623 - High Summer

It's high summer again, and this year time seems to run on a frenzy. We had mixed weather so far, much rain lately, and work is a little bit over-represented in my life at the moment. I have stayed in Vienna for the weekend and will be off to work in some minutes.

Enough of the rant. I love these long days. I think one should spend all his life on the summer side of the planet. Although I leave work late, I always catch some daylight. This is the image of Friday, taken in Burggasse, in front of a former cinema. The light was blinding and I love the shadows and reflections on the ground.

Tonight I'll really have to go back to my normal schedule. It feels different when you post about an image that you have taken only hours ago. The emotions are much more present. I'll also have to write some words about creativity. Stay tuned. I'll try hard to be back in the evening.

The Song of the Day is "High Summer" from Van Morrison's 1999 album "Back on Top"

620 - In Heaven She Walks

Hmm ... why is it that I always feel like a rabbit with a stopwatch lately? Well, we're still a day behind, this is only the image of yesterday, Tuesday, and I confess, I had my troubles with it. Originally I had taken it because of the shadow to the right, and I have several others of that, with or without feet. This was a vertical, and I really liked how the shadow went on. The problem was, that the big foreground, the feet and the direction in which the woman walks did not play together. Radically cropping from the bottom, almost to a square, finally did the trick.

The Song of the Day is once again from one of those generally disliked Stranglers albums. It's "In Heaven She Walks" from the 2002 release "Written in Red". Sorry, no lyrics, but at least a video on YouTube.

612 - Private Goes Public

It's a funny feeling, now that SoFoBoMo is over for me as well. I feel ... relaxed. The pressure is gone. Sure, I will go back once more and produce the physical book, but there is no deadline to that.

Do I feel tired? Do I need a creative break? Not really. I probably need more sleep, yes, but otherwise I feel as creative as ever. I guess the reason is, that I have not spent much time shooting, actually not more than six hours. Most work went into post-processing, and that, although tedious, was fascinating and interesting. After all, I have never before tried to create such a big and consistent body of work, much less from one shooting. In a way it was a similar experience to that of making the exhibition in January.

Yesterday night, on the train from Carinthia, I have tried my next book, some "Best of 2006/2007", just a compilation of the best images of the first 15 months of my blog, and although it was technically no problem, the result was rubbish. This is another lesson: I may have the means now to produce a book in very short time, but this is no substitute for a vision and for proper planning and design. Otherwise I may produce something in the form of a book, but it won't be a good book :)

Now for today's images. Actually I like both of them. The vandalized telephone receiver caught my eye because of the color and, even more so, because of the curve of the cable. I finally settled for the other image though. Austria is currently host to the European Soccer Championship, and today was the match Austria vs Germany. Thousands of people were on the streets, mostly on their way to one of the public viewing areas in the so-called fan zones, and what I saw in Westbahnstraße, was one of the funnier ideas. Some people had taken a TV set out onto the sidewalk, along with some furniture, and were viewing in public. Someone made a video, and they really seemed to enjoy themselves. Oh yes, Austria lost 0:1, but that was to be expected :)

The Song of the Day is "Private Goes Public", the last song on the European version of the 1992 Suzanne Vega album "99.9 F°".

602 - The Day That Jackie Jumped The Jail

Sometimes you've got only one chance. This is the single image that I shot on Friday. I took it on my way to the train, just as I went up the escalator from the Underground. After the gloomy darkness below, I suddenly saw a blue sky and a flash of strong yellow. I did not think about it, I just raised the camera and, without any conscious effort, got this, just in the right split-second.

I combined three versions from one RAW file to cope with the enormous contrast, but otherwise I could have taken the original composition as shot. That I still cropped it, well, I saw the chance to get some lines int corners, and I simply couldn't resist. The original was not bad, but this one is even stronger.

The Song of the Day is "The Day That Jackie Jumped The Jail" from the 1991 Deacon Blue album "Fellow Hoodlums". See them live on YouTube. The song is in the second part of the video.

579 - Boulevard Of Dreams

I don't crop my images very often out of their original composition. I do crop, yes, but mostly to take care of a slight oversight, correct a sloppiness of execution. I don't normally do something like what I've done here.

