937 - Sweet The Sting

It is Sunday afternoon, I am still processing images of Thursday.

Yesterday I was shopping most of the day, then I was swimming for the first time this year. The lake may have about 17 degrees Celsius, the water feels definitely warmer than it was when I was there at the end of September.

In the evening I was held up, because the populist madness of censoring the Internet (allegedly for fighting child pornography only) has swapped over from Germany to Austria. I have spent more than two hours writing a long mail to one politician, Gottfried Hirz of Upper Austria’s Green party, whom I absolutely would not have expected to vote for that craze. I took great lengths to explain the situation, we’ll see what answer I get.

But anyway, let this be not about censorship, let it be about SoFoBoMo.

I’m pretty sick of playing catch up and always being three days behind. You know, when I am photographing, I always think a lot. I think about things that I could write, I have inner monologues about what I see, what I shoot, why I shoot it, why I shoot it this way, what I want to tell you, and when I get home, I forget all that, because what I find and what I need to write about, are the images of three days back. This is frustrating.

Thus, the new method is, that I won’t try to keep up the illusion that text and images were from the same day. If I need to talk about something that happened at the day that I write the post, I’ll simply do so.

Back to the images. I could really have gone on processing images of Thursday, there are at least four contenders left, but for now it’s enough.

All these images were shot with another favorite lens of mine, the Sigma 50/1.4. The Image of the Day is not exactly what I’d call a snapshot, but it was the only way to react to a certain situation. The machine moved, the train moved, seeing, composing, shooting, that was all within one second - and now I greatly like this cruel instrument.

The Bicycles? Well, maybe more my dream than anyone else’s, although Ove has similar obsessions 🙂

The graffiti images maybe need some explanation. The second one would have been the Image of the Day, but unfortunately I do not own the Elton John album “Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only the Piano Player”. If I did, I would have named this image (and the whole post) “Crocodile Rock”.

The third graffiti image is definitely an “Urban Dream”, although it presents the old problem of language. How do you cope with an image that contains text, written in a language that 90% of your audience won’t understand?

I have no ready solution but to explain it, and that may well lose the point. Anyway, the text means “Less work, higher wages, self-determination of workers”, a revolutionary, leftist parole, that looks so incredibly out-fashioned on this wall. It is not by accident that this is the wall of a house that belongs (or belonged) to our communist party. Communist romantics, in a way 🙂

The next image is more a puzzle than a dream. It contains a typical element of my photography, the bicycle, and then some signs seen from behind, and a poster spelling “Gesucht” or “Wanted”. I like this image. It is dense. It is opaque. It tries to keep you out. It breaks rules. I love it.

The last image is the only one that I didn’t process at all. It’s the JPEG right out of the camera. It’s colors are true to what I remember, but now that I see it, I might as well have pushed saturation a tad.

This also brings up the question if (or if not) these images are the final renditions that will go into the book. Honestly, like so much these days, I don’t know. Last year’s “Tscheppaschlucht” was really easy. Just shoot a bunch of images in a given sequence within a short time, all in one place, all under very similar lighting conditions, all within a small range of subjects, and then process it to a common look. Tedious but simple.

This time it can be everything. I may find a meaningful sequence of subjects and styles, I may have to re-work many of the images into a “look”, or maybe I can bind it with text. I have no idea, or rather, I do have ideas, many of them, but I don’t know yet which of them may apply.

The Song of the Day is “Sweet The Sting” from the 2005 Tori Amos album “The Beekeeper”. Hear it live on YouTube.