681 - The Meaning Of Life

Paul Butzi recently wrote about the sources of meaning in photography. He was inspired by a comment Seth Glassman made about another of Paul's posts, that one inspired by a third post on Doug Stockdale's blog (don't you love the blogoshere?).

Paul is mostly concerned with the fact that, while it is difficult to give a single photograph precise meaning, a series of photographs condenses and focuses meaning, and the more so, the longer the series. This is quite obvious but important to keep in mind.

One side topic were the sources of meaning, and Paul writes

But I still think that the meaning was in the scene before I photographed it, would have been in the scene even if I hadn’t strolled along, and was not placed there by me.

which finally was the reason for me to chime in. In a comment I already wrote

I think it’s fundamental to note that the whole concept of meaning does not make sense without communication, even if the communication is only between you and yourself. Meaning is either shared meaning or it is not at all, and when you think about it, that has quite a tail of consequences, e.g. that meaning can’t simply reside in configurations of objects. It needs a thinking mind.

and that's exactly where we need to go into some depth today.

What is "meaning"? Does a stone or a tree mean something? Does a book or an image? And if they meant something, to whom would they mean it? To me? To you? To everybody? And if so, would they mean the same to everyone? And if so, why? Or if not, why not?

Let's begin with some observations. Some days ago we had the matter of women wearing headscarves, centered around an image of a most probably Turkish woman. While looking up the correct term on Leo, I came upon a (german) discussion in their forum, where a fellow Austrian mentioned, that in his youth (whenever this was) in Burgenland, the most eastern province of Austria, neighboring Hungary, married women were more or less required to wear a headscarf. The way he says this makes clear that it is not the case any more. Thus we can say that the headscarf, worn by a woman at that time in that place, carried the designation "married", and I guess nobody will object when I call this a "meaning".

Let's look into that further. A headscarf is a piece of cloth. They come in all sizes, colors and designs. The same piece of cloth, not worn by anyone, certainly does not carry any designation at all, it does not mean a thing. But even in that particular configuration the meaning is local to a place and with time it has changed or vanished. If you ask me, these facts don't portend well for a concept of "meaning" that's inherent to objects or even configurations of objects. Thus, from now on, I take it as given, that "meaning" is assigned.

There is more to learn from this example. Upon first thought it would seem that at least there and then this meaning has been universal. Everybody seems to have known it, but even that is only correct for members of that very culture. Someone from, say, the US would not necessarily have "got" this meaning, at least not without having been told at least once.

Now, this is important: meaning is not universal, but it can be shared, and this is done via communication.

Is meaning shared easily? Does shared meaning automatically mean equal meaning? Even that is not the case, and you see it at once when you just have a look at Ted Byrne's comments to "677 - A Stranger In Town". We talk about "left" and "right" as political concepts, but it becomes instantly clear that Ted and I "mean" different things by that. We are certainly able to communicate, and with some exchange we can easily adjust our meanings, at least temporarily, to meet at common ground, but this is not instant at all. We share the exact symbols but only approximate meanings.

To me this again hints strongly at the individual human mind as the source of all meaning.

What does all this mean for art, and there especially for photography? Is it a problem that meaning is always subjective, and that even in a rigidly defined system like a language (well, it's not math, but certainly much more precise than photography, right?), even in such a system, meaning is neither automatically available nor instantly shared? Does this take away from our expressive power? Does art suffer from vaguely defined meaning?

I believe it does not. Let's again look at an example. This time it is one of the most ugly pieces of architecture in Vienna, a so called "Flakturm", meaning a massive tower built during WWII as a base for anti-aircraft artillery. Vienna has six of them, and because they were built to withstand all allied bombardments, they are practically impossible to get rid of. Now, one of them, the one in Esterhazy Park in Vienna's 6^th district, has been used by the American concept artist Lawrence Weiner for an art installation. It was painted white at the top, lit at nights, and it carries the monumental inscription "Smashed to pieces (in the still of the night)".