The reason for it is, that I see a randomness in any format. Sure, there are proportions that please the eye more than others, but once the proportions are set, you only have the problem of using this frame to cut out a piece of reality, isolate it, make plausible the claim that this is a piece able to stand on its own, a piece that has its own, independent meaning. You make this claim at the time you take the image, and it may have merits or not, but if it has not, you have failed initially.

Only in rare cases I initially frame an image in full knowledge that I will crop it to, say, square, framing it for cropping from the beginning. Normally all other cases are essentially failures. Sure, something can often be done, some of it by cropping out of the original composition, but most of the time this still tastes like failure, and rather than cropping, I go out and take the image again. My ways are and my life is, that this is frequently possible and feasible. Then I go out and try framing again, doing it until I have what I intended or am satisfied that there is no proper solution.

Not so here. I was satisfied with the original. There is only a tiny crop from the right, that brings the strong verticals more on a third, but otherwise I have not touched composition. What I have done by cropping is the application of new proportions, cinematic proportions, proportions that tell the story better than others. I don't do this very often.

Why do you crop? Do you? And if not, why not?

The Song of the Day is the excellent "The Cutter" from Echo & The Bunnymen's 1985 album "Songs to Learn and Sing". Enjoy the video on YouTube.

570 - At The Corner

This is the image for yesterday. I still had the Sigma 10-20 mounted and I said to myself, heck, why not try using that lens in the streets again? I haven't done that in a long time, and it sure felt ... alien?

Well, you must know that I use the 10-20mm zoom mostly like a 10mm prime. Normally I zoom this lens only if I absolutely must. I simply love the wild abundance of lines, the distortions, the unreal effects that you get.

Only that it didn't work that way yesterday. In fact, this is the only image that I feel confident of releasing. I like the split-toned B&W version better than the original. It has a more old-fashioned look, something that contrasts nicely with the rather not so conventional distortions. All in all I think it's a nice result for a day that saw me completely at odds with my lens and uninspired as well.

The Song of the Day is "Coles Corner", the title song of Richard Hawley's 2005 album of the same name. See the video on YouTube.

565 - Miss By One

It's late Friday evening, these are the images for Wednesday. Let's see how far we get tonight. This first image is of a view that I've seen thousands of times in 24 years. Morning light falling through my living room window in Vienna. It's a tad on the yellow side, isn't it? Uuhh ... yes. This is the JPEG from the camera, and I had left it set to "cloudy" white balance from the day before. You know, normally I'd have corrected the white point, brought in a tad of color variation, increased contrast, etc, and I shortly tried, but ... it completely ruins the shot. Some images are not meant to be "optimized".

Wednesday was traveling day, and when I am packed with my big camera backpack and an extra bag, I normally use public transport and most of the time that means the Underground. Not so this day. I decided to ride by tramway for some stations, and then go the rest of the way to work. When I left the tramway in Josefstädter Straße, the sun was shortly gone. I used the light for some images of tulips and came up with this. Did you know that all tulips originate from Kazakhstan?

Later on, at work, I used the opportunity for another portrait of Erich. He was very concentrated and left me the time to focus the 50/1.2. Never be sloppy with this lens, because, when using the focus indicator LED, it is crucial to set the focus point to exactly where you want it. At f1.2 the plane of sharpness is so thin that it becomes apparent that it is no plane at all. It is curved, just like the lens. Forget any focus-and-recompose technique, it won't work. You'll never get sharp images.

The last one, the Image of the Day, was taken shortly after the tulips. The sun had come back and I used a polarizer to get rid of the reflections on the peeling paint.

Now, why is this a "miss by one", you ask? Well, the thermometer shows 18 degrees Celsius, which is quite nice for 8am, but I had hoped for 17. Missing it by one made me reconsider the title. You know, I really had to have "17 Again" from the 1999 Eurythmics reunion album "Peace" as Song of the Day one time :)

I absolutely adore Annie Lennox. She has such a wonderfully powerful voice and the end of this song is ... special. If I remember well, they have performed the song to an overwhelming reception in the morning of New Year's Day 2000 at a concert in London's Trafalgar Square. I really would have given a lot to not only see it on TV :)

There is a remixed version of the album, that's what you currently get if you don't care, and nobody seems to like it. I can't tell, I have the original, but you are warned. See the video on YouTube.

