649 - Big Rain Tonight

Ahh, these days that begin bad and then only deteriorate! I left home in the morning and already had to duck under an umbrella. It did only rain moderately, but nevertheless enough to make me fear for my camera, and then it grew worse the whole day. In the evening when I left work, it poured down again.

This is an image that I shot in the morning. The lens? Just like in the other two images of today, my new Nikkor AF 85/1.8D! That's what I finally settled for. Given that I have a fantastic Sigma 70/2.8 Macro, it is probably equally redundant as the 28/1.8 had been, contrasted with the 30/1.4, but, hey, it's not about logic, it's about fun.

So, what can I say about this lens? It's metal, it's robust, it looks good, it focuses fast, it focuses precisely, it has a nice bokeh and it is a bargain compared to the 85/1.4. The Image of the Day, the bicycle in the rain, is right out of the camera, the daylight image had its colors pushed, not more, and the night image of Volkstheater had all kinds of things done to it. All three images were shot from under an umbrella :)

The Song of the Day is "Last Night Was a Big Rain" from Sara Hickman's 1989 album "Equal Scary People". See a video on YouTube.

646 - Harley Heaven

I've spent this weekend working in Vienna, and last night, Sunday, when I left work, it poured down like mad. My first idea was to take public transport, but I finally resisted the temptation. I mounted the Sigma 30/1.4, took the umbrella out of my Lowepro Rover AW II backpack, secured its rain cover (AW means "all weather"), and off I went. Mostly caring about the camera, I was slightly wet upon arriving home, but I had quite some nice images. What finally made it is this one, a Harley parked in the rain.

The Song of the Day is "Harleys & Indians (Riders In The Sky)" from the 1994 Roxette album "Crash! Boom! Bang!". Sorry, no video, but last.fm has a sound sample.

643 - Here's That Rainy Day

Thursday was rainy. I took some mediocre images in the morning, while it was still dry, and some more interesting in late afternoon in pouring rain. I don't have the time to process all of them, but this is one of my favorites. Again I use a more or less out of focus background and a sharp foreground, and this time it is a variation on the concept of "601 - Rainy Day in June". The lens used is the Sigma 30/1.4, and it took me some attempts to find the ideal aperture of f4. Here we have just enough definition in the background to vaguely recognize people and umbrellas, and enough blur to keep the image timeless and general.

The Song of the Day is "Here's That Rainy Day". I have it on "Magic Voices", a seven CD collection of all records made by the Singers Unlimited. Unfortunately I have no sound samples, but of course YouTube has plenty of other versions.

622 - Stormy Weather

This is certainly no great photo, the yellow reflection to the left is much too distracting for that, but it does one thing very well: it accurately shows the light that caused me to take it in the first place.

Technically this is not an HDR image. It was made from one RAW file by combining three different versions, using luminance masks, "Blend If" sliders, an extra layer in "Soft Light" blending mode and a photo filter.

I could probably have found a better composition, but I was in a hurry. I crouched in the middle of the street, sheltering myself and the camera from the heavy rain with an umbrella, using a short time when there were no cars. Pretty inconvenient :)

Here is one more image with the same Sigma 30/1.4 lens. I kinda like it, though neither my artistic contribution is overwhelming, nor is it that of the graffer. Sometimes I wonder. I can understand what someone could get out of making graffiti, at least a certain kind. Some graffiti are art, even if Ted disagrees :)

But where does this trend to use stencils come from?? Why do people do that? There is nothing at all artistic in it. Even a monkey could do that. Why bother? Do you have any idea?

The Song of the Day is "Stormy Weather", one of my most favorite songs, a Harold Arlen composition, this time interpreted by Ethel Waters. I found her by chance, searching for versions of "Stormy Weather", not knowing that it was actually her signature song. Well, it's probably excusable, she was slightly before my time :)

I have it on a compilation of recordings from between 1931 and 1934, but that does not seem to be available any more. Instead you could probably get this one called "Am I Blue?". Hear it on YouTube.

601 - Rainy Day in June

There is a school of thought that reminds us to concentrate on one subject, to not clutter our images, to keep them free of distractions, and I am only too willing to submit, but not all of the time. Sometimes life is clutter, and to feel it, I have to let you dive in. Have you ever tried to photograph from under an umbrella, while walking in the rain? Well, that's how it feels :)

The Song of the Day is "Rainy Day in June" from the classic 1966 Kinks album "Face to Face". If you don't have it, go for it. Hear the song on YouTube.

