that insane mix of background daylight and muted interior neon light it actually did quite well. Still, it's too yellow and we'll need to correct that.

There are many ways to correct color, and while I have extensively used Lab color mode last year, my current tool is the "Photo Filter" adjustment layer. We need some cooling here, and the cooling filter of choice for this image is "Cooling (LBB)" at the default strength of 25% and an opacity of 30%. Of the three cooling filters, LBB is the one that has a slightly reddish cast, and that looks good here.

Now that colors and tones are about right, it is a good time to clone out some blemishes of the skin. Remember, this is not about altering the image, it is about removing distractions that are not part of the personality of your model. Everybody has some red spots at times, but nobody considers those spots essential for recognizing the person. They are alway in different positions, it's only the photographic image that would lock them in place. By removing them, we only reveal the archetype the sits below. Good riddance.

We could stop here, but a little beauty blur is always nice in a portrait, and even more so when the image quality is already stressed by an attempt to pull detail out of deep shadows. I call this my "neutral blur", and I have an action for that. Basically it goes like this:

Select the whole image, "Copy merged" and paste into a new layer. Duplicate this layer. Set the first one to "Screen" mode and Gaussian blur it with a radius of 30 pixels. Let Opacity at 100%. Then set the other one to "Multiply", blur it with a radius of 5 and set the opacity to 60%. Group the two layers and set the opacity of the group to what looks good. Here I have used 70%.

For women we would probably leave it at that, but Erich is a man and here we want a tad more definition. I could have used a PhotoLift layer, but instead I "Copy Merged" again and use unsharp mask with an amount of 60 and a radius of 60 pixels on the result. An opacity of 50% is ideal in this case.

Impressive? Certainly. It's not that I did this in zero time, not at all. Especially the mask of the "Linear Light" layer took me some time, but I guess the result clearly recommends having a look at blending modes.

One note though: Don't expect such extreme manipulations to work with JPEGs taken with a point-and-shoot camera. Photoshop can't do wonders. Noise and JPEG artifacts will frequently restrict how far you can go. For maximum malleability you need RAW files and a DSLR.

The Song of the Day is again "Them There Eyes", but this time it's not Louis Armstrong, this time it's Anita O'Day and her 1957 collaboration with the Oscar Peterson Trio "Anita Sings the Most".

537 - More Than Rain

This is the image for Wednesday. I shot it on my way home. Rain had just stopped, the sun was back again, and I saw this gorgeous Mini Cooper, wet and sparkling all over with reflections.

The other two images were made only minutes later, on the same street. I had not expected much more than rain, but I got a big bunch of colors instead. Who would complain?

It's interesting. All three images were made with the Nikon 18-200 VR. Well, when you look into the sidebar and scroll way down to the labels, then you'll see that the 18-200 is by far my most used lens. OK, what's interesting now? Well, the interesting thing is, that I have used the Sigma 70/2.8 almost exclusively for about four months, suddenly I am back to the 18-200, and now I stick with that. Don't ask me about my inspiration, but that's how funny it works :)

The Song of the day is "More Than Rain" from Tom Waits' classic "Franks Wild Years". See him perform live on YouTube.

514 - Let's Push Things Forward

This is the image for yesterday, Monday. I had not much time for photographing at all, and just as I was trying to make something out of the last sunlight and the shadows of the cars on these walls, two young men came along on their skateboards.

Sigma 10-20 at 20mm, f7.1 and 1/125s.

The Song of the Day is "Let's Push Things Forward" from The Streets' 2002 album "Original Pirate Material". See the video on YouTube.

501 - Ain't No Big Thing

Can you remember when Ted discovered European cars? The 2CV? And then the Smart, the car that fits in every parking lot?

Well, here in Austria even the Police drives them. Here is one in front of the side entrance of our parliament. Had it been a night shot, I surely would have chosen Jethro Tull's "The Mouse Police Never Sleeps" as Song of the Day, but alas, it was right in the morning when yesterday I shot this image.

This is again the Sigma 70/2.8, this time, with plenty of light, at f8 and still at 1/400s. Some tiny enhancements in lighting after the fact.

The Song of the Day is "Ain't No Big Thing" from John Lee Hooker's 1997 album "Don't Look Back". That's his co-production with Van Morrison.

And now? I guess I owe Ted some hundred answers to his questions from yesterday's comment. I promised to answer little by little, and in fact I'll try to answer one point per day. Is that fair? This should only take me the next 500 posts, at least as long as Ted stops asking :)

Ted, you asked what I have discovered "about the 'if only' cursing that happens when you see the results on your computer screen and wonder 'if only' you'd panned a tad more left, pulled a tad more back, grabbed a tad more sky, earth, chest, or leg?". That's an easy one for starters:

Most of the time it is no curse at all. 95% of my images are shot in everyday locations, locations that I can go back to whenever I like. 95% of my people images have the people blurred and in the background. It may be difficult to impossible to get another opportunity for a missed shot, but in most cases it is not. And then, when all the shooting is done, there is still Photoshop. Mind you, not as a means to rescue bad images, no, simply as another stag in the "making" of images.

No, I have no problem to miss a shot. I may create something different in Photoshop, or I may go back the other day and try it again. Or the other year. In fact, there is a shot that can only be taken within a short range of days, maybe not more than one or two, in January. I have partially missed an opportunity during winter 2005/2006, and since then I have forgotten every year, but one year I'll get it :)

494 - On Every Street

It's Friday morning now and this is the image for Tuesday. Still struggling :)

I didn't have too many spectacular things, so you gotta to work with what you have, right? I've treated this image with my recipe for creating detail in noisy or slightly unfocused images, neither because it was noisy, nor because it was badly focused, no, I did it in order to not lose detail.

