616 - The Water

This morning I have fooled around for more than an hour with the only image of yesterday that could have been usable, but finally I decided to drop it. A dead horse is a dead horse, no need trying to ride it. Instead I present you another SoFoBoMo image, and this is the image that determined the style of my book. I had already processed more than fifteen images when I tried this one, and the result changed it all. This is one of the reasons why post-processing took me so long: after this image I had to re-work everything that came before.

The Song of the Day is "The Water" from the 2007 Feist album "The Reminder". See her live at YouTube.

613 - Shiny Things

It is only now and only slowly, that I find the time to enjoy some of the books that came out of SoFoBoMo. One that particularly inspires me because of its wonderful fresh look on details "in between", is Esther Emma Jongste's "Colorful Daily Details". I'm loving it and it influences the way I see. Yesterday's telephone receiver (which is currently on Fine Art Photoblog) came out of that, and in a way today's image as well. After two weeks of fisheye images I enjoy being back to small details.

It's early in the morning now, I was too tired to post yesterday. Work is tough at the moment. When I left, light was already failing. I probably should have asked two guys, who were practicing bicycle jumps, if I could take some images. I would even have had my flash with me, but after 11 hours of work I could not muster the energy. Pretty silly though. I guess I could have gone away with some first class action shots.

Anyway. I decided for the slow route, and on my way home I took a series of images of the usual things, cars, street corners, graffiti and such. This closeup image of a car back light is what I liked most.

The Song of the Day is "Shiny Things", again from the great Tom Waits' Opus Magnum "Orphans". Take the time and hear into the sound sample on Amazon's site. The only thing I've found on YouTube was an arrangement for ukulele, but - hey, why not? It's a pretty little melody.

Bill Birtch and I are playing ping pong with these songs from Orphans, every once in a while he chooses one and then I do, but they are really that good. Oh, by the way, Bill has a pretty nice image of a bicycle over there. You know, I love bicycles :)

612 - Private Goes Public

It's a funny feeling, now that SoFoBoMo is over for me as well. I feel ... relaxed. The pressure is gone. Sure, I will go back once more and produce the physical book, but there is no deadline to that.

Do I feel tired? Do I need a creative break? Not really. I probably need more sleep, yes, but otherwise I feel as creative as ever. I guess the reason is, that I have not spent much time shooting, actually not more than six hours. Most work went into post-processing, and that, although tedious, was fascinating and interesting. After all, I have never before tried to create such a big and consistent body of work, much less from one shooting. In a way it was a similar experience to that of making the exhibition in January.

Yesterday night, on the train from Carinthia, I have tried my next book, some "Best of 2006/2007", just a compilation of the best images of the first 15 months of my blog, and although it was technically no problem, the result was rubbish. This is another lesson: I may have the means now to produce a book in very short time, but this is no substitute for a vision and for proper planning and design. Otherwise I may produce something in the form of a book, but it won't be a good book :)

Now for today's images. Actually I like both of them. The vandalized telephone receiver caught my eye because of the color and, even more so, because of the curve of the cable. I finally settled for the other image though. Austria is currently host to the European Soccer Championship, and today was the match Austria vs Germany. Thousands of people were on the streets, mostly on their way to one of the public viewing areas in the so-called fan zones, and what I saw in Westbahnstraße, was one of the funnier ideas. Some people had taken a TV set out onto the sidewalk, along with some furniture, and were viewing in public. Someone made a video, and they really seemed to enjoy themselves. Oh yes, Austria lost 0:1, but that was to be expected :)

The Song of the Day is "Private Goes Public", the last song on the European version of the 1992 Suzanne Vega album "99.9 F°".

611 - SoFoBoMo - Late But Done

Here we are, that's what I hinted at in my two earlier posts of today: The book is finished. Over the course of the last two days I have made the final touches to the images, finished some text that I had begun last Sunday on the train, produced the book in InDesign, created a PDF and uploaded it to ISSUU. I've also submitted it to sofobomo.org - let's see if it gets accepted. No way to deny it, the book was finished two weeks after the official end of SoFoBoMo '08, but at least it was done in less than a month, and that's what it was all about.

