607 - Let There Be More Light

I had some other nice images yesterday, and I was already willing to throw this one away. I had shot it at 8:11pm, when I just had left work. The image was badly lit, with a nice sky, but overall way too blue. It had some comic-like look, charming in a way, but still, I had already deleted it when I finally decided to take it back, load it in Photoshop and see if it has any potential. 14 layers later the Image of the Day is what I got. I like it :)

The Song of the Day is "Let There Be More Light" from the 1969 Pink Floyd album "A Saucerful of Secrets". Hear it on YouTube.

602 - The Day That Jackie Jumped The Jail

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

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

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

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.

563 - The Sun Died

It's still Thursday, first of May, and I seem to be catching up at least a bit. This is the image for Monday.

On Monday I didn't achieve much. I made a very nice portrait that I can't show, photographed a fantastically colored pattern of green chairs in front of an orange background, but somehow I framed it in a way that I can't salvage the image, regardless of what I do, and at the end of the day, while eating at my favorite Greek restaurant, I watched the sun dying. This is what made it. Don't ask me why I framed it like I did. I couldn't tell you why. It simply ... feels right :)

The Song of the Day is "The Sun Died" from Betty Carter's 1969 album "Finally".

560 - The Magic Castle

It's Tuesday evening now and this is the image of Friday. I'm not exactly catching up, but I'm not falling further behind either. One gets so humble :)

Actually there was not much material and I was lucky finding anything at all. This image, taken with the Sigma 30/1.4, was shot when I had just arrived in Carinthia. As you may remember, my father had been in Vienna for two weeks, and we returned together, me driving his car. He's 73 after all.

Traffic was modest, all the accidents (two exactly) were on the opposite lanes, and so it was rather relaxed. When we crossed the border to Carinthia, even the sun came out. Unfortunately this didn't help me much, because driving on the highway you are at least as unable to take photographs as on the train.

In post-processing I have cropped the image to be symmetric, cloned out some distractions, and re-adjusted contrasts between sky and earth, mimicking an ND gradient filter. Basically that's it.

The Song of the Day is "In The Forest" from the 2004 Coral album "Magic and Medicine". Sorry, no video found.

555 - Every Dog Has Its Day

It's almost a rule: I don't make good images when I am on a trip. I always feel the urge to document the places where I've been, and that's for a reason: of many past trips years ago I can only remember the places where I've taken pictures. Today we were in Friuli, Italy's north-east province. It's just a little more than an hour by car from home to Udine, Friuli's capital.

This particular image, the reflection of clouds in the water of a storage lake, was taken while still at home, and from there it only went down. It was a nice trip, but photographically I was completely uninspired. The dog barked at me when, in order to take a photo, I parked the car a meter from its fence. I kinda liked the tiny guy with the big ears. Of course the 20/1.8 was the wrong lens, because he wouldn't let me get as near as I wanted, but then again, the wide angle emphasizes its size and that's OK.

The image is further a good example of what you can do to the images from a modern DSLR. This was harsh light, I didn't use a flash (the tiny guy was frightened anyway), and the dog was mostly in deep shadow. After heavy Photoshop treatment the image is still good enough for a print.

The Song of the Day is "Every Dog Has Its Day" from Willy DeVille's 1990 album "Victory Mixture". Tell me you American guys: what's wrong with Willy DeVille? You get all his records here in Europe, but in the US you have to import him?? Sorry, no sound sample, no lyrics.

524 - For You Blue

There are days of need and days of plenty. Thursday was a day of plenty, and that's one reason why it took me so long to come up with this entry.

In the morning it began completely innocent, with a little sunshine, too cold for the season but friendly. I tried to get on with my series of images with de-focused foregrounds of color. After Wednesday's pink and green I wanted to tackle blue, a much bigger challenge. I had already tried it the last two days, had tried cars and traffic signs, but whenever there was something blue, the background did not work. That's not always a problem in photography, but with these shots it is: after all, you have to focus on the background.

This magnolia tree is very near to where I work. It stands in front of a baroque palace, and I have made these two shots from the other side of the street, the front lens more or less inside some flowers. It's the same tree, and if you look very carefully, you can see that I have removed a branch from the yellow image, that I have left in in the blue. In the blue image it works, because the movement is mostly horizontal, but in the yellow image with the strong diagonal composition it was out of place.

Fast forward in time. I left work at 4pm, and that's how Vienna looked like. Sort of a backlash. I'm afraid there will be more of that the next days. In fact, the very moment that I write this, Saturday noon, it has just stopped snowing.

The next image again reminds me of those environments that you see in sci-fi computer games, the techno-industrial environments that you run around and where you frag your enemies.

