553 - Straight Up And Down

It's Friday. As I write this, I'm on the train to Carinthia, and as on so many Fridays, I have no substantial image. On the other hand, I have just worked on the cover images for a CD. Remember "462 - Congeniality"? At that concert I had shot more than 300 images, using Wolfgang's Nikon 80-200/2.8, and now that a CD is coming out, I was asked to supply the cover images. On the back cover will be the empty room after the concert, and on the front a detail of a saxophone. We don't show musicians, because the CD will cover the best of four concerts of different bands. The actual image on the cover will be a square crop of the lower part, here I show the original composition.

I'm pretty satisfied how well the sax comes out. The image was shot in extremely low light at 200mm, f3.2, 1/100s and ISO 5600. For that it's rather smooth :)

Regarding the Song of the Day, my choice of music here on the train is restricted to what's on my IAUDIO X5 60GB music player, and unfortunately I have not much Jazz on it. Still, "Straight Up And Down" from Eric Dolphy's 1964 album "Out To Lunch" will do, will it? No video, sorry, but Amazon's sound sample is actually quite good.

497 - Stop That Train

Obviously I am back to the Sigma 70/2.8. This is one of the few images that I shot today, while on my way from work to the train. ISo 200, f4.5 at 1/125s. These ramps are used to load cars on to the train. Nice colors, no?

OK, that's it. Backlog eliminated :)

The Song of the Day is "Stop That Train", a Peter Tosh song, interpreted by the Jerry Garcia Band on their 1991 live album. See a live version on YouTube.

496 - Watching You

This image is from Thursday evening. It is complex, or at least the distortions of the 1mm lens suggest complexity. For me this is a lurker's perspective. Someone is watching someone else, but why? Is there a story to be told?

Sigma 10-20 at 10mm, f4.5, ISO 1600 and 1/8s. Post-processing in Photoshop.

The Song of the Day is "Watching You" from Melissa Etheridge's 1988 debut album. As regards her music, I am a late-comer, but better late than never, right?

495 - Time Marches On

It's Friday night now, past 2am, and I sit here, back in Carinthia, after four hours on the train, working on my backlog. Well, at least the images are done and already uploaded to SmugMug, the titles are found, the Songs selected, only the actual writing is left. Let's go:

These images are from Wednesday, and the first is a morning image. I took it near work, using the Sigma 70/2.8 at f13. Nothing spectacular, but I like the compression.

The next one is from the evening. Before leaving work, I had switched to the Sigma 10-20. 10mm and f4 at ISO 360 and 1/8s. We had images like that before, although that does not necessarily stop me doing variations again. Anyway, nothing really new here.

Most of the other images were shot from out of different doorways, with very slow shutter speeds, focused at one wall of the doorway. I had taken lots of these images. Some had people walking by, some not, and from those that had, I liked the one that became Image of the Day best.

The Song of the Day is once again from Dr. John, "Time Marches On", and again it is from "N'Awlinz: Dis Dat or d'Udda".

494 - On Every Street

It's Friday morning now and this is the image for Tuesday. Still struggling :)

I didn't have too many spectacular things, so you gotta to work with what you have, right? I've treated this image with my recipe for creating detail in noisy or slightly unfocused images, neither because it was noisy, nor because it was badly focused, no, I did it in order to not lose detail.

The problem is, that these street scenes against the sundown contain so incredibly much contrast, that you really have to push the image to extremes, in order to get shadow detail, and if you didn't have noise before, then you have it for sure. The final image has rich detail, is smooth and has color depth. I'd print it big anytime.

The Song of the Day is "On Every Street" from the 1991 Dire Straits album "On Every Street". See a live version on YouTube.

493 - Respectable Street

Oh my, and I had hoped to get rid of my backlog! This is the image of Monday, and I'm still two days behind.

Today's excuse? Well, I have published my three entries labeled "Photoshop Tutorial" to good-tutorials, and all three made it to the front page, netting me the biggest rush on my blog so far.

One of the readers asked me for a Photoshop file for the "creating details" tutorial, and then the problem began: I could easily crop the image to 200x200 pixels, enough to reveal the layer structure and still keep the file at only 1.2 MB (compared to the 330 MB of the original), but I found out that SmugMug would not host PSD files! Hmm ... that's unfortunate: you pay for a pro account with unlimited bandwidth, but they don't let you upload files of the world's most popular image manipulation program. The challenge was now, to find a free hoster with a high bandwidth limit.

