678 - Sit Down

It's Friday morning now, I'm almost off to work, so let's keep this short.

Yesterday I was swimming, and this is an image from Vienna's biggest public bath, "Gänsehäufl", an island in the back waters of river Danube.

The Song of the Day is "Sit Down" from the 1990 James album "Gold Mother". See this fantastic version on YouTube, live in Manchester, or this one, Manchester as well. That's what I call a concert :)

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.

584 - SoFoBoMo - Slow Down

Niels Henriksen of "My Camera World" today asked me to make the "additional" images on the blog a bit bigger, e.g. double their size. Well, I admit, on a 24" monitor they come out a tad small. The problem is, what I use here are sizes that get automatically generated by SmugMug, my image host, upon upload. The thumbnails are the smallest size, but the next size, "small" is already three to four times bigger. That's too much. On the other hand, creating the images at sizes fitting into a 200x200 square and uploading them myself, that would take me much more time than I can afford. Sorry Niels, I've tried, but "small" makes the page look horrible. As I see no easy solution, I'll to keep things as they are.

SoFoBoMo progress is slowing down. I have processed only three images tonight, one of them here for your pleasure. What I do at the moment is making all basic adjustments of color and contrast, clone things out, apply vignettes, re-light parts of the scene to support flow, and some things more. I will certainly have to come back to some images though. Later, when all these basic steps are done (before end of the week), I'll get back to colors and try to create more of a consistent "look".

As regards my daily photography, today that was restricted to my way home from work. Vienna is a beautiful city, and "Spittelberg", the historical center of its 7th district, even more so. The first image is of an alleyway partially obscured by the branches of a tree. Like all other images of today it has been taken with the Sigma 30/1.4, this one at f1.4.

The next one is the image that I originally wanted to take as Image of the Day. It's part of a lattice in front of a window of a historical building.

Finally I decided to take the chairs instead. They better fit the title of today's SoFoBoMo report. Oops! What's that? Titles choosing images??

Like the alleyway this image is an unprocessed JPEG right out of the camera. It has a slightly greenish cast that I easily could have removed, but that's what the light is in this old, mossy backyard. Sometimes a cast is not a cast but simply atmosphere :)

The Song of the Day is "Slow Down" from India Arie's 2002 album "Voyage to India". No video, sorry.

353 - Silence

There is a certain kind of movie that is not seen often any more. I mean slow, silent moves. Silent not in the sense that there would be no sound, no, I mean movies that take their time. Movies where between scenes the screen fades to black, movies that don't scream "ACTION!!!" in your face, movies like Jim Jarmusch's "Down by Law" or David Lynch's "The Straight Story". These movies teach us to see, and sometimes even to live.

This afternoon I was in the restaurant Ufertaverne, sitting on the covered middle terrace, half in the shadow, took my time to see, and to listen to the silence.

Nikon 18-200, 105mm at f5.3 and 1/160s. Straight from the camera.

"Silence" is a song by bassist Charlie Haden. I have it on his Liberation Music Orchestra masterpiece "The Ballad of the Fallen", but today we need the much more contemplative version on "Magico", recorded in 1979 with Egberto Gismonti and Jan Garbarek.

236 - The Line Between Love and Hate

This is another image shot with the Sigma 150/2.8 at f2.8. It's from the same place in Ahornergasse where in April I was "179 - Sitting in the Sun, Drinking a Beer". Tuesday I had started using the 150/2.8 as a walkaround lens and Wednesday I was still at it. It's actually a funny thing. Sure, 150mm is not a very convenient focal length to say the least, but on the other hand it forces you to see what you have never seen, or otherwise simply to be very creative. Post-processing was again done in Capture NX.

I've never been a big fan of the Eurythmics, at least not at their time, but I learned to love Annie Lennox with her 1995 album "Medusa". From that album is today's Song of the day, "The Thin Line Between Love And Hate".

229 - Feelin' That Glow

We're further into the realm of shallow depth-of-field now. Very shallow. A razor-thin slice of reality and a backdrop of soft colors. This image is from Wednesday. I worked late and when I left at about 8pm I had not shot a single image all day, so I really had to do something about it.

What I did was mounting the Nikon 50/1.2. I don't use this lens very often and if so then mostly for portraits. It's manual focus only and really hard to focus at times, but since I have discovered that the D200 still measures focus and that I only have to look at the green dot in the viewfinder turning up, it's much easier. Ahh, I love this camera.

It had rained all day, it was a cold evening and when I passed by Shultz' bar at Siebensternplatz, nobody sat outside.

I really love this shot. It's all light (wasn't that a title sometime?) and color and glow. 50/1.2 at f1.2, ISO 360 and 1/60s, Auto-ISO of course. I have used Capture NX to get a TIFF with colors as shot, and in Photoshop I have rotated the image a bit and cloned a minor distraction out. That's it.

Roberta Flack has made many good albums, I have them all, arguably the first five or so are the best, and my personal favorite is "Feel Like Makin' Love". It's romantic, flower power, and - without knowing anything about Roberta Flack's biography - it really feels like the work of someone just fallen deeply in love. "Feelin' That Glow" is the Song of the Day. No lyrics to be found on the net and no time to write them down from the booklet. Sorry.

192 - Sit Down, Relax!!

This is just around the corner from work. I took the image on my way to the underground and further on to "Alte Donau", where I had dinner at a nice place by the water. I used the Nikon 18-200 at 200mm and f11.

The Song of the Day is Edoardo Bennato's "Relax" from the not so easily available album "Kaiwanna". Amazon claims this is from 2003, but that's nonsense. 1985 it is, and what an album. Experimental, varied in style but not in quality. Get a sound sample here.

188 - Walk on By

This is an afternoon image from my way home. In Mondscheingasse I saw the shadow of a bicycle leaning there, and when a guy with an orange in his hand walked by, I took this image. After he had passed I took another strictly composed shot, and one more when a woman parked a second bicycle. Needless to say that both didn't come close. The guy is in a perfect position, his shadow is in a perfect position, and, did I say I like the orange?

The Song of the Day is "Walk on By" from Cake's 1998 album "Prolonging the Magic".

179 - Sitting in the Sun, Drinking a Beer

On my return home I stopped in Ahornergasse (this is the same place as in "173 - Night Walk"), sat down at Café Ahorn for a beer, basking in the sun. This is not the very noblest of cafés, it's not a place I would recommend blindly to everybody, but the fact that this is a dead-end street, therefore without traffic, and that it is sunny, makes it somehow special. I am not there very often, but it is nice to find yourself remembered, to be asked if you want the same as always. It adds to the warm feeling of the sun.

"Streetlife Serenader" from Billy Joel's 1974 album "Streetlife Serenade" is the Song of the Day.

173 - Night Walk

This image is from Wednesday night. I went home from work late, and when I passed the Café Ahorn in Ahornergasse (contrary to what the map says, there is a connection between Neubaugasse and Ahornergasse/Seidengasse), I saw this stack of chairs, catching the light of street lanterns. I shot this with the Nikon 50/1.2 at f1.2.

The Song of the Day is "La Nuit De Clifton Chenier" from Beausoleil's 1991 album "Cajun Conja". Looking them up on Amazon has reminded me of how much is now available from them. Once, when I bought this CD - in the wake of the movie "The Big Easy" - it was impossible to get more than two CDs. As to be expected, there seem to be no lyrics online :)