This is the same escalator that we had in "475 - Up with People", but this time I ran to be first, in order to get it devoid of people. There is nothing wrong with people, but in this case, using the Nikon 18-200 VR at 18mm, I wanted the neutrality that allows me to think of this place as a sci-fi environment.

What can you do on a winter day in early spring? What about swimming? Actually that's what I did, and this time I took a borrowed Fuji FinePix F11 with me, along with an underwater bag. The F11 is a six megapixel camera with Fuji's SuperCCD sensor, and it makes quite good images, obviously copes well with strong contrasts, has moderate noise levels at ISO 200 and delivers usable results up to ISO 800.

I took about 80 images while fogs rose from the warm water, snowflakes drifted, and for a short moment it looked like the sun would brake through the clouds.

In the end it decided to stay veiled, and shortly after these images were taken, snowfall returned with might. Well, there are worse things than to float in the warm water and let the snow fall on your face :)

The Song of the Day is "For You Blue" from "Let It Be", the last album published by the Beatles. See a video from the movie on YouTube.

520 - Dark Clouds

Only the ever same view from our garden? C'mon! I'm no freakin' picture taking machine, am I? After all, this is the third blog entry that I write today :)

I guess I'm lucky that I caught this moment at all. Most of the day we were under heavy cloud cover, and now, in the evening, it has begun to rain. What shall I say? The weather is a little undecided at the moment. The weather report predicts snow down to 700 meters and maybe below for the bulk of the next week (we are on 600 meters!), and on the other hand the grass gets green again and the early flowers sprout.

Nikon 18-200 VR at 18mm, f11 and 1/160s, post-processing from two versions of the same RAW file, one for the clouds, local contrast enhancements with PhotoLift and more of the usual.

The Song of the Day is "Dark Clouds" from Mary Coughlan's 2001 album "Long Honeymoon". Sorry, neither lyrics nor videos found, but you should own this record anyway :)

485 - The Sea Calls

Every once in a while I feel a strong desire to drive down to the sea, either to Croatia or to Italy. Yesterday it had to be Italy. The first image, right out of the camera, was shot in the small yacht harbor Grignano, a short way north of Trieste, right after Miramare. I used the Sigma 70/2.8 Macro at f2.8.

The next image was also shot with the Sigma 70/2.8 Macro, this time at f4, and about 10km to the north, in Sistiana, another yacht harbor. On Sundays all of Trieste and Monfalcone are out at the sea, thus it was rather crowded. That's really the time, when fast telephoto lenses shine. I walked around and shot details, lots of details. and the crowds didn't bother me at all.

Next comes another image from Sistiana. This place is really only a bunch of piers with boats and some bars :)

We finished our trip in Duino, a small village with a large castle, made famous by the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke.

In Duino I changed to the Sigma 10-20. For this image and for the Image of the Day I used f11 and shot from the tripod. This is the harbor of Duino, with the unpretentious but excellent restaurant "Dama Bianca" in the back. Hmm ... just the right time for some sweet twilight shots, but then, don't boats move? They do, and this is one more lesson learned :)

The Image of the Day is from only minutes after sundown. There were no spectacular clouds, only a nice gradient and the moon. I was lucky, because the girl sat there, completely motionless, and only seconds after this shot, she stood up and walked away.

The Song of the Day is "The Sea Calls" from the fabulous Richard Hawley's 2007 album "Lady's Bridge".

One last thing: there will be an important announcement today, Monday 11. Be sure to check back, it's an amazing thing. See you this night!

426 - Moon Over Bourbon Street

This was the sky when I left work in the afternoon, shortly after a spectacular sundown. Oh well, but it has a charm of its own :)

Nikon 18-200 at 200mm, f9, 1/30s and ISO 3200.

The Song of the Day is "Moon Over Bourbon Street". I have it on Sting's live album "Bring on the Night". The studio version is up on YouTube, cleverly combined with scenes from "Interview With A Vampire" (or was it really on the soundtrack?).

381 - Symphony in Blue

It's interesting. I use StatCounter for tracking my visitors, and the last two days I had visitors who looked at thirty pages or more ... and left no single comment. Pretty please: if you like what you see (and I suppose nobody looks at thirty pages without at least a tiny spark of sympathy), leave me a comment, and if you don't like it, even more so. It's the inner urge that keeps us going, but it's your comments that make it easy :)

Today I got a parcel from the US: Ted's prints have finally arrived. He had sent them to Florence, but they arrived one day too late, and so he lugged them back to the US, only to send them again. Now, here they are. Thanks Ted :)

This reminds me of my bad conscience. I still have not processed most of the images from Florence. So far no problem, Ted still rambles around San Pietro (and brilliantly so, but that will hardly surprise anyone, will it?) and is far from Firenze, but more and more I feel the need to carry on. Well, three or four of my images from that morning when we both were out shooting together are probably worth the hassle, and at least one of them is something Ted has not seen :)

But let's get back to today. I am still meddling with HDR images, now almost always tone-mapping with Photomatix' defaults, then applying a levels adjustment for a black point and probably some gamma adjustment (around 0.8 or so), most of the time a vignette (a soft light layer, hand-painted), and a beauty blur.

