673 - De Colores

Some days ago Mark Hobson, "The Landscapist", wrote a very interesting blog entry "on seeing". He says

So, it comes as a surprise to me that most others do not look and see in anything like the manner I do. It has become increasingly obvious to me that most people are almost blind to the physical world around them. They seem to look and see enough just to navigate (I mean that literally) their way around the planet but beyond that actually take notice of very little of the physical world that they inhabit.

and later down, after some examples

It is often remarked, when someone does something remarkably stupid, "Where was he/she when they passed out the brains?" I am beginning to wonder, "Where the hell were they when they passed out the eyes?"

Contrary to what the latter quote may seem to imply, Mark Hobson's humorous rant was in no way judgemental, he simply reports this as facts, but it immediately connected with me, I read it a couple of times and I thought about what this means for me, for my work and for the satisfaction that I can get out of it.

Take this image, shot yesterday, Saturday. I was on my way to the lake and I stopped in one of the places that I often do, knowing they are always good for an image, regardless of the lens mounted. I arrived there, saw blossoms in blue, yellow and white against a rich green backdrop, complemented by the brightly red insulators on the fence posts. Wow! I even knew what the final image would look like, the rough composition, the distribution of sharpness, etc. I needed to experiment with aperture, because my use of the 70-300 at 300mm has not become fully automatic yet, but basically all was there from the instant of first sight. This is a photographer's view. I know that most people, seeing me crouching there, would ask themselves what the hell I was doing and why I did not take a nice image of the gorgeous panorama.

Well, I guess in this case the outcome is an image that easily communicates what I saw, and most of the people, who would not have seen what I did, will admit that there was at least some value in taking the picture. This is not always the case though. Sometimes not even the final result makes those, who have not "got it", get it.

What does it mean to have "got it" anyway? It is certainly not about intelligence, because I know extremely bright minds who are completely blind to those things. It is also not a general sensibility that one has or has not and that applies to all senses.

I am sure that in most cases when I am pleased with a work and most people don't "get it", there is still something to be got, and that the general refusal is not automatically a sign for a "miss" (though that can be as well). For me the proof lies in the fact that those people who still like it, are mostly fellow minds, artists whose works appeal to me, who speak a similar language.

Can it be learned? Yes, I think so, at least to a certain degree. I think I wouldn't have seen this image a few years ago, i.e. before my liaison with photography. Being curious, experimenting, seeing results of others, all that makes you see potential that you wouldn't have been able to see otherwise. Openness and curiosity, these are two important aspects on the producing, as well as on the consuming side. I guess you can only see what you are open to see, and this applies to artists and audiences.

And then? I believe the rest is passion. I am passionate about photography, and that makes me "get" some things that others may not get. Others are passionate about quantum physics, and it is immeasurable how much I don't get about that. Nothing to worry about, nothing to brag about. We are what we are, we are different and that's a damn fine thing. The world would be boring without it.

The Song of the Day is the Mexican folk song "De Colores", sung by Joan Baez on her 1974 album "Gracias a la Vida". Hear it on YouTube.

672 - Only Pretty, What A Pity

"It’s Pretty, but is it Art?" Paul Butzi recently asked on his blog, quoting from an article in the Wall Street Journal. The article is about Dale Chihuly, his art glass and about why the exhibition "Chihuly at the de Young" is inappropriate.

One of the more offensive arguments is that

The word most commonly used by Chihuly-fanciers to describe the works is "beautiful," a concept of little value in defining serious art after the Impressionists.

Paul strongly disagrees, so do I, and on that grounds we could forget the nonsense, but on the other hand it is maybe a good opportunity to reflect a little about three different notions of art:

Art as in "what artists do" is a process of interacting with reality, a process of discovery that is by necessity explorative, experimental, iterative and dynamic. The artifacts may be beautiful to the uninvolved observer or they may be not, and that really is not the question. The question is, whether they connect to the viewers, make them think, make them ask questions, make them dream, involve them in any way. If so, then art is successful. Beauty is a way to that end, but definitely not the only legitimate. I think from the presence or the absence of beauty alone, nothing can be concluded. If it works or if not, that is a guts feeling and it is individual. This is what I feel is True Art.

The second notion, art as an object of trade, has a severe problem with a couple of those properties that I have claimed for true art. The dynamics of exploration tend to produce unpredictable results. Gold is not dynamic, neither are diamonds and, thank God, neither is Van Gogh. That's the reason why the art market loves two kinds of artists: dead artists and those who are Good as Dead.

A dead artist can't ever produce anything again, and that keeps prices high and supply restricted. Like big diamonds, huhh?? A dead artist can't ever say or do anything that decreases his value. Compare this to Steven Demetre Georgiou aka Cat Stevens aka Yusuf Islam. Someone held a record contract with him and that contract lost value with his turn to Islam, and it again lost value with the partial quotings after 9/11. OK, that is a popular musician, but the point is, no way this could happen with Monet, Picasso, Dalì or Adams.

The other kind of artists is those who are Good as Dead. They don't change. They behave. At some point of their career they have "found their style", as the euphemism goes, and now they stick to that, risk nothing, make a living of producing the ever same things in the ever same ways and in restricted quantities.

This is not living art, it is dead art. Most of these things had value at their time, some keep their value, but the artists have ceased to contribute anything original, new or meaningful. It's repetition for the sake of the market.

Finally we have a third notion of art, and that is the trivialized conception of a de-sensibilized public opinion. Here we mostly find the equation "Art = Beauty".

The general public does not care much about the process of art, but they do care about emotions. Their emotions. They do feel when they get involved, and beauty is a powerful means to that. So are ugliness and fear, but because the public does not care about the deeper aspects of art, they see it as something pleasurable to be consumed. Only beauty can easily fulfill that role, and thus the equation.

The article about Chihuly is from the elitist perspective of the art marketeer, and it is arrogant and silly, especially the quote about beauty. It's especially stupid, because art was never only beautiful, even less so before the impressionists. Art was about power, about devotion, about passion, just as True Art is today. What does he mean by "a concept of little value in defining serious art after the Impressionists" anyway? Does he see the Impressionists as the last who had a right to claim beauty? Oh dear, they were about truth, not beauty. Some of their images just happen to be beautiful, that's all.

Now what about Chihuly, you may ask. I didn't know him before I was pointed to him by Paul's post. What I see on his site certainly does not particularly involve me, and from my guts I would put him into the category of artists who know how to make a living by virtue of their style. At the end of the day there may be a case against Dale Chihuly's art, but a plump attack on beauty is certainly the wrong way.

The Song of the Day is "Only Pretty, What A Pity" from the 1968 Lovin' Spoonful album "Everything Playing". No lyrics, no video. Sorry.

667 - Electric Ladyland VI

I've spent most of my day sleeping and mulling over a title for yesterday's entry, and what meager fruit I earned, I earned it late afternoon on my way to the lake. I was really in a hurry, thus I had no time to experiment. I settled with an image that I had already taken once and not used then. Today I used the new Nikon 70-300 VR at 112mm and f8.

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

652 - Over The Hills And Far Away

No shallow depth of field today, no strange discs of light, just some images of Carinthia's nature, taken Saturday afternoon. I could have titled this entry "Of curves, hills and rabbits".

Let's begin with curves. All these images were of course made with the Nikon 85/1.8, although this time mostly at f8 or above. Weather was constantly changing, and this image has some "just before the rain" feeling. It did rain shortly after, but only for minutes. I took the image because of the way the compression played with the curves.

Following the curves of the street, we have a curving fence now. Again this is helped along by the slight compression of the short telephoto lens.

When I finally went swimming, I saw this rabbit in the grass of our parcel by the lake. He obviously had the feeling of being camouflaged and invisible to me. He seemed completely comfortable until I reached about 1.5 meters, then he ran away. Sorry, I did not want to disturb him. After all, he lives there, much more than I do :)

The Song of the Day, quite a nice match for the Image of the Day, is "Over The Hills And Far Away" from the 1973 Led Zeppelin album "Houses of the Holy". Hear it on YouTube.

638 - In The Grove

Oh Goodness, I'm hopelessly behind. These are some of the images of Saturday.

