674 - From A Distance

It was no particularly beautiful day today. It was a bit hazy, but good enough to go swimming. I shot 17 images in 20 minutes, three of them are here, the Image of the Day and another square ...

... and then there is one more that could be in my "Electric Ladyland" series.

It's late and I leave you with the Song of the Day, "From A Distance" by the Divine Miss M, to be heard on her 1990 album "Some People's Lives". Hear the album version and a live version on YouTube.

673 - De Colores

Some days ago Mark Hobson, "The Landscapist", wrote a very interesting blog entry "on seeing". He says

So, it comes as a surprise to me that most others do not look and see in anything like the manner I do. It has become increasingly obvious to me that most people are almost blind to the physical world around them. They seem to look and see enough just to navigate (I mean that literally) their way around the planet but beyond that actually take notice of very little of the physical world that they inhabit.

and later down, after some examples

It is often remarked, when someone does something remarkably stupid, "Where was he/she when they passed out the brains?" I am beginning to wonder, "Where the hell were they when they passed out the eyes?"

Contrary to what the latter quote may seem to imply, Mark Hobson's humorous rant was in no way judgemental, he simply reports this as facts, but it immediately connected with me, I read it a couple of times and I thought about what this means for me, for my work and for the satisfaction that I can get out of it.

Take this image, shot yesterday, Saturday. I was on my way to the lake and I stopped in one of the places that I often do, knowing they are always good for an image, regardless of the lens mounted. I arrived there, saw blossoms in blue, yellow and white against a rich green backdrop, complemented by the brightly red insulators on the fence posts. Wow! I even knew what the final image would look like, the rough composition, the distribution of sharpness, etc. I needed to experiment with aperture, because my use of the 70-300 at 300mm has not become fully automatic yet, but basically all was there from the instant of first sight. This is a photographer's view. I know that most people, seeing me crouching there, would ask themselves what the hell I was doing and why I did not take a nice image of the gorgeous panorama.

Well, I guess in this case the outcome is an image that easily communicates what I saw, and most of the people, who would not have seen what I did, will admit that there was at least some value in taking the picture. This is not always the case though. Sometimes not even the final result makes those, who have not "got it", get it.

What does it mean to have "got it" anyway? It is certainly not about intelligence, because I know extremely bright minds who are completely blind to those things. It is also not a general sensibility that one has or has not and that applies to all senses.

I am sure that in most cases when I am pleased with a work and most people don't "get it", there is still something to be got, and that the general refusal is not automatically a sign for a "miss" (though that can be as well). For me the proof lies in the fact that those people who still like it, are mostly fellow minds, artists whose works appeal to me, who speak a similar language.

Can it be learned? Yes, I think so, at least to a certain degree. I think I wouldn't have seen this image a few years ago, i.e. before my liaison with photography. Being curious, experimenting, seeing results of others, all that makes you see potential that you wouldn't have been able to see otherwise. Openness and curiosity, these are two important aspects on the producing, as well as on the consuming side. I guess you can only see what you are open to see, and this applies to artists and audiences.

And then? I believe the rest is passion. I am passionate about photography, and that makes me "get" some things that others may not get. Others are passionate about quantum physics, and it is immeasurable how much I don't get about that. Nothing to worry about, nothing to brag about. We are what we are, we are different and that's a damn fine thing. The world would be boring without it.

The Song of the Day is the Mexican folk song "De Colores", sung by Joan Baez on her 1974 album "Gracias a la Vida". Hear it on YouTube.

672 - Only Pretty, What A Pity

"It’s Pretty, but is it Art?" Paul Butzi recently asked on his blog, quoting from an article in the Wall Street Journal. The article is about Dale Chihuly, his art glass and about why the exhibition "Chihuly at the de Young" is inappropriate.

One of the more offensive arguments is that

The word most commonly used by Chihuly-fanciers to describe the works is "beautiful," a concept of little value in defining serious art after the Impressionists.

Paul strongly disagrees, so do I, and on that grounds we could forget the nonsense, but on the other hand it is maybe a good opportunity to reflect a little about three different notions of art:

Art as in "what artists do" is a process of interacting with reality, a process of discovery that is by necessity explorative, experimental, iterative and dynamic. The artifacts may be beautiful to the uninvolved observer or they may be not, and that really is not the question. The question is, whether they connect to the viewers, make them think, make them ask questions, make them dream, involve them in any way. If so, then art is successful. Beauty is a way to that end, but definitely not the only legitimate. I think from the presence or the absence of beauty alone, nothing can be concluded. If it works or if not, that is a guts feeling and it is individual. This is what I feel is True Art.

