590 - Thru And Thru

I had only half an hour for shooting today, thus I took the car, drove slowly along until I found a meadow with a nice mix of flowers, and there I took some images of bees and another variation on the theme of photographing through some kind of blurry foreground.

I love this image because the view through the grass and the near flowers on a group of flowers in some distance produces a totality that, even though it does not reflect what we see through our eyes, nevertheless reflects my feeling that flowers are everywhere at the moment. It is an immersing view.

No news on SoFoBoMo. I'm in for some real stress this week :)

The Song of the Day is "Thru And Thru" from the 1994 Rolling Stones album "Voodoo Lounge". See them live on YouTube.

576 - All The World Is Green

That's just another pretty landscape for Sunday. I was up to something different, but things did not work out as intended. I'll see into it today.

The Song of the Day is "All The World Is Green" from Tom Waits' 2002 album "Blood Money". See him perform live on YouTube.

567 - Time And Time Again

You have seen these mountains yesterday, and I'm afraid I'll have to come back to them time and time again. This particular image is from yesterday late afternoon. I have used split ND filters, and while I liked what I saw on the camera's LCD, I did not like what they did to the histogram. On the positive side, there is a lot of detail in the snow on the mountains, but this is outweighed by the negative effect on the top of the sky. I try using - and liking - them every once in a while, but compared to the elegance and flexibility of curves with gradient masks, they are a blunt instrument.

Or not so? I suspect that I expect too much. Maybe I need to use them more subtly, only going for part of the effect, using them as a means to get better material for the real work in Photoshop.

With this image I am quite satisfied. It has 13 layers, one group and seven distinct masks, and some of the layers are controlled by reduced opacity. The result is entirely artificial, I have completely re-modeled the tonalities, but it looks natural to me. Well, at least I have been guilty of worse atrocities to nature in the past :)

The Song of the Day is "Time And Time Again" from the 1993 Counting Crows album "August and Everything After". See them live on YouTube.

565 - Miss By One

It's late Friday evening, these are the images for Wednesday. Let's see how far we get tonight. This first image is of a view that I've seen thousands of times in 24 years. Morning light falling through my living room window in Vienna. It's a tad on the yellow side, isn't it? Uuhh ... yes. This is the JPEG from the camera, and I had left it set to "cloudy" white balance from the day before. You know, normally I'd have corrected the white point, brought in a tad of color variation, increased contrast, etc, and I shortly tried, but ... it completely ruins the shot. Some images are not meant to be "optimized".

Wednesday was traveling day, and when I am packed with my big camera backpack and an extra bag, I normally use public transport and most of the time that means the Underground. Not so this day. I decided to ride by tramway for some stations, and then go the rest of the way to work. When I left the tramway in Josefstädter Straße, the sun was shortly gone. I used the light for some images of tulips and came up with this. Did you know that all tulips originate from Kazakhstan?

Later on, at work, I used the opportunity for another portrait of Erich. He was very concentrated and left me the time to focus the 50/1.2. Never be sloppy with this lens, because, when using the focus indicator LED, it is crucial to set the focus point to exactly where you want it. At f1.2 the plane of sharpness is so thin that it becomes apparent that it is no plane at all. It is curved, just like the lens. Forget any focus-and-recompose technique, it won't work. You'll never get sharp images.

The last one, the Image of the Day, was taken shortly after the tulips. The sun had come back and I used a polarizer to get rid of the reflections on the peeling paint.

Now, why is this a "miss by one", you ask? Well, the thermometer shows 18 degrees Celsius, which is quite nice for 8am, but I had hoped for 17. Missing it by one made me reconsider the title. You know, I really had to have "17 Again" from the 1999 Eurythmics reunion album "Peace" as Song of the Day one time :)

I absolutely adore Annie Lennox. She has such a wonderfully powerful voice and the end of this song is ... special. If I remember well, they have performed the song to an overwhelming reception in the morning of New Year's Day 2000 at a concert in London's Trafalgar Square. I really would have given a lot to not only see it on TV :)

There is a remixed version of the album, that's what you currently get if you don't care, and nobody seems to like it. I can't tell, I have the original, but you are warned. See the video on YouTube.

561 - How Many Worlds

Some time ago I've written that the world is fractal, which Ted Byrne found amusing, but essentially that's what it is: Even if you believe you know a region (like I certainly do in case of my home Carinthia), you only have to look around the next corner to see something completely new. And even if you don't, even if you look at the same things again and again, you can always see them from different angles, different distances, giving you new perspectives, and even if all this is constant, then there is the ever changing light.

