490 - After Closing Time

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

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

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

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

487 - Electric Ladyland II

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

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

481 - Hour Of Need

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

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

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

479 - Time

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

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

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

477 - Low Expectations

Just as I wanted to go out and take some images, it began to rain heavily, and within minutes the rain turned into snow. I gave up, this must suffice for today.

Sigma 150/2.8 at f8, 1/250s, ISO 3200, built in flash.

The Song of the Day is "Low Expectations" from Edwyn Collins' 1994 release "Gorgeous George".

471 - Something Cool

I'm back to rainy and cold Vienna. This is an image from today in sunny Carinthia. Well, not that you see much of the sun here :)

Another landscape shot with my Sigma 150/2.8 Macro, taken at f4. This will be the last shot with this lens until next weekend. I've left it in Carinthia because it is so darn heavy :)

The Song of the Day is "Something Cool" from Holly Cole's 2003 album "Shade". Hear a sound sample in the music store of cmt.ca.

470 - This Is The Place

Yes, this is the place that I've mentioned yesterday. I've returned, because yesterday's image was cut too tight on the right side.

You see, I'm still shooting unorthodox landscapes. Hmm ... can it be that shooting landscapes with telephoto lenses is out of fashion? Or is it only I who can't see those images in a sea of wide-angle shots? Whatever it is, for me this is an exciting place to explore. I did it with the Sigma 70/2.8 for more than a month now, and at the moment it is the Sigma 150/2.8 that I use. It gives me even more compression, and wide open the DOF is so shallow, it's pure bliss.

I have long wondered what this image means to me. The trees are a bit like a barrier, a fence, a circle unbroken, guards protecting a forbidden place. This is an inside viewed from an outside, and maybe this place was sacred for some long forgotten people? What does it mean to you?

There is only one more image for today- It's from the same place where I've been in the afternoon, two days ago. Power lines and telephone cables can be the bane of the landscape photographer, but who says that they can't be an interesting subject?

The Song of the Day is "This Must Be The Place" from the 1983 Talking Heads album "Speaking in Tongues". See it performed live on YouTube. I guess it's from the concert movie "Stop Making Sense". Funny that I've never seen the movie, funny that its soundtrack is the only Heads CD that I don't have. I guess I'm atypical in this respect :)

469 - Just Can't Last

What is it that makes photography in a city so much easier than in the country? For me it's always a struggle with landscapes. In Vienna I can go out at any time of the day and pull a rabbit out of a hat, even if the rabbit did not exist before and the hat is not even there, but here I am much more bound by the cycle of light. Yesterday I was extremely late, in fact I had only about 20 precious minutes before the light was gone. This first image was taken only some meters up the way from where I took "468 - Wild Wood". This time I had the urge to take my current landscape strategy to extremes. I used the Sigma 150/2.8 wide open, relishing the enormously short DOF. I'll return to this very place today, to repeat an image that I've tried yesterday but have cut too tight to be usable.

The next one was taken some minutes later along the street towards Klagenfurt. We had this lookout before, this time it was during the last seconds of fading sunshine.

Driving that direction was useless now, so I turned around, because back in the upper parts of Ludmannsdorf I could still see some sun. That's where the Image of the Day was taken. I made two versions, one at f8 and this one at f2.8, focused on the edge of the lawn where the sun still hit. From a purely artistic point of view the mole hills are slightly distracting, but on the other hand they give depth and I wouldn't have been able to clone them all out anyway.

The Song of the Day is "Just Can't Last" from Natalie Merchant's 2001 album "Motherland". On YouTube you can see a clip with the full song performed live on the "Late Night Show".

380 - Lily Of The Morning

Of the session only two images remained, this and a detail, that I'm probably going to post on the Radiant Vista. Both images were shot from the tripod, the first with the Nikon 18-200 at 75mm, f13 and 20s. I didn't use the macro flash kit, because I really liked the colors that I got from my test shots. The background are two blue
folders, one lying flat on the table, one standing atop.

For the second image I did use the macro flash kit and the Sigma 150/2.8 macro lens at f19, but with the camera set to slow flash mode. Basically that means that the foreground is mostly lit by reduced flashes, but the shutter stays open almost for the whole time that it would take without flashes. The result is, that the background does not go black, like it would normally do. Of course you can get the same result with a proper arrangement of flashes, but as I have only two of them and wanted to light the flower with both, this was the most economic solution. The obvious drawback is, that the method fails to work on moving objects.

Early in the afternoon the fog went away, and later on there was even some sun. I used the opportunity to shoot some HDR images from the tripod. The first one is from 3:31pm, just before the sun came out. At that time there was a dense cloud cover over the whole valley, only in the south-west a patch of blue was visible.