Paul Butzi recently posted some questions about the whole experience, so here are my answers:

• Was it fun? - Well, sure, of course. Actually I had expected it to be much more tedious and less fun than it was.


• What sort of things did you learn? - Oh, many. For instance that when you participate in a project, it is a good idea to start on time. Or that when you embark on a journey, you have to do it with all your heart. Or that thinking about a problem tends to diminish it greatly. Hmm ... all things that I would have known if it had been an IT project :)


• Was your experience pretty much what you expected, or it did turn out that doing the book was wildly different from what you’d pictured when you signed up? - I wouldn't say wildly different, but I have greatly underestimated the time that it would take to harmonize the images. In such a series of images, small differences in light are enough to make successive images different in the overall look. What the camera saw, can only be taken as an approximation. I have worked on all these images in Lab mode, and I am glad that I did so. It greatly simplified color corrections late in the process.


• What aspects of the whole thing were frustrating? - Only the time before I began, but that is only because I did not even really think about it. I presumed, a project would naturally spring into existence and was angry that it didn't.


• What aspects were most rewarding? - Browsing the finished book on ISSUU. Apart from that, well, I think mostly that I learned so many things, and that nothing turned out hard at all.


• Having participated this year (regardless of whether you finished it or not), would you ever want to do it again? - Yes, absolutely. The next time I will know how to approach the hardest part, i.e. finding a project, and I will have no problem starting when everybody else does. In fact I can't wait until next year, I will do at least one other book this year. Maybe it will be the "Naschmarkt" project that I have written about in the book, that means staying in a place, the biggest market place in Vienna, for a whole day and taking photographs from the time people arrive and get their deliveries, through the whole day, until at night the place gets cleaned up. We'll see. Maybe I'll do a "Best of 2007" and a "Best of 2008" as well. With the templates that I have, making a book that's structurally similar to this one, should not take more than two hours, at least for the PDF.


• Do you have suggestions about ways to change things to make it more successful/fun/educational/rewarding for participants in future SoFoBoMo events? - Not really. Thanks to you all and to your efforts this was as painless as it could be.


• What resources did you find helpful? - Paul Lester's "book in an hour", Some of Gordon's links, the hints pointing to ISSUU, and of course the free Blurbs templates on The Art of Engineering. I still had no more than cursory looks into the InDesign training DVD that I've bought.


• What aspects of SoFoBoMo were positive surprises? What aspects were disappointments? - Positive: I had no idea that it would be so simple to make a book. Master pages and the "place gun" in InDesign, these are real time savers. I had an incredibly simple layout though.


• How about that fuzzy month thing? Did that work for you, or not? - Obviously not, but that's nobody's but my fault. Starting so late completely disconnected me from most of the social experience, and I won't do that again. Still, even if it was a very solitary job, it was great to do it. Would I change the rules for next year? Well, probably we could reduce the fuzziness to 2 weeks, like Paul Lester suggested, but on the other hand, it seems to have worked for most participants. No, I'd keep it. It's a nice quirk :)

Here we are. And now? Was that it??

Not really. I have a PDF and a publication on ISSUU, thus the formal requirements for SoFoBoMo (apart from the time frame obviously) are fulfilled, but of course I want to get this beast printed on real paper. Many people seem to have gone the Blurb route, so that's probably what I'll do as well. I guess that's a job for the next weekend.

And then, of course I'll put my template up for download and maybe write a tutorial about what I've learned. This may not be much, but I think I have quite a good process now, at least for this narrow application. After all, when I looked at my book this morning, I found it too small for my taste. It took me about an hour to completely re-create it from scratch at a bigger size.

That's it for today. Here is the book. Enjoy!

The Song of the Day is "Late Show" from the 1986 Laurie Anderson album "Home Of The Brave". See the video on YouTube.

600 - My Days Are Numbered

So we've got some more, huh? Oh my, 600. The funny thing is, that when I began posting an image a day, although I was not sure that it would be easy to come up with one daily, I did not doubt that I would do this for a very long time.