Weiner's installation is certainly recognized as art. Let's look at the most important part of it, the only one that has survived and is easy to see for everyone, the inscription. Ask anybody on the street what that is, up on the tower. You will most likely get "Art" as an answer. Depending on the person it may come with a derisive smirk, but nevertheless the art aspect is generally recognized and agreed upon. Why? And what is the exact meaning of this installation? Is there such a beast at all?

Let's look at the text itself. There is a strong tension between the concepts of "smashed" (which implies noise) and "still of the night" (which does not). This tension is what we feel as surreal, and surreal means there is no obvious, inherent meaning at all. Neither of the two fragments of this text is surreal, both could be said to have meaning, but the combination is surreal and in that surrealism it is void of meaning. It's easy to see that just that property makes it art in the first place. It is art because it is ambivalent. It is art because it can work as a receptacle for all kinds of meanings that we like to project on it.

In the end it does not seem to be a problem that we photographers have trouble forcing our images to have an exact and universally shared meaning. Much more than a weakness, it seems to be a strength. Art's power lies in ambivalence. There is nothing to worry about.

The Song of the Day is my only one with the word "meaning" in its title. It is "The Meaning Of Life" from the Monty Python film of the same name, available with lots of other famous songs on "Monty Python Sings". Hear it in the intro to the movie on YouTube.

647 - Out In The Street

Again two images made with the Sigma 70/2.8, one sharp from front to back, one not. I shot the images some minutes before I entered a shop and ... but that's a story for tomorrow :)

The Song of the Day is "Out In The Street", again from Bruce Springsteen's 1980 masterpiece "The River", and this time I have a video.

645 - The Price You Pay

Back to normal again. Amazon has recovered during the night and SmugMug is also up again. Sorry folks.

Last morning, when posting Friday's images, I'd almost posted these two as well. Uhmm ... being days behind obviously tends to weaken my memory ... or so :)

Anyway. Here we are with something old reflected in something new. This image, taken late Saturday morning, just minutes after the Image of the Day, shows the building where I work. I chose a B&W conversion with this bluish tint for increased drama. You may agree or not, some will certainly not. But for those I have the Image of the Day, a brightly colored triptych celebrating monetary opportunity and numeric decline :)

The Song of the Day is "The Price You Pay" from the 1980 Bruce Springsteen double album "The River". There is no original on YouTube, but plenty of covers like this one.

644 - She Is Still A Mystery

Black and white again. This is the image for Friday. A woman on the street, that's for sure, but ...

The Song of the Day is "She Is Still A Mystery" from the 1967 Lovin' Spoonful album "Everything Playing".

642 - Steppin' Out

This is an image of Wednesday afternoon. It was a hot, sunny afternoon and I went along a big street near work. The dream images of Tuesday morning still linger with me, and although I don't try to force anything, I still do mostly verticals.

There are new convex metal devices mounted on the lamp posts along many of Vienna's streets. They hold advertising posters for cultural events, and I have used one of these things like a wall. The reflection from the white building on the left provides a nice light source. I've used the Sigma 70/2.8 at f8 and 1/800s. Boy, speak of enough light! I am so near to the focus point, that even at f8 there is enough blur on the background to achieve the effect that I wanted.

I have pondered about the title for a long time, and I finally found what it reminds me of: it is like stepping out of a building into a sunny, to some degree uncertain future, but still certain enough to follow your way with confidence. It's an optimistic image :)

The Song of the Day is "Steppin' Out". I have it on "John Mayall - Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton". Hear it on YouTube.

641 - Series Of Dreams

Remember the dream, or shall I say, the series of images that flashed through my mind when I woke up last morning? Remember that I told you about it in "638 - In The Grove""? When I went to work yesterday morning, I was constantly on the lookout for vertical compositions that had elements of those dream images.

Of course I did not find anything that even remotely matched what I had seen, but given that I was in Vienna's streets, it did not come unexpectedly that there were neither flower-strewn beds nor sailing boats around. That was not what I was looking for anyway. I was looking for structural similarities, and what I found was vague at best.

