524 - For You Blue

There are days of need and days of plenty. Thursday was a day of plenty, and that's one reason why it took me so long to come up with this entry.

In the morning it began completely innocent, with a little sunshine, too cold for the season but friendly. I tried to get on with my series of images with de-focused foregrounds of color. After Wednesday's pink and green I wanted to tackle blue, a much bigger challenge. I had already tried it the last two days, had tried cars and traffic signs, but whenever there was something blue, the background did not work. That's not always a problem in photography, but with these shots it is: after all, you have to focus on the background.

This magnolia tree is very near to where I work. It stands in front of a baroque palace, and I have made these two shots from the other side of the street, the front lens more or less inside some flowers. It's the same tree, and if you look very carefully, you can see that I have removed a branch from the yellow image, that I have left in in the blue. In the blue image it works, because the movement is mostly horizontal, but in the yellow image with the strong diagonal composition it was out of place.

Fast forward in time. I left work at 4pm, and that's how Vienna looked like. Sort of a backlash. I'm afraid there will be more of that the next days. In fact, the very moment that I write this, Saturday noon, it has just stopped snowing.

The next image again reminds me of those environments that you see in sci-fi computer games, the techno-industrial environments that you run around and where you frag your enemies.

This is the same escalator that we had in "475 - Up with People", but this time I ran to be first, in order to get it devoid of people. There is nothing wrong with people, but in this case, using the Nikon 18-200 VR at 18mm, I wanted the neutrality that allows me to think of this place as a sci-fi environment.

What can you do on a winter day in early spring? What about swimming? Actually that's what I did, and this time I took a borrowed Fuji FinePix F11 with me, along with an underwater bag. The F11 is a six megapixel camera with Fuji's SuperCCD sensor, and it makes quite good images, obviously copes well with strong contrasts, has moderate noise levels at ISO 200 and delivers usable results up to ISO 800.

I took about 80 images while fogs rose from the warm water, snowflakes drifted, and for a short moment it looked like the sun would brake through the clouds.

In the end it decided to stay veiled, and shortly after these images were taken, snowfall returned with might. Well, there are worse things than to float in the warm water and let the snow fall on your face :)

The Song of the Day is "For You Blue" from "Let It Be", the last album published by the Beatles. See a video from the movie on YouTube.

465 - Oh The Morning Glory!

Normally I don't post an Image of the Day before I am not sure that I won't take any more images that day, but this time it's different. I may take more images, there may be some good, but - honestly - I don't believe I can top this.

Of course it's a cliché (hi Ted!), what more than a sunrise or sundown, and even though I did some major post-processing, I can't really claim the grandezza. I was simply at the right time in the right place, i.e. at home :)

This was probably the most impressive morning red that I have seen in a long time. I could have run for the Sigma 10-20 and even at 10mm I wouldn't have been able to frame the whole spectacle. On the other hand, I'm glad I didn't, kept the Nikon 18-200 VR and at least scored the image as it is, because only one or two minutes later all was over, and then the fog began to rise, reached us, and at 2pm it is still here.

EDIT: I simply had to add this sundown. Seems it's sunrise/sundown time. Hmm ... last year at that time it was waterfalls :)

The Song of the Day is "Morning Glory" from Leonard Cohen's 2004 album "Dear Heather". Hear the full song at mp3skyline.com. They have an interesting concept for sound samples: They let you hear the full song, but interrupt it with a beep every 30 seconds or so. That's great, because this song develops its own grandezza, and not before the end :)

464 - He's A Runner

Well, it's foggy now all day. We are at an altitude of 600 meters, and it would take a hundred more to get out of the fog. Today when I brought Michael to the train, we were a bit late for Klagenfurt and early for Velden, thus I took the alternative route via Schiefling, because I hoped we would get out of the fog. It was not entirely successful. This image was taken at the highest point, and we were still not really out, but at least the flaming clouds were already visible. I decided to take an image, just as a runner came by.

Nikon 18-200 VR at 18mm, f8, 1/8s and ISO 1100, hand-held.

The Song of the Day is "He's A Runner" from the third Blood, Sweat & Tears album "3". Hear a version by Laura Nyro on YouTube.

438 - Nowhere

There was fog when I woke up this morning. I went into the garden, took an image of the crooked old fence that runs down the hill, and then went to bed again.

Sigma 70/2.8 at f2.8, 1/50s and ISO 500, post-processing with Photoshop.

In the early afternoon, when the fog had cleared up, I took the car and drove around to take some more shots. I am still abusing the Sigma 70/2.8 macro and try to find out what it can do for me.

This second image is another landscape, and like yesterday's it is based on a flat S-curve, emphasized by the compression of the telephoto lens. This time it is f8 at 1/400s and ISO 200.