Two of them are experiments in B&W conversion, and I think that the process is simple and works well. Basically the idea is to use the new B&W conversion layer in CS3, use its presets (high-contrast red, high-contrast blue, maximum black, maximum white, ...), just concentrate on parts of the image, limit the conversion with masks, and overlay another filter for another part, again masked, until everything is B&W.

In both images the upper part uses the high-contrast red preset, while the lower part uses high-contrast blue, and in case of the farmhouse there is even some maximum black in between. Finally I have applied toning with a gradient map and overlayed some blur, restricting blending to parts of the tonal range. Hmm ... that's probably stuff for a tutorial.

The two B&W images and the Image of the Day were taken with the Sigma 70/2.8 Macro. I love this short telephoto lens and, funnily enough, I even seem to dream in this kind of images. Just as I woke up (it's Tuesday, 5:59 as I write this), I saw an image before my eyes, and I know, when I ever want to take it, I'll use this lens. The image faded as my conscious mind set in, and thankfully I managed to remember it. It was a bedroom window or rather a door to a terrace, shot as a vertical across the bed, focus was on the bed, there were flowers on the bed and in the background I saw a person, very much out of focus, just recognizable, probably opening the door.

The composition was very vertical in the upper part, parallel lines, the person being one of them, occupying the left half of the upper two thirds, the right half being the lines of the door frame and some curtains. The flowers in the foreground lay asymmetrically, higher on the right side. Just as I was trying to analyze this image (or at least to not forget it), an image of a yacht harbor flashed up. Boats and masts, a similar composition, divided in asymmetric halves in the upper part, the lower part holding it together in a balanced way.

What that means? No idea. Things like that don't happen regularly to me. In fact they normally don't happen at all. Seems like a rather interesting kind of inspiration to me :)

Let me leave you with one final image of Saturday. We were dining on the terrace of a restaurant, and just after the main course, I turned my back, looked across the street and saw this spectacular evening scene. I took some images with the Sigma 10-20, some with the 70/2.8, but what I like most is this fisheye image. Landscapes with a fisheye? Sure. Just keep the horizon in the middle and it will be straight. Of course you don't only get a spectacularly big sky, you'll also get a lot of boring foreground (at least here it was boring) but that's easy to fix with a crop from below.

The Song of the Day is "I had A Dream" from Ray Charles' 1958 album "Yes, Indeed!!". A video is supplied with the lyrics. Admittedly it's not Ray Charles, but it's not shabby either. So who are Bob and Clive??

618 - Melancholia

It was hot today, very hot, and on my way to my favorite lake, I took this image from out of the car. Post-processing took some time and involved a selectively masked and overall subdued B&W layer, some cloning and rather traditional burning. The result was not unlike yesterday's image, but in the end I've added a strong saturation layer that brought almost all color back. Still, a little bit of the B&W character remains, and that's what I want.

Yesterday's image was really the result of a desparate experiment, but I feel that there is potential in this technique. I mean, selective B&W is cheesy, you know, these bright blue eyes in othewise B&W faces, but this is promising and you may see me walking that route once in a while.

The title? I have no idea, it just feels right :)

I'm on the train right now and with only a limited selection of music, and apart from that I can only slightly remember a song that has the word "melancholia" in it, but probably not in the title. Therefore I have simply searched for something on Google, and I have found this: a video on YouTube, titled "Melancholia", and attributed to Led Zeppelin. No doubt, that is Led Zeppelin, I know the song, but they have nothing called Melancholia, I've checked the track listings for all their albums on Amazon. Googling for text fragments finally revealed that it is "Since I've Been Loving You". I have it on a 4 CD box set called "Led Zeppelin", but it is really from "Led Zeppelin III". Well, whatever you choose, you can't go wrong.

617 - Fading Memories

This barn is part of a farm in the southern Carinthian mountains. The original farm house still stands, and to its left there is a big new guest house. I don't know if the barn is still used, I suppose so, but I guess in only some years it will be a memory. Let's keep it from fading away.

The Song of the Day is "Not Fade Away" from the 1964 Rolling Stones album "England's Newest Hitmakers". See them perform live on YouTube.