Here are five vertical images that have been shot with the dream images in mind, plus a fancy car and another vertical that I could not resist to take when the sun went down. I present these images in unedited form, and I do that for two reasons: firstly, I was too lazy to edit seven files, and secondly, this is not about any single image, this is about a series, inspired by a dream.

The images are mostly in the order they were taken. What I was after, was roughly a pattern of vertical stripes in the background, and a foreground that covers the lower third of the image, but in an asymmetrical way. The Image of the Day was my first attempt. Compared to the dream of the bed and the window, the relation between foreground and background is inverse: here the background is sharp, my hand, used as an impromptu foreground is out of focus.

This does not matter for my purpose, but I believe that one of the two should be out of focus. All images were taken with the Sigma 70/2.8, mostly wide open, to provide for a shallow depth of field.

While working, I found this base concept inspiring, although I did not stick strictly to it. Most images keep only the verticals, and the foreground is replaced by part of the sidewalk, asymmetry provided by the perspective.

What's the point of all that? For me it was interesting to see these dream images at all, and trying to respond to them was only natural. Why do I share it? Sure, this is as "work in progress" as it could possibly be, but in a way I think this is interesting. It's more or less a kind of unfiltered visual thought.

Now for something completely different. I often photograph and write about bicycles, and many of them are products of the former Austrian company "Puch". I had almost forgotten that they had also made cars, but when I saw one on the streets, I simply had to take an image. This is a "Puch 500", basically a licensed "Fiat 500". I have never sat in such a car, much less driven one myself. They were almost extinct before my time.

The day ended with wonderful late sunlight, and I had to record this as well. This is the view through my living room window in Vienna.

The Song of the Day, "Series of Dreams", is the last song on the 1991 official "Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3". The song is from a collaboration with Daniel Lanois and U2, as far as I remember. See the video 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??

633 - Undecided

Cameras have a stunning potential to show us a world beyond our experience, yet we are so used to this fact, that it is interesting news to many people, when you tell and show them, that some of what they see on images can't be seen through human eyes. Much of Susan Sontag's collection of essays "On Photography" circles around this very topic of convergence between our perceived reality and the world of images.

One of the main culprits is the shallow depth of field that photographers can use to isolate their subject. The result can be everything from looking perfectly real, via deeply surreal, to completely abstract.

Shallow DOF is an effect that I absolutely enjoy using. Probably I should take my time and label all those images on the blog. I suspect they will amount to something between 50 and 100 by now.

I have long wondered about how to title this Image of the Day. For me it is somewhere in that surreal middle ground. The point of view is so low, that there is some aspect of being caught inside. I am not sure if this is positive or negative. Then there is the vaguely recognizable row of windows, quickly fading into a nondescript mist. There is a kind of gray warmth outside, but it does not give me a cozy feeling. Uncertainty? I don' know. I am undecided.

The Song of the Day is the old Jazz standard "Undecided", and the only version I have is on the 1993 Natalie Cole album "Take a Look". Hear another version by a Czech Jazz band on YouTube. Not bad. Not at all bad :)

632 - Ball and Biscuit

Pretty much my only achievement today was a series of images of our cat playing with a ball. It's not a normal ball though. It has a compartment that you can fill with cat-cookies, and when he rolls the ball, cookies fall out. You can imagine that he was busy playing and all the while kept us busy laughing. This is the best image of the series, as most of the time lately shot with the Sigma 70/2.8.

The Song of the Day is "Ball and Biscuit" from the 2003 White Stripes album "Elephant". See them live on YouTube.

631 - Summertime II

This is the image for yesterday, July 5^th, and quite exactly a year ago, on July 7^th, 2007 I had another image titled "266 - Summertime". I love this season, and yesterday, while on my way to the lake, I tried to find out what exactly characterizes our landscape these days.

