675 - Dexter Rides Again

Black & white, the last refuge of the color blind, as Ted likes to say. I don't do it very often, but sometimes it is a no-brainer, for instance when there is not much color to begin with.

I shot these two images yesterday morning on my way to work, and the interesting thing is, that I had something totally different in mind. I wanted to use the long lens to capture the hundreds of cables above our streets, long rows of light fixtures dancing in between. In fact I did and the images were not even bad, at least workable in any case, but then this image of a bicycle rider came in between, and somehow everything else paled.

Does this happen to you as well? That you go out with a certain goal, determined to concentrate on a certain kind of subject, and then the unexpected happens? What do you do? Do you give in as I did?

For all who don't like B&W, here is something in color. Although, it's graffiti on a garage door, and some people don't like graffiti either :)

The Song of the Day is "Dexter Rides Again" by Dexter Gordon. I have it on disc 84 of "The Ultimate Jazz Archive". I even found a sound sample. It's the background music to a video about "HAM Radio:PL-259 Installation Made Easy and FUNny". Oh well.

665 - With A Little Help From My Friends

Yesterday I have announced that you will see more squares, well, today you get them, and I freely admit: This is byrnesque! Actually not only the final result is (and then, maybe not: Ted might have had some enhancements up his sleeve ... I'd probably have as well, but not at 2:20am), no even the process is. I have done as I was told, loaded the image (4348x2964 pixels) in Photoshop, created a new image of size 2000x2000, moved the photo over as a layer and positioned it within the frame. Works like a charm.

In fact, what you see here are two views into the same image, one of them mirrored (lame question: which one :-?), and, interestingly enough, it does not even look obvious.

Shot today with my new Nikon 70-300 VR at 300mm. The air was humid and hot, thus the shimmering.

The Song of the Day is "With A Little Help From My Friends" from the classic 1967 Beatles album "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band". Hear it on YouTube.

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.

630 - Oooh, What A Lucky Man I Was

Yesterday's food is from the can. I was short on time in the morning, and when I left for the train, the light was utterly flat and uninspiring. I could have delayed photographing to the evening, but on the other hand I had plenty of time for post-processing while on the train.

I always carry a bunch of files with me in a folder "TODO", and for lack of anything better to do, I began processing some of them.

The decaying house front is not far from where I live. When I am late and take the way to work via the Underground, I always pass by, but this particular image was taken about a year ago, in the afternoon. I used my Nikon 50/1.2 and was on the way to a concert where I wanted to use this fast lens.

The next image, a garbage can in Mariahilfer Straße in Vienna, was taken last August with the then new Sigma 20/1.8. It was early morning on a bright day with blinding sunlight, and I liked the contrast between the modern design and the traces of ... uhmm ... neglect.

The final image, the Image of the Day, is from that Sunday morning in Florence/Italy when I was photographing with my friend Ted Byrne. This image was taken while Ted was on the other side, making the first image that he posted from Florence.

This is one of those images that I always wanted to process. I tried it one time and did not particularly like the result, so it went back into the "TODO" folder. Much to Ted's annoyance I took all my images that morning from the tripod and I really took my time. Just as I was satisfied with the framing, a white car drove by to park in front of these poles, right in my image. I pressed the shutter only a second before. The sidelight is from the car's head lights. While the original would have been nothing but a failed attempt, this side light makes the image, and that's also what was so hard to bring out in post-processing. I was just a lucky man :)

The Song of the Day is "Lucky Man" from ELP's 1970 debut album "Emerson Lake & Palmer". See something like a 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.

593 - Controversy

With only three more days to go for SoFoBoMo and no book yet produced, God knows I should do anything but write about other people's posts on other people's blogs, but as things are, you have to either voice your opinion when the topic is hot, or nobody will listen.

Today, on Craig Tanner's Light Diary, I ran into a reference to a post by Joe Reifer titled "Going deeper may require more abstract excursions". Joe basically utters his frustration about the state of photography related blogs and the fact that most of them in his opinion produce junk.

