127 - Klagenfurt, Where I was Born

I was born in Klagenfurt in 1964. Actually you can even see the hospital where it happened. It is the biggest building on the right side of the street, about a third from the top. I’ve been living in Klagenfurt, or actually its northern outskirts, until I was 19. It is a nice little town of about 90,000 people, capital of Carinthia, Austria’s most southern province, situated at the eastern end of Wörthersee, Carinthia’s most prominent lake. This view is from Kreuzbergl, through Radetzkystraße, right into the center.

Today, when I got out for photographing, the sun was already setting. I would have been right in time for dusk at Wörthersee, which is always a safe bet, but this time I thought I would try the view from Kreuzbergl, a hill in western Klagenfurt and its most expensive neighborhood, over the center, towards the eastern sunset. I took the image with the Nikon 18-200 at f8 and 36mm from the tripod. This is a combination of two exposures, one for the sky, one for the foreground, blended together with a gradient mask.

The story of the day is from The New York Times, and it is something that makes me very sad. A recent children’s book, “The Higher Power of Lucky” by Susan Patron, this year’s winner of the Newbery Medal, contains the word “scrotum” and is therefore banned from school libraries.

We live in a world of hypocrites, we always did, but it gets worse. I don’t know why, but it does. It seems like we will look back at the early 1970s as the golden time of free thought.

And this marks another novelty: I’ll introduce the Song of the Day, which in the light of this sad story has to be Nick Cave’s “God is in the House” from his stellar 2001 album “No More Shall We Part”. If you don’t have it, go out and buy it. And don’t forget to get “Abattoir Blues / Lyre of Orpheus” as well. They are really so good.