630 - Oooh, What A Lucky Man I Was

Yesterday's food is from the can. I was short on time in the morning, and when I left for the train, the light was utterly flat and uninspiring. I could have delayed photographing to the evening, but on the other hand I had plenty of time for post-processing while on the train.

I always carry a bunch of files with me in a folder "TODO", and for lack of anything better to do, I began processing some of them.

The decaying house front is not far from where I live. When I am late and take the way to work via the Underground, I always pass by, but this particular image was taken about a year ago, in the afternoon. I used my Nikon 50/1.2 and was on the way to a concert where I wanted to use this fast lens.

The next image, a garbage can in Mariahilfer Straße in Vienna, was taken last August with the then new Sigma 20/1.8. It was early morning on a bright day with blinding sunlight, and I liked the contrast between the modern design and the traces of ... uhmm ... neglect.

The final image, the Image of the Day, is from that Sunday morning in Florence/Italy when I was photographing with my friend Ted Byrne. This image was taken while Ted was on the other side, making the first image that he posted from Florence.

This is one of those images that I always wanted to process. I tried it one time and did not particularly like the result, so it went back into the "TODO" folder. Much to Ted's annoyance I took all my images that morning from the tripod and I really took my time. Just as I was satisfied with the framing, a white car drove by to park in front of these poles, right in my image. I pressed the shutter only a second before. The sidelight is from the car's head lights. While the original would have been nothing but a failed attempt, this side light makes the image, and that's also what was so hard to bring out in post-processing. I was just a lucky man :)

The Song of the Day is "Lucky Man" from ELP's 1970 debut album "Emerson Lake & Palmer". See something like a video on YouTube.

546 - Gli altri siamo noi

This is the image for Friday, but it was not taken yesterday. Yesterday was one of those travel days. No time to take pictures in the morning (at least nothing worthy), no time to take pictures on the way to the train (I've tried, it was better but still not good enough), and then for almost the whole time on the train I saw the most spectacular weather outside. Fantastic light, dramatic skies, I could have taken hundreds of images, and instead I sat there, sub-par images loaded in Photoshop, trying to ride dead horses. Goodness, that's tough!

Fortunately I have a folder titled TODO on my hard drive, and there I found this image that I always had wanted to work upon and that I never actually had. It's from my trip to Florence, Italy, where I met Ted Byrne. See here on my blog (read in reverse order) and there on Ted's (reverse as well). And while we're at it, here are some more images of that day, images that I have not even processed yesterday, images that I have shown on the Radiant Vista forums, but never on my blog. Hope you don't mind when I throw them in :)

Back to the Image of the Day. There is always the question of whether it is ethically acceptable to show images of beggars or not, but this is not an image about a beggar, It is about the shadow of power looming over the outcast, it is about being a stranger in a world that does not welcome you, it is about being outside, about being rejected as "The Other", but as an old song says: sooner or later we are the others, or in Italian, "tanto prima o poi gli altri siamo noi".

Umberto Tozzi is well known for his poetic lyrics, but it is much well known that Giancarlo Bigazzi, with whom he had a long collaboration from the mid-seventies up to the 1991 release "Gli altri siamo noi", was a driving artistic force. About this song Bigazzi later said that Tozzi had written neither a single line nor note. They ended up in court, and such is human nature, that this is neither uncommon for long-standing artistic collaborations nor for friendships or marriages.

Anyway. The lyrics to this song are quite challenging in the Italian original, and although there is an English version of the song, it is very much different, thus I'll try it with Irene's translation to German, translated to English by me:

I have never been lonelier than this,
but at night I wish it would be Monday soon,
to go out with the others and paint the town.
With the others, trapped in themselves, the others
who open up in the sun like the flowers that dress
when they wake up, when they go out, when they go away,
when they arrive.
We are like those shrouded angels,
the eyes in their faces like mirrors,
because the others are us.

Walls tumble under the breath of an idea,
Allah or Jesus, in a church or a mosque,
We are the others, but here on this same way,
like cowardly heroes, we leave behind what connects us
to those who wait and ask themselves why they were born
and suddenly die.
Maybe they are swallows, leaves from Africa,
who smile at us in melancholy,
and all of us are victims and hangmen,
sooner or later we are the others.

When they sing, when they cry,
the others are us.
When they're born, when they die,
the others are us.

In this world we are the others.