He challenges us, to not ramble about questions in art theory that have long been decided, to not write endlessly about photography business as if photography taken online were a business, to not dwell on technical matters of how we shot a certain image, and to not write the seven thousandth tutorial about making sundowns more colorful in Photoshop. He challenges us to take our passion to extremes, to delve for the deep and the pure, and he supposes that

Your normal sources are not going to cut it. The internet is not going to cut it. This may take wandering around the middle of the desert for a few days to figure out. Maybe a few weeks. Probably longer.

There you have it. As someone guilty of most of that, am I offended? Not at all.

Do I feel the need to defend my position? Not really. I find the notion interesting. It resonates with my own doubts about what I do. Don't get me wrong, I am not particularly prone to doubt, but from time to time ...

Whenever I have written a really lousy post, whenever an Image of the Day is only some image of the day, whenever I have posted another Photoshop tutorial (did you know that about 95% of my visitors come for maybe 5% of my posts, and would you have expected, that all of them happen to be either Photoshop tutorials or posts about my Nikon D300?), always in these situations I ask myself, "Was this necessary? Did the world need that?".

It didn't, and yes, probably it was necessary. Jay Watson already pointed it out on his blog, that much of what we do in blogging is about exposure and fulfilling expectations. We post to get seen, and in a world of blind but literate search engines, we get found much easier when we write. That's one of the reasons why I always select a Song of the Day and mostly title my image after it. It's incredible how many people arrive from Google searches for song titles.

It's similar with my images. I know that some of them are quite good, and I know equally well that many are not. Do I care? Yes, I do, but I post them anyway. This is a daily photoblog, and the expectation is, that there will be a new photo every day.

Most of my visitors don't comment (which is a pity), but from the comments that I do get, I understand that nobody expects me to post earth-shattering images every day. I do what I can, and people seem to accept it.

And then: I can't remember having seen much earth-shattering art in my life at all. Most art does not shatter. It comments.

It comments on concepts, sometimes in a very precise way (much of what Ted Byrne does is of that type), sometimes rather vaguely, like commenting on beauty. And if it does not comment on concepts, then it may comment on feelings, reflecting the outlook of its creator.

Joe Reifer pointed to Roger Ballen as an example of a photographer whose art "blew his mind". I didn't know Roger Ballen, but I absolutely understand the notion. This is high-class Art with a big capital A. No doubt about that, and I am thankful for the link. I find Ballen's images disturbing, surreal, absolutely classic in their formal structure, even beautiful in their negation of traditional beauty ... and I can't imagine why he does so many of them and nothing else.

These images fascinate me, they hold me for quite some time, they are even one of the reasons why this whole topic drew me into writing another lengthy post, and producing them would be an interesting project, but producing nothing but them, would bore me to death.

I am not a big fan of big projects. I enjoy doing some of this, some of that, from time to time circling around one subject (bicycles are one of them), without forcing myself, always trying to keep this a passion, not a job.

My own Art is what happens in that process, what gets fueled by my joy. I produce it because I feel an urge. I offer it to everybody who will care to look, but if only a very few did, like it was for a long time in the beginning, I probably still would do it. I do not rely on my Art economically, and that frees me of having to make compromises, gives me the opportunity to explore dead ends, the opportunity to try and to fail. I wouldn't want it otherwise, and that is a kind of purity that I miss with much of what many "names" in the Art scene produce, all those luminaries who have "found their style", as the euphemism goes for "have found something that sells, and stick to it".

Purity and depth cannot be forced. They must be found, and I fully agree with Joe that deserts may help in this regard :)

I further agree that risks must be taken. I am not so sure about his examples though. Yes, Ballen is a photographer who wanders the disturbing realms of dreams, but this is not risk, this is mainstream since almost 90 years. He does so in a very convincing way, and had he one book in that style, I would be amazed. Seeing that all his work repeats that same recipe, I can't see the depth any more. The repetition uses the effect up, the work freezes into an empty pose.