596 - SoFoBoMo - Funny How Time Slips Away

Funny. At the moment there are a lot of things that I'd have imagined easier. Let's talk about this fisheye lens first.

I was very busy yesterday, basically editing SoFoBoMo images all day, but every once in a while, when I needed to get on my feet for some minutes, I took the camera and tried taking a picture.

Normally when I do that, I pretty much know what an image will or can look like compositionally, and that without even having used the viewfinder. This also works for more exotic lenses or when the intended depth of field is very shallow. It even works for the Lensbaby. They all are quite predictable. Take some images and you know how the lens works, know how the lens works, and you can predict any image. Easy.

Not so with this beast. Everything twists and turns, and so do you while trying to get your feet out of the image. Or your elbow.

At the moment I try using the lens for macro shots like with these roses (I suppose that's what they are, some wild roses). And really, wide open, at f2.8, and going so near that the front lens almost touches the petals, there is even something like bokeh :)

SoFoBoMo editing is the other hard stuff. I did it all day yesterday, and at night there were still six or seven images missing, and so was the text. Still, I reckoned I would manage to get it ready by Sunday 11:00am.

The trouble is, that a sequence of images that were shot in varying conditions of light must be edited in a way that makes a continuous, smooth impression. Color temperature is such a thing. In normal image editing, e.g. for the Image of the Day, it is completely irrelevant whether the absolute temperature is "correct" or not. Sure, I could use a gray card, but what for? If it looks OK, it's OK, if not, not.

Sequences work differently. The images must work together. Any abrupt color changes will get noticed, and the same is true for different styles of post-processing. And that's my problem. Over the course of almost two weeks of editing I have changed styles, using different monitors, all calibrated but all with different limits, I have introduced color shifts. These things are often not visible when you see only one image at a time, but together the differences hurt the eye. More than a million years of evolution have trained us to see the most subtle differences.

And that's why time slips away :)

The Song of the Day, "Funny How Time Slips Away", is from the 1974 Bryan Ferry album "Another Time, Another Place".

575 - A Ray Of Light

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

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

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

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

540 - I'm A Lumberjack, And I'm Okay

Saturday morning I woke up from the door bell. I thought it was the baker who comes every Saturday morning. "I'm coming!", said I and dressed quickly, rushed to the door, opened it and ... saw cousin Peter smiling in my puzzled face, just like on this image, in full attire, saying: "C'mon, let's go and cut down some trees!". I'd give a lot for an image of my face :)

It turned out that he was here to fell two trees near our house, just on the other side of the street. He said he needed me to watch for cars, and I thought I couldn't let him work alone, so I volunteered to help him. Well, two trees became eight, and when we were done with work it was four hours later.

The Image of the Day is from late afternoon. This is a pond near Klagenfurt and I love the reflections of the trees.

The Song of the Day is the "Lumberjack Song" from "Monty Python Sings". See the video on YouTube.

534 - The Red Bench II

How does your inspiration work? Mine at least has its own ways. Today I set out to create another one of these images with unfocused swatches of color in the foreground, and while I drove, I realized that I was mentally closed. I looked for flowers and blossoms, nothing else, and although I know that this normally produces the desired results, it does not feel half as good as simply letting go, opening myself up to the world around me, dialing the ego to a lower level, stopping to think about my environment, letting it run through me, tasting the wind, drinking the sun, touching the light, getting entangled in lines and embraced by colors.

No, I'm not drunk and it's not always so dramatic, but basically that is the nature of my inspiration, and when I give in, I have no idea what to expect. In this state of mind images just happen, because I am at a higher level of sensitivity to what is around me. I react to the smallest impulse, and I react immediately. Being alone helps greatly :)

The Song of the Day is the hilarious rendering of "My Way" by the Austrian brass septet Mnozil Brass from "Smoke Live". There are some clips on YouTube, unfortunately not this one, but to get a feeling for what this band is about, you could see their version of "Bohemian Rhapsody".

528 - Electric Ladyland IV

Two very different images, two very different treatments in post-processing. The Image of the Day was shot at the same place as "489 - Electric Ladyland III", only some meters to the left and with a different lens. The landscape is completely dominated by masts and cables, dissonant as the rough, noisy finish that I have chosen. In contrast to this we have the undulating, horizontal lines of the other image, bucolic, soft, finished with a soft blur on top.