The problem is, that these street scenes against the sundown contain so incredibly much contrast, that you really have to push the image to extremes, in order to get shadow detail, and if you didn't have noise before, then you have it for sure. The final image has rich detail, is smooth and has color depth. I'd print it big anytime.

The Song of the Day is "On Every Street" from the 1991 Dire Straits album "On Every Street". See a live version on YouTube.

451 - Tell Me When My Light Turns Green

I'm late, oh my God, I'm so late! I've taken a day off from work for printing, and that's what I've done all day. This is the image for yesterday, one for today will follow in a few hours.

This should have been a B&W image. Yesterday when I went home from work, I did what I've said I'd do: I set the camera to "monochrome", ISO 6400 maximum and Auto-ISO, and then I walked off into the night.

What can I say? It did not turn out all too well. I was a bit in a hurry, and I believe that after so much color work, I would have needed time to let myself fall into that B&W vision, time to experiment. I mean, I can do B&W work, you have seen some, and if not then you can search for the label Black and White and see for yourself, but going out with the express intent of shooting only B&W and willingly ignoring color, that's a different story. Whatever, maybe it's not my thing, maybe I was not in the mood (actually I found it depressing), the outcome is that I have no real inclination to try it again anytime soon :)

Thankfully not all was lost, because setting the camera to "monochrome" changes nothing of what the RAW file contains, and this is of course color information. This was not a really bad B&W image, but, lo and behold, in color and with a tiny color shift towards green, it looks real good to my eyes.

Sigma 30/1.4 at f1.4, 1/50s and ISO 720.

The Song of the Day is "Tell Me When My Light Turns Green" from the 1980 debut album of one of the best bands of the eighties, no, one of the best bands ever: I'm speaking of "Searching for the Young Soul Rebels" by Dexy's Midnight Runners.

432 - Hit The Road To Dreamland

It's Christmas time, right? Yesterday I finally gave in to an urge that had buggered me for half a year now, the urge to buy another macro lens, one that would be better suited to street photography than my Sigma 150/2.8.

"Street photography?", you say, "Why on earth would anyone use a macro lens to go out on the street?".

To get into Dreamland, of course, that's why! This brand new Sigma 70/2.8 macro lets me get near to a reflection in a car or to an advertising on the post of a street sign, and then throw lights in the background wildly out of focus. Out on the street, this is not a lens to portrait reality, it's a lens to create dreams.

Both images were shot wide open at f2.8.

The Song of the Day is the Harold Arlen / Johnny Mercer standard "Hit The Road To Dreamland" and while it's certainly enjoyable to listen to Jane Monheit (and see her) on YouTube, I'll recommend a different version today. It's from Dr. John's 2006 album "Mercernary", and it's as much Mac Rebennack as it gets :)

431 - They'll Be Home For Christmas?

Funny how it sometimes turns out. I had a completely different image in mind all day, I had an idea what to write about it, but it somehow didn't materialize :)

And then, when I saw this image, the street, the Christmas decoration, the traffic, all the cars heading somewhere home, and when I heard Holly Cole, the great, reliable Holly Cole, always good for a Song of the Day, sing "I'll Be Home For Christmas", then I knew this can't be wrong, can it?

The song is from her 2001 album "Baby, It's Cold Outside". Not your typical Christmas album.

423 - Brand New Car

What can you say in five minutes?

It's a car, a friendly car that I met last morning on my way to work. It's been sweatin' a lot, must've run fast.

Nikon 50/1.8 at f1.8, 1/30s and ISO 200.

The Song of the Day is "Brand New Car" from "Voodoo Lounge", one of the best Rolling Stones albums ever.

408 - Anything Goes

Today, when in the morning the fog lifted for some minutes and I caught a glimpse of blue sky, it almost looked like we could get a sunny day.

I was so wrong. Not only that the fog returned for hours, no, it even began to drizzle. In the late afternoon I gave up my hope on landscape shots and decided to drive to Klagenfurt. They have a Christmas market, and that always means color and light.

I was so wrong. By the time I was there it poured down and there was no chance to get any decent shots. I already played with the thought of using one of yesterday's images, shot immediately before I made yesterday's "Chance Meeting". You can even see the door in the background.

When I eventually drove down to our favorite China restaurant, I finally found the image. I had already stopped looking, at least consciously, when I recognized that they had added Christmas decoration to the already lush lights on the restaurant. I had the Sigma 10-20 mounted, and with all the cars parking in front of the lights, it was hard to get any interesting composition. OK, I thought, then with a car. And so I did :)

Sigma 10-20 at 10mm, f5.6, ISO 125, 1/4s, hand-held from under an umbrella.

The Song of the Day is my all-time favorite version of Cole Porter's "Anything Goes". It's from the opening scene of "Indiana Jones & the Temple of Doom", sung by Helen Hobson in Mandarin. Hilarious! Hear a sound sample on Amazon.com. It's track 8 you want. Track 16 is the normal English version.


Today, when in the morning the fog lifted for some minutes and I caught a glimpse of blue sky, it almost looked like we could get a sunny day.

I was so wrong. Not only that the fog returned for hours, no, it even began to drizzle. In the late afternoon I gave up my hope on landscape shots and decided to drive to Klagenfurt. They have a Christmas market, and that always means color and light.

UPDATE: This image reminds Ted of one of the two prints that I brought to Florence. See for yourself at "271 - Night Lights".