I firmly believe that passion is the key, and that in order to find the purity and the depth, we have to wade through shallow murk at times. There is no way around it, neither for the artist nor for the visitor. Nobody can produce a masterpiece every day, but if you don't try, if you are not productive, it won't ever happen.

This image is funny. Somebody had written "KILL", and someone else had corrected it to "KISS" later. Doesn't it bring in an interesting aspect if I tell you that the whole original text said "KILL ALL RACISTS"? Sure, killing is not my thing, but kissing?? Ambivalence is everywhere and art is always a comment.

The Song of the Day is "A Thousand Kisses Deep" from Leonard Cohen's 2001 album "Ten New Songs". Hear it on YouTube.

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.

569 - My Book

The inspiration to this image came from Ted's post "Pigeon". There he presented three times four ways to have fun with a lighthouse. All of the images are gorgeous wide angle shots, and one of them has a whale's jaw in the foreground, lying in the grass.

Gosh, I thought, it's a long long time since I last did wide angle. Of the three processing variants that Ted presented, the third - his choice, he called it "heavy metal" - did not really ring with me, but it sparked an idea. In that particular series of images I would have liked a softer variant, but contrasted with an object. Something like the whale's jaw in composition, but an object that would be clearly out of place. A surreal element.

The other thing that led to today's image is, small wonder, the image of yesterday, "In Children's Stories".

It was clear now that I'd do a wide angle shot, it was clear that I would do it from the tripod, using HDR if necessary (which it was not), and the idea of the forest, of green filtered light, still kept me.

That was the concept. An image in the forest, and in the foreground an out-of-place object. Now I needed only two things, an object and a place. Thinking of yesterday, I first thought about a children's toy, ideally an old, damaged doll. This would have given an element of danger, but unfortunately I had no doll. Hmm ... must remember to find one.

From there it was not far to the book. It would have to be bound in red, preferably a big old book, if at all possible something that would survive lying on the ground, and so I finally selected the Collected Works of Shakespeare, that I had once bought very cheaply.

The first place that came to my mind was the gorge where I have shot a series of images about 16 months ago (see "Quake in a Gorgeous Gorge", "Down Again", "Probing Deeper" and "Substitutions"). Forest, water, book. Looked good to me. The only problem is, that I have recently seen wood workers around that place. I wanted to avoid any traces of human presence, thus I decided to simply try my luck with a new place.

The first choice was another gorge, but that one was completely inaccessible, at least from the side that I tried. I gave it up for today and instead drove to another place that I know. I have shot "Logging Again" there and almost a year later "Happy Birthday". There is no water, but the logs would do as well.

On my way there, about two curves before, I found what you see here. Water. Not waterfalls, not even much water, but I absolutely loved how the water repeated yesterday's metaphor of the way. Here we are now.

The Song of the Day is "My Book" from the 1990 Beautiful South album "Choke". See Paul Heaton perform it in the original video on YouTube.

Oh, by the way, it's "Richard III" where the book came to rest. Whatever that means.

546 - Gli altri siamo noi

This is the image for Friday, but it was not taken yesterday. Yesterday was one of those travel days. No time to take pictures in the morning (at least nothing worthy), no time to take pictures on the way to the train (I've tried, it was better but still not good enough), and then for almost the whole time on the train I saw the most spectacular weather outside. Fantastic light, dramatic skies, I could have taken hundreds of images, and instead I sat there, sub-par images loaded in Photoshop, trying to ride dead horses. Goodness, that's tough!

Fortunately I have a folder titled TODO on my hard drive, and there I found this image that I always had wanted to work upon and that I never actually had. It's from my trip to Florence, Italy, where I met Ted Byrne. See here on my blog (read in reverse order) and there on Ted's (reverse as well). And while we're at it, here are some more images of that day, images that I have not even processed yesterday, images that I have shown on the Radiant Vista forums, but never on my blog. Hope you don't mind when I throw them in :)

Back to the Image of the Day. There is always the question of whether it is ethically acceptable to show images of beggars or not, but this is not an image about a beggar, It is about the shadow of power looming over the outcast, it is about being a stranger in a world that does not welcome you, it is about being outside, about being rejected as "The Other", but as an old song says: sooner or later we are the others, or in Italian, "tanto prima o poi gli altri siamo noi".

