Today’s image is technically quite the same as yesterday’s. Small wonder, I processed them in the same session on the train. Again the image was shot with the Lensbaby, and this time I have used two images from a series of eight. In the morning I saw this dog waiting in front of a bakery. He was so cute and at the same time seemed so helpless, I simply had to take some images. Finally none of them was particularly good, thus I combined two of them with different areas of relative sharpness, and then I did the edge finding game again, once more with two layers, one of them for rough contours, one for texture.
The Song of the Day is “How Come My Dog Don’t Bark When You Come Around” from Dr. John’s 1992 album “Goin’ Back to New Orleans“. Hear it sung live on YouTube. Nice performance.
The Good Thing: I go to sleep now. The Bad Thing: I have to get up in less than three hours. Oh my!
This is the image of yesterday, Monday. I’m treading a bit on Bill Birch‘s turf here. The image was shot at night and again with the Lensbaby. What the camera saw is pretty noisy, and worse, it’s flat and not terribly sharp. Hey, have you ever tried focusing a Lensbaby at f2.0 in darkness while bending it? Good luck!
What I did in post-processing, was a variant of the technique for inventing detail that I’ve recently described, only this time I used two layers with edges, a rough one derived from the “Glowing Edges” filter and the usual one from “Find Edges”. The rough one is applied in “Soft Light”, the fine one in “Multiply” mode, both with reduced opacity, and there is a blur involved as well.
I’m writing this as I’m on the train, on my way from Vienna to Carinthia. I carry one last image for the show with me, along with more paper for matting. Tomorrow evening I need to hang the images, so there is still much to do and I’m incredibly tired. Hmm … I guess I won’t work till late, but instead rise very early 
The Song of the Day is of course “The Long And Winding Road” from the 1970 Beatles album “Let It Be“. You know it anyway, but hear it on YouTube.
I’m still preparing the images for my show on Thursday. This is REAL work! Matting and framing six images took me hours, and there are still 18 more to go. On the other hand, there is hardly anything that beats a real print. I have printed Super B format (the maximum my printer will do) and left a small white border around the image. On that border I title and sign the image. Then I use a passepartout in one of three colors, dark red, sunflower yellow and medium gray, and on the passepartout I title and sign again, as the other writing is now covered. The art is, to cut the window as precisely as possible, in order to not obscure the image but completly cover the white border. It’s work. Real work. And it looks damn good
Weather today was like yesterday, i.e. rainy, but I didn’t have time to take photos anyway. I took some halfhearted Lensbaby shots of the rainy landscape down from our garden, but I guess I spare you these.
The Image of the Day is from a shop that I passed by after having arrived in Vienna. Still the Lensbaby, still at f2.0, still twisting like mad
The Song of the Day is “Voodoo” from Chris Isaak’s 1985 debut album “Silvertone“.
We had snow in the night and then rain. When I drove into town it was just the right mixture for disaster, and though I could avoid any trouble, two people have died on the streets that morning.
I had to buy paper for passepartouts, a metal ruler, a sharp knife, all for the show next week. Did I mention that I have an exhibition in a café in Villach, starting next Thursday? Well, I have printed 24 images last Tuesday, and now I only need to frame them. A lot of work, but what did I do? I slept the whole afternoon, and when I woke up I had to create an image.
This is the Lensbaby again, but this time with a macro lens attached. Post-processing was done in Photoshop.
The Song of the Day is “La vida es rosa”, Ana Salazar’s 2005 Flamenco rendition of Edith Piaf’s unforgettable “La vie en rose”. It’s from the album “Un Himno Al Amor“. Amazon’s German division has a sound sample.
I’m sorry, I’m a bit late. This is the image of yesterday, Friday. I began taking images on the train from Vienna, while waiting for its departure, but they did not turn out too well. This one is from a series that I shot after having arrived in Velden, Carinthia. It’s a pillar on the terrace of a café, just opposite of Velden’s casino. They have still Christmas decorations on, and the small point lights are a good match for the Lensbaby’s distortions.
It’s been a long time since I last used the Lensbaby. The Lensbaby is a very simple 50/2.0, but instead of a normal lens barrel, it has a flexible tube. Additionally the lens has very strong natural distortions, throwing everything but the center out of focus. That’s what we call the “sweet spot”. By bending the lens you can move the sweet spot, but it’s not only that. The more you bend the lens, the more you increase the distortions. A characteristic of the Lensbaby is the egg-shaped rendition of out-of-focus point lights, and the art now is, to bend the lens in a way that these highlights create meaningful or aesthetic patterns.
In this case I have tried to let shadows point into the corners, have a stone there on the lower right, and let the lights point into the last corner. This is the image right out of the camera. 1/30s at ISO 1000.
The Song of the Day is “Baby, Why not” from Marcia Ball’s 2003 album “So Many Rivers“.
We have been here. This is the church of Maria Saal, and you’ve seen it in “29 – At the Church“.