Sure, I had photographed a lot before, for one and a half years with a Kodak bridge cam, and then since May 2006 with the Nikon D200, and although I had tried to photograph daily, I had never really managed to do so. When I began blogging, obviously the time was there. Since then, there has been an image for each day, and only something between 10 and 15 were not shot on the very same day.

As Ted always says, this has brought me along quite a way. I guess if you at all happen to like using a camera, there is no better training than using it. On the other hand, it slows me down in other respects. SoFoBoMo is an example. I would have had no trouble finishing in time, had I not taken it as a side project. Anyway. The current plan is still to finish it around this weekend.

The Song of the Day is "My Days Are Numbered" from the first Blood, Sweat & Tears album "Child Is Father to the Man". Hear it on YouTube.

597 - SoFoBoMo - A Hard Day's Night

You may have read the post from this Sunday noon, "SoFoBoMo - Not Yet", that I have missed the SoFoBoMo deadline. Still, I don't give up. This afternoon, shortly before 6pm, I have finished the last image. I am at 51 images now. I think I will cut that down to about 40 images in a very simple layout. I don't even think about something as complicated (though it may not even be) as the book of Gordon McGregor. For me a very simple layout will do. One image on each right hand side, a piece of text on the facing side. The images will have a simple white background without a border. El cheapo? Sure, but so are many books. You must not forget that I have no influence on the sequence. What came first comes first. Strictly along the time line. This was one of the premises for the whole project. I wanted to get that combinatorial problem out of the way.

Have a look at Paul Butzi's book "A Good Walk" (PDF). The left and the right image often combine wonderfully and make for one big composition. I can't do that. I don't have 800 images to choose from. I have what I have and the sequence is given.

Anyway. Now I sit on the train to Vienna, finishing this hard day with today's blog entry. The Image of the Day was shot somewhere in the middle between Carinthia and Vienna, of course with the new fisheye.

The Song of the Day is "A Hard Day's Night" from the Beatles album of the same name. See the video 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".

SoFoBoMo - Not Yet

It's 11:55am on Sunday, June 1, local time. There is absolutely no possibility to pretend that SoFoBoMo were still running. It's over.

I would have been able to create some PDF in time, but at around 8am, I have given up. Of the 48 edited images so far, four or five may be thrown out, but there are some definite keepers that, in the early editing phase, were treated in a slightly different style, and those I want to redo. There are also some color differences, and I'll sort them out in the next two or three days. I have to do that in Vienna, where I have my best monitor. All monitors are calibrated, but calibration can only bring you so far.

Here we are. I still intend to finish the book, I'll do it within the next days, but it may take me probably until next weekend. Then I will be at three weeks, which is still a nice achievement. I have no idea if I will be able to show it on www.sofobomo.org though. I'll ask.

Regular posting, with images etc, continues this evening.

595 - Junk: Everybody's Got Something To Hide

I said junk and I mean junk. I've had slightly better images on Friday, but I finally decided for this one, not for its aesthetic qualities (on a scale from 0 to 100 it would firmly score in the negative range), no, not for aesthetics, but because it reveals something. How so, you ask? By hiding, I say.

Vienna's southern train station, Südbahnhof, is is (and will be for years) a big construction site. I remember four images ("448 - Down In The Hole)", "525 - Too Much Of Nothing", "588 - SoFoBoMo - Progressing Pretty Well" and one earlier, that I'm too lazy to search for now, that have been shot at that place. I did it always on Fridays, as Friday is my traveling day from Vienna to Carinthia. I always shot them through this wire fence ... and now they have hidden the site.

Suddenly.

Unexpectedly.

Oh, I know why. It's because in two weeks Austria will be host to "Euro 2008", the European soccer championship. It always amazes me, how well organized this crime is. All newspapers are staunchly pro, as are all television stations. This is propaganda with an efficiency every authoritarian régime of the past, Nazis included, could only have dreamed of. Sure, the Nazis had similar results, and so had the Soviets, but they had to use force. Today the propaganda system is fueled by money only.

Ask someone on Austria's streets. People are at best indifferent, most are outright fed up with this "event of the year". Public and publicized opinion contradict each other strongly. Why? Money.