The second notion, art as an object of trade, has a severe problem with a couple of those properties that I have claimed for true art. The dynamics of exploration tend to produce unpredictable results. Gold is not dynamic, neither are diamonds and, thank God, neither is Van Gogh. That's the reason why the art market loves two kinds of artists: dead artists and those who are Good as Dead.

A dead artist can't ever produce anything again, and that keeps prices high and supply restricted. Like big diamonds, huhh?? A dead artist can't ever say or do anything that decreases his value. Compare this to Steven Demetre Georgiou aka Cat Stevens aka Yusuf Islam. Someone held a record contract with him and that contract lost value with his turn to Islam, and it again lost value with the partial quotings after 9/11. OK, that is a popular musician, but the point is, no way this could happen with Monet, Picasso, Dalì or Adams.

The other kind of artists is those who are Good as Dead. They don't change. They behave. At some point of their career they have "found their style", as the euphemism goes, and now they stick to that, risk nothing, make a living of producing the ever same things in the ever same ways and in restricted quantities.

This is not living art, it is dead art. Most of these things had value at their time, some keep their value, but the artists have ceased to contribute anything original, new or meaningful. It's repetition for the sake of the market.

Finally we have a third notion of art, and that is the trivialized conception of a de-sensibilized public opinion. Here we mostly find the equation "Art = Beauty".

The general public does not care much about the process of art, but they do care about emotions. Their emotions. They do feel when they get involved, and beauty is a powerful means to that. So are ugliness and fear, but because the public does not care about the deeper aspects of art, they see it as something pleasurable to be consumed. Only beauty can easily fulfill that role, and thus the equation.

The article about Chihuly is from the elitist perspective of the art marketeer, and it is arrogant and silly, especially the quote about beauty. It's especially stupid, because art was never only beautiful, even less so before the impressionists. Art was about power, about devotion, about passion, just as True Art is today. What does he mean by "a concept of little value in defining serious art after the Impressionists" anyway? Does he see the Impressionists as the last who had a right to claim beauty? Oh dear, they were about truth, not beauty. Some of their images just happen to be beautiful, that's all.

Now what about Chihuly, you may ask. I didn't know him before I was pointed to him by Paul's post. What I see on his site certainly does not particularly involve me, and from my guts I would put him into the category of artists who know how to make a living by virtue of their style. At the end of the day there may be a case against Dale Chihuly's art, but a plump attack on beauty is certainly the wrong way.

The Song of the Day is "Only Pretty, What A Pity" from the 1968 Lovin' Spoonful album "Everything Playing". No lyrics, no video. Sorry.

660 - Pleasantly Blue

Yesterday, right at the side of the street, I had found a strip of land between two fields, that had been left as a wild flower meadow, and at the moment it is full of wonderfully blue flowers. As yesterday's attempts had been completely fruitless, I decided to return today and try it again, this time not with the 85/1.8 but with the 18-200 at 200 mm.

Seems like I was right. What you need in such a case is not shallow depth of field (it will be shallow anyway, don't care), what you need is compression. Look for a lump of blue flowers, go near, shoot right through it onto some yellow or orange flowers in the middleground. That's exactly what I wanted.

The Song of the Day is "Pleasantly Blue" from the 1992 4 Non Blondes album "Bigger, Better, Faster, More!". Hear it on YouTube.

653 - Too Marvelous for Words

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

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

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

649 - Big Rain Tonight

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

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

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

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

604 - Hiding In The Shadows

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

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

596 - SoFoBoMo - Funny How Time Slips Away

Funny. At the moment there are a lot of things that I'd have imagined easier. Let's talk about this fisheye lens first.

I was very busy yesterday, basically editing SoFoBoMo images all day, but every once in a while, when I needed to get on my feet for some minutes, I took the camera and tried taking a picture.

Normally when I do that, I pretty much know what an image will or can look like compositionally, and that without even having used the viewfinder. This also works for more exotic lenses or when the intended depth of field is very shallow. It even works for the Lensbaby. They all are quite predictable. Take some images and you know how the lens works, know how the lens works, and you can predict any image. Easy.

Not so with this beast. Everything twists and turns, and so do you while trying to get your feet out of the image. Or your elbow.