583 - SoFoBoMo - Processing On A Rainy Day

Rain was forecast, rain was to be expected, rain it did. Who could be upset? In fact, I very much appreciated the time, because sifting through 140 images, not to find one single Image of the Day but to identify and process as many as possible, that's quite a task. As already mentioned, I use Lab processing on all these images, because there's really a need to drive the different shades of green apart. I am not really sure about the colors yet, I may get back and make final adjustments later, but that's easy in Lab.

So far the session looks good to me. I have just counted, and even when I'm really conservative, I can come up with more than 35 usable images. Still, I'll allow myself the luxury to go back next weekend. There will be different light, I may use different lenses or at least I may be in a different mood.

Seems like image making is not my problem. Stringing them together ain't either, because as I have outlined in my kick-off post, the order is already given by the sequence of places along the path. What troubles me, is only that I have no idea so far of how to make a book :)

Today's Image of the Day is not from the SoFoBoMo session, it's genuinely from today. Employing the Sigma 70/2.8, I have ventured into the garden, well, more along the wall, just as far as the roof would still cover me, and this was the only flower in reach :)

The Song of the Day is "It Feels Like Rain" from Aaron Neville's 1991 album "Warm Your Heart".

537 - More Than Rain

This is the image for Wednesday. I shot it on my way home. Rain had just stopped, the sun was back again, and I saw this gorgeous Mini Cooper, wet and sparkling all over with reflections.

The other two images were made only minutes later, on the same street. I had not expected much more than rain, but I got a big bunch of colors instead. Who would complain?

It's interesting. All three images were made with the Nikon 18-200 VR. Well, when you look into the sidebar and scroll way down to the labels, then you'll see that the 18-200 is by far my most used lens. OK, what's interesting now? Well, the interesting thing is, that I have used the Sigma 70/2.8 almost exclusively for about four months, suddenly I am back to the 18-200, and now I stick with that. Don't ask me about my inspiration, but that's how funny it works :)

The Song of the day is "More Than Rain" from Tom Waits' classic "Franks Wild Years". See him perform live on YouTube.

451 - Tell Me When My Light Turns Green

I'm late, oh my God, I'm so late! I've taken a day off from work for printing, and that's what I've done all day. This is the image for yesterday, one for today will follow in a few hours.

This should have been a B&W image. Yesterday when I went home from work, I did what I've said I'd do: I set the camera to "monochrome", ISO 6400 maximum and Auto-ISO, and then I walked off into the night.

What can I say? It did not turn out all too well. I was a bit in a hurry, and I believe that after so much color work, I would have needed time to let myself fall into that B&W vision, time to experiment. I mean, I can do B&W work, you have seen some, and if not then you can search for the label Black and White and see for yourself, but going out with the express intent of shooting only B&W and willingly ignoring color, that's a different story. Whatever, maybe it's not my thing, maybe I was not in the mood (actually I found it depressing), the outcome is that I have no real inclination to try it again anytime soon :)

Thankfully not all was lost, because setting the camera to "monochrome" changes nothing of what the RAW file contains, and this is of course color information. This was not a really bad B&W image, but, lo and behold, in color and with a tiny color shift towards green, it looks real good to my eyes.

Sigma 30/1.4 at f1.4, 1/50s and ISO 720.

The Song of the Day is "Tell Me When My Light Turns Green" from the 1980 debut album of one of the best bands of the eighties, no, one of the best bands ever: I'm speaking of "Searching for the Young Soul Rebels" by Dexy's Midnight Runners.

446 - Hide Away

Shooting at f4 and 1/125s and still not sharp. Welcome to the wonderful world of non-stabilized telephoto lenses.

Anyway, I like this image so much (or all the others of yesterday so much less) that it had to be the Image of the Day, thus I have applied some post-processing devices that would easily allow me to print the image at 13x19 inches. It acquired a much more graphic quality, but that's OK when bicycles hide, comics style :)

If you're interested in the post-processing done, drop me a comment.

The Song of the Day is "Hide Away" from Mick Jagger's 2001 solo album "Goddess in the Doorway", which probably deserves a prize for worst cover art.

423 - Brand New Car

What can you say in five minutes?

