The weekend is over and I am on the train back to Vienna. I had intended to go swimming, but we’ve had rain most of the two days, and it was much too cold as well.
On Saturday, after we had a consultation with my father in Klagenfurt about the plans for the new apartment in Villach, we drove back and, far in the west, saw sunlight. I didn’t have any images yet, so we decided to try our luck and drive into the south-western valley of Carinthia, a place called Gailtal.
It was already past 6 pm and you know the problem: What should you do, drive fast in the hope to finally reach a last sunny spot, or drive slow, admit that you chase a chimera and be content with whatever you may spot along the way?
We decided to chase the light, and really, shortly after Hermagor we made it 🙂
This image is interesting, because I was standing much lower than the church, and normally I would have had to use the image without proper correction of perspective, or else I would have lost much of of it, especially in the lower part. After some experimenting I decided to do it optically incorrect, while retaining almost all of the original composition.
I did this by selecting the upper two thirds of the image, just below the church, right through the hedges, copying that to a new layer. Using “Edit / Transform / Perspective” I grabbed the right upper corner, dragged it to the right, and thus by stretching the image along the upper edge, I corrected the strongly converging lines. Now the verticals were OK, but the building looked compressed, and so I stretched the whole part vertically until the building looked right. I lost the upper part of the sky, but there was no horizontal compression in the lower part of the image, and consequently I didn’t have to crop from the sides.
You can’t do that in general, at least not if straight lines run across the border between the two parts of the image. If you look carefully, you can see a bend in a line of the shack between the wood and the church, but it is really minor, and everything else is in the hedges, where there are no straight lines at all. You can’t use any soft transition, because the two parts of the image only line up along the lower edge, along the cut. It either works or it does not. Here it did.
The Song of the Day is “Chasing The Light” from the 1989 album “Leningrad Cowboys Go America”. Hear it on YouTube.