At the moment I try using the lens for macro shots like with these roses (I suppose that's what they are, some wild roses). And really, wide open, at f2.8, and going so near that the front lens almost touches the petals, there is even something like bokeh :)

SoFoBoMo editing is the other hard stuff. I did it all day yesterday, and at night there were still six or seven images missing, and so was the text. Still, I reckoned I would manage to get it ready by Sunday 11:00am.

The trouble is, that a sequence of images that were shot in varying conditions of light must be edited in a way that makes a continuous, smooth impression. Color temperature is such a thing. In normal image editing, e.g. for the Image of the Day, it is completely irrelevant whether the absolute temperature is "correct" or not. Sure, I could use a gray card, but what for? If it looks OK, it's OK, if not, not.

Sequences work differently. The images must work together. Any abrupt color changes will get noticed, and the same is true for different styles of post-processing. And that's my problem. Over the course of almost two weeks of editing I have changed styles, using different monitors, all calibrated but all with different limits, I have introduced color shifts. These things are often not visible when you see only one image at a time, but together the differences hurt the eye. More than a million years of evolution have trained us to see the most subtle differences.

And that's why time slips away :)

The Song of the Day, "Funny How Time Slips Away", is from the 1974 Bryan Ferry album "Another Time, Another Place".

590 - Thru And Thru

I had only half an hour for shooting today, thus I took the car, drove slowly along until I found a meadow with a nice mix of flowers, and there I took some images of bees and another variation on the theme of photographing through some kind of blurry foreground.

I love this image because the view through the grass and the near flowers on a group of flowers in some distance produces a totality that, even though it does not reflect what we see through our eyes, nevertheless reflects my feeling that flowers are everywhere at the moment. It is an immersing view.

No news on SoFoBoMo. I'm in for some real stress this week :)

The Song of the Day is "Thru And Thru" from the 1994 Rolling Stones album "Voodoo Lounge". See them live on YouTube.

588 - SoFoBoMo - Progressing Pretty Well

Funnily enough, having stress and no typical photo opportunity at all, that's always a catalyst for me. In the morning, after having written yesterday's entry, I had no time to take images, and in fact I arrived at work literally at the last minute.

I had already decided to skip image taking for today, when on my way to the train I looked through this fence.

Vienna's southern railway station is one big construction site for the next years. You have already seen some images from there, and today, looking through this fence, I saw the signs reading "VIENNA SIGHTSEEING".

Is that bizarre? In all this disorder, in all this chaos, in the middle of a place that's as unattractive for tourists as it can get, there is a lost piece of touristic infrastructure. And in front of that ... flowers. Well ... that's pretty, I thought.

There was not much processing needed for the Image of the Day. It was the first thing that I did on the train, and then I began to process more SoFoBoMo images. I managed to do five of them while on the train, and this brings the score up to 22. On the other hand, it's a week now since I shot them, and there is only one more week to go. Still no idea how to make a book.



The Song of the Day is "Pretty" from the 2003 Beautiful South album "Gaze". See a live version on YouTube.

583 - SoFoBoMo - Processing On A Rainy Day

Rain was forecast, rain was to be expected, rain it did. Who could be upset? In fact, I very much appreciated the time, because sifting through 140 images, not to find one single Image of the Day but to identify and process as many as possible, that's quite a task. As already mentioned, I use Lab processing on all these images, because there's really a need to drive the different shades of green apart. I am not really sure about the colors yet, I may get back and make final adjustments later, but that's easy in Lab.

So far the session looks good to me. I have just counted, and even when I'm really conservative, I can come up with more than 35 usable images. Still, I'll allow myself the luxury to go back next weekend. There will be different light, I may use different lenses or at least I may be in a different mood.

Seems like image making is not my problem. Stringing them together ain't either, because as I have outlined in my kick-off post, the order is already given by the sequence of places along the path. What troubles me, is only that I have no idea so far of how to make a book :)

Today's Image of the Day is not from the SoFoBoMo session, it's genuinely from today. Employing the Sigma 70/2.8, I have ventured into the garden, well, more along the wall, just as far as the roof would still cover me, and this was the only flower in reach :)

The Song of the Day is "It Feels Like Rain" from Aaron Neville's 1991 album "Warm Your Heart".

580 - Two of Us

These are the images of yesterday, Thursday. Not exactly my most productive day, but nevertheless I could take some images on my way home.

Both images for today were shot with the Sigma 30/1.4, my most-used lens at the moment. It's funny, at any time I have such a lens that I keep on the camera almost all the time, and that I return to quickly, after I have been forced to change. The 30/1.4 was hardly used at all for almost half a year, now it's back in fashion.

