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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

589 - The Vanishing Act

This is the result of another day off of SoFoBoMo. We were in Slovenia, about 90 minutes from home, and we came to see a fascinating phenomenon, a lake that's only there in winter and spring. In summer it completely dries up, only to re-appear half a year later.

Phenomena like this are not uncommon in Slovenia. Geologically this is a karst landscape, porous limestone full of caves and underground rivers, rivers that come out of a cave, only to vanish in a canyon some miles down, coming back to the light of day somewhere else.

We plan to come back some time in August for the other side of the story. It must be interesting to see the boats lying on the ground when there is no lake at all.

Or maybe that's not completely true. Some parts of the lake seemingly don't vanish completely, or if they do, they do it so late, that no grass grows where the water leaves. These parts are covered by a thick layer of dead reeds, an ideal place for small spiders. Wherever you tread, there are hundreds of them.

We finished the day with a trip to the peak of a nearby mountain. There, at 1114 meters above sea level, is a restaurant with a fantastic view on the lake below. This last image was taken from the forest road up the mountain.

The Song of the Day is "Vanishing Act" from the 2003 Lou Reed album "The Raven".

587 - The Tower

Yesterday I took a short break from SoFoBoMo editing. I went to a local park and tried to realize a concept that had been in my head for some time: Wide angle landscape images with tarot cards in them. The idea was to bring in a surreal element via the juxtaposition of reality and the symbols of the Major Arcana.

I failed miserably. I cannot remember a session that produced so much unusable rubbish in years. This image, although sub-par, is the only that I could even think of using. Well, let's forget about it :)

The Song of the Day is "I May Be Wrong, But I Won't Be Wrong Always" from the 1968 Ten Years After release "Undead".

582 - SoFoBoMo - The First Attack

Yesterday, after my first SoFoBoMo shooting trip, I was too tired to do much with the images at all, much less posting a blog entry. I had tried to realize concept #3, a real trip along a route, and I did it in a gorge in the southern mountains of Carinthia, the so called "Tscheppaschlucht".

The idea was, to simply follow the trail along the creek. I ended up with a five hour walk and 140 images taken. Enough for a book? Probably, but I will return anyway. Almost all images were shot with the Sigma 10-20, mostly at or around 10mm. In hindsight I'd like to have more with other lenses. You know, any lens brings with it a certain way of seeing, and I'd like to explore some different angles before I call it a book.

Processing will be done in Lab mode, using a "Man from Mars" for color correction. The images were originally shot at "Cloudy" white balance. I did not trust the automatics with all that yellow/green foliage. Conversion in Camera RAW was done to 5000 Kelvin / +10. That's a nice base for the Lab manipulations afterwards. Overall I try to keep processing conservative.

The Song of the Day is "The First Attack" from the 1987 Proclaimers album "This Is the Story". No sound samples but what Amazon has. Sorry.

576 - All The World Is Green

That's just another pretty landscape for Sunday. I was up to something different, but things did not work out as intended. I'll see into it today.

The Song of the Day is "All The World Is Green" from Tom Waits' 2002 album "Blood Money". See him perform live on YouTube.

575 - A Ray Of Light

It's Sunday night now and I write the entry for Saturday. Saturday afternoon I was out photographing for an hour, nothing special, only some wide-angle landscapes, but the really spectacular thing was, what I saw when I returned home.

Situations like these are really impossible to photograph. The dynamic range exceeds everything that sensors or film can record, yes, it exceeds even the range of the human eye. I had made two exposures, one with a completely burned out sky and a second with most of the sky intact, but everything else pretty lost in darkness.

The two exposures were from slightly different points of view and impossible to combine. I've decided to use the second one, the dark one. This is a 14 layer job with 8 distinct masks, but ultimately I think I made it. It's pretty amazing what enormous reserves the RAW files of Nikon's D300 have.

The Song of the Day is "Ray Of Light" from Madonna's 1998 album of the same title. See the original video on YouTube.

569 - My Book

The inspiration to this image came from Ted's post "Pigeon". There he presented three times four ways to have fun with a lighthouse. All of the images are gorgeous wide angle shots, and one of them has a whale's jaw in the foreground, lying in the grass.

Gosh, I thought, it's a long long time since I last did wide angle. Of the three processing variants that Ted presented, the third - his choice, he called it "heavy metal" - did not really ring with me, but it sparked an idea. In that particular series of images I would have liked a softer variant, but contrasted with an object. Something like the whale's jaw in composition, but an object that would be clearly out of place. A surreal element.

The other thing that led to today's image is, small wonder, the image of yesterday, "In Children's Stories".

It was clear now that I'd do a wide angle shot, it was clear that I would do it from the tripod, using HDR if necessary (which it was not), and the idea of the forest, of green filtered light, still kept me.

