941 - Top Of The City

It’s Thursday night, this is the entry for Monday. Private occupations and an inescapable, deep longing for sleep have caused this bad delay 🙂

Let’s see what we have. Monday was a sunny day. I could carry on where I stopped last week.

Of course dreams come in very different flavors. Some people dream of being rich, being on top, and for some, the dreams are much more basic.

For instance there is the dream of a bed. Do you know that those new, ugly benches in Vienna were especially designed to make it impossible for people to sleep on? How pervert is that? A society spends money on public furniture, and then cripples that furniture to a point where it hardly does its job, only to keep “social problems” out of sight?

Sure, we have a problem with beggars coming from eastern countries, but they come from the same countries where they had paid jobs under communist rule (with low incomes and still not much to buy, yes, indeed), and now those countries had the most radical economic transformation ever, and they had it, financed by our banks, directed by our consultants, forced by convergence criteria dictated by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund.

How surprising is it that some of those people end up here, washed to our shores, begging on our streets, violating our sense of beauty and order?

Both images were shot in the morning, and here is the next nuisance. I wish I could spare Ted the sight, but here’s again some of that other aesthetic evil of our times. Urgh! Graffiti!! Well, I just couldn’t resist the side light combined with the compression of the Nikon 70-300 VR.

All the other images, including the Image of the Day, are again about rooftops, balconies and the dream of being near the sky.

It’s interesting: I make a lot of these images, always made them, drew them in my youth, long, long before there ever were digital cameras, but I publish them rarely. It’s probably just because they are so frequent in my work. Still, there must be a reason why the recur.

Janine recently asked for more of my “Electric Ladyland” series. I didn’t want to use it as Image of the Day, but here it is: “Electric Ladyland IX” 🙂

The electric wiring of our cityscapes and landscapes is a much underrepresented subject, especially when you put it in proportion with how much we photographers are normally annoyed by it. The solution is: don’t fight it, use it 🙂

So far, including these Monday images, I have processed 45 images out of 86 candidates for my SoFoBoMo project “Urban Dreams”. Some of them may not make it into the book, but the majority could and I would have no problem finding 35 images. I really could stop now, but of course I won’t.

I plan to produce a book template this weekend though. Basically an empty layout that I can use to try different sequences of images.

I won’t do anything fancy. The layout will be similar to last year’s, only this time I may even end up using blank left pages with an image title and very little if any text, and then on the right page the image. That’s about what Mark Hobson proposed in his series about POD photo books. Greatly recommended reading for everybody dabbling in SoFoBoMo.

Well, in fact everything on Mark’s site is great. At the moment I neglect reading other people’s blogs badly (sorry everybody), and Mark’s is always rewarding, not only for his imagery that I admire, but also for his witty and intelligent writing that never even tries to avoid controversy 🙂

The Song of the Day, “Top Of The City”, is from Kate Bush’s 1993 album “The Red Shoes”, a much underrated album, but for me her best work to date. YouTube has the video. And while you are at it, have a look at another masterwork and my favorite piece from this album: