650 - True Love Tends to Forget



These are images of yesterday, Thursday. As I have nothing for today yet and plenty of time at the moment (I’m currently on the train from Vienna to Carinthia, a four hours ride), I felt the temptation to use one of them for today. Well, I resisted. There is still time and I intend to get lucky 🙂

The Image of the Day was taken only seconds after I left my appartment, while still on the same floor. This is something I really believe in: One should never dismiss a subject on the ground that it has been used before. I had quite some Images of the Day made in this very staircase, and while I would not spend an hour shooting images here, a few every few days tend to be fun and the routine is productive as well.

The umbrella has not been arranged by me, it was simply there, someone seems to have forgotten it. As always when I have a new lens, I currently use the Nikon 85/1.8 almost exclusively, and as always with fast primes, I mostly play with shallow depth of field.

This image surprised me quite a lot in post-processing. The original out of the camera was dark and moody, but when I clicked “Auto” in Adobe Camera RAW, I found that I liked this light look much better. A comment on SmugMug, my photo hosting site, described this as “a very lovely shot”, and indeed there is something serene in this shot that I did not anticipate originally. Well, some people may be disturbed when their images begin to acquire unintended sense, but I am a great believer in the process of discovery. I think it’s honest. I believe that much of what we see as coherent in the work of other artists is only what has been arranged that way.

Let me conclude with two more images, the first one being a morning image as well. This is another product of Puch, the Austrian manufacturer of bicycles, motorcycles and cars, that I have already written about or its products shown more than once. Just like the car recently, these scooters were old-fashioned in the Seventies, but I remember having seen a lot of them in my youth, all of them in the posession of old men.

The last image is from the afternoon. This is a park along the street where I work, and there are always flowers. I tried to get a nice distribution of verticals and asense of depth. Nothing special, but I like it.

The Song of the Day, “True Love Tends to Forget”, is from Bob Dylan’s 1978 album “Street Legal”. Funnily enough this was the first Dylan album that I bought. Hear the Song on YouTube.


There are 2 comments

Marti   (2008-07-26)

Hello Andreas,

Yes, this is a very lovely shot. It evokes feelings in me of "home at last", "safety from the storm" -- feelings along those lines.

When I was first out of university, I worked in Washington DC for a year. A very small effeciency apartment, at 14th and Rhode Island, was my home there. Although small and without a view, it was cozy and "home". Your umbrella image in your building reminds me so much of my small little apartment and it's shelter from the rainy, steamy summer days in Washington. A very lovely feeling and one that is nice to remember.

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Andreas   (2008-07-27)

Marti,

Yes, that's the awesome power of photography and one of the reasons why I am so much drawn to it: It allows us to take something ordinary out of its context, open it up to all kinds of associations, and the good thing is, everybody can have their own. For me it was mostly the umbrella and the notion that it had most probably been forgotten, for you it may be the architecture, the pattern in the tiles or whatever, that triggers a feeling of "home". Funny, huhh??

Thanks for being here.

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