After some research I settled with box.net and their free "lite" account. It's 10 GB per month limit will suffice for about 7000 downloads per month, and I hope that is enough. If not, I'll probably have to upgrade. We'll see.

This image was shot Monday evening on Vienna's most busy shopping street Mariahilfer Straße, and I used the Sigma 70/2.8 at f2.8 and 1/160s.

The Song of the Day is XTC's "Respectable Street". I have a live version on the 4 CD box "Transistor Blast: The Best of the BBC Sessions". See the video on YouTube.

492 - Roughly About Sundown

It's Tuesday morning now and I'm finally back again with the long-overdue entry for Sunday. This is an odd assortment of images, and most of them have not even been taken on Sunday at all. The reason is ...

I have a new tool. It's Pixel Vistas PhotoLift, a Photoshop filter costing 40 US dollars. I found it by chance, browsing ads on The Online Photographer. PhotoLift is a tool to manipulate local contrast in an image. Using Photoshop's "Unsharp Mask" filter with a high radius and a low amount (termed HIRALOAM by Dan Margulis, see also here) can be used to achieve a similar effect, but with much less direct control and not with the same accuracy as PhotoLift. PhotoLift is available on Windows for Photoshop up from CS, and on the Mac for CS3 on Intel processors only.

Let's begin with this image of a house in a small village in Carinthia. It is about the balance of two windows, a piece of roof and a piece of ground, but it is also about texture. In this first image I have used a layer created with PhotoLift, set it to blending mode "Multiply" and a reduced opacity of 50%, this way burning the texture into the wall. The original was not overexposed, but the wall was very light, thus the mode "Multiply".

The user interface of PhotoLift is rather simple and lacks finesse. You can set the strength of the effect with a "Local Contrast" slider and the type of effect with a drop-down "Texture". Texture can be set between "Coarse" and "Very Fine", basically determining the "locality" of the effect.

Applying this effect can clip highlights and/or shadows, therefore you have the usual red and blue clipping indicators. They can be switched on/off with two buttons at the bottom, but you really want them on. If you see clipping, you can decrease global contrast with the "Global Contrast" slider, and in case the clipping is only on one side (highlight or shadow), you can shift brightness, to bring the image back into the middle of the tonal range.

The effect can be applied with two "Tools", a paint bucket that fills the whole image, and a brush that you can use to paint the effect into the image. There is an eraser as well, and finally you can set an opacity for the effect.

In practice I found the brush much too slow. I always use the paint bucket, and instead of applying the effect partially inside of the plugin, I use a Photoshop mask on the resulting layer. That's much easier.

Here we can see the dramatic difference between the image with and without the effect. It's striking.

There are two more issues with the plugin, the first being only a slight annoyance: It lacks a "Reset" button but it remembers values between invocations. I hate that. This effect has to be set individually for each image, and without a "Reset" button, I have to manually reset everything upon startup.

The other issue is due to the interactive nature of the plugin, i.e. due to the ability to use a brush and an eraser, and that are more or less unusable anyway. As it is, this plugin can't be a parametric filter, and therefore it can't be used as "Smart Filter", and in actions it will always pop up. This is an unfortunate design decision that I would strongly suggest to reconsider. I would drop the concept of "Tools" at all, make the filter parametric and of course add a "Reset" button :)

Now the question is: is this filter for you? When would you apply it and for what types of images? Let's look at some examples.

The first one is rather obvious again. This is the promised image of the way that I went up the mountain Dobratsch late afternoon on Saturday. I was on the shadow side of the mountain, the tonal range goes from very light sky near the horizon over dark sky in the zenith to almost black patches of ground coming through the snow. In the final image, reduced to 8 bits, there is not much tonal range left for the texture in the snow. It looks flat.

And now the same image, but with PhotoLift applied to the snow area. What a difference again! Suddenly we can see texture.

I have not tried to apply this effect to 8 bit images and, frankly, I wouldn't, because although there is enough tonal reserve in the RAW file, that is hardly true for a JPEG. On the other hand, I always shoot RAW+JPEG and never manipulate JPEGs at all, so that's not a problem.