The three images of yesterday represent such a thing: harvested fields baking in the hot sun. They were taken at the same time in the same place, but looking in slightly different directions. As a result, neither the contrast between sky and earth was the same nor the colors. And that's one of the things that I have learned while working on my SoFoBoMo book: A series of images from a certain time and a certain place just does not make it, unless you take your time to match colors and light. It's a well known phenomenon, that strongly contrasting images easily make a good match, whereas largely similar but in subtle ways different images fight each other.

So, "Summertime" is the Song of the Day, but what version? Yesteryear we had Lambert, Hendricks & Ross, this year it's Helen Merrill. I have two different recordings of this Gershwin tune by Helen Merrill, one of them, the one that I like better, on a compilation called "Blossom of Stars", that currently only seems available used and from £45 upwards. Ouch! I suggest that, before shell out the money, you sample the wares around here.

629 - Electric Ladyland V

Time for another installment of my "Electric Ladyland" series. This time we are in Vienna, the image is from today (caught up!!) and again I don't fight the ever present cables, the wires that keep our civilization running, again I use them. Apart from that I may have added some slight enhancements in Photoshop as well. I can't help it, it just happens some times.

The second image is from the morning. That's what I originally wanted to present as Image of the Day, before things got out of control :)

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".

628 - I'm Waiting For The Man

I had processed these two images of yesterday right in time, but this time SmugMug had thwarted my plan to catch up. They had a longer outage last night (my night that is) during which no images could be added to the site.

I took both of these images yesterday afternoon, on my way home through Lerchenfelderstraße, one at the corner Lange Gasse, one at the corner Kellermanngasse. The bicycle fastened to the railing was only a question of composition, the other one required some thought :)

The Song of the day is "I'm Waiting For The Man" from the classic 1967 Velvet Underground "Banana" album. See this video or that. Why exactly this song? Honestly, I have no idea :))

627 - Mon Vieux Joseph

As I said, this was a very short intermezzo in Carinthia. I took the train down on Monday afternoon, and today, Wednesday, I returned to Vienna early in the morning.

Of course I was swimming, albeit much too short. On my way to the lake, I took the first image, two blades of spelt (as I found out on Wikipedia), using the somewhat inelegant but extremely effective "machine gun" approach. Of the 11 surviving images, this was the one that I liked most. Talk about industrial image making :)

Technically I have converted the image in Capture NX, because I liked the original approach of the camera and would have had a hard time to mimic colors and contrast in Adobe Camera RAW. The only thing that I did in CS3 was sharpening.

The other two images are from the break between the two parts of the concert. The Clemencic Consort gave Carmina Burana, and it was just as great as I had expected. See this video for a sample. In the Gothic church of Maria Saal we had the slightly nicer environment though :)

I am quite sure that the Saint on the glass window holding the infant Christ is Joseph, thus the Song of the Day is "Joseph" from Georges Moustaki's best known 1969 (what a year!!!) album "Le Meteque". Hear it on YouTube.

625 - Who Cares?

So I wanted to talk about creativity, right? It was all induced by a post on Paul Lester's blog and the discussion that resulted from it. Please go there for the whole thing, but basically I've argued that creativity is not the thing to care about, productivity is.

Creativity is the outside view of a productive artist, answering to the inputs from a source of inspiration, busily producing art.

What does that mean? It means that creativity is something to be observed by non-creative people. It is not a category of any importance to the artist. Creativity is an indirect by-product. If you constantly produce, and if your productivity answers to the inputs of your source of inspiration, then you can't be other than creative.

Creativity was one point in Paul's post, artistic growth was the other, but it is again the same thing. Constantly produce, and you can't help but grow. It's automatic. It's one of the few things in the world that are free and that we don't have to worry about. Being thankful, yes, worrying, no.

Let's get back to the definition of terms. What's a "source of inspiration" anyway? Well, whatever inspires you. I mean it in the widest sense. For me it's the visual world. My surroundings. I am a visual type of person. I see, capture, work on that, and the outcome may be either art or a failed attempt, but in the beginning there is always some visual input.