That was the concept. An image in the forest, and in the foreground an out-of-place object. Now I needed only two things, an object and a place. Thinking of yesterday, I first thought about a children's toy, ideally an old, damaged doll. This would have given an element of danger, but unfortunately I had no doll. Hmm ... must remember to find one.

From there it was not far to the book. It would have to be bound in red, preferably a big old book, if at all possible something that would survive lying on the ground, and so I finally selected the Collected Works of Shakespeare, that I had once bought very cheaply.

The first place that came to my mind was the gorge where I have shot a series of images about 16 months ago (see "Quake in a Gorgeous Gorge", "Down Again", "Probing Deeper" and "Substitutions"). Forest, water, book. Looked good to me. The only problem is, that I have recently seen wood workers around that place. I wanted to avoid any traces of human presence, thus I decided to simply try my luck with a new place.

The first choice was another gorge, but that one was completely inaccessible, at least from the side that I tried. I gave it up for today and instead drove to another place that I know. I have shot "Logging Again" there and almost a year later "Happy Birthday". There is no water, but the logs would do as well.

On my way there, about two curves before, I found what you see here. Water. Not waterfalls, not even much water, but I absolutely loved how the water repeated yesterday's metaphor of the way. Here we are now.

The Song of the Day is "My Book" from the 1990 Beautiful South album "Choke". See Paul Heaton perform it in the original video on YouTube.

Oh, by the way, it's "Richard III" where the book came to rest. Whatever that means.

567 - Time And Time Again

You have seen these mountains yesterday, and I'm afraid I'll have to come back to them time and time again. This particular image is from yesterday late afternoon. I have used split ND filters, and while I liked what I saw on the camera's LCD, I did not like what they did to the histogram. On the positive side, there is a lot of detail in the snow on the mountains, but this is outweighed by the negative effect on the top of the sky. I try using - and liking - them every once in a while, but compared to the elegance and flexibility of curves with gradient masks, they are a blunt instrument.

Or not so? I suspect that I expect too much. Maybe I need to use them more subtly, only going for part of the effect, using them as a means to get better material for the real work in Photoshop.

With this image I am quite satisfied. It has 13 layers, one group and seven distinct masks, and some of the layers are controlled by reduced opacity. The result is entirely artificial, I have completely re-modeled the tonalities, but it looks natural to me. Well, at least I have been guilty of worse atrocities to nature in the past :)

The Song of the Day is "Time And Time Again" from the 1993 Counting Crows album "August and Everything After". See them live on YouTube.

566 - Wild Mountainside

Actually this is not so wild at all. It is simply the morning view from our garden on Thursday, first of May. I made few other images, most of the time I was processing photos and trying to catch up on this blog.

"Wild Mountainside" is another song from Eddi Reader's lovely 2003 album "Eddi Reader Sings the Songs of Robert Burns". See her perform it live at the Scottish Parliament on YouTube.

561 - How Many Worlds

Some time ago I've written that the world is fractal, which Ted Byrne found amusing, but essentially that's what it is: Even if you believe you know a region (like I certainly do in case of my home Carinthia), you only have to look around the next corner to see something completely new. And even if you don't, even if you look at the same things again and again, you can always see them from different angles, different distances, giving you new perspectives, and even if all this is constant, then there is the ever changing light.

This post is about dandelions. It's all about the same subject, but we constantly change our perspective, going from a distanced view on a spring meadow all the way down into the wonderful world of macro photography.

See these two images? I didn't recognize it until I saw them side by side in the thumbnail view in my SmugMug galleries. In reality they were shot basically at the same place, hills to the south of Klagenfurt, but they were certainly not side by side. We got there when, just for the sake of it, we followed a small country road that we had never used before. It began rather unpromising and grew interesting later, making me completely forget the light rain. The two images were shot with the Sigma 30/1.4.

When was this? Oh yes, Saturday. It's now Thursday, the first of May, public holiday in Austria, the weather outside is just as it was on Saturday, and I write about images that I have processed yesterday on the train.

Last weekend was ideal for photographing dandelions. Now, only some days later, the first of them have already had their metamorphosis into white balls of feather, but then it was sprinkled yellow all over the place. Vienna, as you have seen in "559 - Obeisance" is already a week or two beyond, but that's normal, as Carinthia is higher and encircled by mountains.

Later in the afternoon long after the rain had stopped, the sun came out, and I mounted the Sigma 20/1.8, a marvelous wide-angle macro lens, grabbed a towel and went out into the garden, trying to capture the flowers from a very low perspective. We also see a progression here from normal to very shallow depth of field, and this all culminates in the Image of the Day, shot from extremely near and wide open at f1.8. For this last image, shown at the top of this post, the front lens must almost have touched the flower. The world is fractal. If you think you've seen everything there is, just get nearer and dive into the wonder of a world that you can't see but through a camera.

The Song of the Day is "How Many Worlds" from Brian Eno's great 2005 album "Another Day on Earth". Check it out, it may not be everybody's taste, but it's well worth it. Also hear the song on YouTube.