I leave you with three more subtle applications of the effect. This image of a farm house in our village in Carinthia was flat in the concrete areas to the left. I have partially applied the effect to those areas, in "Normal" blending mode and with decreased opacity. That's a pattern in general: I tend to make the effect rather strong, and then reduce opacity. This often leads to more control, and I can always revise my decisions later.

This image of a damaged mural on a church in Carinthia had the effect applied to the damaged areas only. I would do that to put emphasis on the fact that it's damaged.

The final image is a B&W image of a bridge, and here I have subtly increased local contrast on the underside, making the concrete texture and the shimmering light from the reflections of the water more tangible.

And what about the Image of the Day? The only image beside the mural, that was actually shot on Sunday? It has the effect as well. Here I have used it in "Screen" mode with reduced opacity on the wall of the church. It brightens the main subject and at the same time makes it rough. This image is of course an HDR image made from multiple exposures, tone mapped in Photomatix Pro and brought to life in Photoshop.

The Image of the Day and the way up the mountain were shot with the Sigma 10-20 at 10mm, all others with the Sigma 70/2.8 Macro, as usual on my Nikon D300.

The Song of the Day is the Gershwin standard "Treat Me Rough", interpreted by Ella Fitzgerald. If you don't have them, why not get all of the "Song Books"?

491 - Just In Time

Dobratsch is a mountain that we had quite often now and I won't bother you again with the story of the catastrophe of 1348 (no, not the plague). If you have not read it yet, just have a look at these past entries.

Today when I was ready for photographing, it was already mid-afternoon. I could have gone out again to shoot power lines or farm houses but, knowing that it would be my last opportunity for a week, I decided to drive to Villach and up the mountain Dobratsch again. At about 4pm I parked the car, changed to winter boots, mounted the Sigma 10-20, took the Lowepro slingshot with my gear, shouldered the tripod, and then I began climbing the mountain.

Well, climbing is a big word. Actually there is a well prepared way up the mountain, but there was still snow, the summit is 300 meters above the parking area and several kilometers away. Sundown was predicted for 5:30pm, thus I had plenty of time. At least that's what I thought.

I'll show an image of the way up there tomorrow when I'll be writing about a new tool I have. The whole way is on the shadow side (well, at least in the evening), and when you finally think that now you've got it, the summit must be very near, you realize that you have reached only a platform, and there it is, the summit, far away, impressively looming in a distance.



It took me 90 minutes to reach the big broadcast station (mercifully omitted here) and the ridge between the two churches. Yes, there are two churches up there, and I happily admit that I cowardly refused to follow the ridge past the cross and to the western church. This last image may give you an impression why :)

The way down was comparatively fast. The moon cast strong light, and even without my headlamp I would have had no trouble getting down, merely the wind was a tad chilly. Afterwards I heard on TV that the temperatures on Dobratsch had been at around -12 degrees Celsius, and that together with the wind this would correspond to -26 degrees. Oh well, so that's why it felt cold :)

All images were shot with the Sigma 10-20 at 10mm and as sequences of seven bracketed shots. The merging to HDR and the tone mapping were made in Photomatix Pro, the final touches in Photoshop.

Oh yes, one more word about the temperatures. Most of the time I carried the camera in the slingshot, and when I had it out for a longer period of time without actually shooting, I had the battery removed and wore it near to my body. Batteries discharge much faster when in the cold. I simply did not want to take a risk. During actual use everything worked completely normal.

The Song of the Day is Nina Simone's "Just In Time". I have it on the "Tomato Collection", a double CD compilation with somewhat mixed acoustic quality, that nevertheless is absolutely recommendable. Hear another, equally good version on YouTube.

490 - After Closing Time

The last weeks had wonderful weather here in Carinthia. Blue skies, no clouds, sunny all the time, but yesterday the air was so full of haze, that I did not even think about shooting landscapes. Instead I drove to Villach in the evening, with the intention of shooting colored lights.

The original idea was to use the Sigma 150/2.8 Macro from the tripod and with much DOF. I wanted to stack shop signs and use the compression of the lens to create a surreal effect. The only problem was that, when I was there, I could not find anything of that kind. Tough.

Instead I shot shopping carts. In the green light of the flower shop they were a bit monochromatic, therefore I took #1 through some heavily defocused artificial flowers, and these are the flowers. Still, the Image of the Day is the monochromatic pattern of the stacked carts :)

The Song of the Day is "Shopping Trolley" from Beth Orton's 2006 album "Comfort of Strangers". See the video on YouTube.