The second image is from approximately the same position, and it is the same view as in "373 - As Time Goes By". I am shooting almost into the sun. It is just outside of the upper left corner. The result were some flares, but in Lab color mode you can get rid of them in a very elegant way. Just use the clone stamp separately on the "a" and "b" channel to eliminate the color shifts, and finally paint with a soft brush and low opacity in soft light mode on the luminance channel. It works like magic. Yes, I know, there are some flares left, but these are not the one's that I mentioned, those are really gone without a trace. What is left is only what I didn't care to tackle.

The third and last image is from our garden down to the south-east. This is the kind of light that you get when the valley is covered with clouds and the sun stands low in the west.

All three HDR images were shot with the Nikon 18-200 as seven bracketed exposures from the tripod, using the Nikon MC-36 remote control and the camera set to high speed multi-shot mode. Then the seven JPEGs were merged in Photomatix Pro, tone-mapped using the defaults, and finally finished in Photoshop.

The Song of the Day is "Lilies Of The Valley" from David Byrne's 1994 album "David Byrne". I had contemplated Bob Dylan's "Lily Of The West", but that would have been sepia. For shrill colors it must be David Byrne :)

342 - The Needle

It's 6am, I have to pack my things. Not much time to write, much less to comment elsewhere. I've changed format today to accommodate a new device, A box of links in the sidebar, provided by BlogRush. I'm not really sure what to make of it, supposedly it should bring traffic to my blog. Basically it works a bit like pyramid systems. You join them, supply details of your blog, topic and RSS feed, install their widget on your page, and off you go. But don't let me explain, see the video on their site.

Does it work? I have no idea. It's supposed to really multiply traffic when you spread the word and other people install that thing on their blogs, coming from your's while registering. We'll see. Yesterday I saw two incidents of SPAM in the box, and maybe this is a good idea that will be killed off by spammers soon, but maybe not. I'll keep an eye on it and remove it if it begins to misbehave. Should you see inappropriate links creeping up, things that look like SPAM, please leave me a comment or send me mail.

So, what have I changed? It's my headlines. From now on they will have the word "Photo" in front of the number. This should make them readily identifiable as coming from a photoblog and not being SPAM :)

This image is from yesterday morning. I shot it with the Sigma 150/2.8, again with f2.8, standing in front of a building, shooting straight up in the sky.

The Song of the Day is Neil Young's "The Needle And The Damage Done", topically probably a little bit off, but when I look at the image, the word "needle" creeps up, do what I might. The Song is originally from his 1972 album "Harvest", and there are several live performances to be seen on YouTube.

341 - The Right Track (Or Is It Left?)

When doubt is what makes the thinking man, boy, then I'm in serious trouble. The second I had seen this image on the LCD of my D200, I had no doubt at all that this would be the Image of the Day. I didn't even have to change a bit. What you see is the JPEG right out of the camera.

I had got out quite early and weather was fine. This was the third image this morning, again with the Sigma 150/2.8 macro, wide open at f2.8. I had focused at the sunny buildings in the back, thus basically at infinity, trying to get the track going from blurry to defined.

Well, this morning I had all kinds of trouble with this lens. 150mm times 1.5, and that unstabilized, for many applications this is simply impossible. At one point I have tried to shoot upward, the camera over my head, to capture a gorgeous play of light and shadow high on a wall, but even at a minimum shutter speed of 1/100s I could not hold the shot, not even once in maybe ten attempts. I simply need a monopod for such things.

On the other hand, when I get a shot, then it is really something special, just like this one. The shallow DOF of a fast telephoto lens, together with the compression, that makes for a breathtaking perspective. This is a good example, mostly because of the near curve of the track, and there is another, maybe even better example in my "Cityscapes & Street Photography" gallery, one that I'm going to post on the Radiant Vista later.

The Song of the Day is again from Ray Charles' 1958 album "Yes Indeed!!", again the sound sample is from Amazon's German department. It's called "Get on the Right Track Baby".

340 - Carry That Weight

This morning, when I went to work, I saw the truck of a transport company and it had all those slightly different shoulder straps hanging on it. I took the shot with a quite unusual lens, at least for walking around: my Sigma 150/2.8 macro. Boy, you gotta carry that weight :)

But really, it's not the first time that I say this: it may be an awkward lens for general use in the streets, but it forces you into a completely different way of using your camera. It's amazing: try it at times. Nothing fuels creativity better. Finally, post-processing was entirely done in Capture NX.

Now, so what could be the Song of the Day? Hmmmm ... Well, this was one of the rare cases when I did not have to search for a title or a song at all. It came all by itself.

The Beatles' "Carry That Weight" from "Abbey Road" is actually the middle part of an acoustic triptych. Amazon regrettably has no sound samples, and I guess it's not their fault. The Beatles were alway last when it came to new technologies. It took ages until their music was available on CD, and I can vaguely remember having read that they just released it for electronic distribution via the Internet. But of course you can hear it on YouTube.