Other artists may be different. Some may be inspired by music, literature, other art, but for me it's normally raw sensory input. Well, that again can be on a very abstract level, like some lines or angles, an isolated color or some other details that most people wouldn't see. With enough practice you become pretty good at seeing.

It is also not so that I blindly respond to every input at any time, no, I may use a filter. One such filter is the choice of lens. Normally I leave home with one particular lens mounted, and most of the time I don't change it during the day. The lens works as a filter, it causes me to look for a certain category of things.

Another filter, one that was effective when I made the first two photos, those of a street scene in Vienna, another such filter is a concept. Here it was the concept of consciously trying to capture "along-the-street" and "diagonally-across-the-street" views. It's something that I have been on the lookout for during most of the last week. The idea is to slow down on the streets, stop in places where there are no "sights", look for the "in-between" things, denying the view that there are "sights" scattered around with nothing in between. See "Oasis in the City" on Marti Jeffers' blog "My View" for a discussion on "in-between-ness".

I don't know if these two images are art and, honestly, I don't care. This "project" if you will is an attempt to see my own city with fresh eyes. I concentrate on something that I have not done in a while, and looking at the images that result, Saturday's "624 - It's OK To Listen To The Gray Voice", Sunday's street scenes that you see here and so many others that I don't show because they either had some flaws or I simply did not have the time to work on them, looking at these images I am amazed to discover views that I must have seen before, but can not remember. All that is fresh and exciting.

What's so exciting about two street images that look almost the same, you may ask. Well, it's that they are adequate solutions to two very different problems. In fact, that's something important. The subject is not what an image is about. Yes, these two images have mostly the same subject, a crossing of Neubaugasse and Neustiftgasse in Vienna's 7^th district, but that's not the what they are about. The first image is about an urban canyon, a meandering street, a fan-like roof line in the background, and about some details that you unfortunately can't see at this resolution, even when you click on the image. You would need a big print for that.

The second image is not about a canyon. You know now that it was taken at roughly the same place, but from the image you can deduce the other side of the street only by looking at the shadows. They hint at buildings, but there is no way to tell what kind of buildings that are. The curving, diagonal movement of the street is important here, but it is broken up by verticals. I have included the posts in the foreground to take up the dominant vertical movement.

You see, these are images with roughly the same subject, but they are about completely different things. In both cases I have responded to my source of inspiration. I did it both spontaneously and with a plan in mind. The plan allowed me to restrict my attention to those aspects that I wanted to trigger my spontaneity.

Whatever your source of inspiration is, if you constantly observe it, you will find a stream of ever changing input, sometimes more, sometimes less changing, but if your work is based on that, your productivity will always be creative and you will continue to grow. The only way to avoid it, is to stop listening to your input.

That's what happens when artists "find their style". Nonsense! That's a euphemism and it should read "find something that sells and that they stick to for the rest of their now non-creative lives".

Style is another thing that an artist must not worry about. Mind, I don't say "need not", I say "must not". It's another thing that should be left to be perceived by others from the outside. It's not your concern. An observable style will result from busy productive work, it's also automatic, it's also free.

Basically these are two sides of a coin. When you are productive and listen to input, then you will be perceived as creative, because you respond to an ever changing world, and thus your art is ever changing as well. On the other hand, the experience that you gain by busily producing, will allow you to make shortcuts, to re-apply partial solutions that you have found to be appropriate for certain partial problems. An attentive viewer will recognize that, will see you invariably take a certain direction at a certain crossing, probably most of the time take the other at another crossing. That's really what style is all about and why it is so absurd to try to appropriate someone else's style:

From its very nature style is a verb. It is a way of doing, of acting, that is directed by personal and artistic experience. Other experiences, other style. No way to copy that, and why should you want to? You don't have other people's experiences, you have your own, and they are worth to be used.

The Image of the Day is simply funny. A battered sign across, telling van drivers to mind the height of the arch. Obviously nobody cared.