We stay in comfortable deserts
of apartments and tranquility,
far away of the others,
but sooner or later we are the others.

In this now so small world
we are the others.

We are the others
between Indios and Hindus,
between youths in drugstores who don't carry on,
Working class families, forced on vacation by robots,
gypsies from the east in ghettos on the outskirts.
All of us are victims and hangmen,
sooner or later we are the others.

Amazonia,
South Africa,
the others are us,
when they shoot,
when they hope,
the others are us.

In this world we are the others.
In this now so small world
we are the others.

Bigazzi, Tozzi or what, I find this quite impressive, don't you? See the video on YouTube.

512 - The River Sings

After the huge amount of work that I put into yesterday's Photoshop tutorial (I actually finished it tonight at 2am), and due to the fact that I have taken no image at all today (the first time in what? A year??), I needed to resort to my TODO images.

This one is from my trip to Firenze, Italy, where I met Ted Byrne. I took it the morning we were shooting the sunrise at Il Duomo. This is river Arno, and although I had the image on my TODO list, I didn't need to do anything at all.

Nikon D200, Nikon 18-200 VR at 200mm, f8 and 1/80s.

The Song of the Day is "The River Sings" from Enya's gorgeous 2005 album "Amarantine". See the video on YouTube.

505 - Sailing

This is not an image of yesterday. Yesterday was a drab, rainy day here in Carinthia, and the northern part of Austria had a bad storm that is supposed to return today. Not a tornado or hurricane, but with speeds up to 100 mph nevertheless. Four people in Austria were reported dead, three of them hit by falling trees. I decided to stay in bed and slept for most of the day.

At night I tried to take some images of forks. Why forks? Well, Neil Creek, one of my co-artists on Fine Art Photoblog, runs a competition about images of forks on his blog, basically a creativity training, and, having no image yet, I thought I could at least try.

Shiny little bastards, those forks. I found myself without easy success, completely uninspired and at the moment not willing to further explore the essence forks. I gave up and decided to tackle one of those images tagged "TODO" in my image database.

This is it. An image shot last July in the harbor of Mali Lošinj, an image that I did not use as Image of the Day then, an image that I always planned to work upon one time and that I had completely forgotten in the meantime.

The Song of the Day is "Sailing" by Rod Stewart, and I have it on the 1982 release "Absolutely Live".

411 - The Beat Of The Night

Wouldn't it be much better if I could write about the "heat" of the night? OK, a guy may dream, yeah?

Yesterday we had Christmas decoration in Josefstädter Straße as seen in the morning, plus a nighttime view from last year, today it's another night shot.

What else? Oh, the Nikon D300 has come to Austria (and everywhere else). What a difference to the launch of the D200. Then it was almost impossible to get one for months, today I have seen it in two shops that I've come by, and one of them had two of it in the window. It looks good. Very good. I'm curious for how long I'll be able to resist :)

The Song of the Day is "The Beat Of The Night" by Bob Geldof. I have it on the excellent compilation "Loudmouth". The Germans have a sound sample.

410 - New Stars In The Sky

We had a relatively sunny day for a change, but of course this does not mean so much when you're at work for the whole day, busily programming your way out of quoting hell. You don't know what quoting hell is? Lucky you!

But even when you're out on the streets: at this time of the year you always feel like being at the ground of a canyon. Sure, there is sun, somewhere up there, but you are damned to march in the shades forever and ever.

One way to get around the problem is, to take images with a long lens and along the canyon walls, preferably when the canyon runs west to east. Just like Josefstädter Straße in this image.

Nikon 18-200 VR at 200mm, f13, 1/80s.

At night the Christmas decoration, these globes that by day almost look like barbed wire, glows eerily blue. Have a look at an image from last year, made in the evening, looking the other way, and using the Sigma 30/1.4 at f6.3.

The final image that I want to share is from this afternoon. It's a strange kind of graffiti: paper glued to a wall, and on that a stenciled motive. Seems to be the most efficient way to ruin as many walls as you can in your precious time. Still, it's cute how the gibbon runs :)

The Song of the Day is by Air and it is called "New Star In The Sky". It's from their 1998 album "Moon Safari". Hear the whole song on YouTube.