This post is about dandelions. It's all about the same subject, but we constantly change our perspective, going from a distanced view on a spring meadow all the way down into the wonderful world of macro photography.

See these two images? I didn't recognize it until I saw them side by side in the thumbnail view in my SmugMug galleries. In reality they were shot basically at the same place, hills to the south of Klagenfurt, but they were certainly not side by side. We got there when, just for the sake of it, we followed a small country road that we had never used before. It began rather unpromising and grew interesting later, making me completely forget the light rain. The two images were shot with the Sigma 30/1.4.

When was this? Oh yes, Saturday. It's now Thursday, the first of May, public holiday in Austria, the weather outside is just as it was on Saturday, and I write about images that I have processed yesterday on the train.

Last weekend was ideal for photographing dandelions. Now, only some days later, the first of them have already had their metamorphosis into white balls of feather, but then it was sprinkled yellow all over the place. Vienna, as you have seen in "559 - Obeisance" is already a week or two beyond, but that's normal, as Carinthia is higher and encircled by mountains.

Later in the afternoon long after the rain had stopped, the sun came out, and I mounted the Sigma 20/1.8, a marvelous wide-angle macro lens, grabbed a towel and went out into the garden, trying to capture the flowers from a very low perspective. We also see a progression here from normal to very shallow depth of field, and this all culminates in the Image of the Day, shot from extremely near and wide open at f1.8. For this last image, shown at the top of this post, the front lens must almost have touched the flower. The world is fractal. If you think you've seen everything there is, just get nearer and dive into the wonder of a world that you can't see but through a camera.

The Song of the Day is "How Many Worlds" from Brian Eno's great 2005 album "Another Day on Earth". Check it out, it may not be everybody's taste, but it's well worth it. Also hear the song on YouTube.

559 - Obeisance

Let's carry on with last week, shall we? These are some of the images of Thursday. There would be some more, but it is obscenely late, I'm afraid I'll have to get some sleep :)

Oh, by the way, I have to apologize to all those whom I normally visit and to those whose mails and comments I failed to answer. I am very short of time at the moment, and even processing the images that I make costs my sleep.

The first image is one of a reflection in the back window of a car. This is something that I photograph every once in a while, because I like these distorted images of liquified architecture.

Number two is actually Jokerman Revisited. I went by once more, there were signs of work done, but basically he is still there. This time I took the image from another perspective, and then in Photoshop carried it a tad further.

Both of the last images were heavily manipulated in Photoshop, much further than I normally go, and in contrast to that, this landscape shot, taken in Vienna's vineyards, is only frugally enhanced. Actually I love this image. I think it looks much wider than it is. Would you believe that this was shot with an effective focal length of 75mm?

And then there is the Image of the Day. Some contrast and color corrections, some vignetting added, but otherwise this is pretty much what came out of the camera. Well, sort of. What I mean is, this incredible softness of the out of focus areas is solely due to the wide aperture at f1.2.

All images were shot using the Nikon 50/1.2. A remarkable lens, and did I mention that it is a beast to focus?

The Song of the Day is actually a soundtrack. It's the soundtrack to "Le Roi Danse" by Gérard Corbiau. The music is by one of my favorite baroque composers, by Jean-Baptiste Lully. See some fantastic dance scenes from the movie on YouTube.

558 - Good To Be Back

I'm five days behind! That's a First! As I reported shortly, we had a computer crash in Carinthia. The PC would not boot at all. On Saturday afternoon we bought a new PC in Klagenfurt, and installing it, that's what I did since. What a weekend!

It finally turned out it was the system disc. It may have had a head-crash, something else may have have happened and may have taken down the disc as well, in any case it's gone. Good news is that I have not lost any image data, bad news is that we lost some other important things like emails. We'll let a specialist try to recover the data. So far my theory is, that most of the drive must be OK, and that most of the data must be recoverable. We'll see and I'll let you know.

The computer in Carinthia still lacks some software for image processing, that is to follow next weekend. Today I wouldn't have been able to use it anyway.

These are images of Wednesday. I have processed them on the train. Originally I would have liked to do Thursday as well, but I was too tired, and some of Thursday's images need my full attention :)

I am still after those soft, blurry images, and over the course of the next days you'll see various approaches. Wednesday it was the Nikon 50/1.2. This is a manual focus lens and, honestly, it is a pain to use. On the other hand, in those cases when I manage to get what I want, I like what I get.