The first image, the flowers, was more of a safe image to fall back, should everything else fail. These flowers grow in a park that I pass by when leaving work. I have no idea what they are called. Anybody?

When I had already given up searching, shortly before I arrived home, I saw what you see in the Image of the Day, a twisted wooden stick in front of a local flower shop, in extreme side light, lit by the low sun.

I took two exposures, one horizontal, one vertical, and when I inspected them later, none was satisfying. The horizontal had this very delicately curved shadow that vanished in the corner, but it lacked the light stripe at the right side. The vertical had this stripe, but the best part of the shadow was missing and the lower part of what was left of the shadow was plump.

What you see here is a combination of the two images, made using Photoshop's "Auto-Align Layers" and "Auto-Blend Layers" functions. Both are new in CS3 and they are one of the many reasons why it's a good idea to upgrade, even when you have a camera that is supported by an earlier version. In my case, with my Nikon D300, I didn't have the choice anyway. As an incentive to upgrade, Adobe chose to make Camera RAW 4 incompatible with CS2 and to not support new cameras in Camera RAW 3 :)

The Song of the Day is "Two of Us", of course from the 1970 Beatles album "Let It Be". See a video on YouTube.

565 - Miss By One

It's late Friday evening, these are the images for Wednesday. Let's see how far we get tonight. This first image is of a view that I've seen thousands of times in 24 years. Morning light falling through my living room window in Vienna. It's a tad on the yellow side, isn't it? Uuhh ... yes. This is the JPEG from the camera, and I had left it set to "cloudy" white balance from the day before. You know, normally I'd have corrected the white point, brought in a tad of color variation, increased contrast, etc, and I shortly tried, but ... it completely ruins the shot. Some images are not meant to be "optimized".

Wednesday was traveling day, and when I am packed with my big camera backpack and an extra bag, I normally use public transport and most of the time that means the Underground. Not so this day. I decided to ride by tramway for some stations, and then go the rest of the way to work. When I left the tramway in Josefstädter Straße, the sun was shortly gone. I used the light for some images of tulips and came up with this. Did you know that all tulips originate from Kazakhstan?

Later on, at work, I used the opportunity for another portrait of Erich. He was very concentrated and left me the time to focus the 50/1.2. Never be sloppy with this lens, because, when using the focus indicator LED, it is crucial to set the focus point to exactly where you want it. At f1.2 the plane of sharpness is so thin that it becomes apparent that it is no plane at all. It is curved, just like the lens. Forget any focus-and-recompose technique, it won't work. You'll never get sharp images.

The last one, the Image of the Day, was taken shortly after the tulips. The sun had come back and I used a polarizer to get rid of the reflections on the peeling paint.

Now, why is this a "miss by one", you ask? Well, the thermometer shows 18 degrees Celsius, which is quite nice for 8am, but I had hoped for 17. Missing it by one made me reconsider the title. You know, I really had to have "17 Again" from the 1999 Eurythmics reunion album "Peace" as Song of the Day one time :)

I absolutely adore Annie Lennox. She has such a wonderfully powerful voice and the end of this song is ... special. If I remember well, they have performed the song to an overwhelming reception in the morning of New Year's Day 2000 at a concert in London's Trafalgar Square. I really would have given a lot to not only see it on TV :)

There is a remixed version of the album, that's what you currently get if you don't care, and nobody seems to like it. I can't tell, I have the original, but you are warned. See the video on YouTube.

559 - Obeisance

Let's carry on with last week, shall we? These are some of the images of Thursday. There would be some more, but it is obscenely late, I'm afraid I'll have to get some sleep :)

Oh, by the way, I have to apologize to all those whom I normally visit and to those whose mails and comments I failed to answer. I am very short of time at the moment, and even processing the images that I make costs my sleep.

The first image is one of a reflection in the back window of a car. This is something that I photograph every once in a while, because I like these distorted images of liquified architecture.

Number two is actually Jokerman Revisited. I went by once more, there were signs of work done, but basically he is still there. This time I took the image from another perspective, and then in Photoshop carried it a tad further.

Both of the last images were heavily manipulated in Photoshop, much further than I normally go, and in contrast to that, this landscape shot, taken in Vienna's vineyards, is only frugally enhanced. Actually I love this image. I think it looks much wider than it is. Would you believe that this was shot with an effective focal length of 75mm?

