803 - Till The End Of The Day

It’s the afternoon of December 25 by now. These are the images of yesterday. Quite a difference from my trip to the sea 🙂

I wanted a Christmas image, more or less cliché with snow and mountains and all that, thus I knew that I would drive up Mount Dobratsch again. Of course I didn’t know how it would turn out, if a sudden cloud would shroud me once there, thus when I saw this scene, a way into the sunny, slightly foggy winter landscape, I took a series of these as safety shots. This is one taken with the Sigma 50/1.4, some other used the Nikon 70-300 VR, but only in this shot did I have the person in such a perfect position. Only later I discovered a second person, lost in the fog.

Of course the image was awkwardly composed, thus I decided for a cinemascape crop. This was nothing planned like Aaron Hobson’s fantastic works, more an accident, but I didn’t want to throw the image away, less for its quality, but because it reminds me of a magic moment, even if it is not image enough to carry that over to you.

Once having something to fall back, I felt confident to take the risk and drive all the way up to the end of the street at 1732m, even though there would have been some nice and sunny lookouts on the way up.


I changed to my moon boots, took the tripod, less as camera support than as walking stick, and walked up the next hill from the car park, just in time to get some last sun.

More than usual I switched between lenses, mostly the Nikon 70-300 VR, that I used for these images of the far mountains, and the Sigma 10-20, my workhorse for winter landscapes on the mountain, yes I even switched to the Sigma 50/1.4 once for a few images of the eastern sunset.

These are the times when I am thankful for one of the major advances in camera technology in the last years, namely sensor cleaning. The more it seems absurd that the latest and greatest Nikon, the D3X, still has no sensor cleaning system. Pretty stupid, because Canon and Sony can do it with 100% viewfinders on full-frame sensors as well, why shouldn’t Nikon be able to do it. Seems like a lame excuse to me. On the other hand, that’s not my problem, it’s that of those people who shell out $8000 for a camera 🙂

I really stayed up there until the show was over. I could have gone on using the tripod for what is really its job, but at 5pm it was enough. I had to return for some major cooking, involving red cabbage, dumplings, cider, apples, thyme and a duck. Besides, Michael had announced to join for dinner 🙂

Without either risk or hesitation I drove down, and only 25 minutes after entering the car, I was back, ready for culinary action.

Post-processing yesterday’s images took me most of this day, light is already gone, I have no idea what I will shoot for today’s entry. We’ll see.

The Song of the Day is “Till The End Of The Day” by The Kinks. I have it on their current best-of collection “Kinks (The Ultimate Collection)”. Hear it on YouTube. Happy holidays to you all. I may or may not get back to you tonight 🙂