These are tools of my father. My father was a master carpenter and entrepreneur, though his business never got even mid-sized. In a way he was – and still is – always the working man.
It is years ago that I took this image. Just look at the file name or the URL: mid-August 2006! That’s before I began this blog.
I’m still here in Carinthia, beautiful autumn days outside, the trees in their most glorious colors, I confined to the apartment, sick of being sick. Well, not much longer. But of course I was not outside yesterday, thus the archive image.
For no particular reason I began looking for an image from the beginning, browsing my early D200 images in chronological order and … they suck. They really do. Most of them do. No that’s not really differentiating, most of my images still suck, but on any given day, I can be sure that I will have a workable image.
Not so then. Oh my! Not only did my images suck, I made so few of them! I didn’t even properly try to make them not suck.
I can best see it in framing. Today when I frame an image, I normally know what I do. I attempt a certain effect, and this is so pronounced, that even after a long time, even if I don’t remember the exact incident, I can immediately see why I framed the image as it is, I understand what I wanted to achieve, even when the image was ultimately a failure. They are my images and I understand my images.
It’s not that I don’t recognize my early images, sure I do, but so very often I recognize them through the locations. I know the places, I can remember many of the incidents, but what I don’t recognize is the style.
Style? Huh?? Bold word for someone denying having one!
Indeed. Uhhh … well … there’s not only black and white, there are shades in between. I am slowly accepting the idea of style being more than a marketing instrument. I am still convinced that much of what goes as “style” is nothing but self-inflicted artistic petrification, annihilation of creativity from fear of changing from a formula that has been found to sell.
There is a deeper meaning though. While the word style is commonly understood as a characteristic of a particular artist’s work, that can be recognized by the recipient, even without knowing the artist, i.e. understood as a distinguishable property of the work, there is merit in looking at style from the artist’s perspective. Here, style is not a result, it is a process, and ultimately it is a way of thinking, a way of analyzing the world. I may frequently change tools, change between color and b&w, change between realistic post-processing and Photoshop plugins like Alien Skin Snap Art, I may do that from one image to the next, may do it within one post and change back with the next, but I change my way of thinking, of analyzing the world, only very slowly, and only due to an ever ongoing learning process.
This is what I mean when I say I don’t recognize my style in these old images. When I see them, frankly, I have no idea what I thought then. There is not much continuity with what I do now. The images could as well have been taken by someone else.
It’s pretty interesting to see how it all began and where the roots are of how I work today. I have not gone back to the early 5 megapixal Kodak images, I guess I should view them systematically as well, but I guess it won’t make much of a difference. What finally made a difference, was when I bought my second SLR lens.
My first lens was a Nikon 18-200 VR, and when I bought the D200, this long range was actually a step back from the even longer range of the Kodak. I was just used to zooming and to the universal availability of all focal lengths.
My second lens was a Sigma 30/1.4, my first prime, and though I can’t remember why exactly I bought a prime at all, I suppose it was the “myth of primes”, it immediately made a difference. Constricted to a frame of a certain size, I began to compose. Not being able to zoom, made me work harder, think deeper, and from that time on I see images that I can identify with. These are images that I have put thoughts into, and the ways of those thoughts are still traceable for me.
Now, what can be learned of all that? Two things:
Productivity may not be the only key to improvement, but it helps a lot. My productivity increased tremendously, when I began to publish a daily photoblog. If you want to get better, there is no better thing than practice, and the rigid discipline of a daily blog is keeping you practicing more than you otherwise would. It’s not as intense as doing it as a job, but it leaves you more freedom to explore.
The second thing is: the “myth of primes” exists for a reason. Restrictions make you work harder, and that improves your work as well.
The Song of the Day is “The Working Man” from the 1968 self-titled Creedence Clearwater Revival debut album. Hear it on YouTube.
On Wednesday we made a trip to the mountains south-east of Kraków, the region between the Beskides and the Tatra. In a journal from 2001 I have read about the region, that legions of its inhabitants had gone to America, especially to Chicago and Toronto, but that most of them never had given up their houses.