489 - Electric Ladyland III

This entry could have been "Give'em Enough Rope" after the 1978 Clash album. On Thursday (yes, I'm two days late, this is the entry for Thursday) I went to take some images of the church of the small village Selpritsch.

The images of the church were not particularly interesting, but in front of the church, there is a playground with this rope dangling from a tree. I took the image with the Sigma 70/2.8 at f2.8 and from fairly near. Thus the DOF.

This entry could have been "Give'em Enough Rope", but instead we are back to the power lines. Taking images of power lines has become something of a project lately. It is part of an examination of the tensions between tradition and the effects of modern life. This is all really at the very beginning and even I don't know exactly what direction it will take. Let's see.

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

488 - Beyond Time

Don't you have the feeling sometimes, that certain places are really beyond time? Places where you've never been before and that look as if they were taken from deep in your past, out of your remotest memories, out of your childhood.

Today when I chanced to be in Velden, I drove by the railway station, and there was this building, old, seemingly not unused, but at this late morning completely deserted, and suddenly I had exactly that feeling. I don't really know what triggers it, but for me it seems to be necessary, that such places are deserted and silent.

You can't really see it at that size, but on the farthest edge of the platform, there is package of Marlboro cigarettes. It all looks as if somebody had just left and could return any moment, and that may be another factor in the place's timelessness.

Both images were shot with the Sigma 70/2.8 at f8 and f9.

The Song of the Day is "Beyond Time" from the 2001 Apocalyptica album "Cult". No lyrics given, it's an instrumental.

487 - Electric Ladyland II

Hmm ... seems like the Song of the Day stays the same, and so does the subject of my images. Only one so far for today, I may add one or two later.

This image was shot with the Sigma 150/2.8 Macro. Much less a typical landscape lens than the 70/2.8, but that's what I'm after at the moment: atypical landscape shots. This one is about a juxtaposition between a line of trees and a line of poles, and most of all it is about depth.

486 - Electric Ladyland

Harmony? Disharmony? Shooting landscapes in our modern times can be tough. Of course you can get out into the big national parks (Austria has quite some of them), and then you won't be bothered by power and telephone lines, but then, why be bothered at all? Are they not an integral part of our life? Don't we depend on them more than on anything else? Our heating system burns oil (hmm ... another such folly), but without electric power it would stop. It is controlled by a computer, it can be programmed to start and stop at certain times of day, to target certain temperatures, whatsoever, but take away these ugly power lines that we photographers hate so much ... and it stops.

If it must be, here is a harmonious image as well. Both were shot with the Sigma 70/2.8 at f11, in both I have cloned out some minor distractions. Disharmonious disharmony? Never!

The Song of the Day is "Have You Ever Been (to Electric Ladyland)" from Jimi Hendrix' 1968 album "Electric Ladyland".

485 - The Sea Calls

Every once in a while I feel a strong desire to drive down to the sea, either to Croatia or to Italy. Yesterday it had to be Italy. The first image, right out of the camera, was shot in the small yacht harbor Grignano, a short way north of Trieste, right after Miramare. I used the Sigma 70/2.8 Macro at f2.8.

The next image was also shot with the Sigma 70/2.8 Macro, this time at f4, and about 10km to the north, in Sistiana, another yacht harbor. On Sundays all of Trieste and Monfalcone are out at the sea, thus it was rather crowded. That's really the time, when fast telephoto lenses shine. I walked around and shot details, lots of details. and the crowds didn't bother me at all.

Next comes another image from Sistiana. This place is really only a bunch of piers with boats and some bars :)

We finished our trip in Duino, a small village with a large castle, made famous by the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke.

In Duino I changed to the Sigma 10-20. For this image and for the Image of the Day I used f11 and shot from the tripod. This is the harbor of Duino, with the unpretentious but excellent restaurant "Dama Bianca" in the back. Hmm ... just the right time for some sweet twilight shots, but then, don't boats move? They do, and this is one more lesson learned :)

The Image of the Day is from only minutes after sundown. There were no spectacular clouds, only a nice gradient and the moon. I was lucky, because the girl sat there, completely motionless, and only seconds after this shot, she stood up and walked away.