This time we were there for a concert. Again the Trigonale festival, and today The Hilliard Ensemble sang Guillaume De Machaut’s “Messe de Notre Dame“, one of the best known masterpieces of the 14th century Ars Nova, a music style that readily used the new possibilities of musical notation. For the first time it was possible to write down rhythm. At the same time this is the earliest surviving example of a full mass where we know the composer.
Hearing Ars Nova may be an interesting experience for the uninitiated, because this is not about musical harmony. It’s serial music and similar techniques can be found 600 years later in our Minimal Music, e.g. in the works of Steve Reich and Terry Riley.
As this mass is too short to fill a whole concert evening, they interspersed the parts with motets also by Machaut. For sound samples see here, but neither the samples of the mass nor those of the motets can give a real impression of this music. 14th century composers simply did not yet see the need to show off within the first 30 seconds
Thank Goodness, in contrast to the 1993 record that I’ve linked to, they have changed their Latin from French style to German/English style. I really can’t stand French style Latin. It always sounds like a bad parody on homosexuals.
You expected a Song of the Day? Well, take any track of these two CDs, and why not the Gloria?
Friday at noon I went to the nearby Rathauspark to enjoy the warm weather and make some photos. There is a small fountain meant for drinking that often catches my eye. In its small basin, cast of brass and only slightly more than a foot in diameter, I found this leaf.
The Song of the Day is “Fallen Leaves” (the only place I found the lyrics was on Simon Telford’s blog, scroll all way down) from Norma Waterson’s fantastic album “The Very Thought of You“. For a sound sample I have to direct you to Amazon in Germany. They have it readily available as import from Canada, Amazon.ca has it only via marketplace dealers, and Amazon in the US does not have it at all. Isn’t globalization a wonderful thing
The Lensbaby is great for abstracting parts of an image that would look busy with an ordinary lens. You simply bend the lens and throw these parts out of focus. At least that’s what one normally does, but nobody says that you have to stop at that. What about bending the lens so much that everything is wildly distorted and more or less out of focus? What about using the linear distortions and aligning them with lines of strong contrast in the scene?
That’s what happened here. This is Trautsongasse, a short street in Vienna’s 8th district that is frequently used as location in movies. Well, on Thursday I was out to lunch and when returning I shot this image. I was mainly interested in using and accentuating the strong contrasting lines in the center. Bending the lens so strongly, made the whole scene look somehow liquid, like melting, and this is another thing that fits, because it was an unusually hot day.
The Song of the Day is “In Liquid Days” from Philip Glass’ 1986 album “Songs from Liquid Days“, a collaboration with Laurie Anderson, David Byrne, Paul Simon, Suzanne Vega, the Kronos Quartet, Linda Ronstadt and others. And not only that, it’s even good
I’m a day back again and I’m not sure if I can catch up today. It’s late and I should rather go to sleep
This image is from yesterday. I was out for a noon session, it was a bright, sunny day and I used the Lensbaby for a change.
There’s not much more to tell, only that I surprisingly had a hard time finding a Song of the Day. I admit, I have settled with the rather obvious: “Sing Joy Spring” by the Manhattan Transfer from their 1985 album “Vocalese“. The lyrics are by the master of vocalese himself, Jon Hendricks of “Lambert, Hendricks & Ross” fame.
This is part of the small, knee-high fence around Vienna’s historic museums. I’ve treated it in a way similar to “118 – Bloody Dangerous“, i.e. turning rust into blood. It reminds me of an épée, D’Artagnan style, that and the two leaves made for the Romance in the title. The idea somehow fascinates me, so this may well turn into a series.
The idea to keep the Photoshop files has turned out quite successful. It’s 1.4GB in 5 days, but with the archiving scheme I mentioned, it does not bother me. It looks like I’ll get roughly two or sometimes three weeks worth of work onto one archival DVD, and this means I’ll keep between two and six weeks on disc. That’s OK.
Without much of searching I’ll let the Guardian have the Story of the Day. They report that, according to Unicef, the UK is the “worst place to be a child“, at least in a lineup of 21 highly developed states. This worries me a lot, because I can remember how shocked I was, when I first came to London in 1988 or so, and I saw homeless people sleeping in the entrances of shops. OK, this was Margaret‘s time, but when it comes to the disruption of civil solidarity by the neo-liberalist notion that the state has to keep out of, well, basically everything, and that public welfare is best left to the mega-corporations, the UK has been avant-garde in Europe. Today, seeing homeless people in our cities is not uncommon at all.
In the light of where this all originated, it’s quite ridiculous when Labour is attacked by the Conservatives. After all it’s their legacy that Labour has never managed to dispose of. But that’s how politics work. It’s all about hypocrisy, populism and the short memory of the public.
How do other nations? The bottom five are Portugal, Austria, Hungary, the US and the UK. Great. Let’s see how that features in Austria’s news.
By the way, the referendum in Portugal turned out as expected, i.e. pro-abortion in early pregnancy.