Indeed you see innumerable of the typical wooden houses being uninhabited. In fact it’s pretty easy to see why: Although the region is beautiful, there is not much work available, almost no industry. My impression is though, that in the meantime tourism has become a substantial pillar of the region’s economy, with Zakopane being the #1 winter sports center in Poland.
Personally I was not particularly impressed though. I am afraid I am spoiled by our own mountains.
Other than that, let me bring forth one gripe that I have with Poland: It’s the habit of the Polish to burn things. We have called this trip jokingly an olfactory trip into the past. Let me explain.
Sometime in my youth it became forbidden to burn junk and plant remains on the fields or in your garden. Neither I nor my parents had ever done such a thing, but it was pretty common among farmers, and I can vaguely remember the protest against the law. It worked well though, and here in Poland I can experience what it means to the environment to not have such a law: It’s crazy, you see fires everywhere, everybody seems to burn some hay, leaves or whatever, and the air is constantly – and pretty unnecessarily – filled with smoke that hangs over the landscape like fog. That’s rather unfortunate, because the pollution by the heavy industry seems to be well under control.
By the way, the final image shows the name of a village. Language is another problem here in Poland, if for nobody else, then at least for me. Normally when I read a name in German, English, Italian, Spanish and to a degree French, I know how to pronounce it, and when I see it, I can more or less immediately recognize it. Not so here. Polish spelling is in a certain way elaborate that makes recognition pretty hard for me, and in some cases, like with this village’s name, it takes some pondering before I even have an idea of how to pronounce it 
The Song of the Day is “Close To The Borderline” from Billy Joel’s 1980 album “Glass Houses”. Hear it on YouTube.
A very conventional photo with Nikon 18-200 VR and Lee ND grad filter for today. I took it on my way to the lake. I wanted to go swimming one more time. No idea what the weather in a week will be.
Btw, due to yesterday’s 20 hours downpour, the water level in the lake has risen by between 20 and 30cm to an all-year high. Pretty impressive. This has also cooled down the water to maybe 22 centigrades, which is very comfortable.
The rest of the day was shopping, packing for tomorrow’s trip to Kraków, Poland, and dining out with Michael, who visited us today.
I guess the next blog entry will be from Poland, at least if the hotel has WiFi as promised. If not, if you don’t hear from me for a week, then I am not dead, then I have a connection problem 
The Song of the Day is “Dog Days Are Over” by Florence + the Machine. The album “Lungs”, that I have linked to, won’t be out in the US before October 20. You can either wait or get the download. YouTube has a video, and here is the link to Amazon’s download version: Lungs
I’m on the train to Carinthia now, and I can say that it’s the first time that I am greatly thankful for a major delay of the train.
Due to deviations, the tramway line 18, the line that’s normally a pretty direct connection from my home to the train station, a 20 minutes affair, today took almost 40 minutes, and that after having been severely late. It was no problem though, because the train to Carinthia was late as well, thus I sit here and everything’s fine and dandy.
I had taken a day off and after a late breakfast I decided to go out and make some pictures, this time with a lens that had lain idle for maybe half a year, a lens that I have bought more than three years ago, along with the Nikon D200.
It’s the Nikon 18-200 VR, a lens that featured in over 220 blog posts since, but that had fallen more or less from grace. You know how much I love shallow DOF, you know how often I photograph in dark places, and of course these are all disciplines where my primes fare much better. On the other hand, where such a long zoom is unbeatable, is the ability to react to every subject.
What I did today was really casual, almost mindless photographing. No big effort, no restrictions, freely changing focal lengths from fairly wide angle to an equivalent of 300mm, and that’s without ever changing lenses. Relaxing, I tell you. It’s not for every day, but at times it feels really well. And not only that: There is quite a number of images that otherwise I would not have taken at all, and that’s regardless of how many primes I would have had with me.
And then? Well, then I called my camera dealer “Blende 7“, one of Vienna’s best camera shops, asked them if they had the Sigma 28/1.8 in stock, they had and, well, as I said, the 18-200 is a fine lens, but not for every day
The Song of the Day is “Liars’ Bar” from the 1996 Beautiful South album “Blue Is The Colour”. Dailymotion has the hilarious video.
