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 🙂