Umberto Tozzi is well known for his poetic lyrics, but it is much well known that Giancarlo Bigazzi, with whom he had a long collaboration from the mid-seventies up to the 1991 release "Gli altri siamo noi", was a driving artistic force. About this song Bigazzi later said that Tozzi had written neither a single line nor note. They ended up in court, and such is human nature, that this is neither uncommon for long-standing artistic collaborations nor for friendships or marriages.

Anyway. The lyrics to this song are quite challenging in the Italian original, and although there is an English version of the song, it is very much different, thus I'll try it with Irene's translation to German, translated to English by me:

I have never been lonelier than this,
but at night I wish it would be Monday soon,
to go out with the others and paint the town.
With the others, trapped in themselves, the others
who open up in the sun like the flowers that dress
when they wake up, when they go out, when they go away,
when they arrive.
We are like those shrouded angels,
the eyes in their faces like mirrors,
because the others are us.

Walls tumble under the breath of an idea,
Allah or Jesus, in a church or a mosque,
We are the others, but here on this same way,
like cowardly heroes, we leave behind what connects us
to those who wait and ask themselves why they were born
and suddenly die.
Maybe they are swallows, leaves from Africa,
who smile at us in melancholy,
and all of us are victims and hangmen,
sooner or later we are the others.

When they sing, when they cry,
the others are us.
When they're born, when they die,
the others are us.

In this world we are the others.

We stay in comfortable deserts
of apartments and tranquility,
far away of the others,
but sooner or later we are the others.

In this now so small world
we are the others.

We are the others
between Indios and Hindus,
between youths in drugstores who don't carry on,
Working class families, forced on vacation by robots,
gypsies from the east in ghettos on the outskirts.
All of us are victims and hangmen,
sooner or later we are the others.

Amazonia,
South Africa,
the others are us,
when they shoot,
when they hope,
the others are us.

In this world we are the others.
In this now so small world
we are the others.

Bigazzi, Tozzi or what, I find this quite impressive, don't you? See the video on YouTube.

543 - Jokerman

On a construction site in Kaiserstraße, very near to where I live, I found this charcoal drawing on the wall of a building being demolished. A Jokerman, once drawn by a hopeful young revolutionary, and this reminds me of Ted Byrne's current blog entry, "Quarry", where he muses about salavging "something that soon won't be anyplace but in an image". John Henry Mills or the Jokerman, one will wither with time, one will be torn down with force. There are stories behind both, and though the stories will be lost, these images remain, and they will begin to tell their own stories.

"Jokerman" is the opener (and I think it was the hit) on Bob Dylan's 1983 Return-From-Jesus album "Infidels". See it on YouTube.

529 - These Moments Of Beauty

Boy, talk about a delay! But it was not only laziness on my part, I really had to think about this one :)

Ted Byrne recently posted an essay "What Do We Do After We Go “Wow”? The purpose of beauty in art photography", and somehow I feel the need to answer. Well, Ted, here comes the answer.

You originally asked about the sufficiency of beauty from the perspective of a viewer. You were quite surprised when, in a clever comment to your article, Michael McMurrough pointed out that the question arises from the point of view of an artist as well.

I think before we can even begin to discuss the role of beauty in art, we have to define beauty itself, and here we immediately recognize that beauty is a completely subjective concept. What people regard as beautiful is not only different for different people, the "average" even varies with geographic region, with culture, and within a culture changes over the course of centuries. Just have a look at the baroque ideal of a beautiful woman, compared to the 1960s ideal that was shaped largely by a fashion model named Twiggy.

So what is beauty? Much greater minds than mine have tried to answer this question, thus I'll skip the idea of a final definition altogether, and only try to come up with a concept that works for me.

So what is beauty for me? I think beauty is a certain quality of inexplicable simplicity, that nevertheless has the power to represent arbitrarily complex configurations of reality. Beauty is not a state that can be constructed, it can only be approached, but it is not glaring like a beacon. Beauty is elusive, subtle and fragile. Not enough of a definition? Sorry, I have no better one,this will have to do for now.

I read a book just now. It's Ian Roberts' "Creative Authenticity", that was recently recommended by Paul Butzi. In the first chapter, "Searching for Beauty", Ian connects beauty with transcendental silence, and he concludes, that the artist's authenticity and growth, and ultimately the work's "resonance and truth are what will give it beauty", meaning that beauty is something that happens as a byproduct of authentic, meaningful art. Mind though, that there is no way to force it. There are things that seem to be necessary, like - very profanely - just "showing up", meaning constantly working on expressing yourself, instead of evading the confrontation with your creative self. This is the 90% sweat part. It's clear though, that "showing up" alone achieves nothing.

Ian's concept of beauty is much more elevated than your's, Ted. For you, beauty is just one tool in the artist's toolkit, just one possibility to open a portal to deeper meaning. For the purpose of this text I tend to stick more with Ian and his idea that beauty "happens" through passionate creative acts, but that's more a matter of definitions, of how broad we see the range of what we like to assign the label "beauty". I think we each know what the other means.

This semantic problem comes from the fact that the word beauty is used for a bewildering number of things in a bewildering number of contexts, and I suppose it is for a reason, that through all the history of philosophy, we as a species have not come up with a final definition of the concept. It may even be, that it is no single concept at all, and it would make sense to use different words for different aspects of "beauty". Alas, although we are free to do so, this is not the way language works. In order to be understood, we need to use symbols with shared (or at least approximately shared) meanings. Thus we are back to the one word "beauty" and the problem of its ambiguity. That's the deeper reason why we constantly use the word with qualifiers like in "spiritual beauty".

We may not be able to define beauty, but does that mean we can't recognize it? Not at all! We may ultimately not always mean the same things, but every one of us can point to certain instances of beauty, and this is a beauty that's individually felt. Remarkably similar to religious experiences, isn't it? That may be the reason, that beauty is so often associated with the divine.

I am digressing. The original question was about the role of beauty in photographic art, so let's see if we have come any further so far:

When we can't define beauty, when we can't fabricate it, but when we still can see it when it is there, when beauty is happening through passionate creative acts, why should it make sense to worry about it at all?

And, lastly, this is my stance: I don't care. Some of my images may be beautiful in a more than superficial sense, I believe that the number of them increases the longer I practice photography, but I simply don't care. I pour passion into my work, and if that produces beauty at times, I let it gladly happen, and even if I wouldn't, it would happen anyway.

Though some of my images may be beautiful in a more than superficial sense, not all of them are, and I dare say most of them are not. They may have other qualities. They may evoke feelings, invite to dreaming, transport stories, express tension, and all that is possible without actually having beauty. Some of these qualities may be less lasting than real beauty (you note the qualifier?), some may only work upon first view, some may only work for me, but these are things that I like to care about, these are things that I can define, and these are things that I can try to create. Beauty I can not. And that, Ted, that is the reason why I don't believe that beauty is a tool.

At least not what I call beauty. Prettiness yes, beauty no. Beauty in its real sense, deep, innate beauty may cause you to go "Wow!", but more often than not it won't. What makes you go "Wow!" is something else, and this is what may be used up, leaving you with the question of "what else?". Beauty is timeless and it is an end, not a means.

There is another role of beauty though, and that's in the creative act itself, or rather in its inception, in the inspiration that comes in the very begining: At least for me, these inspirations frequently are like a glimpse of beauty, and that beauty, lighting up in a fleeting moment, too short to get hold of it, that beauty is what makes me delve into a subject, makes me want to explore it.

All Images were made with the Nikon 18-200 VR. The Song of the Day is "This Moment", again from Melissa Etheridge's fantastic 2004 album "Lucky". See her perform it live on YouTube.