311 - Il Combattimento

We had rain in Vienna all afternoon. In the morning I was in a hurry and didn't make a single photo, in the afternoon on my way back home I couldn't, in the evening I had no time, and so I began around 11pm to set up a game of chess, two flashes of my macro flash kit and the camera on tripod. At first I tried my luck with the Sigma 20/1.8 wide open and very near, but that didn't work too well, at least I found nothing that excited me. I was already determined to use an archive image for today, when I finally decided to try one more shot with the Sigma 150/2.8 macro. About 20 shots later I had what you see here.

This is no real game any more, but photography has other rules than chess. I did a lot of shuffling around with the chess pieces and the flashes until I had this configuration. Actually I like it, I enjoyed the experience and I expect to get back to chess on another rainy day.

What really took time, was not taking the image, was not processing it in Photoshop, what took me time was finding a decent sound sample from one of the recordings of Claudio Monteverdi's "Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda". This is probably the most dramatic music Monteverdi has ever written, and I was lucky to find a sample from William Christie and Les Arts Florissants. I'm always amazed by how good Christie is. Whenever I compare recordings of something baroque and operatic, and whenever Les Arts Florissants are in the game, they usually end up among the three best, and frequently they are my favorites.

The sound sample is only from the beginning, but the drama builds up fast enough to give you at least a hint of what this really is.

268 - Fly On The Wall

Today I didn't have much chance to get somewhere for shooting. Today, like every year for one day, the road was closed for cars, it was Ironman day. Actually I hate it. It was a wonderful day, I would have wanted to go swimming, and instead I had to stay home. But in every Evil there is Good, right? Each year I say to myself that this is a wonderful chance to practice panning, and like every other year I didn't. Oh well!

Now when it came to shooting for an Image of the Day, I took the easy road, unpacked the Sigma 150 macro and the macro flash kit, crawled around the house for 15 minutes, and came back with a fly, two spiders and some ants. Boy, is this hard to shoot marching ants! At least the other guys were patient and I could have used the tripod as well :)

The Song of the Day is "Fly on the Wall" by female Blues singer Marcia Ball from Louisiana, now living in Austin, TX. It's from her 2001 album "Presumed Innocent", the first one of her that I bought after having found it in a shop by chance. If you don't know her, give it a try. I've just ordered the five albums that I didn't already have :)

253 - If There Is Something

The first notion I had of yesterday was that of a big, menacing cloud right above us. It was already drizzling, I could take two images from the not-yet rainy far western horizon, they looked good in reality, sunny mountains, dark clouds, but somehow I managed to spoil them. Only a minute later the rain grew stronger and obscured everything.

Well, the day began bad and kept to its promise, so I used it mainly to get up to present with my blog, hang around in other people's blogs, etc. In the evening we had concert tickets for Trigonale, Carinthia's festival of Old Music. I generally love music from the late Middle Ages (basically beginning with the French Trouvère/Troubadour music) through Renaissance and Baroque, the Classics, up to the present. This festival is mostly about baroque music, and over the years it has got quite a reputation. "Names" like Jordi Savall don't play everywere after all.

The concert was in Sankt Veit. We left home a full hour earlier, but it took us ages to get through Klagenfurt's road repair sites, and when we finally arrived, it was impossible to get a parking lot within a reasonable distance. We were fed up and decided to go to an Italian restaurant in Klagenfurt instead.

All the while the rain went on, and when I was back home I still had no Image of the Day, but at least I had an idea. I wanted to take a chess board and set up something dramatic with flashes and so on. Well, after some searching I found out that I have no chess board in Carinthia any more. I did some experiments with matches, then some with some screws, but nothing convinced me at all. It was now well beyond midnight and I finally grew nervous. Of course I could have taken an image from the archives, but I really didn't want to. I knew, if there is something even remotely usable, then I can do it. Finally I found this ... thing. It's some carved, wooden object without any discernable use that people hang on walls.

The Sigma 150/2.8 macro and my macro flash kit did the trick.

"Roxy Music" by the band of the same name is one of the most glorious debut albums of all times. It's timelessly modern music, and this is very much due to the fact that Brian Eno was part of Roxy Music on their first two albums. This is the same Brian Eno that fostered The Talking Heads, another band of timeless modernicity.

"If There Is Something" from that 1972 debut album is the Song of the Day.

236 - The Line Between Love and Hate

This is another image shot with the Sigma 150/2.8 at f2.8. It's from the same place in Ahornergasse where in April I was "179 - Sitting in the Sun, Drinking a Beer". Tuesday I had started using the 150/2.8 as a walkaround lens and Wednesday I was still at it. It's actually a funny thing. Sure, 150mm is not a very convenient focal length to say the least, but on the other hand it forces you to see what you have never seen, or otherwise simply to be very creative. Post-processing was again done in Capture NX.

I've never been a big fan of the Eurythmics, at least not at their time, but I learned to love Annie Lennox with her 1995 album "Medusa". From that album is today's Song of the day, "The Thin Line Between Love And Hate".

235 - Hammer Horror

If you blog, you either blog daily or you better don't blog at all. It's simply not reasonable to expect people to come back after having seen no updates for six days, is it? Well, I won't stop blogging, therefore I'll honestly try to keep my dates with you.

This is an image from (blush) Tuesday morning. In the second half of the 19^th century there was an industry that produced lots of these figures for all the houses that were built all over Vienna, then the center of a mighty empire and a rapidly expanding city. So, this was not high art, it was mass-produced decoration, and the motif was normally related to the profession of the principal. I have tried to find out what the combination of hammer and vase means, but unfortunately to no avail, so you'll have to settle with the image.

I shot the image with the Sigma 150/2.8 at f2.8, actually a macro lens, but since my Nikon 18-200 is still being repaired, it has to second as telephoto lens. Post-processing was done in Capture NX.

The Song of the Day is "Hammer Horror" from the most wonderful Kate Bush's 1990 album "Lionheart". Kate Bush is a phenomenon. I can't really recommend one of her albums, because all of them are so incredibly good, there is no way but having them all. This is a little bit like movies by Stanley Kubrick. One couldn't possibly single out a "best" of them either.

226 - Paixões diagonais

We had rain all day and I have not been out of the house for longer than it took to fetch this flower.

In a way I like studio work. It's so ... repeatable. You can experiment with flashes, flash modes, additional light sources, compositions, and you have all the time in the world to get it right.

In this case I used the two flashes of my R2D2, a bluish white LED light and slow flash mode for keeping the background from getting black. After the fact I made some adjustments to white balance in Camera RAW towards blue/green. The first helped the background, the second kept detail in the red petals. Slightly cropping from both sides finally helped satisfying my diagonal passions :)

"Paixões diagonais" from Mísia's 1999 album of the same name is the Song of the Day. Read the lyrics on Mísia's own site. Just click on the flags for translations.

216 - Viva Italia (or Hungary?)

At the moment I'm constantly one day behind, but with a little luck I'll catch up today.

Yesterday was rainy and I had to resort to macro photography. It was late when I began and it took me four different flowers until I came up with anything halfway decent. This is not a particularly ingenious composition or so, but I feel lighting is quite OK, so all tribute to Nikon. The flash system is really top notch.

This daisy looks a little bit like an Italian flag or maybe a Hungarian, depends on how you look at it. The background was originally a dark pale green, but I have overlayed a slightly blurred version of some grass that I have shot last fall.

The Song of the Day is from one of Italy's most favorite cantautori, Francesco De Gregori. It's "Viva l'Italia", originally from the 1979 album of the same title. I have it on the 1994 live album "BOOTLEG". Unfortunately I could not find a sound sample from that, so I'll have to direct you to the greatly different 1979 version.

215 - I've Got a C3P0 Now

Yesterday it had to be. I mean, if you feel the need for something, and if it simply is nowhere in stock, then it's not so hard to be rational and not buy it. I mean, I'm an online buyer for music and DVDs, yes, but for technical gear I feel there's nothing more satisfying than feeling the impulse, trying to resist (honestly ... well) and finally giving in. Of course that does not work if nobody stocks it, and so I was protected for some days, until finally yesterday I found out that there are two dealers in Vienna that have a C3P0 on stock.

Did I say C3P0? No no, I meant an R2D2! Ah, now I have it: it's an R1C1 and it consists of an SU-800 and two SB-R200, not to mention the bundled SX-1, SG-3IR, SW-C1, two AS-20, two SZ-1, two SW-11, an SW-12 and all those other unnamed accessories. But, thankfully the guys were so kind as to provide an SS-MS1 to carry everything around. Click here to see what it looks like when assembled.

This is the first image I made with it. Sigma 150/2.8 at f13, ISO 100 and 1/250s. Quite easy to handhold, but I still used a tripod for reasons of control.

On the music front there's something new as well. While ripping CDs filed under "F", I found out that two discs had inexplicably vanished, Roberta Flack's "Feel Like Makin' Love" (1975 )and Aretha Franklin's "Young, Gifted and Black" (1972, 1973). For me they are somehow linked together emotionally, for purely personal reasons and because of them being out of the same period. I may have lent them to someone and this would explain why exactly these two were gone. Anyway, yesterday I've got a package from Amazon.co.uk with these two gems and Aretha's "I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You" thrown in for giving me the feeling that I've bought at least one thing new :)

Completely unconnected with this image, Aretha's "All The King's Horses" from "Young, Gifted and Black" is the Song of the Day. Enjoy. I certainly do.