Euro 2008 is sold as a big event that will be beneficial to the public. The saying is, that restaurants and bars will profit hugely, and that it will have a lasting effect on tourism.

Maybe. So far I see that in the so-called "Fan Zones" everything will be controlled by the biggest European brewery Carlsberg (nobody will be allowed to sell a local beer), Coca Cola and McDonalds. The usual suspects, one might say.

And now they've hidden the construction site on Südbahnhof. Ok, ok, I stop my rant. Things are as they are, the world won't change because I find it disgusting, thus I could as well arrange myself with it. Uhh ... yes ... thank you, City of Vienna, that you spare me the view of holes in the ground and machinery, from now on I'll happily photograph white fences. But probably you'll spare me even that. You'll hopefully rent the white fences to advertisers. That's it. The only thing that's still missing. Advertising. And if at all possible, please do it for "Euro 2008". This city needs it. Advertising will make it a better place.

But now for something completely different.

SoFoBoMo.

Yesterday morning I was ready to give up. Not so now. I certainly won't finish before midnight, but I have reinterpreted the rules. As long as it is May, 31 somewhere on this planet, it will be SoFoBoMo. This gives me 11 hours more time. My deadline now is tomorrow, 11 am. At that time there will be no May any more. Hmm ... one could cheat and deny daylight saving time for probably another hour :)

Anyway, I've got to be back to editing now. See you tomorrow, hopefully with a book. Good Night.

The Song of the Day is "Everybody's Got Something To Hide Except Me And My Monkey" from the White Album. Hear it on YouTube.

588 - SoFoBoMo - Progressing Pretty Well

Funnily enough, having stress and no typical photo opportunity at all, that's always a catalyst for me. In the morning, after having written yesterday's entry, I had no time to take images, and in fact I arrived at work literally at the last minute.

I had already decided to skip image taking for today, when on my way to the train I looked through this fence.

Vienna's southern railway station is one big construction site for the next years. You have already seen some images from there, and today, looking through this fence, I saw the signs reading "VIENNA SIGHTSEEING".

Is that bizarre? In all this disorder, in all this chaos, in the middle of a place that's as unattractive for tourists as it can get, there is a lost piece of touristic infrastructure. And in front of that ... flowers. Well ... that's pretty, I thought.

There was not much processing needed for the Image of the Day. It was the first thing that I did on the train, and then I began to process more SoFoBoMo images. I managed to do five of them while on the train, and this brings the score up to 22. On the other hand, it's a week now since I shot them, and there is only one more week to go. Still no idea how to make a book.



The Song of the Day is "Pretty" from the 2003 Beautiful South album "Gaze". See a live version on YouTube.

586 - SoFoBoMo - Editing Till Daybreak

This is an image that I made Wednesday morning. I had risen early to write Tuesday's entry, and this is what it looked like, out of my kitchen window. Well, sort of. I had seen the strong color contrast between the artificially lit window frames and the blue outside. I took some images, and when I felt satisfied, I went to the computer and found ... the memory card already in the card reader. I had taken the images into the internal buffer, and when I turned the camera off, they were gone. Oh well, there's a first time for everything, I guess :)

Of course, when I returned to the kitchen, the light was gone. What you see here is a careful and thorough reconstruction of what it would have looked like when taken earlier. No problem, just a little work with color temperature, color relations and tonal values. Why easy when you can have it the hard way?

SoFoBoMo progresses. Not in wild strides, but it does. Still, I'll have to speed up now. The problem is, while some images come easy, some really need attention. This one, for instance, took me three iterations until I was satisfied with the distribution of light. Now I feel it's perfectly balanced, but that's after more than an hour of work.

Another problem is the forest light. I want a wide variety of colors, but there must still be a green cast. I need to control contrasts and I want nice vivid saturation, but without being gaudy. See the problem? Here we have the result of another two hours. And still I have no idea of how to make a book :)

The Song of the Day is "Daybreak" from Lisa Ekdahl's 2002 album "Heaven Earth & Beyond". No sound samples from Amazon, but at least a commercial with part of the song on YouTube. A nice song and quite fitting, as I see day break while I write these very words.