This gets really painful now. My last real post was for Friday and today it’s already Tuesday evening. On the other hand, Ted Byrne just congratulated me for the delay. He says it makes me human. Oh well
It took me so long, because I am a tad short of time, that’s one thing, and the other is, that I wanted to tell a story.
Have you ever been bucked off by a mountain? Well, I have on Saturday, but let me tell the whole thing chronologically.
Just as I left the house, I saw two contrails crossing. I took some quick snaps and at a lesser day I would have been satisfied. Not on Saturday though. We had wonderful sunny weather in Carinthia, I wanted to make a longer trip, and we decided to go down to Slovenia.
When we arrived there, it turned out to be more hazy than at home, but the signs of Spring approaching were everywhere, and most of all it was warm with almost no snow. It must have had something about 15 centigrades, I guess. I even saw the first flowers of this year.
The contrail image was taken with the Nikon 24/2.8, but I soon turned to the zooms. It’s much more convenient and sometimes you really need more reach. An example is this image of a rural church standing in a field. I liked the juxtaposition with the power lines, and 300mm at f13 was just right.
The plan was to leave the highway at Kranj, head for Škofja Loka and then cross over to Italy at Nova Gorica. I have drawn a map in Google Maps of what became the final route. I hope you appreciate it, because it took me an insane amount of time to make it
Actually, drawing routes on maps in Google Maps is not hard at all if you know how to do it. First of all, you have to be logged in with your Google Account. I know that some people are very sensitive to Google’s omnipresence, so I’d like to mention that you may want to log out after the map is finished. If you don’t do so, all your subsequent Google searches will be done on behalf of your account.
On the other hand, if you don’t trust Google, you have to use some anonymizing proxy anyway, because your IP address is as good as an account for the purpose of tracking your activities. I am a GMail and Google Reader user, and although I don’t necessarily trust Google more than any other company, I am always logged in.
When you are logged in, you see a link “My Maps”, and there you can edit your own maps, add markers and draw lines, just as I did.
Now, the trick in drawing routes is, to always begin with a straight line between start and finish. Click once for the start, double-click for the finish. This line will have a handle at each end and one exactly in the middle. Next you drag the middle handle to a point on the map where you want to have it, preferably in the middle. Oops, two new handles have appeared, one in each half of the line, each of them in the middle of the straight segment. You can repeat that as often as you need: grab the middle handle and pull it to its proper place. Each time two new handles appear, one to each side of the point that you have just moved. It’s really easy, actually much easier to do than to describe. Just give it a try.
The image with the bridges and the image of the castle were made in Škofja Loka, a beautiful little town north-west of Slovenia’s capital Ljubljana. This is a wonderfully picturesque place and I am sure to return sometime this year for a more thorough visit.
Did I promise an adventure story? Ooops, yes, I did. Well, here’s the adventure. If you look at the map, you see a marker in the south, labeled “Here we gave up“. When you zoom in, you see that we tried to take a shortcut between Dolenja Trebuša and ?epovan, and that we gave up.
Well, what you don’t see is, that this small and winding road crosses a mountain ridge, that it is a narrow dirt road without guard rails, hardly wide enough that two cars can pass each other, and most importantly, you don’t see that for long stretches this road is literally hewn into a sheer cliff, steeply rising to the right and falling 50, 100 or 200 meters to the left.
The road is closed in winter, but, hey, this is no winter any more, is it? In truly adventurous spirit we tried it. After all, what can happen? Now, when after some time the first snow and ice appeared, and when I had to zig-zag to avoid the fallen rocks on the road, I began to change my mind.
I finally gave up when I reached a place where I could turn the car. I happily admit that I was maybe not exactly in panic, but very far from feeling even remotely safe. The problem was, that I had no idea how far from the ridge we were. From what we saw, it could have been only another 50 meters up, but 200 or more were equally likely. Today, from the satellite map, I know that we had almost made it, but from where we stood, there was no chance to tell.
