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.

667 - Electric Ladyland VI

I've spent most of my day sleeping and mulling over a title for yesterday's entry, and what meager fruit I earned, I earned it late afternoon on my way to the lake. I was really in a hurry, thus I had no time to experiment. I settled with an image that I had already taken once and not used then. Today I used the new Nikon 70-300 VR at 112mm and f8.

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

666 - The Number Of The Beast

This post was meant to be about fences, about looking down from a hill, about quiet summer mornings and such things. Of the two fence images that I shot Saturday morning, it was clear that I would take the vertical. The images were uploaded to SmugMug, and the only thing amiss was a title. Don't you feel that, due to the strong compression at 300mm, both images look like gentle, rolling waves? I contemplated "Waves" by the Hooverphonic as title, but neither could I find a video on YouTube, nor was the text exactly fitting. These images certainly don't evoke the feeling of sea waves in the night.

OK, I thought, let's look for "Morning" as a keyword. "New Morning" by Nick Cave? Wow, a song like a religious epiphany, an explosion of pathos, ... "The sky was a kingdom / All covered in blood" ... I couldn't. I have to save this song for the most impressive sunrise that I'll ever encounter.

"Fool On The Hill"? Probably, but whose version? I was ready to go with Aretha Franklin, but still, it didn't seem to fit. Maybe something different? Something like "Air" by The Incredible String Band? No way, already used for "128 - Rural Quietude". Still, this would have been the mood.

"Don't Fence Me In"? The David Byrne version? I must have used that, have I? No, I have not and there is even a video. Hmm ... Holly Cole would be even better, but as usual with her songs, no video, not even a sound sample on Amazon. Damn.

Having nothing really compelling, I went back to Aretha's "Fool On The Hill" (or probably really the original by The Beatles?), and just as I wrote the caption on SmugMug, I recognized the number!

Oh my, I could have saved a lot of time. Thankfully I had a fitting image, shot yesterday as well.

The Song of the Day is "Ride My Llama" from Neil Young's 1979 masterpiece "Rust Never Sleeps". Hear it on YouTube.

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.

659 - Out To Lunch

Saturday I shot some flower images in the morning, and for some reason I thought they were good and I'd have an Image of the Day secured. Well, turned out they were not, and although I had shot 72 images during the day, I was in big trouble. Whatever I touched fell apart. In my plight I finally settled with this image. It was taken during a late lunch in a very peculiar restaurant, the "Marktcafé" of "Finkensteiner Nudelfabrik" near Villach. Fantastic noodle dishes. Should you happen to be in the surroundings, give it a try. Reservation recommended at dinner time.

The Song of the Day, "Out To Lunch", is from Eric Dolphy's classic 1964 album of the same name. No video. What did you think?

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 :)

652 - Over The Hills And Far Away

No shallow depth of field today, no strange discs of light, just some images of Carinthia's nature, taken Saturday afternoon. I could have titled this entry "Of curves, hills and rabbits".

Let's begin with curves. All these images were of course made with the Nikon 85/1.8, although this time mostly at f8 or above. Weather was constantly changing, and this image has some "just before the rain" feeling. It did rain shortly after, but only for minutes. I took the image because of the way the compression played with the curves.

Following the curves of the street, we have a curving fence now. Again this is helped along by the slight compression of the short telephoto lens.

When I finally went swimming, I saw this rabbit in the grass of our parcel by the lake. He obviously had the feeling of being camouflaged and invisible to me. He seemed completely comfortable until I reached about 1.5 meters, then he ran away. Sorry, I did not want to disturb him. After all, he lives there, much more than I do :)

The Song of the Day, quite a nice match for the Image of the Day, is "Over The Hills And Far Away" from the 1973 Led Zeppelin album "Houses of the Holy". Hear it on YouTube.

651 - Night At The Station

Friday night, when I arrived at Klagenfurt's train station, I had no image yet, but I knew there are always long lines of bicycles, waiting through the night, hundreds of them, and that's what I took on. Nikon 85/1.8 at f1.8, 1/100s and ISO 1250.

The Song of the Day is "Night Train" from Rickie Lee Jones' 1979 debut album. No video, sorry.

638 - In The Grove

Oh Goodness, I'm hopelessly behind. These are some of the images of Saturday.

Two of them are experiments in B&W conversion, and I think that the process is simple and works well. Basically the idea is to use the new B&W conversion layer in CS3, use its presets (high-contrast red, high-contrast blue, maximum black, maximum white, ...), just concentrate on parts of the image, limit the conversion with masks, and overlay another filter for another part, again masked, until everything is B&W.

In both images the upper part uses the high-contrast red preset, while the lower part uses high-contrast blue, and in case of the farmhouse there is even some maximum black in between. Finally I have applied toning with a gradient map and overlayed some blur, restricting blending to parts of the tonal range. Hmm ... that's probably stuff for a tutorial.

