After yesterday’s moody (“downright spooky” did Michael say) bicycle, we’re in for something more cheerful today, and that’s quite fitting, because today (for me it’s after midnight and therefore Friday 20th), yes today is Paul Lester’s birthday. Happy Birthday Paul!
Please head over to his blog and give him a cheer 🙂
I’m hopelessly behind with blog reading, and while I was at Paul’s site, I noticed that he already talks about SoFoBoMo ‘09, thus I took the detour and just registered. Paul Butzi’s experiment has matured and is a real institution now. There’s already a big crowd of people who have committed to do a Solo Photo Book in a Month. If you’ve always thought creating a photo book is too hard, why don’t you give it a try? You’ll hardly find a more supportive crowd.
Today’s image is of some left-over Christmas decoration in Vienna’s Neubaugasse. I let my inspiration run wild, and this is what I got after 21 Photoshop layers. Guess I like it, especially compared to what the camera saw 🙂
In fact I like it so much, I will also submit it to Fine Art Photoblog. Stylistically it is in a line with last year’s “629 - Electric Ladyland V”, also making use of distorted edge layers, just as I explained in my tutorial “683 - Welcome To The Republic”.
For the Song of the Day I had a lot of choices. These lights reminded me of moons, and “moon” is a pretty frequent word in song titles. Add to that, that I’ve just today ripped my three recordings of Arnold Schoenberg’s “Pierrot Lunaire” and you see my dilemma. I like Schoenberg’s music, and interestingly enough I love to hear it while programming. Nobody understands that, but it works well for me 🙂
Schoenberg actually was an afterthought. I already had settled with “Mad, Mad Moonlight” by Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel, the image was with that title at SmugMug, had been seen by a few people, and I did not want to change the title any more. As for Cockney Rebel, well, they were never great in the US, but today their original albums are hard to get even in Europe. The collection that I have is not available any more. Your best bet will be the three CDs of “Cockney Rebel: A Steve Harley Anthology”. Hear it on YouTube.