In a situation like this, all kinds of thoughts come up: What if there is snow across the road? What if there are so many and so big rocks on the road that I can’t drive through or around? What if I have to drive hundreds of meters backwards? Is it stupid to turn around or is it folly to not to, as long as you can?
It was a little ironic that just a minute or two after we had turned around, another car came up the road. It was someone from the region, thus the road was obviously safe. I felt a little stupid, but didn’t turn around again to follow him. Even if I had wanted to, I would not have been able to for at least a kilometer. Somehow grudgingly, but not really unhappy, I drove back down to Dolenja Trebuša. I will try the road one more time in summer, but this time I simply had enough.
Actually I am not really sure where I took this image. In any case it was before our little adventure. I suppose it must have been in the vicinity of Cerkno, one of Slovenia’s winter sports centers.
The Image of the Day has been taken a little bit back down south, most likely not much north of Kobarid. I have used the Sigma 10-20mm. The contrast between the dark forest and the mountains reflecting the last rays of the sun was extreme. You can’t really see it in the image, but I was standing in front of an abyss that dropped down maybe about 100 meters. The river in the valley is called So?a, and for readers of Hemingway’s “A Farewell To Arms” it may be better known under its italian name Isonzo.
The novel plays further downriver, but this valley was the stage for some of the most fierce battles of WWI.
You may find the color of the water slightly exaggerated, but it’s actually quite correct. This river’s color is such an impossible cyan, it’s hard to believe even when you are there. I don’t know the exact reason for this extreme color, but it must be connected to some minerals in the water.
Hey, that’s it. The Song of the Day is again “River Deep, Mountain High“, but this time it’s the original by Tina Turner. Hmm … when last time I called the Deep Purple version the absolutely best version ever, I must admit that I had not heard Tina Turner in a long time. In fact, I did not have a single Tina Turner record in my collection. I have somewhat remedied that since, by at least putting her “Platinum Collection” into my Amazon shopping basket.
It’s hard to recommend a single version of this song, thus I may point you to an early version, most likely the classic Phil Spector production, to a recent version with orchestra from French television, and finally to a version that she performed with an all-star band recorded live in 1989 at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. You may spot Little Richard, Stevie Wonder and Paul Simon. The image quality is so bad, I could not recognize anybody else, but the performance is top notch. Or maybe 1996 live in Amsterdam? There are countless fantastic performances on YouTube, you could really get lost. Fact is, I did, and that’s another reason why you had to wait so long
Well, these two weeks in Carinthia were quite a roller coaster ride. Up the mountains, down to the sea, deep snow, no snow at all, and this time it’s the sea again.
These are images of Monday. For various reasons it took me a while to get them processed, but now it’s done. It’s almost 3:30am though, tomorrow (well, technically today, but I’d still like to get a cap of sleep) I’ll have to work again, thus we’ll keep this short and sweet 
Lots of new highways have been built in the last years. I remember, when I was a child, it took us 8 hours to get down to the Croatian isles, while Monday it were no more than 2:40 hours from Villach to the island of Krk.
Of all the Croatian islands, Krk is the most accessible, because it can be reached via a bridge from near Rijeka, and it is the most northern island in the Kvarner archipelago.
Incidentally this was my first “real” visit to Krk, though I had crossed it in July 2007 on my way home from Mali Losinj. The island is rather flat. I can’t find any exact information right now, but I honestly doubt that the highest point, the village Vrh (which means summit) is even 100 meters above sea level.
The first two images were taken in Punat, one of the biggest yacht harbors in the Adriatic, but otherwise not overly exciting. Opposite of Punat, in the middle of an almost circular bay, lies the small island of Košljun with its Franciscan monastery. As far as I know, it can be visited, but for lack of time I have not even tried.
The main town on Krk is called Krk as well. It has been a bishop’s see from at least the 6th century, it’s still partially walled, and the bishop’s palace is one of the biggest buildings. The image to the right is part of the town wall.
The town of Krk is really cat territory. Just sit down anywhere, and slowly but steadily one cat after the other will come and inspect you, beg for food or simply some affection. I can’t remember having seen so many of them in one place.
This image is particularly dear to me, because it needed a lot of affection as well, and after a good dose of post-processing, I guess it is quite OK. It was my first candidate for the Image of the Day, but finally the scooter won for its warm colors that so perfectly capture the feeling that I had, when I escaped from Carinthian frost to a sunny land by the sea, where it’s winter as well, but where the winter is 15 centigrades warmer 
Of course warmth is relative. When the sun went down, I took some last images and then left. I could have stayed longer, but due to its orientation, Krk is not a very good place for a sundown. In fact, not even the “summit” Vrh is, because even there the sun vanishes in the mountains of the western island of Cres. The sky did some pretty things though.
When I crossed the border between Croatia and Slovenia, the temperature had fallen below freezing, and there was again snow.
The Song of the Day is “Southbound Again” from the 1978 self-titled Dire Straits album. Hear it on YouTube.
That’s it for today. Did I say something of “short and sweet”? Oh well! As for the images of today, I’ll try to catch up tomorrow. Have a good night.
Tomorrow I have to get up early, thus I’ll keep this short. In the afternoon I made another trip down to Italy, just to find out that the shadow sides were white with frost. Still, it’s a much friendlier landscape than ours at the moment.
I was late as every day lately, and I lacked a real destination, but nevertheless it was nice to just drive around shoot an image here, an image there, until the sun went down.
The first two images were shot on a small road, well, road is almost a euphemism, along the river Ledra, approximately in the middle between Osoppo and San Daniele.
The last time I was there for the bridge, I had noticed that from where you drive up the highway, you have a fantastic view at the sundown. A deeply red sun had dipped below a very low horizon, because from that point and at that time of the year, the sun vanishes in the gap between two hills. The highway is the highest point there, and that had increased the effect. Of course you can’t stop on a highway, just to photograph the sundown, therefore I had missed the opportunity then.
Today I have stopped just before the driveway. I went some meters into the field, chose a tree to cover the direct sun and shot a series of images. The Image of the Day is what I liked best.
The Song of the Day is one more time from Paul Heaton. It’s “The World’s On Fire” from the 1987 Housemartins album “The People Who Grinned Themselves to Death”. Hear it on YouTube.
This is the blog entry for December 31, but when you read this, it has been New Year all over the world, thus let me begin with a heartfelt Happy New Year to you all!
This blog is now well in its third year and still running daily, with the images having been shot that very day. It’s a fantastic journey, exhilarating at times, exciting and very satisfying. Your feedback plays an important role in that. I remember times when I wrote practically into the void, and now I see a steady flow of comments. It makes all the difference. Thank you.
Of the things that I’ve learned this year, I’d like to point out only one, and that’s my new found appreciation of the square. This is completely due to the works of two great artists, Ted Byrne, who uses the square sparingly but with perfection (see only his retaliation on the bicycle front), and then of course the great master of the square himself, Mark Hobson, aka “The Landscapist“.
You have seen squares from me in the past, you will see some today, and the image in the following post will be a square as well. I know that, because it’s already post-processed and uploaded to SmugMug.
Speaking of SmugMug, along with the fact that this post has so many images, SmugMug is the second reason why I am late today. At the moment they have a hardly acceptable quality of service. There is one scheduled maintenance window per week, that means a short time, normally below half an hour in read-only mode, and I could easily live with that. The problem is, that over the last months they had lots of unscheduled outages.
I know, this is all for good reasons, SmugMug is growing into the video business (Vincent Laforet promoting them), has opened up to RAW storage, and these things have necessitated changes to the whole underlying infrastructure – but still: they are a premium service, they charge a premium, and as their customer I can expect that those things that I use, care about and pay for, work and are available.
Oh well. Sorry for the rant, but I simply have to say it: at the moment I would not recommend SmugMug to anyone doing business with their images. I’ll be the first to announce when the situation has stabilized.
Let’s forget the little annoyances of blogging life, let’s get to what this is all about: the images.
My plan for yesterday was to drive down to Italy again and take a mountain road from Chiusaforte (halfway between A23 exists “Pontebba” and “Carnia/Tolmezzo”) via Sella Nevea and back to Tarvisio. I have not driven the road for 20 years, but I remember some interesting sights.