The two B&W images and the Image of the Day were taken with the Sigma 70/2.8 Macro. I love this short telephoto lens and, funnily enough, I even seem to dream in this kind of images. Just as I woke up (it's Tuesday, 5:59 as I write this), I saw an image before my eyes, and I know, when I ever want to take it, I'll use this lens. The image faded as my conscious mind set in, and thankfully I managed to remember it. It was a bedroom window or rather a door to a terrace, shot as a vertical across the bed, focus was on the bed, there were flowers on the bed and in the background I saw a person, very much out of focus, just recognizable, probably opening the door.

The composition was very vertical in the upper part, parallel lines, the person being one of them, occupying the left half of the upper two thirds, the right half being the lines of the door frame and some curtains. The flowers in the foreground lay asymmetrically, higher on the right side. Just as I was trying to analyze this image (or at least to not forget it), an image of a yacht harbor flashed up. Boats and masts, a similar composition, divided in asymmetric halves in the upper part, the lower part holding it together in a balanced way.

What that means? No idea. Things like that don't happen regularly to me. In fact they normally don't happen at all. Seems like a rather interesting kind of inspiration to me :)

Let me leave you with one final image of Saturday. We were dining on the terrace of a restaurant, and just after the main course, I turned my back, looked across the street and saw this spectacular evening scene. I took some images with the Sigma 10-20, some with the 70/2.8, but what I like most is this fisheye image. Landscapes with a fisheye? Sure. Just keep the horizon in the middle and it will be straight. Of course you don't only get a spectacularly big sky, you'll also get a lot of boring foreground (at least here it was boring) but that's easy to fix with a crop from below.

The Song of the Day is "I had A Dream" from Ray Charles' 1958 album "Yes, Indeed!!". A video is supplied with the lyrics. Admittedly it's not Ray Charles, but it's not shabby either. So who are Bob and Clive??

631 - Summertime II

This is the image for yesterday, July 5^th, and quite exactly a year ago, on July 7^th, 2007 I had another image titled "266 - Summertime". I love this season, and yesterday, while on my way to the lake, I tried to find out what exactly characterizes our landscape these days.

The three images of yesterday represent such a thing: harvested fields baking in the hot sun. They were taken at the same time in the same place, but looking in slightly different directions. As a result, neither the contrast between sky and earth was the same nor the colors. And that's one of the things that I have learned while working on my SoFoBoMo book: A series of images from a certain time and a certain place just does not make it, unless you take your time to match colors and light. It's a well known phenomenon, that strongly contrasting images easily make a good match, whereas largely similar but in subtle ways different images fight each other.

So, "Summertime" is the Song of the Day, but what version? Yesteryear we had Lambert, Hendricks & Ross, this year it's Helen Merrill. I have two different recordings of this Gershwin tune by Helen Merrill, one of them, the one that I like better, on a compilation called "Blossom of Stars", that currently only seems available used and from £45 upwards. Ouch! I suggest that, before shell out the money, you sample the wares around here.

627 - Mon Vieux Joseph

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

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

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

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

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

618 - Melancholia

It was hot today, very hot, and on my way to my favorite lake, I took this image from out of the car. Post-processing took some time and involved a selectively masked and overall subdued B&W layer, some cloning and rather traditional burning. The result was not unlike yesterday's image, but in the end I've added a strong saturation layer that brought almost all color back. Still, a little bit of the B&W character remains, and that's what I want.

Yesterday's image was really the result of a desparate experiment, but I feel that there is potential in this technique. I mean, selective B&W is cheesy, you know, these bright blue eyes in othewise B&W faces, but this is promising and you may see me walking that route once in a while.

The title? I have no idea, it just feels right :)

I'm on the train right now and with only a limited selection of music, and apart from that I can only slightly remember a song that has the word "melancholia" in it, but probably not in the title. Therefore I have simply searched for something on Google, and I have found this: a video on YouTube, titled "Melancholia", and attributed to Led Zeppelin. No doubt, that is Led Zeppelin, I know the song, but they have nothing called Melancholia, I've checked the track listings for all their albums on Amazon. Googling for text fragments finally revealed that it is "Since I've Been Loving You". I have it on a 4 CD box set called "Led Zeppelin", but it is really from "Led Zeppelin III". Well, whatever you choose, you can't go wrong.

617 - Fading Memories

This barn is part of a farm in the southern Carinthian mountains. The original farm house still stands, and to its left there is a big new guest house. I don't know if the barn is still used, I suppose so, but I guess in only some years it will be a memory. Let's keep it from fading away.

The Song of the Day is "Not Fade Away" from the 1964 Rolling Stones album "England's Newest Hitmakers". See them perform live on YouTube.

616 - The Water

This morning I have fooled around for more than an hour with the only image of yesterday that could have been usable, but finally I decided to drop it. A dead horse is a dead horse, no need trying to ride it. Instead I present you another SoFoBoMo image, and this is the image that determined the style of my book. I had already processed more than fifteen images when I tried this one, and the result changed it all. This is one of the reasons why post-processing took me so long: after this image I had to re-work everything that came before.

The Song of the Day is "The Water" from the 2007 Feist album "The Reminder". See her live at YouTube.