The Song of the Day is "Nowhere" from the 1992 Giant Sand album "Ramp". No lyrics, sorry.

384 - When The Sun Comes Out

When I woke up this morning, I immediately saw that the weather forecast had been right. It was a bright day with clear blue sky, and the fog was already retreating. I rushed out, shot some images down into the valley, over the fog and to the mountains, and in the end I went to these trees, knowing that there would be fingers of light. There were :)

The Song of the Day is "When The Sun Comes Out", and as good as the young Barbra Streisand was, her version pales against Judy Garland's. I have it on a CD with live tracks from sometime in the early 1960s, but the exact compilation seems to be unavailable now, though I have found the very same version on a CD of the same name, "Over The Rainbow". It seems to be from the same masters, it only has less tracks. Anyway, "When The Sun Comes Out" and the incredibly sad, heart-tearing "Over The Rainbow" alone would be worth the price.

Regrettably YouTube has no version by Judy Garland, but there is a live version by Barbra Streisand, recorded during her 2006 tour, and while this may be more triumphant than sad, it is no slouch either.

383 - Fog Creeping

Late in the afternoon, or better, what's to be called late these seasons, I drove to a neighboring village to buy some provisions, because tomorrow, All-Saints, is a public holiday in Austria. We are a very catholic country.

When I left, I had already decided to leave the camera bag at home, knowing that I had taken some usable images in the morning, but in the last moment I returned and grabbed it, and now I'm glad that I did.

On my way, the sun was already down, I suddenly saw fog creeping up, and it looked ghostly, just as if it would seep out of the ground. I parked the car at the first place possible, grabbed the camera, the remote control and the tripod, and ran back some 100 meters to the place you see here.

I made three series of bracketed exposures, seven each, with the intent to create HDR images. When I came home, I processed the last series, the best one, with Photomatix Pro and then worked on it in Photoshop.

I didn't like it. Photomatix strongly emphasizes local contrasts, and in this case that produced a halo above the clouds. The sky looked uneven, unnatural. As a result, I threw away the fruits of more than an hour of work, loaded three of the original exposures as layers in Photoshop, and blended them with masks. The result looks much more natural.

The Song of the Day is "Right Tool For The Job" from Marcia Ball's 2005 album "Live! Down the Road". Sorry, no lyrics found.

344 - Summer's Almost Gone

This morning I had to be in Klagenfurt. We left at 7:10am in bright sunshine and entered dense fog after about 10 km, half way to Klagenfurt.

It's funny. I grew up in that town, and as long as I lived there, I did not know what a beautiful autumn could be. There was fog, always only fog.

Today at 8:10am I left Klagenfurt on the highway A2 along Carinthia's most famous lake, Wörthersee, heading west. I was sure that the fog would end before the end of the lake, and I was right. In Velden I was able to shoot a series of images of boats in receding fog, this was the one I liked most. Nikon 18-200 at 18mm and f8, shot with a polarizer.

Later this day I was swimming, and it is still possible, but when I'm honest, I have to admit that "Summer's Almost Gone". And this is also a song from The Doors' probably most underrated album "Waiting for the Sun".

324 - Frivolously Searching For Fog

It won't be long and I will call the simple idea absurd: Going out in the morning (well, driving, actually), down into the valley, searching for fog. But that's what I did today.

Yesterday morning I had to go to Klagenfurt and was amazed about the sudden feeling of autumn when I dived into the fog, and today I wanted to repeat the experience. I was only partially successful, I guess you can't repeat experiences like that, because once you've had them, you yourself have changed. There is no way around.

On the other hand, when you live somewhere for a long time, you know your places, and this is one of them. It's an alley at a small road that leads from Ludmannsdorf down to Feistriz.

I shot all of today's images with the Nikon 18-200 VR, a wonderful lens when you don't look for certain effects but for certain places. Post-processing was done in Capture NX, and I have only slightly driven colors apart, nothing more. I have tried setting a white and black point. The resulting image looked good, but id did not convey the feeling of fog, thus I have abandoned it.

"The Fog" from Kate Bush's 1989 album "The Sensual World" is the Song of the Day.

310 - The Morning Fog

Hmm ... I'll blame the fact that this morning we had fog down in the valley to the rain of the last days. This is not a sign of summer ending early, surely it can't be :)

I shall go swimming in an hour or two, and I have no idea what images I'll make the rest of the day, but I like this one enough to make it Image of the Day. It's nothing special compositionally or so, but it was a magic moment and I believe the image captures at least a little of it.

"The Morning Fog" from Kate Bush's 1985 album "Hounds of Love" is the Song of the Day.