The Song of the Day is the Gershwin tune "Who Cares". Ella or Anita? That's a little bit like Beatles or Stones, huhh?? I prefer Anita on her 1955 album "This Is Anita". Any live recording by Ella could change that though. Give me a hint if you know of a good one.

624 - It's OK To Listen To The Gray Voice

Ted won't say so, certainly not. Sorry Ted, even I did not intend to do B&W today. It just happened :)

The Image of the Day is from yesterday afternoon, and what attracted me were of course the reflections on the street. The other two images are from the morning, the first 50 meters from home, just in front of where I shot "622 - Stormy Weather". I had already posted it in a color version, but somehow I was not satisfied.

When I did the second image, I also tried color, but there was not much to begin with, mainly shades of reddish earth tones, and so I tried B&W. I frequently do that, just to see how it looks, and normally I revert to color, but in this case B&W did well, because it emphasized the already abstract nature of the image.

Frequently I tone B&W images, and most of the time I use the actions from ePaperPress. That's Tom Niemann's site, the guy who brought you PTLens. While PTLens is a commercial product (but the price tag of $15 is more or less symbolic for what this program does and how well it is supported), the Photoshop actions for toning are free. Try them, they are great.

As I said, normally I use these actions, lately I tend to tone myself with a Gradient Map layer over the B&W conversion layer. I did so this time, and playing with colors and the gradient's mid-point brought exactly the tonality that I've had in mind. As a result, I copied these B&W conversion layers to the other two images, adjusted tonality, but let the tone intact. There you have it. Three identically toned images, all shot with the Sigma 70/2.8, none originally intended for B&W, all victim of my curiosity :)

I really wanted to talk about creativity today, but, sorry, these images got in my way. I also wanted to post one more entry with my the images of today, but that won't work either. It's already past midnight, maybe I get two entries posted tomorrow. We'll see.

The Song of the Day is "It's OK to Listen to the Gray Voice" from Jan Garbarek's 1984 album of the same name. No lyrics, only saxophone :)

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.

619 - An Afternoon Walk

Sometimes it is much trouble coming up with a single good image, and sometimes the trouble is, that I have so many that are quite nice, but not a single one that really stands out.

This is what we call a Mofa. That's the abbreviation for "Motorfahrrad" or "motor bicycle". This is an old one and it is a Puch. We had quite some of their bicycles so far (just check out my collection of Bicycles, a lot of them are Puch), but they have made motorbikes as well, some bigger, some like this one. I remember, when I was a child, the postmen used them. Well, that was at the end of the sixties, early seventies.

Monday afternoon was very hot and I slowly strolled home, taking one of the routes that I especially like on such hot lazy afternoons. It leads through one particularly sleepy part of Vienna's 8^th district. This is neither a historic region nor a shiny one, much of the architectural body is from the 1920s/30s, it seems to have been heavily bombed in WW2 and hastily mended in the fifties, but even that is now some time ago, and this part of the city has the charm of a place where people live but are quite not there. In fact that may well have been on that hot afternoon. I guess everybody but me was swimming :)

Originally I had wanted to stay at work longer, but I was still tired from my late-night arrival from Carinthia, and instead decided to go home. For part of the walk I used the Sigma 70/2.8, for the other part the Sigma 30/1.4. Both are among my favorite lenses.

Sometimes I wonder what people think when they see me standing or crouching there, and sometimes they even tell me. Just as I was taking an image of ivy on the garden side of a house (i've omitted it here), an old man came by and said "What are you photographing here? The ivy? But that's everywhere!".

He is right, and that's exactly the way most people run around. Ask them what they've seen, and you get a "Oh, nothing special". That's wrong. Everything is special around us, everything is unique, so are our lives, and if we fail to see and recognize it, then we fail to live at all.

The Song of the Day is "Lazy Afternoon" from the fabulous Holly Cole's 2003 album "Shade". Sorry, no lyrics, not even sound samples, Amazon does not like Holly or Holly does not like Amazon. I don't know. There is no video on YouTube either, but it's still the Song of the Day. You have to believe me :)

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.