584 - SoFoBoMo - Slow Down

Niels Henriksen of "My Camera World" today asked me to make the "additional" images on the blog a bit bigger, e.g. double their size. Well, I admit, on a 24" monitor they come out a tad small. The problem is, what I use here are sizes that get automatically generated by SmugMug, my image host, upon upload. The thumbnails are the smallest size, but the next size, "small" is already three to four times bigger. That's too much. On the other hand, creating the images at sizes fitting into a 200x200 square and uploading them myself, that would take me much more time than I can afford. Sorry Niels, I've tried, but "small" makes the page look horrible. As I see no easy solution, I'll to keep things as they are.

SoFoBoMo progress is slowing down. I have processed only three images tonight, one of them here for your pleasure. What I do at the moment is making all basic adjustments of color and contrast, clone things out, apply vignettes, re-light parts of the scene to support flow, and some things more. I will certainly have to come back to some images though. Later, when all these basic steps are done (before end of the week), I'll get back to colors and try to create more of a consistent "look".

As regards my daily photography, today that was restricted to my way home from work. Vienna is a beautiful city, and "Spittelberg", the historical center of its 7th district, even more so. The first image is of an alleyway partially obscured by the branches of a tree. Like all other images of today it has been taken with the Sigma 30/1.4, this one at f1.4.

The next one is the image that I originally wanted to take as Image of the Day. It's part of a lattice in front of a window of a historical building.

Finally I decided to take the chairs instead. They better fit the title of today's SoFoBoMo report. Oops! What's that? Titles choosing images??

Like the alleyway this image is an unprocessed JPEG right out of the camera. It has a slightly greenish cast that I easily could have removed, but that's what the light is in this old, mossy backyard. Sometimes a cast is not a cast but simply atmosphere :)

The Song of the Day is "Slow Down" from India Arie's 2002 album "Voyage to India". No video, sorry.

583 - SoFoBoMo - Processing On A Rainy Day

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

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

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

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

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

582 - SoFoBoMo - The First Attack

Yesterday, after my first SoFoBoMo shooting trip, I was too tired to do much with the images at all, much less posting a blog entry. I had tried to realize concept #3, a real trip along a route, and I did it in a gorge in the southern mountains of Carinthia, the so called "Tscheppaschlucht".

The idea was, to simply follow the trail along the creek. I ended up with a five hour walk and 140 images taken. Enough for a book? Probably, but I will return anyway. Almost all images were shot with the Sigma 10-20, mostly at or around 10mm. In hindsight I'd like to have more with other lenses. You know, any lens brings with it a certain way of seeing, and I'd like to explore some different angles before I call it a book.

Processing will be done in Lab mode, using a "Man from Mars" for color correction. The images were originally shot at "Cloudy" white balance. I did not trust the automatics with all that yellow/green foliage. Conversion in Camera RAW was done to 5000 Kelvin / +10. That's a nice base for the Lab manipulations afterwards. Overall I try to keep processing conservative.

The Song of the Day is "The First Attack" from the 1987 Proclaimers album "This Is the Story". No sound samples but what Amazon has. Sorry.

581 - SoFoBoMo At Last

It's Friday, I'm sitting on the train, and here is another bicycle portrait. In a comment, Ted Byrne recently asked me to present my images of bicycles in some kind of collection, on a separate web page, in a photo book or something like that.

Well, I've already thought about that, and it would have been an interesting SoFoBoMo project. Trouble is, that SoFoBoMo rules require at least 35 images shot within a 31 day interval between first of April and last of May (that's what Paul Butzi, who invented SoFoBoMo calls a "fuzzy month"). 35 good bicycle images, that's quite a lot to be shot in a month. That would have required finding more than one bicycle per day on average. Suffice to say that I gave up on the idea.

