Sometimes I have no problem finding a suitable image, sometimes I have to make one. Yesterday was of the latter category.

I tried to process an image that had quite interesting lines, but then nothing more. Light was garbage, tonal distribution was garbage, colors as well, and after I had finished a B&W version this morning, I decided to try another one.

Well, I just did, and although the image had some merits, it just wouldn’t work. Finally I remembered my friend Bill Birtch and his motion blur experiments, and – what can I say – I found the result strangely satisfying.

The Song of the Day is “Keep On Movin’“, originally from Pino Daniele’s 1984 album “Musicante”. This album is regrettably unavailable via Amazon, thus I link to the 2CD collection “I Grandi Successi”, probably a good idea because for many it would be their first Pino Daniele album anyway. Hear the song on YouTube.

Saturday began with rain. Much rain.

Again there were floods in parts of Austria, and the air cooled down by about 15 degrees Celsius. High mountain roads above 1500 meters were impassable without snow chains, in other words, it was a rather unusual high summer weekend.

In the afternoon the eastern part of Carinthia seemed to be sunny, so we took the car, drove down to Saualpe, a north-south mountain chain in eastern Carinthia, and explored the country roads.

Carinthia is not densely populated, but certainly denser than all that gorgeous nature would demand. In this certain part though, there are only some small villages far and between.

It’s really a wonderful landscape up there on the mountain, but of course it has a reason that not many people live there. You are far away from every supermarket, not to speak of a real city, and what looks so wonderful in summer, is quite a problem in winter. Winters up there are long, and to live there probably means to be snowed in a couple of times a year.

There are plenty of churches up on the mountain, one in every village, sometimes for not more than maybe ten houses, some solitary, and one of the churches, Sankt Leonhard, is even off the road in the middle of a forest. That’s the one with the walls in the Image of the Day.

The images were taken with three prime lenses, 24, 35, 70, and two zooms, 11-16 and 70-300. This was lens changing day

All images were treated with a combination of Topaz Adjust and Alien Skin Snap Art. For the high-contrast images with lots of sky, I have normally taken two differently developed versions from the same RAW, combined with a mask. I love these effects on landscapes.

It’s probably Kitsch, but it triggers something in me. Those images look like a certain kind of illustrations that I liked in my books when I was a child, a kind of illustrations that completely came out of fashion in the 1970s.

The Song of the Day is “In A Country Churchyard” from the 1977 Chris De Burgh album “At the End of a Perfect Day”. Hear it on YouTube.

In the morning I was in a hurry again, and being in a hurry is normally pretty adverse to being creative.

I solved the problem by letting the camera do on its own. This is one of a series of images that I took while being on the train. I pointed the camera out of the window, in different directions, in angles that I thought could probably make for an interesting image, and from that series of essentially random images I got at least this one.

In the meantime, after one and a half days in Vienna, I’m on the train back to Carinthia. Tomorrow night we’ll see an opera in Graz. Nikolaus Harnoncourt, the great Austrian master of Baroque music directs, no, not Purcell, not Haendel, not Bach, he directs Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess”. More about that tomorrow night or Thursday.

Btw, while I sit here on the train and look through dirty windows, outside is fantastic weather, golden light, a sky mixed with blue and scattered clouds. It’s pure masochism to even look out of the window. Oh well

The Song of the Day is the Elvis song “Mystery Train“, interpreted by the Neville Brothers on their 1990 album “Brother’s Keeper”. Hear it on Deezer.

I was pretty much in a hurry in the morning. When I left work late in the afternoon, we had traces of sunshine mixed with some raindrops, and halfway that turned into a constant drizzle. Oh well, it IS worse north of the alps.

The first image is from the morning. I had just left the Underground station. So … you think your camera’s got a big, heavy battery, huh? Loser! That’s a big battery

I suppose electricity in the Underground station had failed and they came with the big truck to our rescue: 400 kVA!! That’s a battery.

The next image is from the afternoon, near my workplace. This is a garbage container of some construction company, and the sign on it reads “Please don’t fill in refrigerators and PC monitors“. I wonder if they take TV sets or sofas

I used the Nikon 24/2.8 for all images. Post-processing is similar to what I did the last days, Topaz Adjust and Snap Art. The exact settings, which Snap Art effect I use, how much I modify it, which Topaz effect I use, whether I add lines made with Snap Art “Stylize” or not, what kind of masks I use, the opacity values, all that varies from image to image, thus it wouldn’t make much sense to create an action. It’s more of a pattern than an algorithm.