The first image is a detail of a carved pillar at the entrance to a Chinese restaurant. This is a place that I pass by very often, and I am attracted to the colors, especially on gray days. The environment is not overly beautiful, thus using a macro-like approach is probably a good idea. Of course this is no macro lens, not at all, but due to the extremely shallow depth of field, the look is not far from what macro shots look like.

The next image is one of my typical bicycle portraits, nothing new, and you may have seen the pose before. I still like the image, not the least for its colors.

The final image is a detail from Spittelberg, one of Vienna's more picturesque neighborhoods. I love the ivy and the mysterious oblique lines in the background.

The Song of the Day is "Good To Be Back" from Natalie Cole's 1989 album of the same title.

554 - Tenderly

Climate changes, that's pretty evident. It's even obvious for everyone but George W. Bush that those changes are man-made, but there is one thing that seemingly does not change at all: April is unpredictable.

When I woke up, it was cloudy, as soon as I went out, it began to pour down like mad, and then it was sunny for the bigger part of the day. Problem is, that I slept most of the afternoon, and when I woke up again and decided to go for some magic light ... it rained again.

The first image is from the morning. Like all other images of today it was shot with my only manual focus lens (well, apart from the Lensbaby), the Nikon 50/1.2. This image, like the other two, was shot at f1.2 for minimum depth of field. At this aperture the lens is still pretty sharp but soft, mostly due to coma, I think. This does not matter for portraits, one of the major applications of this lens, and it does not matter either, when the lens is used for extremely selective focus.

The second image, a blossom on an apple tree, shows the same qualities. Depth of field is extremely shallow, light is soft. And then there is the Image of the Day, and it exemplifies how I like to work with this lens: I go very near, as near as the lens allows. This is not a macro lens, much to the contrary, as an older design its minimum focusing distance is somewhere in the range of 50cm (around 1 1/2 feet), but going as near as it gets ensures minimum depth of field. Focusing is pretty painful at f1.2, and it is more so at that distance. Most of the time I need between one and three shots until I'm satisfied.

If at all possible, I try to get something colorful in the foreground, Whatever it is (in case of the Image of the Day only some more blossoms), it will be rendered completely out of focus, a mere cloud of color, and so will be the background.

The Song of the Day is "Tenderly" by Billie Holiday. I've got her version on the collection "Solitude: The Billie Holiday Story, Vol. 2". Hear it on YouTube.

549 - Lilac Wine

Yesterday morning (yesterday? Well, it's Tuesday morning 5:30 now, I have just woken up) when I went to work, I still had the Sigma 70/2.8 Macro mounted from the weekend's macro sessions. Boy, did that lens feel good on the street! It's that combination of a short telephoto lens with the incredible control of depth of field. I absolutely love using this lens wide open.

In the end I have only worked on this single image. There are some others that would be worthwhile (and that I would have taken anytime on a lesser day), one that I'll try again because of too tight framing, and a gorgeous bicycle that was unfortunately marred by litter on the ground that I failed to see and remove. What's wrong with Photoshop, you ask? Well, have you ever tried to clone behind the spokes of a bicycle's wheel? Believe me, there are selections you don't want to make :)

The Song of the Day is "Lilac Wine" by the great Nina Simone. I have it on the collection of her Philips recordings "For Women". Hear it on YouTube.

544 - You Can't Always Get What You Want

A mixed bag of impressions, that's what I have today. The first two images are again experiments with the concept of strongly blurred foregrounds. A small park near my workplace has contributed the flowers, another park just on the other side of the road the tree. I really like to play with this kind of images, because they show the world in a way that we usually don't see. Basically you can use that effect to construct all kinds of strange worlds full of mystery and color.

The next image, taken only 50 meters from the tree, could not be more different. This is the backside of Volkstheater, one of Vienna's most prominent theater houses, specializing mostly on 20^th century drama. The contrasts were extremely harsh and I'm pretty satisfied with the conversion to B&W.

Finally there is the Image of the Day, a plastic tray in front of a second hand shop, with some books and a separator, obviously intended to be used with LP records, but no records are there, only this piece of fiber board with "Rolling Stones" written on it. Well, I guess you can't always get what you want :)

And of course that's the Song of the Day. It's originally from the 1969 album "Let It Bleed". YouTube has quite some versions of it, for instance this really ecstatic one.

541 - Helpless

Not my most photographic day. I've installed ESET Internet Security on two computers and tried a memory upgrade on two laptops. Well, ESET was a full success, just like on my computer in Vienna. Getting rid of Norton Internet Security and installing ESET was almost as effective as a processor upgrade. Highly recommended.