I registered on Paul's SoFoBoMo announcement page, but ever since then I've held back. I lacked a project. Part of the problem is my weekly travel from Vienna to Carinthia and back. Now that I think of it, bicycles wouldn't have been such a bad idea. You find them in both places :)

Another idea was to photograph portraits of strangers on the train. After all, I spend eight hours a week traveling, and most of the time I could ask someone. Let's see, that's four weekends, probably five if I position the "fuzzy month" well, though creating the last images in the very last days would mean to severely press my luck. What if I didn't find anyone on the last weekend? OK, that means four weekends, nine images per weekend, and that could mean at least three people with three images, but better two images per person, probably 17 people and a self-portrait as the last image. Still, quite a lot, probably manageable, but I soon found out I had another problem: On most weekends I need that travel time to catch up with my daily blog!

Finally there is the fact, that I am not even excited by the idea. It would have been an interesting project, but probably not for me. I enjoy having silence and peace on the train, I enjoy working here, and when it's busy in the compartment (just as it is now), then I hear music. Sacred music by Mozart at the moment. You see, I'm probably not the type for this kind of assignment :)

Still, reading Paul Butzi's blog, Paul Lester's and Gordon McGregor's (all three have finished their books by now), seeing the SoFoBoMo site, and not having a book of my own, that's unsatisfying, to say the least.

There are only two weeks left now, I still have no project, not a single image, the only thing I have is an InDesign training DVD that I've bought, eight hours of training and I've seen not a single minute so far.

Anyway, this lack of a book is nagging me. I was already sure to give up (oh that bitter taste of defeat!), when I thought about it again today, and suddenly I saw the whole idea of a project from a new angle.

It's hard to find unrelated objects of a kind, at least 35 of them in one month, and then take good images of all of them, images that also combine to a meaningful sequence. It's even harder when you have a day job, and my weekly travels contribute to the problem. I can take landscapes on weekends, but in Vienna I do mostly street photography. How do you select a common kind of object?

So what, did I think today, if I don't spread picture taking at all? What if I select a single day in Vienna or in Carinthia and do all my photography in that one day? Impossible? Maybe, but probably not if I re-think the concept of a project.

A book, regardless of type, literature or photo book, is by its very nature a sequence. What if I center the project around a naturally sequential concept?

So what is sequential? Order? The passing of time? A journey? Life?

Every book is a journey and so is life. That looks promising. I still have no clear vision of what I want to do, so let's inspect some options.

I could let time pass, but stay in one place. Well, that's fine for a year, with seasons, different weather and all the small changes that happen in a year, that may even make an interesting book. Probably this could even be done in a city like Vienna, standing at a busy corner. Something like "From Dawn Till Dusk". It needs a busy, interesting place with much variability during the day, some luck, and it could well work. "Naschmarkt" comes to my mind. It's the biggest market in Vienna. People begin working there at sunrise, and at night it ends with a big cleanup. I'd have to ask the shop owners, but I am quite sure most would agree.

What about an abstract, conceptional journey from far to near? Think about a forest seen in a distance. Now the same forest, a little nearer, nearer still, a group of trees at the side of the forest, a single tree, a branch, some leaves, a single leaf, part of a leaf, concrete to abstract. If this is not enough to yield a minimum of 35 images, I could use the same concept for two, three, maybe four such "journeys" and make these parts of the book. A forest, a mountain, a village, a river. "Inspections". Nice title :)

What about a real journey? Well, rather a short trip, I guess. Something like walking from one end of Vienna to the other. If I carefully plan my way, I'll hardly have trouble finding interesting places, but even if not, if I have to use something "unrelated" for part of the trip, then it will still be related, simply by the fact that it is there, on my route.

I have not decided yet, but it is clear that I better do something this weekend in Carinthia (that would be Sunday, I think) or during the next week in Vienna, though that would almost certainly need a day off from work. In any case I have to have the images ready before next weekend. That will leave me eight more days to produce a book. Crazy? Sure. Funny? Certainly! Possible? I have no idea :)

It seems like SoFoBoMo is not over yet. Stay tuned.

The Song of the Day is "At Last", and the version I mean is the one by the ever so fantastic Mary Coughlan. It's on her 2002 album "Red Blues". Of course I have no video, but there is one of Etta James' version. It's different, but it will give you an idea. While Etta James is very much Rhythm and Blues, Mary Coughlan is strictly Blues. Well, both are great and it's a great song.