And then there is the Image of the Day. Some contrast and color corrections, some vignetting added, but otherwise this is pretty much what came out of the camera. Well, sort of. What I mean is, this incredible softness of the out of focus areas is solely due to the wide aperture at f1.2.

All images were shot using the Nikon 50/1.2. A remarkable lens, and did I mention that it is a beast to focus?

The Song of the Day is actually a soundtrack. It's the soundtrack to "Le Roi Danse" by Gérard Corbiau. The music is by one of my favorite baroque composers, by Jean-Baptiste Lully. See some fantastic dance scenes from the movie on YouTube.

558 - Good To Be Back

I'm five days behind! That's a First! As I reported shortly, we had a computer crash in Carinthia. The PC would not boot at all. On Saturday afternoon we bought a new PC in Klagenfurt, and installing it, that's what I did since. What a weekend!

It finally turned out it was the system disc. It may have had a head-crash, something else may have have happened and may have taken down the disc as well, in any case it's gone. Good news is that I have not lost any image data, bad news is that we lost some other important things like emails. We'll let a specialist try to recover the data. So far my theory is, that most of the drive must be OK, and that most of the data must be recoverable. We'll see and I'll let you know.

The computer in Carinthia still lacks some software for image processing, that is to follow next weekend. Today I wouldn't have been able to use it anyway.

These are images of Wednesday. I have processed them on the train. Originally I would have liked to do Thursday as well, but I was too tired, and some of Thursday's images need my full attention :)

I am still after those soft, blurry images, and over the course of the next days you'll see various approaches. Wednesday it was the Nikon 50/1.2. This is a manual focus lens and, honestly, it is a pain to use. On the other hand, in those cases when I manage to get what I want, I like what I get.

The first image is a detail of a carved pillar at the entrance to a Chinese restaurant. This is a place that I pass by very often, and I am attracted to the colors, especially on gray days. The environment is not overly beautiful, thus using a macro-like approach is probably a good idea. Of course this is no macro lens, not at all, but due to the extremely shallow depth of field, the look is not far from what macro shots look like.

The next image is one of my typical bicycle portraits, nothing new, and you may have seen the pose before. I still like the image, not the least for its colors.

The final image is a detail from Spittelberg, one of Vienna's more picturesque neighborhoods. I love the ivy and the mysterious oblique lines in the background.

The Song of the Day is "Good To Be Back" from Natalie Cole's 1989 album of the same title.

554 - Tenderly

Climate changes, that's pretty evident. It's even obvious for everyone but George W. Bush that those changes are man-made, but there is one thing that seemingly does not change at all: April is unpredictable.

When I woke up, it was cloudy, as soon as I went out, it began to pour down like mad, and then it was sunny for the bigger part of the day. Problem is, that I slept most of the afternoon, and when I woke up again and decided to go for some magic light ... it rained again.

The first image is from the morning. Like all other images of today it was shot with my only manual focus lens (well, apart from the Lensbaby), the Nikon 50/1.2. This image, like the other two, was shot at f1.2 for minimum depth of field. At this aperture the lens is still pretty sharp but soft, mostly due to coma, I think. This does not matter for portraits, one of the major applications of this lens, and it does not matter either, when the lens is used for extremely selective focus.

The second image, a blossom on an apple tree, shows the same qualities. Depth of field is extremely shallow, light is soft. And then there is the Image of the Day, and it exemplifies how I like to work with this lens: I go very near, as near as the lens allows. This is not a macro lens, much to the contrary, as an older design its minimum focusing distance is somewhere in the range of 50cm (around 1 1/2 feet), but going as near as it gets ensures minimum depth of field. Focusing is pretty painful at f1.2, and it is more so at that distance. Most of the time I need between one and three shots until I'm satisfied.

If at all possible, I try to get something colorful in the foreground, Whatever it is (in case of the Image of the Day only some more blossoms), it will be rendered completely out of focus, a mere cloud of color, and so will be the background.

The Song of the Day is "Tenderly" by Billie Holiday. I've got her version on the collection "Solitude: The Billie Holiday Story, Vol. 2". Hear it on YouTube.

549 - Lilac Wine

Yesterday morning (yesterday? Well, it's Tuesday morning 5:30 now, I have just woken up) when I went to work, I still had the Sigma 70/2.8 Macro mounted from the weekend's macro sessions. Boy, did that lens feel good on the street! It's that combination of a short telephoto lens with the incredible control of depth of field. I absolutely love using this lens wide open.