The memory upgrade did not go so well. I've bought 2 GB for a notebook that has 512 MB installed, the memory is faster than what came with the computer ... and it didn't work. I tried it then in my own notebook, same game, slightly faster memory, same result. Either I have bought defective memory, or notebooks are very much more sensitive to mismatches in memory timings. I've never before had problems with too fast memory. Oh well.

This image is from my 5 minutes photo session in the garden. That was it :)

The Song of the Day is Neil Young's "Helpless", but not from "The Last Waltz", not from "Unplugged" and not even from Neil Young: Patti Smith sang it on her 2007 cover album "Twelve", and someone on YouTube has illustrated it with images from Wim Wenders' "Der Himmel über Berlin". Not the worst combination.

533 - On A Clear Day You Can See Forever

I don't really like polarizers. They change colors, and it is really awkward to restore them after the fact. I wonder how people did this in film days.

Anyway. Today we made a trip down to Slovenia. The idea was to visit a lake that regularly vanishes in summer, but it's on 800 meters above sea level, and when we were there, we found the landscape covered with snow. We chose plan B and escaped to the sea, entering Italy in Trieste.

It was an uncommonly clear day in Italy, and I can't remember ever having seen the mountains of South Tyrol from Trieste. Amazing.

These two images were taken just south of Udine using the Nikon 18-200 VR.

The Song of the Day is "On a Clear Day (You Can See Forever)" from the 1970 Barbra Streisand movie. Hear Barbra sing and see her wearing funny clothes on YouTube :)

526 - Black And White World

It took me quite some time to work on three other images, only to find out that I like none of them, thus we are left with only two images for yesterday, Saturday.

Both images were shot in the morning, the Image of the Day at 7:53am and the other one at 10:59am, when it had stopped snowing. For the Image of the Day I have used my new flash, flashing directly into the snowflakes, freezing them at 1/250s. In the meantime (it's past Sunday noon now) the snow has melted again, although there is more of it predicted for tomorrow.

The Song of the Day is "Black And White World" from the 1980 collection of b-sides and album cuts "Ten Bloody Marys & Ten How's Your Fathers" by Elvis Costello & The Attractions.

517 - La Primavera

I left work early today. The sun was shining brightly, I hoped to catch some rays in the park, surely I did, and it did not last long. I used two lenses, the Sigma 20/1.8 which is gorgeous, did not do it today but will return soon, and of course the Sigma 70/2.8 Macro.

It's funny. When I bought the 70/2.8, I was not sure if I would really use it that much. After all, macro photography is not so much my thing, I have the Sigma 150/2.8 Macro as well, and for general photography, there should be not so much of a difference between it and the Nikon 50/1.8, right?

Wrong. This turned out to be my most used lens of the last three months. For this particular image I used the mat that I always carry around, laid on the ground and shot with f2.8 and 1/500s.

The Song of the Day could easily be the opening Allegro of Vivaldi's "Four Seasons", but we're going for the exotic today: "Primavera" by Portuguese fado superstar Mariza. Get it on "Fado Curvo" or on the 2006 live album "Concerto em Lisboa". See her perform it live on YouTube.

507 - Leafy Mysteries

Let's begin with some pure facts. Today, the day after the storm, we had something around 18 degrees Celsius in Austria, that's 64.4 degrees Fahrenheit, clear blue sky, a wonderful spring day. The brushes in Vienna are beginning to sprout leaves, and in reality these leaves are still tiny, but they really make a difference. How should I depict that?

When I went to work in the morning, I had the idea that I could take an image of some indistinct architecture, seen through a veil of unfocused leaves, thereby magnifying the leaves and metaphorically let them take over the city.

Only in the afternoon, on my way home, did I find a matching place and the right light, and here it is, taken with the Sigma 70/2.8 at f9, 1/160s and ISO 200.

That's for the pleasure, now for the pain. Tomorrow we will have temperatures around 10 to 12 degrees less, rain, and in higher parts of Vienna even snow. In Carinthia it is supposed to be even colder, around the freezing point, with snowfalls down into the valleys, up to 70cm predicted in the southern parts of Carinthia. Hmm ... that's where we live. I won't be there of course, but, don't panic, you will see snow, it's supposed to stay. Oh my!

"Leafy Mysteries" is a song from Paul Weller's 2002 album "Illumination". See the video on YouTube.

For me, Paul Weller is an acquired taste. I had not heard The Jam when they had their days, The Style Council saw me totally ignorant, and Weller himself had to be brought to my attention by my friend Manfred Hauswirth, music authority, computer scientist and now working in Ireland.

