469 - Just Can't Last



What is it that makes photography in a city so much easier than in the country? For me it’s always a struggle with landscapes. In Vienna I can go out at any time of the day and pull a rabbit out of a hat, even if the rabbit did not exist before and the hat is not even there, but here I am much more bound by the cycle of light. Yesterday I was extremely late, in fact I had only about 20 precious minutes before the light was gone. This first image was taken only some meters up the way from where I took “468 - Wild Wood”. This time I had the urge to take my current landscape strategy to extremes. I used the Sigma 150/2.8 wide open, relishing the enormously short DOF. I’ll return to this very place today, to repeat an image that I’ve tried yesterday but have cut too tight to be usable.

The next one was taken some minutes later along the street towards Klagenfurt. We had this lookout before, this time it was during the last seconds of fading sunshine.

Driving that direction was useless now, so I turned around, because back in the upper parts of Ludmannsdorf I could still see some sun. That’s where the Image of the Day was taken. I made two versions, one at f8 and this one at f2.8, focused on the edge of the lawn where the sun still hit. From a purely artistic point of view the mole hills are slightly distracting, but on the other hand they give depth and I wouldn’t have been able to clone them all out anyway.

The Song of the Day is “Just Can’t Last” from Natalie Merchant’s 2001 album “Motherland”. On YouTube you can see a clip with the full song performed live on the “Late Night Show”.