409 - From The Underground

The minute when a reflection from some glass pane shed light on the wall outside to the right of my living room window, was a nice start into the day, but basically that was my last glimpse of sun. I am afraid it is becoming a pattern now: bright, sunny mornings that turn into gray slush as soon as I get out of the house :)

The next opportunity for taking photographs did not occur before I left work. It was already dim and unfriendly, everything from gusts to rain and the odd snowflake. I had protected my Loewepro Slingshot 300 with its all-weather cover (a fantastic bag, the best I've ever had), taken the camera out, protected by an umbrella, and tried to brave the elements.

No avail. When the droplets attacked horizontally and the wind turned around my umbrella for the second time, I cowardly retreated to the Underground.

The station "Volkstheater" is a crossing of two Underground lines, U2 and U3, thus it has two levels, U3, the one that I needed to take, being on the lower level. I took the image to the left while riding down the escalator. It is entirely uncomposed, basically a snapshot, but I like the slight motion blur and the strong feeling of perspective.

At the base of the escalator I turned my attention straight upwards for the Image of the Day. That's always a good idea when you search for an image: look where you normally don't look. It's surprising how often this yields interesting views.

All images were taken with the Sigma 10-20 at 10mm, the Image of the Day at f4, ISO 500 and 1/4s, hand-held.

The Song of the Day is "Notes From The Underground" from the 1987 Manhattan Transfer album "Brasil". I have not found a video clip on YouTube. Maybe there is one, but searching for the title, you only find clips related to Dostoevsky's short novel, and searching for the group you find so many clips that I gave up wading through. Anyway, if you don't already have this album, I can heartily recommend it to you. It is different from most of the Manhattan Transfer's work, but nothing short of excellent.

408 - Anything Goes

Today, when in the morning the fog lifted for some minutes and I caught a glimpse of blue sky, it almost looked like we could get a sunny day.

I was so wrong. Not only that the fog returned for hours, no, it even began to drizzle. In the late afternoon I gave up my hope on landscape shots and decided to drive to Klagenfurt. They have a Christmas market, and that always means color and light.

I was so wrong. By the time I was there it poured down and there was no chance to get any decent shots. I already played with the thought of using one of yesterday's images, shot immediately before I made yesterday's "Chance Meeting". You can even see the door in the background.

When I eventually drove down to our favorite China restaurant, I finally found the image. I had already stopped looking, at least consciously, when I recognized that they had added Christmas decoration to the already lush lights on the restaurant. I had the Sigma 10-20 mounted, and with all the cars parking in front of the lights, it was hard to get any interesting composition. OK, I thought, then with a car. And so I did :)

Sigma 10-20 at 10mm, f5.6, ISO 125, 1/4s, hand-held from under an umbrella.

The Song of the Day is my all-time favorite version of Cole Porter's "Anything Goes". It's from the opening scene of "Indiana Jones & the Temple of Doom", sung by Helen Hobson in Mandarin. Hilarious! Hear a sound sample on Amazon.com. It's track 8 you want. Track 16 is the normal English version.


Today, when in the morning the fog lifted for some minutes and I caught a glimpse of blue sky, it almost looked like we could get a sunny day.

I was so wrong. Not only that the fog returned for hours, no, it even began to drizzle. In the late afternoon I gave up my hope on landscape shots and decided to drive to Klagenfurt. They have a Christmas market, and that always means color and light.

UPDATE: This image reminds Ted of one of the two prints that I brought to Florence. See for yourself at "271 - Night Lights".

407 - Chance Meeting

In the morning I had to be in Klagenfurt to get my new contact lenses. I have lost one, more than a week ago, and it was time to renew them anyway, so I ordered a pair. Yesterday they arrived, today I went to fetch them. Normally it does not make a lot of a difference while photographing. I really feel alright using the D200 while wearing glasses, but at this time of the year I have constant trouble with the glasses filming over, so I'm glad to be back to lenses.

I knew that there would most likely be rain in the afternoon (wrong, but only by hours, now in the middle of the night it does rain), so I used the opportunity and took some images in Klagenfurt's historical center. This constellation of a door and a manhole cover is something that immediately caught my attention.

The Song of the Day is "Chance Meeting" from the stellar 1972 Roxy Music debut album "Roxy Music".

406 - He's Right But He Can't Spell

That's what we like. A guy who knows what he is. Too bad he can't spell, right?

Well, whenever I post graffiti, Ted righteously hates it. Most of the time I am more forgiving, but this is the kind of scribbling that's beyond the line, even for me. It's a sad thing, that 90% of all graffiti are such junk.