It would be about time to answer to Ted Byrne's recent essay "What Do We Do After We Go “Wow”? The purpose of beauty in art photography", and these two images could be an anchor, but it's too late now. I'll try it tomorrow :)

In case you have not guessed it: The Song of the Day is still "Have You Ever Been (to Electric Ladyland)" from Jimi Hendrix' 1968 album "Electric Ladyland".

513 - Slow Down

I was tired and uninspired today. When I set out for photographing, it was already late, about one hour before sundown, and none of the usual locations made a big impression on me. The snow is almost gone, but due to the high contrast, what is left of it distracts even more.

Anyway. I've promised you snow, here is snow. This small house has fascinated me for a long time, but it is situated in a place where I normally drive by with the car, and pretty fast so. Many times I have thought that I should take a photo of it, but when I saw it, it always was too late to stop. Today, also motivated by the dramatic sky, I remembered to stop in time, and so I finally got my image :)

The Song of the Day is "Slow Down" from Anita O'Day with Gene Krupa. You get it on "Let Me Off Uptown: The Best of Anita O'Day", I have it on a different compilation that may be not available any more. Hear it in a nice 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"?

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.

478 - Sometimes In Winter

That was one of those no-more-than-a-single-image days, and this is another shot taken with the Sigma 70/2.8. You see, I love this lens! It's not stabilized, but that's not really a problem with the D300. I use it with Auto-ISO set to 1/100s minimum shutter speed and a maximum ISO of 3200, and that almost always suffices.

In this case I have used f2.8, 1/500s and ISO 200. The result was a tad busy and not as balanced as I wanted it, thus I have invested quite a bit in post-processing.

The Song of the Day is "Sometimes In Winter" from the 1969 Blood, Sweat & Tears album "Blood, Sweat & Tears".

445 - Torn, Battered, Still Standing

Back again to the Sigma 70/2.8 Macro and another typical macro shot :)

I was late for shooting and again drove to a place near Sternberg. This torn and battered fence, leading alongside a way from the local graveyard, through a pasture and up to a forest, was where I decided to stop and try to catch some last sun. Do you recognize it? The configuration has this distinct Iowa Jima aesthetics :)

The Song of the Day is "Torn" from Natalie Imbruglia's 1998 debut album "Left of the Middle". See the video on YouTube.

439 - The Lookout

Oh my, these are a lot of images today, and they are all from a one hour trip by car, just a round through the neighborhood. All images were shot with the Sigma 70/2.8 Macro (what else) and, no, I'm still not tired of it. Actually there was the one or other temptation to change to a wide lens, but I did not give in. I want to learn this lens, want to get a feeling for the frame and what you can do with it.

If it were not so obscenely late, I would probably post even some images more, some test shots for this lens' bokeh, but that will have to wait, hopefully not longer than for the weekend.

The first image is of a farm on a hill, and this was actually the first and only moment when I was tempted to change lenses. It is always that way when I shoot primes: it takes me some time to accommodate to the way the lens sees, to fall into this particular vision. At this time I still felt awkward, and I think it shows.

The next shot is nothing particularly special either, but it turned out to be a test shot. I took it at f11 first, and then I thought, hey, let's get the background a little more blurry, let's do it at f4. I tried and ... it did not work. It was not sharp. I tried it again, then at f2.8, tried another focus point, no way! At f8 it was sharp.

Could I have a focus problem? And why hadn't I recognized it days ago? Well, now that I thought of it, most of my images with this lens have been at f8 or above, and those below, they were focused so near that it was completely insignificant if it was a millimeter back from where I had targeted. I checked it again, using f2.8 on the houses from the first shot, and what I saw was what every lens tester would qualify as "a bit of softness wide open, as to be expected". Hmm ... approaching hyperfocal distance would certainly make things better. Could this "bit of softness" be actually a rest of the focus error?

For a short moment I felt dismay. Of course it would be no problem to get the lens changed. I had this with the Sigma 20/1.8 before, I went to the shop and left it with a brand new one that focused perfectly, but at that moment I was not in Vienna, I wanted to shoot with this lens, and having it not doing what I wanted it to do was annoying.