611 - SoFoBoMo - Late But Done

Here we are, that's what I hinted at in my two earlier posts of today: The book is finished. Over the course of the last two days I have made the final touches to the images, finished some text that I had begun last Sunday on the train, produced the book in InDesign, created a PDF and uploaded it to ISSUU. I've also submitted it to sofobomo.org - let's see if it gets accepted. No way to deny it, the book was finished two weeks after the official end of SoFoBoMo '08, but at least it was done in less than a month, and that's what it was all about.

Paul Butzi recently posted some questions about the whole experience, so here are my answers:

• Was it fun? - Well, sure, of course. Actually I had expected it to be much more tedious and less fun than it was.


• What sort of things did you learn? - Oh, many. For instance that when you participate in a project, it is a good idea to start on time. Or that when you embark on a journey, you have to do it with all your heart. Or that thinking about a problem tends to diminish it greatly. Hmm ... all things that I would have known if it had been an IT project :)


• Was your experience pretty much what you expected, or it did turn out that doing the book was wildly different from what you’d pictured when you signed up? - I wouldn't say wildly different, but I have greatly underestimated the time that it would take to harmonize the images. In such a series of images, small differences in light are enough to make successive images different in the overall look. What the camera saw, can only be taken as an approximation. I have worked on all these images in Lab mode, and I am glad that I did so. It greatly simplified color corrections late in the process.


• What aspects of the whole thing were frustrating? - Only the time before I began, but that is only because I did not even really think about it. I presumed, a project would naturally spring into existence and was angry that it didn't.


• What aspects were most rewarding? - Browsing the finished book on ISSUU. Apart from that, well, I think mostly that I learned so many things, and that nothing turned out hard at all.


• Having participated this year (regardless of whether you finished it or not), would you ever want to do it again? - Yes, absolutely. The next time I will know how to approach the hardest part, i.e. finding a project, and I will have no problem starting when everybody else does. In fact I can't wait until next year, I will do at least one other book this year. Maybe it will be the "Naschmarkt" project that I have written about in the book, that means staying in a place, the biggest market place in Vienna, for a whole day and taking photographs from the time people arrive and get their deliveries, through the whole day, until at night the place gets cleaned up. We'll see. Maybe I'll do a "Best of 2007" and a "Best of 2008" as well. With the templates that I have, making a book that's structurally similar to this one, should not take more than two hours, at least for the PDF.


• Do you have suggestions about ways to change things to make it more successful/fun/educational/rewarding for participants in future SoFoBoMo events? - Not really. Thanks to you all and to your efforts this was as painless as it could be.


• What resources did you find helpful? - Paul Lester's "book in an hour", Some of Gordon's links, the hints pointing to ISSUU, and of course the free Blurbs templates on The Art of Engineering. I still had no more than cursory looks into the InDesign training DVD that I've bought.


• What aspects of SoFoBoMo were positive surprises? What aspects were disappointments? - Positive: I had no idea that it would be so simple to make a book. Master pages and the "place gun" in InDesign, these are real time savers. I had an incredibly simple layout though.


• How about that fuzzy month thing? Did that work for you, or not? - Obviously not, but that's nobody's but my fault. Starting so late completely disconnected me from most of the social experience, and I won't do that again. Still, even if it was a very solitary job, it was great to do it. Would I change the rules for next year? Well, probably we could reduce the fuzziness to 2 weeks, like Paul Lester suggested, but on the other hand, it seems to have worked for most participants. No, I'd keep it. It's a nice quirk :)

Here we are. And now? Was that it??

Not really. I have a PDF and a publication on ISSUU, thus the formal requirements for SoFoBoMo (apart from the time frame obviously) are fulfilled, but of course I want to get this beast printed on real paper. Many people seem to have gone the Blurb route, so that's probably what I'll do as well. I guess that's a job for the next weekend.

And then, of course I'll put my template up for download and maybe write a tutorial about what I've learned. This may not be much, but I think I have quite a good process now, at least for this narrow application. After all, when I looked at my book this morning, I found it too small for my taste. It took me about an hour to completely re-create it from scratch at a bigger size.

That's it for today. Here is the book. Enjoy!

The Song of the Day is "Late Show" from the 1986 Laurie Anderson album "Home Of The Brave". See the video on YouTube.

610 - Near To You

Yesterday we had rain most of the time. I only went out on the terrace and made some macro images of leaves, but that was OK. I was busy anyway, and I wouldn't have had time for hunting motives. The reason? See it this evening :)

The Song of the Day is "Near To You" by the great Nina Simone. I have it on a fantastic sampler called "The Tomato Collection". Not the best thinkable quality overall, but what a collection of songs!

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 :)

603 - The Garden Of Earthly Delights

Landscapes with the fisheye, that's still elusive for me, but using it in the typical wide-angle style with a prominent foreground works quite well. This image was taken at the entrance to our parcel of land at Keutschacher See, the lake where I normally go swimming and where I did so yesterday. Btw, this is a "Philadelphus Coronarius" or "Mock Orange" shrub :)

The Song of the Day is "Garden Of Earthly Delights" from the 1989 XTC album "Oranges & Lemons". Hear it on YouTube.