In the end I have only worked on this single image. There are some others that would be worthwhile (and that I would have taken anytime on a lesser day), one that I'll try again because of too tight framing, and a gorgeous bicycle that was unfortunately marred by litter on the ground that I failed to see and remove. What's wrong with Photoshop, you ask? Well, have you ever tried to clone behind the spokes of a bicycle's wheel? Believe me, there are selections you don't want to make :)

The Song of the Day is "Lilac Wine" by the great Nina Simone. I have it on the collection of her Philips recordings "For Women". Hear it on YouTube.

541 - Helpless

Not my most photographic day. I've installed ESET Internet Security on two computers and tried a memory upgrade on two laptops. Well, ESET was a full success, just like on my computer in Vienna. Getting rid of Norton Internet Security and installing ESET was almost as effective as a processor upgrade. Highly recommended.

The memory upgrade did not go so well. I've bought 2 GB for a notebook that has 512 MB installed, the memory is faster than what came with the computer ... and it didn't work. I tried it then in my own notebook, same game, slightly faster memory, same result. Either I have bought defective memory, or notebooks are very much more sensitive to mismatches in memory timings. I've never before had problems with too fast memory. Oh well.

This image is from my 5 minutes photo session in the garden. That was it :)

The Song of the Day is Neil Young's "Helpless", but not from "The Last Waltz", not from "Unplugged" and not even from Neil Young: Patti Smith sang it on her 2007 cover album "Twelve", and someone on YouTube has illustrated it with images from Wim Wenders' "Der Himmel über Berlin". Not the worst combination.

517 - La Primavera

I left work early today. The sun was shining brightly, I hoped to catch some rays in the park, surely I did, and it did not last long. I used two lenses, the Sigma 20/1.8 which is gorgeous, did not do it today but will return soon, and of course the Sigma 70/2.8 Macro.

It's funny. When I bought the 70/2.8, I was not sure if I would really use it that much. After all, macro photography is not so much my thing, I have the Sigma 150/2.8 Macro as well, and for general photography, there should be not so much of a difference between it and the Nikon 50/1.8, right?

Wrong. This turned out to be my most used lens of the last three months. For this particular image I used the mat that I always carry around, laid on the ground and shot with f2.8 and 1/500s.

The Song of the Day could easily be the opening Allegro of Vivaldi's "Four Seasons", but we're going for the exotic today: "Primavera" by Portuguese fado superstar Mariza. Get it on "Fado Curvo" or on the 2006 live album "Concerto em Lisboa". See her perform it live on YouTube.

498 - Where The Wild Roses Grow

On Saturday we wanted to visit Bistra, a former Carthusian monastery, that is now the Technical Museum of Slovenia. Bistra is located in a very rural environment along the marshes south-west of Slovenia's capital Ljubljana, only about 90 minutes by car from home. We had bad luck though, the museum is closed until March.

Being already there, we decided to drive a little further along the road towards Borovnica, and from there a forest road up a mountain and to a church that we saw on the map.

And I'm glad we did! In that forest I have seen more Christmas Roses than before in my whole life altogether (Hey Flo, I found out all by myself!). The mountain is sprinkled with flowers. The Image of the Day and this image were both shot there, both with the Sigma 70/2.8 at f2.8. It was an extremely warm weekend with temperatures up to 20 degrees Celsius, and for the Image of the Day I actually lay on the ground, wearing Jeans and T-Shirt.

On top of the mountain there was actually a village and sure enough this church. Churches on Mountains and hills, that's a very common thing in Slovenia, and much more apparent than in every other European region that I've seen so far. This is the only image taken with the Nikon 18-200 VR at 18mm. The foreground tempted me :)

Borovnica is hardly more than a big village with some old industry. I don't know what they produce, but at least I took this image of some industrial architecture. It does not look totally deserted in Borovnica, but also not very lively either.

We took our way back along a completely straight, narrow street through the marshes, parallel to the river Ljubljanica. Every once in a while a way goes right or left, many of them like this one with beautiful trees.

Shortly before you reach Ljubljana, the road leads through the long stretched village Črna vas (Black Village, after the black earth in the marshes) with its famous church of St. Michael, built by the most important architect of Slovenia, Jože Plečnik. We were not inside because it was already late, but we will certainly come back.

It was a warm day, but not clear at all. The air was full of haze, and this hazy sundown concludes our little trip to Slovenia.

The Song of the Day is "Where The Wild Roses Grow" by Nick Cave and Kylie Minogue, from the 1996 album "Murder Ballads". See the video on YouTube.