When I started out at 11:45am, I was a tad late for the trip, because at 3pm I had to be back to Villach, but I started anyway. When I came to Dogna, the first village south of Pontebba, I saw that the road into the valley to the east was open, some 18km of dead-end street, that according to the map looked interesting and would lead me high up the mountains.
I reconsidered my plans and decided to take that road into territory so far unknown to me.
The first three images were made from the same place, already high above the mountain torrent, #1 looking back to Dogna, where I had left the main street, #2 looking into the valley, and #3 a tele shot across the valley onto the bizarre ice formations on those north cliffs that never get direct sunlight at all.
Interestingly enough I found a village after maybe six kilometers, perching in a nice, sunny place high above the valley, and there were even people on the street. Hmm … must be a strange way of living there. I suppose this village is cut off the main street during snowfall, and even if it’s not, the way to the next big supermarket, to the next media shop, to the next post office, to the next school, the next whatever, must be prohibitively long.
The road winds on and on into the valley, following the sunny side, mostly being free of snow, but still, where it winds into the shadow, the street is in parts blank ice.
It’s a funny feeling to drive such a road, when you don’t know how it goes on, when you always have to expect a place where you have to turn your car, and that on a road where places to turn are hardly available at all.
This is definitely waterfall territory, and I expect to return sometime in spring, when the snow is gone and there’s still lots of water. Two or three such places were particularly promising, one of them in the image with the small bridge.
One of the reasons why it’s difficult to takes photos in this valley, is the fact that you can’t choose your light. At least at this time of the year you are forced to do your images at or around noon, because that’s the only time when there is sunlight at all. Forget about golden light, forget about sunset, these are things that happen on the mountain peaks, 500 or 800 meters above you.
For this image I resorted to the D300’s built-in flash. This tunnel with its icicles is actually part of the road, I had to drive through. Gives you another funny feeling
All the images in this post were shot with the Nikon 18-200 VR and a Hoya Pro1 circular polarizer. You know my mixed feelings about polarizers, an
d this time was no exception. The blue of the sky gets slightly pale dark, with more magenta than is actually natural, and in the image of the Day you see well the effect of an unevenly polarized sky. Technically it is a bad image, I should have left off the polarizer, or better bracketed from the tripod, one time with, one time without polarizer, and then mixed the two exposures in Photoshop. Needless to say that I did not. That I have selected exactly this image for the Image of the Day is due to the wonderful effect that the polarizer had on the mountains.
I have converted all images using the DxO Optics Pro Photoshop plugin. Not only that it does a great job in equalizing lens defects (and any super zoom has plenty of them), it also makes opening up the shadows a very easy and controlled process. All images were finally taken to Photoshop, where I did any cloning, saturation adjustments and contrast fine-tuning. If you are new to this blog, you may be interested in my series of posts about experiences with DxO Optics Pro 5.3.
The last image was taken in almost the same place as the first. The sun was just vanishing behind the mountain, and for a moment the trees on the ridge, still bathed in sunlight, were a golden crest, not much different from the typical rim light used in studio portrait photography.
Most probably I should have switched to the Nikon 70-300 VR, but this was really a matter of seconds, thus I held on to the 18-200. That’s another of the problems that you encounter, photographing in such a place: you can’t stop wherever you want, and if you do, you have to hurry. There was not much traffic at all, but still, at one time I stopped for an image, just in the middle of the road, and sure at exactly that time another car came along and interrupted me.
Well, that’s it for this short and unexpected trip. As the weather permits, I will follow my original plan some time this weekend. We’ll see.
The Song of the Day is “Higher Ground“, not the Stevie Wonder composition, no, the song interpreted by Vanessa Williams on her 1994 album “The Sweetest Days”. Amazon has a sound sample, and there is also a video on YouTube, not from her version, but from one by Melissa Manchester.
