2093 - There And Back Again

After a long break here’s the post for Wednesday at last. I’d been held up by too many images and no clear idea how to use them.

In the recent past I have tended to avoid those kitchen sink posts, because they tend to bury everything but the Image of the Day. Instead I’ve created separate posts, more than one for a day. It helps focusing the post, makes writing easier for me, though I think the two times I did it, nobody really cared. This time it’s back to the kitchen sink, for no other reason than that I’m lazy 🙂

In the two images at the beginning I was struck by symmetry. It’s not perfect symmetry, but it is a kind of symmetry that we encounter very often and ignore almost always. I kinda like it.

This would have been it (and in fact the Image of the Day is my favorite image in this post), had I not been in Salzburg for a concert of Hubert von Goisern. Hubert is one of the most interesting Austrian musicians, mixing traditional Austrian music with all kinds of world music and a heavy dose of American style Rock and Blues. He sings Upper Austrian dialect, so you may have trouble understanding him, even if you speak German, but you may still like his music. In this video you’ll at least recognize the melody 🙂

These images are not good examples of concert photography. I really should have brought the Sigma 150/2.8, this would have given me two stops over the Olympus 40-150, reducing ISO to 1600. The two images with Hubert and the bassist were taken with the 45/1.8 wide open and they are extremely tight crops.

On the other hand, using the big and heavy 150/2.8 would have been much less convenient and the camera would have been less easy to keep under the rain coat during the occasional showers 🙂

The concert ended too late to return to Vienna the same day, thus I had time for a night stroll through Salzburg.

Salzburg is a city on the edge of the Alps, a flat space with a river running between two big rocks, with steep mountains rising just behind. As long as you avoid the “rocks” (one of them with the famous fortress Hohensalzburg) and the mountains, the city itself is a fine place for casual cycling, and therefore I found a rich hunting ground.

Hubert von Goisern’s latest album is “Entwederundoder” (“Eitherandor”). The song that gave its name to the current tour is “Brenna tuats guat” (“But it burns well”), a song about how everybody knows that money does not grow on the meadows, but that it burns well, just as the food that we burn for fuel, while elsewhere people die of hunger. Here’s the official video. That’s also the lineup of the current tour.