OK, the rain stopped, in mid-afternoon I took the car, drove into the next forest, looked for a way, some nice lines, anything that would possibly work with an ultra-wide, and here is the result.
I have used a polarizer, set the minimum shutter speed for Auto ISO to 1/8s, and then I took a series of images in this place.
I tried to get as low as possible, in order to use the cracks of the asphalt as foreground, I tried to keep any high-contrast sky out of view, and because the resulting image was too much tilted even for my taste, I have warped and twisted it around in Photoshop until it would fit 🙂
Today is summer solstice, and as bad as the day was in between, it ended in the most magnificent sundown I have ever seen in my life. Imagine a clear, bright sun coming in very low. Above a dark cloud cover. A sunlit rural church, behind it the most impossible storm clouds, dark violet with mixed in patches of deep orange. Honestly, in Photoshop I would not dare to do that. I would pull the trigger, I would tone it down, because no sky will ever look like that and … Damn, it did and I was on the train!!
Yup. That’s the reason why you get nothing but a forest road. Sorry for that 🙂
But there is another thing that I have learned and that I want to share. It’s nothing photographic, more philosophic, but I try it anyway.
Michael visited us today and confronted us with a hypothetical question. He had been to a discussion in Salzburg where the question arose, and the hypothetical situation was the following:
Imagine a trial for rape. The defender argues that the victim had invited the rapist with her provocative clothing. The judge is a muslim woman wearing a hijab. The prosecutor claims the judge to be biased.
Actually the situation is rather stupid and my solution would be, that as long as there is not a law that forbids wearing certain clothes while executing certain offices, there is no merit to the claim at all. The judge may indeed later be found to have been biased, but the same could be true for anyone, and everything beforehand is nothing but prejudice.
Michael argued in a different way. He says that we are a secular society, and that religious symbols, regardless of the actual religion, are incompatible with the function of a judge. Openly wearing a religious symbol is always a public embrace of a certain set of believes, and believes are by definition prejudices.
OK, that’s the setting. The interesting point now is, that Michael and I come from the very same position. Both of us agree that we live in a society that at least claims secularity, that a truly secular society is what we should strive for, and still we go different ways.
Michael’s idea of banning religious symbols in certain contexts where the bearer acts as a representative of the state, is more or less the French way. My own position is liberal, relaxed, probably libertarian, basically it’s “Judge people by their doings, not by what they wear, and you can’t judge them before they act”.
What I find so fascinating, and why I share this stupid scenario, is my sudden realization, that a philosophical position in no way determines your actions. Both ways can be argued and defended on good grounds, and both of us could claim the same reasons. Still we would execute either tolerance or force, trying to defend the same position.
That’s it. No big image, no big insight, only the conclusion that things can get pretty complicated when you begin to look into the details 🙂
The Song of the Day is probably a little less song-like than some may expect. It’s “Three Ways to One” from Ornette Coleman’s 1997 album “Colors: Live from Leipzig”. Yes, that’s the guy whose album “Free Jazz” gave name to the whole genre. I personally know some people who strictly refuse to call that music, but on the other hand, I keep getting the same reaction to Schönberg as well 🙂
Deezer has the album for you to hear. Give it a try, relax, go with the flow, and you may even find yourself tapping, maybe even itching to move to it 🙂