557 - Sarah

May I introduce my niece Sarah? She is a year and some days old, daughter of my sister Astrid and her husband Martin, and she is the delight of my father, who has spent the last two weeks working in Vienna and living with them. Yesterday we returned to Carinthia.

These images are from my visit on Tuesday evening. I had already worked on them and uploaded them to SmugMug, thus I can post this entry. The other images of the week, Wednesday and Thursday, are unrecoverable at the moment, I will post them when I am back in Vienna.

The Song of the Day is "Sara" from Antonello Venditti's 1978 album "Sotto Il Segno Dei Pesci". The lyrics are not exactly what one would write about his baby niece, but Bob Dylan's "Sara" wouldn't have been better in this regard :)

See Antonello Venditti perform live 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.

542 - The Show Is Over, Say Good-Bye

Welcome to the second edition of "Fine Art Explained".

Every once in a while I write a Photoshop tutorial, and that can be for one of three reasons: I could have found an interesting technique that I like to share ("448 - Down In The Hole" is such a case), I could have found an interesting tool or plugin (in "492 - Roughly About Sundown" it's PhotoLift), or I feel that I have found an interesting solution for an originally unspectacular image, something that I am proud of. In the latter case I simply show how I develop an image from ground up. That's "Fine Art Explained", and "511 - Gasoline Alley" was the first example.

Yesterday was a drab, cold day, and I left work early, heading not west, towards home, but east into the city's center, the first district, the part that was walled from medieval times until the walls were torn down under Napoleon Bonaparte.

Near the northern border, near the channel that comes in from river Danube, is a gothic church, "Maria am Gestade" (Saint Mary by the Waters), and from its western facade there are stairs down to a small place called "Am Gestade". This is our stage. Here I took an image of a man walking down the stairs, here I made a series of photos, trying to capture the spirit of the place.

I had to wait some time until the place was empty, but I used the time nevertheless, making image after image, looking for something that would work. I finally settled with this image: Nikon 18-200 VR at 18mm, 1/100s and ISO 280. Much of the stairs in the foreground, a door and the yellow lines, in the background the curving row of houses that leads into the unknown. No sky. This image and the image of the man walking down are JPEGs straight from the camera.

Whenever I am at that point, I ask myself: "What's wrong with this image? What is too much, what is missing?". Here the answer was clear: the expanse of the place lacked contrast and most of all a focal point, a center of interest. OK, I thought, maybe I can use the man.

I opened up the image of the empty place in Adobe Camera RAW, applied some basic adjustments there, and then loaded the second image, the image of the man, converted with the same parameters, into another layer. There was a gully to the left of the man, and I used that to rotate, resize and skew the top layer. This was easiest when I set the opacity of the top layer to 50%, so that I could see the gully on both layers. Moving, rotating and skewing took its time, and, as you can see, the result is not perfect.

The reason is, that the images were taken with different focal lengths and different perspectives, but after I had applied a black mask and by painting with white on the mask revealed only the man, it did not matter at all. The man had neither hard edges, nor did he have to have a certain alignment to any edges in the image. Organic forms are very forgiving in that regard.

You see, I have combined two images, and one of them has been scaled to less than half its size. The result of this scaling is most certainly an increased relative sharpness of the scaled-down image. In this case it was not so pronounced, but had it been, then I would have had to slightly blur the man now.

The next image shows a small but important step. I have cleaned up the image and removed unimportant but distracting details. The most obvious is the glaring puddle in the background, near the right edge. It's extremely high contrast, and the eye is naturally attracted to high contrast. Some smaller specks of litter on the stairs and some near white points in the far background also had to go, because they were in positions where I absolutely did not want to lead the eye. Basically the idea was to make the man the single most important focal point, and everything else, even the door included, his arena.

There is not much difference in the next image. I have selected the yellow of the stripes (Select / Select Color Range) with a narrow range (fuzziness set to around 50), and then added a "Hue/Saturation" adjustment layer, automatically taking the mask from the selection. Here I added a healthy dose of saturation to the yellows, making them pop. In another "Hue/Saturation" layer I have desaturated some already very saturated reds in the far background. I did this, knowing that I would add global saturation later, and I wanted a level ground for all colors.

Compared to the JPEG from the camera, I had already increased mid-tone contrasts a bit in the RAW converter, but I really wanted strongly increased local contrasts, making the textures come forward. At the moment my tool of choice is PhotoLift, a plugin that allows a broad range of manipulations of local and global contrast. See more about it in "492 - Roughly About Sundown". I used +80% local contrast, -20% global contrast, -10% brightness and +20% saturation, and the resulting layer has an opacity of 50%. Basically this is experimentation. Use what looks best.

The tonal foundation was better now, with the bulk of the image shifted more down into the mid-range, and with a healthier distribution. Next I added some standard adjustment layers: a levels layer for setting black and white point, a curves layer for mid-tone contrasts, both in luminosity mode. Then I pushed saturation quite a bit. The result looks punchier, less muddy. You see it best in the wall textures, but I admit that the effect is subtle.

Such forceful contrast manipulations tend to make the image look unnaturally sharp and grainy, and in many cases I add something that I call a "Neutral Blur". This is an Orton-like effect, but without the glow. You get it by copy-merging the stack onto a new layer, duplicating that layer, setting one to mode "Multiply" and 60% opacity, the other to "Screen" and 100%, and then blurring the multiply layer with radius 5 and the screen layer with radius 30. Group them and set the group's opacity to 50%.

This "Neutral Blur" is exactly that: neutral. It does not change overall tonality and it does not affect colors, but it gives the image an aura of substance. It's hard to explain and in these screen shots it's certainly hard to see as well, but when you try it for yourself, you will immediately recognize it.

Of course the image has again lost punch now, and here I normally apply some high pass sharpening with a radius between 1 and 2, here like most of the time 1.5. This again brings back the punch without looking unnatural or sacrificing the "substance" gained through the blur.

Remember my warning concerning compositing and that one may have to blur a strongly shrunk layer? Well, something similar had happened in the meantime. The increased local contrast of the PhotoLift layer, together with the high pass sharpening, had produced a trace of a halo around the man. Thus I copied the high pass layer, inverted it, masked it with black and painted in the mask with a small white brush along the man's contours. Perfect. The halo was gone. If this wouldn't have sufficed, I could have clipped a levels adjustment layer into the inverse sharpening, thereby increasing its effect.

Now we're almost there. I added a vignette to accentuate the focus and finally sharpened the image in Lab and with an edge mask. A vignette is something that you see in many if not most of my images. It helps to direct the eye and it adds drama to the scene. Depending on the scene and the strength of the vignette, this can be quite some drama :)

So far the workflow was very reasonable and now comes the sin: I was not really impressed with the image, and I decided to remove the gully. Eeek! A pixel-bearing cleanup layer on top of all these adjustments! Ugly. But ... I did it. I was too lazy to redo sharpening, blurring and high pass sharpening. It was late and it was only meant as an experiment, just to see how it would look like.

Well, it made a world of a difference. Suddenly the man perfectly worked as a focal point. I had not recognized it all the time but, as useful as the gully had been while compositing, as distracting it was now.

For your reference, this is the whole layer stack again, only the group with the neutral blur not expanded.

The title of this image is a line from the Song of the Day, "Take A Bow", from Madonna's 1994 album "Bedtime Stories". Maybe that's only me, but I can't remember ever having seen a better music video. A marvelous piece of art. See it on YouTube.

Oh yes, two more things: I have done what I normally don't ever do, I have changed an Image of the Day. I had been very unsatisfied with "539 - Heading For the Light". Head over and compare for yourself.

The other thing is this image. I made it shortly before the Image of the Day, not far away, and it is another 16 layer job, but that would be a different story.

536 - Donegan's Gone

I shot this image today on my way home. In reality, I have to admit, I don't know this man, but one thing's for sure, he can't be Donegan, because Donegan's gone.

The Song of the Day is "Donegan's Gone" from Mark Knopfler's 2004 album "Shangri-La". See him perform it live and explain the story on YouTube.