And this immediately brings me to the Song of the Day. Enjoy the Sex Pistols and "Silly Thing". It is on "Flogging a Dead Horse" and "The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle", and also on "Kiss This: The Best of the Sex Pistols". Hear it also on YouTube.

But now for something completely different. Speaking of Ted, today he posted two fantastic images of a young and well-looking photographer at work, and somehow this spurned my desire to retaliate. The thread goes on. Or is it a threat?

405 - Those Lonely Lonely Nights

Yesterday evening, after dinner at the local Greek restaurant, I decided to walk around the block. I had five images that day, three or four usable, which would have been perfectly alright, but when you're in the habit of taking images all the time, these numbers are unnervingly low :)

One round around the block proved enough. It was cold and unfriendly, so when I got this image, I was satisfied.

Sigma 10-20 at 13mm, f4.5, ISO 1600 and 1/3s.

This is the second image in a row now, that uses a technique that I just discovered (well, for me at least, everyone else may already know it).

Have you ever tried to push saturation on a noisy image? Something shot at ISO 1600? Uhhh, you get terrible blotches of color. One way to get around that, is to convert to Lab and blur the color channels, but this one works in RGB:

Duplicate your layer, blur it with a Gaussian blur and a high radius of around 30. You get buttery smooth colors with absolutely no noise, albeit no detail. Then set the blending mode to "Color". Voilà, you see the original luminance and detail, but with the smooth colors. Now you can add a Hue/Saturation layer and mightily increase saturation. Try to switch the "color smoothing layer" off and see the difference.

Of course this is a trade-off between color noise and color detail, but as the eye is not so picky when it comes to color detail, you are likely to get away with it.

The Song of the Day is "Those Lonely Lonely Nights" from the 1972 album "Dr. John's Gumbo". Sorry, no lyrics.

404 - Someone To Watch Over Me

The nightmare is all over. I have reinstalled Windows and everything works again. It cost me an insane amount of time, but it is done.

This image is from my way home in the evening. Sigma 10-20 at 20mm, f5.6 and 1/4s, hand-held.

The Song of the Day is "Someone To Watch Over Me" from Ella Fitzgerald's Gershwin Songbook. I have it in a nice box of "The Complete Ella Fitzgerald Song Books".

403 - Cheap Escapes

Honestly, I've seen better days. Somehow I have crashed my Photoshop installation and I can't get it back to work. At the moment it looks like some bizarre interaction between the Adobe installer and my anti-virus software, but this is only a guess. Repairing the mess could take anything up to a re-installation of the operating system. Whatever, it will have to wait until tomorrow, and for tonight I needed to take a cheap escape route: an image where I can live with not being able to clone.

Sigma 20/1.8 at f1.8 and 1/30s, shot this morning on my way to work. Post-processing in Capture NX.

The Song of the Day is "Trouble Loves Me" from Morrissey's 1997 album "Maladjusted". There are several live versions up on YouTube, for instance this one.

402 - Charleston Alley

Another day when I left work extra early. Isn't this a wonderful time of the year?

This is an alley where I pass through quite frequently on my way to or from work. I have always felt that its architecture has a certain Italian charm, and this is neither the first Image of the Day shot there, nor will it be the last. "40 - Thoroughfare" is from there and so is "33 - Hanging Gardens".

The Song of the Day is once more one of Jon Hendricks' vocalizations of a Jazz masterpiece, this time it's "Charleston Alley". Hear it on the Lambert, Hendricks & Ross album "The Hottest New Group in Jazz".

401 - Off Color

The difference between a color image and a B&W image used to be ... color. At least when I last looked at it yesterday.

Today's weather is an off-color joke. This image was taken at 3:16pm. We had a bit of snowfall all day, and now the shroud begins to stick. At first I wanted to produce the image in B&W, but then I noticed that it really made no difference, and for demonstration purposes I left it "in color".

Nikon 18-200 at 105mm, f13, ISO 100 and 1/13s, shot from the tripod with mirror lockup.

The other image, taken with the Sigma 10-20 at 12mm, f8 and 2s is from our garden. It was only this weekend that I recognized how bleak this landscape had become, how naked and barren it looked. The leaves had fallen, everything was prepared for winter ...

... and now it is here.