It's a car, a friendly car that I met last morning on my way to work. It's been sweatin' a lot, must've run fast.

Nikon 50/1.8 at f1.8, 1/30s and ISO 200.

The Song of the Day is "Brand New Car" from "Voodoo Lounge", one of the best Rolling Stones albums ever.

417 - An Unexpected Rain

Originally I wanted to write about a new and fantastic feature of the D300, the possibility to calibrate the autofocus for lenses that would otherwise front-focus or back-focus. I mounted the lens that would probably be most susceptible to focus errors, the Sigma 20/1.8, set up a test stage with books, and made a series of test shots. Well, I don't particularly mind that the combination was spot-on for every distance, but for demonstration purposes it would have been interesting.

What's the theory? The D300 can remember focus adjustments for 12 lenses, and these must have a built-in CPU. Maybe that is used for identification purposes only, I don't know and Nikon didn't tell. Most manual focus lenses don't have a CPU, but obviously wouldn't profit from AF adjustments anyway, most autofocus lenses have one, and certainly so anything built in the last 10 years.

Nikon does not recommend setting AF adjustments for lenses that don't need it (Doh!), and they warn that by using these adjustments, a lens can stop focusing to infinity.

Mount the lens that you want to adjust. From the setup menu, under "AF fine tune", you can select one of the 12 storage slots and then enter an adjustment value between -20 and +20, 0 being neutral. Positive values move the focus plane away from the camera, negative ... you get it. Fine tuning must be enabled to be used, by default it is "OFF".

You can "name" the storage slot with a two digit number (initially between 01 and 12), they recommend using the last two digits of the serial number. How silly is that? There are already several places in the menus where we can enter text, so using the same text editor gadget wouldn't have been too hard, would it? Anyway. That's how it is, and that's the end of today's D300 report. Let's move on to the the images.

In the morning, when I went to work, I had some minutes without rain, and in that time I shot this image of some graffiti. You see, I go to great lengths to avoid having Ted running out of his favorite motive :)

The rest of the time it rained, so I was forced to use an umbrella and the all-weather cover of my Lowepro Slingshot 300 AW. It only stopped raining after I had arrived.

At work I immediately was the target of jokes, and they recommended me a job as rain dancer. Well, funnily enough, although I left work in the afternoon under a clear, blue sky, it again began to rain after only 10 minutes. I was less than amused.

Both images, the graffiti and the Image of the Day, were shot with the Nikon 50/1.8 at f1.8. What a wonderful lens that is.

The Song of the Day is "An Unexpected Rain" from Melissa Etheridge's 2007 album "The Awakening". Fantastic stuff, highly recommended. Hear a live performance on YouTube.

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".

375 - The Vanishing

Shocking!! A rainy day, and the first thing you see, when you walk out of the door, is a bicycle vanishing!

Nikon 18-200 at 90mm, f5, 1/8s and ISO 1600, handheld. Oh yes, and a tiny bit of Photoshop too. Btw: no need to tell me this is byrnesque. Of course it is :)

The Song of the Day is "Shock in my Town" from Franco Battiato's 1998 album "Gommalacca". See the video on YouTube.

302 - A Rainy Day in China

At the moment we have a cyclone over the Mediterranean, that constantly shuffles humid air into central Europe, causing a lot of rain and already high water in Switzerland and parts of Germany. Well, sometimes it's good to live on a hill :)

Nevertheless, weather yesterday was far from fair and I had to drive around a little. I got some decent shots, all with the Nikon 18-200 VR (ideal for shooting from out of the car), and when upon returning home I fetched food from a Chinese restaurant in Klagenfurt, I took this image.

"China" from Tori Amos' fabulous 1992 debut album "Little Earthquakes" is the Song of the Day.

283 - Rainy Day

We are the second day here in Worms. Mondays are quiet days here, and we decided to just drive around a little and get an impression of the landscape. Well, we had rather bad luck, it was a little bit rainy most of the day, and that changed to solid rain in the afternoon.

This image was taken in a small village, to be honest, I can't remember its name right now. I used the Sigma 10-20 at 10mm. Post-processing was done in Photoshop, using the original, two layers treated with Photomatix tone mapping, different blending modes, masks, Lab manipulations and who-knows-what :)

The Song of the Day is John Lee Hooker's "Rainy Day" from the 1997 release "Don't Look Back". Sorry, I found no lyrics.