This morning (well, technically yesterday morning, it’s past 3am now) I brought the car to the repair shop. Recently I had begun to hear a strange noise under pretty exotic conditions: only in right bends, while driving steeply upwards, and only with someone sitting beside me. I had expected to get the car at around noon, and then to make another trip down to Italy, this time for the snow-capped mountains that made the backdrop for the last two days’ images.
It shouldn’t come to pass. I only got the car back late in the afternoon, thus my photographic opportunities were limited to what I saw while walking home and then later back to the repair shop. On the other hand, that don’t make it junk
The Image of the Day is an unusually tight crop of an image that I actually liked well, but that suffered from the bland, bright sky. I was already going to give it up, but then I tried kind of a desperation crop. Off went everything that was sky … and I was startled. I had left less than four megapixels, but what I saw deeply satisfied me, more than all other images of today.
The second image is the whole structure from another angle, nearer now, more from below, and I like it as well. Here we are, let’s see what tomorrow brings
The Song of the Day is “That Don’t Make It Junk” from Leonard Cohen’s 2001 album “Ten New Songs”.
Well, sometimes I’m such a stupid idiot, I could bang my head against the wall for having missed the two concerts that he gave to standing ovations this autumn in Vienna. Fact is, I am on the mailing list of Vienna’s Konzerthaus, I must have read the announcement half a year before, but somehow it didn’t register. I only found out again when I read the raving critique of the first concert. Too late, so much too late. Oh well, here’s a video from Toronto.
Have you ever driven 100km in one direction, just for a sundown? Well, yesterday I did 
More and more often I rely on Google Maps for scouting photo locations. Sure, it does not give you the full picture, height information is missing, but if you are aproximately familiar with the environment, it’s a fantastic way to find out how to get somewhere, because it will show you small roads that might even be missing from your maps.
In case of yesterday’s trip, from sight I knew that east of where the highway A23 crosses the river Tagliamento for the second time (counted from the North), there is another bridge over the river, and that was the place where I wanted to go. I intended to leave Villach at 2:15pm, but for various reasons I couldn’t leave before 2:45.
Thanks to Google Maps I knew exactly where to go, and from the moment I left the highway at the exit Gemona/Osoppo at 3:30, it took me no more than ten minutes to get to the bridge, just in time for the sundown.
Basically I was there for an image looking east, over the river and to the gourgeous peaks of the Julian Alps. I had not expected to be able to get down to the river bed, and when I found out that there is indeed a way down, it was already too late. Anyway, that’s for next time.
The bridge was narrow with two lanes and not much space for a photographer to stand, making changing lenses a rather awkward experience. I did it anyway, one more time using my Lowepro Slingshot (this time the 200) like a tray, dangling in front of me. It’s a funny feeling juggling lenses over an abyss, but you get used to it
The images were shot with two lenses: the Nikon 18-200 VR, my travel lens, and the Sigma 10-20.
I often read that those super zooms like my 18-200 (or Paul Lester’s new Tamron 18-270 VC) are derided by prime snobs, and although I like to use primes a lot, while traveling I mostly stick to the 18-200, just because you never know what you need, and when you don’t travel alone, permanently changing lenses makes your company even more nervous than the permanent stops do anyway.
Apart from that, both lenses, the Nikon 18-200 VR and the Sigma 10-20, are supported by DxO Optics Pro in combination with the D200 and D300, thus I get lens correction as well, not only of distortion, but also of CA and vignetting. Pretty nice, if you ask me. OK, in post-processing I put the vignette in again, normally much more so than there was in the first place, but there’s nothing better than a clean start.
I concluded with some images into the sundown, and only half an hour after having arrived, I made my way back to Villach. A tad crazy the whole story, but absolutely satisfying
The Song of the Day, “Look Down Off A Bridge”, is from Jay Leonhart’s 1983 album “Salamander Pie”, a CD that has become famous because a German HiFi magazine used it as reference CD in their tests of high-end audio equipment during the early 1990s.
Indeed the CD is not only exceedingly well recorded, it is also a fine example of very relaxed bar jazz. Wonderful music to listen to, sipping on a glass of whiskey, but even without the whiskey it’s very nice
CD Baby has not only sound samples, they even let you hear the whole song, and at the moment they have the CD in stock.