The Song of the Day is "Off Color" from The Microscopic Septet's album "Surrealistic Swing: History of the Micros, Vol. 2".

400 - Oh, How The Ghost Sings

Another round number, but one gets used to it :)

Today I had a lot of work to do and no time to take images. Only in the evening I could go out and the idea was, to take some images of the local church. HDR and very wide angle, preferably.

It was rubbish. But, interestingly enough, when I fooled around with hand-held images made in non-hand-holdable situations, I found this one: Sigma 10-20 at 17mm, f8, ISO 100 and 7.1s. Yes, seconds.

The Song of the Day is "Oh, How The Ghost Sings" from Lester Bowie's classic album "The Great Pretender". I'll never forget the evening when I first heard the title song in one of Vienna's leading Jazz cafés, "Miles Smiles".

399 - Amid the Falling Snow

I've promised you snow, well, this is snow :)

It does not look exactly like a tiny park almost in the center of Vienna, but that's only the power of the wide-angle. This is a park along the 200 meters between my workplace and the entrance to the Underground. When I walked by, on my way to the train, I suddenly saw the peculiar configuration of these trees, the snow sticking to their north sides and the still colored leaves.

Sigma 10-20 at 16mm, f6.7. 1/40s and ISO 100. Post-processing in Capture NX and Photoshop.

The other image is from this morning. By chance I saw an open house entrance, walked in and took some images. This is the one I liked most. Post-processing with Photomatix Pro and Photoshop. I've deliberately added some grain. I know that many people detest it, but in some cases it simply looks right.

The Song of the Day is "Amid the Falling Snow" from Enya's fabulous 2005 album "Amarantine". Hear it on YouTube.

398 - Where Water Flows

This is a "Bassena". If you're not from Austria, you will most likely not know the term. It is a public water basin in the ground level corridor of an old house. The form of the handle on the faucet is a pun on the German word "Hahn", that can mean "rooster" as well as "faucet".

I took the image yesterday morning, here in my house, before I left for work. Sigma 20/1.8 at f1.8, ISO 1250, 2500K white balance and 1/15s. Boy, that was dark! I had to push the exposure in Photoshop, because the image was slightly underexposed as well. This necessitated the use of Noise Ninja and mild doses of some other tricks, but I guess the result is quite acceptable. In fact I would happily print it in A3 format.

The Song of the Day is "Where Water Flows" from Calexico's 1998 album "The Black Light". No need for lyrics, there ain't any :)

Oh, by the way, we had snow yesterday. I may show some in today's image.

397 - One Step Too Far?

Today you see me torn between two images. Both were shot yesterday morning on my way to work, both with the Sigma 20/1.8, and this one even wide open at f1.8. Hmm ... pretty dark these days in Vienna. It still gave me no more than 1/125s at ISO 100.

What drew me in the first place, was of course the color, but when this guy walked through the frame, I decided to include him. I guess I like the notion of someone walking out of my frame. There is quite a number of these images in my collection now, and some were even Images of the Day (for instance 153 - Passage and 220 - People Are Strange), but it is also inspired by Ted's recent image of an Avvocato walking the streets of Spoleto.

An Avvocato, you ask? How do I know? Oh, I say, just so :)

As regards post-processing, well, I am really not sure about it. Color-wise I may have gone one step too far or maybe not far enough. You decide.

The second image would have been a safe bet. It's been shot not far away, this time at f4 and 1/40s. It is a study in geometry and if I admit that I may have something like a style (I like Michael McMurma's notion that style simply is, to make the same decisions over and again, not always, but significantly more often than otherwise), so if I have a style, then this would be very typical of it.

The Song of the Day is "One Step Too Far" by Faithless, sung by Dido. It's from the 2001 album "Outrospective" and you can see the video on YouTube.

396 - Christmas Time Is Here (Sort Of)

At least that's what the shops want us to believe, and it gets earlier every year.

This morning I shot a wreath of holly in front of a flower shop in Josefstädter Straße. Again I used the Sigma 20/1.8 at f1.8, 1/60s and ISO 100, the front lens almost touching the leaves.

I hope you don't mind that I take the easy road: The Song of the Day is "Christmas Time Is Here" from Holly Cole's 2001 Christmas album "Baby It's Cold Outside". Sorry, couldn't resist :)

Hear sound samples here. Oh, and when you're there, don't forget to hear into the last song, "What About Me". Holly at her best.