The Song of the Day is "The Sea Calls" from the fabulous Richard Hawley's 2007 album "Lady's Bridge".

One last thing: there will be an important announcement today, Monday 11. Be sure to check back, it's an amazing thing. See you this night!

484 - A Soft Seduction

It was bound to happen. I have tried to avoid it for almost a year now, but yesterday I have given in. This image is not from yesterday, it's again from Thursday.

This is one of the images that I shot from the tripod as series of five bracketed shots, and it shows the main reason why I was there in the first place: the soft, subtle gradient and the gentle light of the eastern sundown.

Sigma 10-20 at 10mm and f10.

The Song of the Day is "A Soft Seduction" from the 1997 David Byrne album "Feelings". Hmm ... David Byrne ... another favorite :)

483 - Dead And Lovely

For almost a year now I use song titles as titles for my Images of the Day. Why? See, I own about 3000 CDs, more than 1000 of them are classical, baroque, renaissance and old music, the rest is more or less contemporary popular music and Jazz. Hearing all that in sequence would take me more than a year, and of course I don't do it. Effectively I have a lot of music that I may have heard once or twice, and then shelved.

Selecting a Song of the Day forces me to hear my own music, and that's a very interesting thing. Just have a look at Tom Waits. He is one of the artists whom I select most often, about as often as Bob Dylan, and a year ago I would have ranked Dylan much above Waits. I really have discovered Tom Waits for me again, and that would not have happened without the Song of the Day. That's why I do it :)

The image of the day was shot with the Sigma 70/2.8 at f11, 1s and ISO 200.

"Dead And Lovely" is from the 2004 Tom Waits album "Real Gone". See a video on YouTube.

482 - Waiting (for a Miracle??)

What was I thinking of? Yes, I had a lot of probably usable images on Thursday, but this is supposed to be a daily photoblog, right? I should have simply taken one of them and been done with it. No, instead I held up the queue, searching for the "best" image. Of course you don't know what's best, as long as you don't have post-processed all of them. Well, if I had continued to process all candidates, you'd still be waiting. This morning image, taken with the Nikon 18-200 VR at f13 and 1/50s was the first candidate. I already had taken some shots, when finally the fog rose from the valley. Moments later we were shrouded.

This image and the Image of the Day were both taken at sundown on the mountain Dobratsch. I have been quite often up there last year, but this year it was the first time. I was really there for the eastern sundown, for the soft, gentle gradient, but how the sun vanished, that really had its charm :)

Both images were taken with the Sigma 10-20 at 10mm and f11. I shot these images hand-held, later for some HDR images I changed to the tripod.

The Song of the Day, as a memorial to my stupidity, is the Bruce Cockburn composition "Waiting For A Miracle", interpreted by the Jerry Garcia Band on their 1991 live album.

481 - Hour Of Need

Yesterday was not a rainy day, no, the sun did shine, and we even have some first primroses in the garden. Still, I was working all day and couldn't manage to get any decent shot. Long after midnight, in my hour of need, I remembered the clock that had saved me two days ago. This time it is the pendulum.

Sigma 150/2.8 at f11 and 0.8s, shot from the tripod, lit with a LED lamp.

"Hour Of Need", the Song of the Day, is again from the 1999 Faithless album "Sunday 8pm".

480 - Cold Cold Ground

Didn't think that this would be Tom Waits Week, but it seems as if :)

Yesterday morning it was cold and unfriendly. Low clouds hung between the mountains, the plain at the bottom of the valley lay silent and barren. Originally I had mounted the Sigma 150/2.8, but for this image I needed a wider frame. This is the Sigma 30/1.4 at f11 and 1/200s.

The Song of the Day is "Cold Cold Ground" from Tom Waits' legendary 1987 album "Franks Wild Years". A live version of the song is available on YouTube.

479 - Time

What do you do on a day with snowfall in the morning, dense fog from noon and heavy rain in the evening? Well, I did not go out photographing. These are the times to go searching in the attic, the times for old and broken things, for those things that everybody wanted you to throw away at last.

Sigma 150/2.8 Macro at f18, 2.5s and ISO 200, shot from the tripod.

The Song of the Day is "Time" from Tom Waits' classic 1985 album "Rain Dogs". Hear a fantastic live version on YouTube.