528 - Electric Ladyland IV

Two very different images, two very different treatments in post-processing. The Image of the Day was shot at the same place as "489 - Electric Ladyland III", only some meters to the left and with a different lens. The landscape is completely dominated by masts and cables, dissonant as the rough, noisy finish that I have chosen. In contrast to this we have the undulating, horizontal lines of the other image, bucolic, soft, finished with a soft blur on top.

It would be about time to answer to Ted Byrne's recent essay "What Do We Do After We Go “Wow”? The purpose of beauty in art photography", and these two images could be an anchor, but it's too late now. I'll try it tomorrow :)

In case you have not guessed it: The Song of the Day is still "Have You Ever Been (to Electric Ladyland)" from Jimi Hendrix' 1968 album "Electric Ladyland".

512 - The River Sings

After the huge amount of work that I put into yesterday's Photoshop tutorial (I actually finished it tonight at 2am), and due to the fact that I have taken no image at all today (the first time in what? A year??), I needed to resort to my TODO images.

This one is from my trip to Firenze, Italy, where I met Ted Byrne. I took it the morning we were shooting the sunrise at Il Duomo. This is river Arno, and although I had the image on my TODO list, I didn't need to do anything at all.

Nikon D200, Nikon 18-200 VR at 200mm, f8 and 1/80s.

The Song of the Day is "The River Sings" from Enya's gorgeous 2005 album "Amarantine". See the video on YouTube.

511 - Gasoline Alley

How many layers have your Photoshop files? And what are the things that you routinely do to your images? And why are you doing them? Let's have a look at one image of mine, shall we?

This particular place is a place that I pass by very often. It's on my way from home to the Underground. I always wanted to take an image of this old pump, because it looks so ... old, so out of time and place. Unfortunately there are only two reasons for me to take the Underground: I am either in a terrible hurry, or it rains. Both are not exactly ideal conditions for taking photographs. Yesterday morning it did neither rain nor was I in a hurry, I was only so packed, that I decided not to walk to work.

I made three shots, kneeling on the sidewalk, and this is the one that I finally used. Let's have a quick look at what came out of the camera.

The most obvious difference is the sign on the wall. It is red, which would not be a bad complement to the other vivid color green, but it is extremely high contrast, in an awkward place composition-wise, and it is very modern, compared to the pump. Was that enough reason to throw it out and divert from the path of photographic truth?

Well, if you have followed my blog for any longer time, then you already know my stanza, but instead of repeating it, I shall refer you to my friend Ted Byrne's classic essay "When To Sign A Photograph?". I pretty much agree with Ted in this regard, and that's for "photographic truth" :)

Now, having exposed myself as an unscrupulous forger, let me explain my reasoning for taking this sign out. I said it is in a compositionally awkward place. Why that, you ask? That's a power point, being on the cross of two thirds. Conventional wisdom says that's good, isn't it?

Right, but this is an image that I wanted to take for a very long time, and the reason for wanting to take it is the old-fashioned green pump. I always saw the pump, never the sign, thus this must become an image about the pump, and the sign, being in such a lucky spot, does not contribute at all. It is modern, it is high-contrast, high-saturation, it pops out, it competes badly, and that's the reason why it must go.

Cloning out the sign proved harder than I had thought. My first attempt was to create a new, blank layer, and then to clone with a soft brush, always sampling a bit from above, a bit from below, and that with a clone source turned by 180 degrees to avoid repeating patterns. You remember, the clone source palette is one of the innovations in CS3, and it allows you to clone as if from a rotated source. Very handy, and from near, while I worked, the result looked promising indeed, but to my dismay the cloning was clearly visible from a distance. Why that? Well, the problem lies in this particular kind of texture. It is relatively fine and it is uniform, with uniformity being the culprit here.The soft brush had made the cloned texture less crisp, and that difference clearly showed from a distance. Essentially I had replaced the sign with a blotch that obviously stood out.