Oh, one more thing: Bill Birtch has a new blog, so if you link to him, it's time to update now. For the time being I keep the old link as well. Much too much great stuff there :)

532 - In Another Land

This is the image for Friday. I shot it in the morning, just before I entered this building. I took a series of about 10 shots, some focused on the building, some on the reflections. It's amazing: you could do that the whole day and the images would all be slightly different.

The Song of the Day is "In Another Land" from the 1967 Rolling Stones album "Their Satanic Majesties Request". Hear it on YouTube.

530 - There In A Dream

I shot this image Wednesday evening, on my way back home. Basically I was experimenting with the same idea that I work on more than a week now: the effect of unfocused foregrounds. It makes a difference though, whether you try this in bright daylight or at night. In daylight you can use the foreground to add a touch of diffuse, bright color. At night most foregrounds are much too dark for that. They simply go black. Using flash would be possible but in the typical situation on the street it's much too complicated. Most of the time the on-camera flash is too bright and would overexpose the foreground, while fiddling with a detached flash is awkward.

In these situations I look for different foregrounds. Here you see the reflections of bright street lights on a car. This, along with the slight tilt and the strange angles, gives the scene a surreal, dream-like feeling.

The Song of the Day is "There In A Dream" on "Now is the Hour" by Charlie Haden's Quartet West.

529 - These Moments Of Beauty

Boy, talk about a delay! But it was not only laziness on my part, I really had to think about this one :)

Ted Byrne recently posted an essay "What Do We Do After We Go “Wow”? The purpose of beauty in art photography", and somehow I feel the need to answer. Well, Ted, here comes the answer.

You originally asked about the sufficiency of beauty from the perspective of a viewer. You were quite surprised when, in a clever comment to your article, Michael McMurrough pointed out that the question arises from the point of view of an artist as well.

I think before we can even begin to discuss the role of beauty in art, we have to define beauty itself, and here we immediately recognize that beauty is a completely subjective concept. What people regard as beautiful is not only different for different people, the "average" even varies with geographic region, with culture, and within a culture changes over the course of centuries. Just have a look at the baroque ideal of a beautiful woman, compared to the 1960s ideal that was shaped largely by a fashion model named Twiggy.

So what is beauty? Much greater minds than mine have tried to answer this question, thus I'll skip the idea of a final definition altogether, and only try to come up with a concept that works for me.

So what is beauty for me? I think beauty is a certain quality of inexplicable simplicity, that nevertheless has the power to represent arbitrarily complex configurations of reality. Beauty is not a state that can be constructed, it can only be approached, but it is not glaring like a beacon. Beauty is elusive, subtle and fragile. Not enough of a definition? Sorry, I have no better one,this will have to do for now.

I read a book just now. It's Ian Roberts' "Creative Authenticity", that was recently recommended by Paul Butzi. In the first chapter, "Searching for Beauty", Ian connects beauty with transcendental silence, and he concludes, that the artist's authenticity and growth, and ultimately the work's "resonance and truth are what will give it beauty", meaning that beauty is something that happens as a byproduct of authentic, meaningful art. Mind though, that there is no way to force it. There are things that seem to be necessary, like - very profanely - just "showing up", meaning constantly working on expressing yourself, instead of evading the confrontation with your creative self. This is the 90% sweat part. It's clear though, that "showing up" alone achieves nothing.

Ian's concept of beauty is much more elevated than your's, Ted. For you, beauty is just one tool in the artist's toolkit, just one possibility to open a portal to deeper meaning. For the purpose of this text I tend to stick more with Ian and his idea that beauty "happens" through passionate creative acts, but that's more a matter of definitions, of how broad we see the range of what we like to assign the label "beauty". I think we each know what the other means.

This semantic problem comes from the fact that the word beauty is used for a bewildering number of things in a bewildering number of contexts, and I suppose it is for a reason, that through all the history of philosophy, we as a species have not come up with a final definition of the concept. It may even be, that it is no single concept at all, and it would make sense to use different words for different aspects of "beauty". Alas, although we are free to do so, this is not the way language works. In order to be understood, we need to use symbols with shared (or at least approximately shared) meanings. Thus we are back to the one word "beauty" and the problem of its ambiguity. That's the deeper reason why we constantly use the word with qualifiers like in "spiritual beauty".

