615 - The Light

Funny image, huhh?? Well, I like the effect. This involved some weird tricks like overlaying a layer that was generated by "Filter / Stylize / Find Edges", major pushes in the color department and a lot more. I was inspired to do this for two reasons: the reflection patterns in the tiles looked interesting and, more important, the highlights looked completely burnt out. I just had a discussion with Paul Lester about RAW vs JPEG, and if ever an image was a good example for why I shoot RAW, this is it.

Well, I've done all sorts of violent things to this image, don't get distracted by the graphic syle. The point is, when you look at the lower right corner, there is nothing but white. Everything is clipped and gone. In RAW it took me just an exposure correction of -2.5EV, the details were back and the image was back in the game. But of course, Paul and I do completely different things to our images, and with the kind of shooting he does and his gentle style of post-processing, he won't ever stress an image like I do here. In the end it's quite simple: do what you need and what's enough to reach your goals.

The Song of the Day is "The Light" from the Stranglers album "Coup de Grace". Hear it on YouTube. Judging from the reviews on Amazon, "real" fans seem to dislike this album passionately. Well, I don't :)

602 - The Day That Jackie Jumped The Jail

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

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

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

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.

550 - Beautiful Surprise

It must be spring, I have no other explanation. I am not a typical macro shooter, but now, out of four pictures in a row, we have three macros, and don't forget that on Sunday we had that sun drenched yellow moss as well.

This morning it was sunny, but a little bit windy and not too warm. Well, I was not bothered by having to wear something over my T-shirt, but it is amazing how much movement you have in everything that grows. Though the flowers and the blossoms on the trees and shrubs don't really sway in the wind (it was not that windy), you see sort of a fast micro-movement. The nearer you get, the more everything moves.

Normally I like to set my shutter speed as low as it gets. This can be very low with wide angles or my stabilized 18-200 (1/30s on the long end is quite common, 1/60s if I have a shaky day), or more in line with the usual recommendation of one over the effective focal length. For the Sigma 70/2.8 Macro that I am again back to, I use 1/100s, which perfectly fits the effective length of 105mm. This lens is so incredibly sharp, I really don't want to lose anything due to motion blur.

Guess what, it did not suffice today. I had to go to 1/200s, Auto ISO put me at ISO 800, and that was only at f4. Of course I could have used my macro flash, but of course it is in Carinthia, and of course I wouldn't have used it on my way to work anyway. I don't like to scare off people with something that looks like a laser gun.

Macro shooting is always interesting, because you never know what you get. In this case I was quite surprised by the outcome. These are really tiny yellow blossoms on a brownish brush and I had not much hope of getting anything special. Well, automatic white balance was completely fooled by the colors. These images were taken on a sunny day, in the shade on the underside of a brush, from memory I'd suggest 5500K would be about correct, the camera missed that big time and selected 3850K. No problem, that's what RAW is for, right? Right, only that I actually liked what I got. In fact I liked it so much more than the boring reality, that I decided to keep it that cool. Now here we are. In macro shooting there's always a surprise.

The Song of the Day, "Beautiful Surprise" is from India Arie's 2002 second album "Voyage to India". Hear it on YouTube.

548 - Part Of The Machine

Today I have two yellow images, one a macro shot of some moss in our garden, the other a part of a machine that is used for constructing or repairing railway tracks. You know those machines that are train wagons themselves, yellow and black like a wasp, sprinkled with red details and warning and information signs of all sorts, signs that are completely incomprehensibe to the uninitiated.

The Song of the Day is "Part Of The Machine" from the 1987 Jethro Tull album "Crest Of A Knave".

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.

525 - Too Much Of Nothing

This is nothing. No meaning, no message, no anything, just some geometry, much color and at best an example for what I explore at the moment. I have no better image for Friday.

The Song of the Day is "Too Much Of Nothing" from "The Basement Tapes" by Bob Dylan & The Band.

522 - War No More, War No More

Weather stays unpredictable. In the morning I left home under blue sky and sunshine, ready to shoot the marvels that would unfold on my way to work, but after only 500 meters I had to bury my plans in falling snow. Slightly fed up I took the tram.

Most of the day was sunny while I was at work, and sure enough the sun vanished as soon as I went home. Oh well!

This image was taken through a forsythia shrub. This is basically the same technique of conjuring up color as yesterday, and if the weather stays the same, you may get more of that. I'm sure I can get some nice green, but blue will probably be a challenge :)

The image is dedicated to the victims of suppression in Tibet, and the Song of the Day is "Wartime Prayer" from Clarence Bucaro's 2004 album "Sense of Light". No lyrics, no video.