I could have tried it again with a harder brush and less overlap, and probably I would have succeeded, but in such situations a simpler technique produces superior results. It goes like that:

With the rectangular marquee tool I have selected a patch below the sign, copied it with Ctrl-J on a new layer. With Ctrl-T I went into free transform, rotated the patch by 180 degrees and moved it over the sign. Then I added a mask and by painting into the mask with a small, soft brush, I began taking away from the patch until it only covered roughly the sign.

This revealed another little problem. The sign was in a place where a diffuse shadow from above began. The patch was from below, thus it was too light, at least in its upper part. A curves darkening layer in luminosity blending mode and with a gradient mask applied, the layer clipped into the patch layer, took care of that.

In a similar manner I took out a minor distraction in the upper right corner. The drain cover and some high contrast dirt were taken out by conventional cloning. Neither of them had anything to contribute to the pump. They only brought clutter and unrest to an image that was meant to give a calm feeling of nostalgia.

At this point the image was still looking flat, the colors dull, a bit too blue, and the distribution of tones did not leave much detail in the pump.

I tackled contrasts first. The tones in the dark part on the left side were OK, but I wanted to have more detail in the pump itself and on the walls. In other words: I needed to increase local contrast. I discuss local contrast in detail in another tutorial, suffice to say that I used the PhotoLift plugin again, decreasing global contrast by 20% and adding 80% local contrast.

The result was pleasing across the image, and I did not use a mask as I normally would. I only used a levels adjustment layer to set a black and a white point. This is the result so far. Suddenly we can see the blemishes in the body of the pump, and the wall textures come forward, just as the pump itself. The levels adjustment was in normal blending mode, thus I have increased saturation as well, which is OK here. Had I wanted to avoid influencing colors, I would have used luminosity mode.

What about the BP sign? It is in the same old-fashioned style as the pump, it has the same green, it would perfectly go with the pump, it only has to come forward. It needs more glow, so let's make some glow.

The first thing I did was to add a curves layer with a steep rise in the lower tones. I used blending mode "color dodge" to boost the colors as well. This did not give me enough boost, thus I duplicated the layer. Then I made a merged copy of the image so far, blurred it with a radius of 7 pixels, applied it in screen mode at opacity 50%, and these three layers finally gave the glow.

Next comes the idea of balance. In this case it is the balance of tones, and especially tones in the corners. The right upper and lower corner needed to go darker, in order to balance the darkness of the opposing corners to the left.

This is no hard rule. Images are thinkable where two light corners on the right oppose two dark corners on the left, but, remember, this is neither an image about corners nor an image about opposites. It is an image about a gas pump. This particular gas pump is fairly in the middle, and therefore the corners need to be balanced.

I added another darkening curve in luminosity mode, and used a mask to restrict it to the lower and upper right corner.

At this point, in many cases I boost saturation as far as it does not burn out any channel. Of course there are images that need much more subtlety, but it is always a good idea to try and see what you get.

Well, what I got here was too much yellow, not enough red and no balance in the blues. Dealing with color, I primarily set color temperature in Camera RAW, but when I find later that I was slightly off, I often use Photoshop's "photo filters". They are intuitive, easy to use and can be tamed with masks. Here I used a plain red filter on the bricks to the left and behind the base of the pump. It is subtle, but it makes a difference. Then I raised saturation in general by 20%. Of course this was much too much for the pump, thus I painted in the mask with black over the pump, in effect applying the saturation on everything but the pump.

At this point I felt that the upper part needed some cooling. Therefore I used a cooling filter on the upper right corner and, for balance, on the lower left corner as well.

Of the predefined photo filters, "Cooling Filter (82)" is the most effective, but it has s strong cyan component, cyan cancels red, and that is not what I want here. "Cooling Filter (80)" is rather neutral and "Cooling Filter (LBB)" has a violet tinge. That was what I used.

As a last step I sharpened a merged copy in LAB and used an edge mask to restrict sharpness to the edges. Voilà, here we are: 15 layers.