We may not be able to define beauty, but does that mean we can't recognize it? Not at all! We may ultimately not always mean the same things, but every one of us can point to certain instances of beauty, and this is a beauty that's individually felt. Remarkably similar to religious experiences, isn't it? That may be the reason, that beauty is so often associated with the divine.

I am digressing. The original question was about the role of beauty in photographic art, so let's see if we have come any further so far:

When we can't define beauty, when we can't fabricate it, but when we still can see it when it is there, when beauty is happening through passionate creative acts, why should it make sense to worry about it at all?

And, lastly, this is my stance: I don't care. Some of my images may be beautiful in a more than superficial sense, I believe that the number of them increases the longer I practice photography, but I simply don't care. I pour passion into my work, and if that produces beauty at times, I let it gladly happen, and even if I wouldn't, it would happen anyway.

Though some of my images may be beautiful in a more than superficial sense, not all of them are, and I dare say most of them are not. They may have other qualities. They may evoke feelings, invite to dreaming, transport stories, express tension, and all that is possible without actually having beauty. Some of these qualities may be less lasting than real beauty (you note the qualifier?), some may only work upon first view, some may only work for me, but these are things that I like to care about, these are things that I can define, and these are things that I can try to create. Beauty I can not. And that, Ted, that is the reason why I don't believe that beauty is a tool.

At least not what I call beauty. Prettiness yes, beauty no. Beauty in its real sense, deep, innate beauty may cause you to go "Wow!", but more often than not it won't. What makes you go "Wow!" is something else, and this is what may be used up, leaving you with the question of "what else?". Beauty is timeless and it is an end, not a means.

There is another role of beauty though, and that's in the creative act itself, or rather in its inception, in the inspiration that comes in the very begining: At least for me, these inspirations frequently are like a glimpse of beauty, and that beauty, lighting up in a fleeting moment, too short to get hold of it, that beauty is what makes me delve into a subject, makes me want to explore it.

All Images were made with the Nikon 18-200 VR. The Song of the Day is "This Moment", again from Melissa Etheridge's fantastic 2004 album "Lucky". See her perform it live on YouTube.

516 - Early Mornin' Rain

This is a personal picture. Not because it shows anything about me (yesterday's image did that, he he), but because there is something in these views that fascinates me. In fact I take them over and over again, and that regardless of the lens.

Sigma 10-20 at 11.5mm, f8, 1/50s and ISO 1600.

The Song of the Day is "Early Mornin' Rain", Bob Dylan's cover of a Gordon Lightfoot song; to be found on his much disdained 1970 album "Self Portrait", a "truly perverse collection", as the editorial review on Amazon tries to make me believe :)

514 - Let's Push Things Forward

This is the image for yesterday, Monday. I had not much time for photographing at all, and just as I was trying to make something out of the last sunlight and the shadows of the cars on these walls, two young men came along on their skateboards.

Sigma 10-20 at 20mm, f7.1 and 1/125s.

The Song of the Day is "Let's Push Things Forward" from The Streets' 2002 album "Original Pirate Material". See the video on YouTube.

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.

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!

475 - Up with People

I already should be off to work and instead again I'm in a hurry. I'm always these days. Very exciting things are happening :)

I shot this image yesterday in an underground station. Do you notice the camera? They're everywhere. Why? Because you're a suspect! Huh?? Oh, it's not personal, everybody is. It's just that you exist what makes them suspect you. See? Not exist - no problem.

If you happen to be Austrian, why not go over there and do something about it?

The Song of the Day is "Up with People" from Lambchop's 2000 album "Nixon". See the video on YouTube.

474 - Pressing On

This is a night shot from when I went home yesterday evening at about 10:20pm. I paused to take an image of this door across the street, when I noticed that it would be much better to wait for passers-by. I did, captured a group of people coming from left, and then this young woman from right, pressing forcefully against the resistance of the graffiti.

Sigma 70/2.8 at f2.8, 1/25s and ISO 3200.

The Song of the Day is "Pressing On" from Bob Dylan's 1980 album "Saved". Nice on the album, but the real gem is the live version on YouTube. Go for it!