Hmm ... as I have never explained what I mean when I talk of a beauty blur, it's probably time to do so. For the blur I use a copy of the original tone-mapped layer, once in screen mode and with a 30 pixel Gaussian blur, and then another one in soft light mode with a 5 pixel blur. I may modify each of the two blurred layers with a curves adjustment layer, normally darkening them a bit. This can be fine-tuned by decreasing the opacity of one of the two layers. It depends on the image which one, but most of the time I dial the screen layer a little bit back, to about 80% or so. Then I put the two blurred layers (and their attached curves, if there are any) into a group, fine-tune the opacity of the group, and probably apply a mask to the group.

In this manner I have prepared another variant of the same view that we had twice yesterday. Today it is a morning view. More of the same, yes, but that is the way I think about landscapes in bright light at the moment.

The other image, the Image of the Day, was not shot with the Nikon 18-200, no, for big skies I use a more brutal tool, the Sigma 10-20 at 10mm. This image is from just after sundown, but before the clouds would go red (and, boy, did they go red!).

This time I wanted something theatrical, something unreal, something dominantly blue. The method is basically the same, though I had to use a de-saturation layer in between, or the blue would have clipped.

I already mentioned big skies, but I think I may probably need Kate Bush's "The Big Sky" for another image, so you find me concentrating on color, albeit the same singer. "Symphony in Blue" is from Kate's second album, the 1978 release "Lionheart". See a live version on YouTube.

379 - Pieces Of Sky

I still keep to the house, sleep most of the time, interrupted by short forays into the garden. This image is from 10:46 am, when the low fog had cleared up, shortly before the high fog came and covered the view again.

The Song of the Day is a quiet little piece of art by Beth Orton, "Pieces Of Sky" from her fourth album "Comfort of Strangers". Funny when you look at the ratings on Amazon's site: this album seems to have been a stylistic turning point. People either love it or hate it. See the video on YouTube and judge for yourself.

351 - The Moon Is Mine

I shot this image in the morning, around sunrise. This is a relatively tight crop as my longest lens is the Nikon 18-200 at 200mm, and that's what I used here. Post-processing in Photoshop involved pushing color and contrast without getting banding (even from RAW there are limits), applying a beauty blur on the sky, and sharpening the textured parts of the moon only. The result is quite OK and would suffice technically for a magazine sized print.

The Song of the Day is "The Moon Is Mine", again by Fairground Attraction, the original band of Scottish song wonder Eddie Reader. It's from their 1988 album "The First of a Million Kisses", an album full of wonderful music, and on cover Elliott Erwitt's famous image of the reflection in a car's mirror of a couple kissing.

The original videos of many of the band's hits (the album contained practically nothing but hits) are still to be seen on YouTube, not so this one, but instead we have a live performance on tour in Japan. And a good one it is :)

350 - This Is Not Kansas

In the morning I was in a hurry to get to Villach. When I left our house, I was surprised: the rain had stopped, bizarre clouds drifted low and fast, and in the south-west there was even a patch of blue sky.

In a perfect world I would have been on a hill or a small mountain with good sight in all directions, taking image after image, but instead I was in the car, driving. When I saw this scene though, I simply could not resist.

Nikon 18-200 at 18mm, f8 and 1/100s. Post-processing in Capture NX and Photoshop.

"Somewhere Over The Rainbow" has been covered many times, I have at least 9 versions, and today we go for one of the more exotic. No one else but Eric Clapton has sung it for some time as closer in his concerts. You get it on his live double album "One More Car: One More Rider", that's where I heard it first, but you can also see at least two other versions on YouTube. The one from his "Reptile" tour is the one I like most. Enjoy.

331 - Let It Shine

Well, I was right, the sun did shine again :)

Actually, I always feel a little guilty when posting a sundown or sunrise. There is so little artistic interference, it's just like displaying somebody else's work. On the other hand, this is a particularly beautiful one, isn't it? So, let it shine!

This is the JPEG right out of the camera, shot with the Nikon 18-200 at f8 and 34mm. I had no idea of what to change in post-processing, so I let it be.

"Let It Shine" is a song from Zucchero's latest album "Fly", and by chance it's the Song of the Day. Here is a sound sample.