Most of the changes that I have made were rather subtle, but in combination they have changed the image completely. Now it is exactly what I wanted it to be.

Does it show what was there? Certainly not. Does it show what I saw? Probably. In any case it shows what was important to me and made me take the image in the first place.

Coming to the Song of the Day at the end, I wouldn't have thought that I have only one song with "pump" in its title, one "Jumpin' In The Pump Room" by Charlie Shavers, and that clearly did not fit. Thus Rod Stewart has his second appearance within days, again from the same live album, this time with "Gasoline Alley", my only song with "gasoline" in the title. With its backward looking, romanticizing attitude it is probably not the worst match.

501 - Ain't No Big Thing

Can you remember when Ted discovered European cars? The 2CV? And then the Smart, the car that fits in every parking lot?

Well, here in Austria even the Police drives them. Here is one in front of the side entrance of our parliament. Had it been a night shot, I surely would have chosen Jethro Tull's "The Mouse Police Never Sleeps" as Song of the Day, but alas, it was right in the morning when yesterday I shot this image.

This is again the Sigma 70/2.8, this time, with plenty of light, at f8 and still at 1/400s. Some tiny enhancements in lighting after the fact.

The Song of the Day is "Ain't No Big Thing" from John Lee Hooker's 1997 album "Don't Look Back". That's his co-production with Van Morrison.

And now? I guess I owe Ted some hundred answers to his questions from yesterday's comment. I promised to answer little by little, and in fact I'll try to answer one point per day. Is that fair? This should only take me the next 500 posts, at least as long as Ted stops asking :)

Ted, you asked what I have discovered "about the 'if only' cursing that happens when you see the results on your computer screen and wonder 'if only' you'd panned a tad more left, pulled a tad more back, grabbed a tad more sky, earth, chest, or leg?". That's an easy one for starters:

Most of the time it is no curse at all. 95% of my images are shot in everyday locations, locations that I can go back to whenever I like. 95% of my people images have the people blurred and in the background. It may be difficult to impossible to get another opportunity for a missed shot, but in most cases it is not. And then, when all the shooting is done, there is still Photoshop. Mind you, not as a means to rescue bad images, no, simply as another stag in the "making" of images.

No, I have no problem to miss a shot. I may create something different in Photoshop, or I may go back the other day and try it again. Or the other year. In fact, there is a shot that can only be taken within a short range of days, maybe not more than one or two, in January. I have partially missed an opportunity during winter 2005/2006, and since then I have forgotten every year, but one year I'll get it :)

500 - The Half Of It, Dearie

So this is the half of it. We've come quite a long way together, have we? You most certainly don't remember #1, do you? Nobody was around then and I wrote for half a month into oblivion, until I finally got the first comment by (who else?) my good friend Ted Byrne.

I got it for "17 - Not in Color". Ted predicted that the ultra-wide would become my "normal" way to look at the world. And he certainly was right. It's not the only thing that I use (you have seen lots of images with the 70 lately), but I certainly feel at home with it :)

And now it's #500.

Am I weary? Yes, certainly. Blogging like mad puts a great amount of stress on you. You feel obligated. You are forced to be creative, even when in reality you are not. You take images, you write, you give your best, and for stretches of weeks you get no reaction at all. You certainly ask yourself, is it worth it?

But will I stop? Gosh, no!! This is only the half of it, and then probably not even a tenth. When you look at my SmugMug galleries (click at the image and you're there), then you see that I have used a five digit scheme for numbering, i.e. for this Image of the Day the caption in my SmugMug gallery is "00500 - The Half Of It, Dearie". Quite some headroom, huh?

Originally I wanted something with a number 500 in today's image, but as much as I looked, I couldn't find anything, thus I chose this piece of chrome. In a recent comment Ted called me "the master of the complex metallic reflections", so this is again for Ted Byrne. Cheers!

The Song of the Day is "The Half Of It Dearie Blues" by Ella Fitzgerald. It's from her Gershwin Songbook, and I could recommend that, but you really should have "The Complete Ella Fitzgerald Song Books".