In the meantime I have five or six of his solo albums (Weller's, not Manfred's, whose music career died in its embryonic stages), two of the Jam, and I've just ordered four Style Council albums, along with two other CDs and two photography books, one of them Susan Sontag's "On Photography", the one Ted always talks about :)

219 - Sunday Sun

It's not late, it's early. I really have to make this short :)

I had a lazy Sunday, did some business type portraits of Michael who has recently graduated from university and now looks for a job. See them in my "Portraiture" gallery.

For the Image of the Day I took some of the usual very-low-very-near shots with the Sigma 10-20 at 10mm. Would love to know what the neighbors thought :)

Beck's "Sunday Sun" from his 2002 album "Sea Change" is the Song of the Day.

211 - Rains on Me

It's weekend and weather is, well, interesting. Yesterday I drove to Villach to buy a game. Well, I've rediscovered my interest in games, at least in buying them. I like fantasy role playing games and some time ago I have bought "Gothic 3" and a graphics card capable of running it. It was pathetic. "Gothic 1" was easily the best game I have ever played, "Morrowind" and "Oblivion" included, "Gothic 2" was mostly excellent but in one area it was obvious that it had been rushed, and "Gothic 3" is abysmal from the beginning. Btw, if you're interested in "Gothic 1", please keep in mind that it's a German game. Beware of the English version. The game's success came as a surprise and translation into other languages was an afterthought. On the other hand, can it be worse than the translation of "Morrowind" or "Oblivion" into German? I don't think so :)

I could have bought "Two Worlds", the most recent kid on the block that seems to have had an excellent start (meaning not so many bugs as to render it unplayable), but my fast card is in Vienna and I guess it wont be fun on a 6800GT. Thus I bought "Dungeon Siege II", together in a box with its expansion pack for 19.90 Euro. I'll try it today after having finished this and the next blog entry :)

Where was I? Oh yes, Villach. When returning I came by this place and it was raining, but from the west the sun had come out and cast a strong warm light on the scenery. I stopped on the roadside, grabbed an umbrella from the rear trunk and shot five images with the Sigma 10-20 at 10mm and f11.

We already had Tom Waits' monumental 3-disc opus "Orphans - Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards" and again it gives us the Song of the Day: "Rains On Me".

205 - Spring Flowers

Looks like I've managed it. This is the promised fourth image this day and it is from today. We had mostly fair weather, clouds but with long periods of sun in between. Still I didn't feel like going out and shooting landscape. Contrasts were harsh and now at almost 6pm, when the light should be perfect, the sun has vanished altogether. I'm quite satisfied with my decision to go for a more controlled setup.

This is a bunch of spring flowers that I collected near our house and shot with the Sigma 150/2.5. I used a blue folder as background.

The Song of the Day is "(Nothing But) Flowers" from the Talking Heads' 1988 final album "Naked". Thinking about the 80's, for me there is no music that's more characteristic than that of the Talking Heads, and there were periods of my life when I didn't want to hear anything else. Maybe The Smith had a similar appeal to me, and I guess it's not by accident that I have every single CD either David Byrne or Morrissey have released since. By the way, did you know that David Byrne blogs?

199 - I Can See Clearly Now

Not my most productive day and not much to tell. I shot the image this afternoon with the Nikon 18-200 at 27mm and f13.

In the evening, during dinner in a pizzeria in Sankt Jakob, I heard the Song of the Day on the radio, "I Can See Clearly Now", probably in the original version by Johnny Nash, but this is not what we're looking at today. This song has been covered many times, and the only version I have accessible quite now, is definitely not the worst: Holly Cole on her 1993 album "Don't Smoke in Bed".

195 - Mountain Greenery

This is an image from Thursday. I am one day late and this is not for having had no material. I made a trip out of Vienna, just on the right day at the right time of the year. Weather was marvelous and higher up on the hills the meadows were still full of dandelion blossoms.

Other images from the trip are in my galleries "Spring is Here" and "Landscapes & Nature". Most images, and all that I've uploaded, were made with the Sigma 10-20, this one at 10mm, f13 and with a polarizer.

Rodgers & Hart's "Mountain Greenery" is the Song of the Day, interpreted by Mel Tormé 1954 "Live in Hollywood", released as CD in 1992.

I tell you what: I probably should go along now, catch up and post the image of today, but I won't. It's past 1am, I am tired and tomorrow is another day :)

Good night.