And then I remembered: AF Fine Tuning! Boy, I had written about it, but I had never used it! And really: It took me three or four shots to find the best value of -15 (on a scale from -20 to +20), and that was it! I love the Nikon D300!

The next shot is of an abandoned farm house by the side of the road. Every time I see it (that's maybe a hundred times a year), I think that I should take an image of it, but either I am in a hurry, or, more likely on these weekend trips, it is completely in shadows, whatever, today was the day, I remembered, acted, and it was good. Well, at least I like it :)

It's f8 again, and the next one, the Image of the Day, this lookout by the side of the forest, was even shot at f11.

Why did I chose exactly this image? I think it is for the elegantly curved lines, and then because it is another good example for an image shot with a 70, that does pretty well in the field of conventional landscapes. You know, I love wide-angle lenses, but, as I always say, it is so easy to please with the wide-angle, it's almost no challenge at all.

Again maybe one kilometer further, I shot this image, first at f13, and then I thought, let's try f2.8 for some more visual depth. I focused on the other lookout tower and, I'm afraid you can't really appreciate it at these sizes but, it was tack sharp. Not a trace of softness, not at all. The lesson? Never expect softness wide open. Always check if you have a focus problem, and if you can, fix it with your camera. The D300 can do so, the D3 as well, and while in the Canon line I only know for sure that the 1D MkIII can, I expect the 1Ds MkIII will certainly be able to do so.

Two final images to go, both at f8. I greatly like this one, again for the elegant line of the street curving around the glade. I'm not particularly glad about those white posts, but I didn't want to take them out either. In a way they accentuate the line of the street, but I wouldn't have been unhappy about something more decent with a bit less contrast. Oh well, I guess aesthetic considerations were an afterthought for the farmer. If at all :)

Hey, we're through! This last one is an image of a ruined farmhouse, and I had this house some time in September. All images of today were converted from RAW in Capture NX. I like the way this program keeps the look of the camera-generated JPEGs. The only thing that I have changed from the camera settings, was to reset all sharpening to zero, and in two cases I have adjusted exposure to salvage the red channel. After saving as TIFF, I have finally post-processed the images in Photoshop. This normally included some color correction, minor cloning and strongly sharpening the luminance channel with "Smart Sharpen", a radius of 0.3 and a value of 400. Crazy? Try it for yourself. There is a lot of detail buried, even in these already detailed images that the D300 can produce.

The Song of the Day is "Look Out For My Love" from Neil Young's 1993 album "Unplugged".

436 - Yes, The River Knows

It is still the Sigma 70/2.8 that I use, and I still have not shot any typical macro image. The Image of the Day is again a landscape. Who said, you can't do epic landscapes with a 70? There is even a swan in this image :)

I've taken it at f8, 1/250s and ISO 200. Mind, this lens is not stabilized, so you need a pretty high shutter speed if you don't use a tripod. But when you keep it steady, Goodness, this lens is as sharp as it gets, and it easily outperforms the resolution of the D300's 12.2 megapixel sensor.

From tranquil late-afternoon landscape to high-tension black and white pattern: I found this stack of lumber on my way to the river in the first image. It's again f8, this time at 1/400s. For the toning I have used a gradient mapping. That's something I have never done before, the result is a little bit random, but I like it and will probably dig a little deeper that way.

The next one is the most "macro" as it gets today. Again f8, 1/100s, but this time I went pretty near. Tension again, and a little morbidity.

The last one is a hut at the side of the street. It belongs to a farm, and this is not the first image I've taken from it. This time I did it mostly as a resolution test. The grain of the wood is a pretty good indicator for that, and again the result is tack sharp.

That's it for today. Four images, four genres, four good uses for a macro lens, and again I feel what I always feel when I learn to use a new prime: It's incredibly exciting. You have a fixed frame, a fixed perspective, very simple conditions, and nothing sparks creativity as much as that. All these restrictions come together, only to set you free. Try that with a zoom!

The Song of the Day is "Yes, The River Knows" from the much underrated 1968 Doors album "Waiting for the Sun". See a video on YouTube.