The Song of the Day is “Oh Yes, Take Another Guess” by Ella Fitzgerald. I have it on a 10 CD box of her early recordings, that is most probably not available outside of Austria, Germany and probably Switzerland, but you find the song on many compilations, e.g. “Ella And Her Fellas”. Deezer has the album, YouTube has a video.

Surprisingly enough, this morning I find myself on the train to Carinthia again. Nursing leave. Nothing to worry about, but I suppose it may keep me in Carinthia for the rest of the week.

I just read that Janine, commenting on yesterday’s rain image, hopes for an even higher level of summer, but at least for today I have to disappoint her: It still rains and if at all possible, it is even less inviting than yesterday.

After all that SoFoBoMo action I try to catch up with blog reading, and yesterday night I read Mark “The Landscapist” Hobson. This is always amusing, because Mark is not only a brilliant photographer, he is also never shy of confrontation. Of course he found fault in Mike Johnston’s advice to aspiring photographers, to only use a Leica, a single lens and B&W film of a single type for a year. Actually it’s not so incredibly much fault that he found, but it’s enough for a heated debate. Many people may take offense at Mark’s sometimes slightly aggressive style, but I love it. Here is a man who has strong opinions, grounded in great knowledge and long experience, who fiercely defends them and who is a talented and witty writer as well. It’s not for the timid, but it’s deeply enjoyable

Why I mention Mark? Oh, only because he is the Master of the Square, and every time I’m exposed to his imagery, I feel a strong temptation to get square as well

The Image of the Day was taken this morning out of the rear window of tram line 18 in Vienna, just before I reached Vienna South Station. Think of it as of “826 – Goin’ Down Slow” under adverse conditions

The Song of the Day is “Travelin’ Man” by Anita O’Day. I have it on disc 2 of the 4 CD collection “Young Anita”. Deezer has a version on the album “Let Me Off Uptown”, no idea if it’s the same recording. I can’t check it at the moment. Anyway. Anita is never a bad choice.

It’s the first day of summer. At least that’s what it’s supposed to be.

In reality it pours down like mad, it is relatively cool and the weather forecast mentions snow lines. They are in a very safe distance above us, but at this time of the year even the idea of snow is obscene

Anyway. It is as it is. The bicycle detail was shot in the morning. Uhhh … “shot” again? Oh well, maybe it’s OK to shoot bicycle details, as long as nobody else gets hurt

The Image of the Day shows the impressive summer situation that I encountered when I left work early. For both images I used the Nikon 24/2.8, a lens that I selected because I knew I would not have to struggle with flares and ghosts anyway. It’s a very relaxing change from the Tokina 11-16/2.8, because again I can focus relatively near (still not as near as I like) and the focal length feels so incredibly natural.

Do you know that feeling, when you do something, that you used to do regularly and with pleasure, but have not done long since? That feeling of returning? Well, that’s how it felt

The Song of the Day is “Summer Turns To High” from the 2001 R.E.M album “Reveal”. Sorry, no video, I can’t offer you more than Amazon’s sound sample.

Oh dear! This habit of using song titles, it’s killing me! I’ve just whiled four hours away because of all that associations that connect me with this song.

But first things first: Here’s another image from the gardens of castle Miramare. I simply forgot to use it two days ago.

Of all lenses that you could have on, while you encounter a seagull, sitting on a wall, of all those lenses, a wide-angle, even if moderate, is one of the most awkward. Imagine me with the Nikon 24/2.8, trying to silently approach this bird, and just as I get too near, just as it takes of, I manage to release the shutter. Well, it could have been worse: only minutes later I changed back to the Tokina 11-16

Actually I like the image. The tips of the wings already show some motion blur, but the moment is just right. With the Nikon 70-300 this could have been a really great image. But then, if I had tried to change lense, I most probably would have ended up with no image at all.

The Image of the Day shows part of the window of a long-since closed shop. The yellow frame and the blue paper attracted me, and it was only during post-processing, that I recognized the text. “Revolution”, “Love”, the guitars, that immediately triggered memories, and while my first impulse was “Revolution #9″ by John Lennon, I finally settled with Marc Bolan and “Children Of The Revolution“.

And then it happened. I searched for a video, found the classic performance with Elton John on piano and Ringo Starr on drums, another video with the album version, and then I began to follow links.

I couldn’t stop for almost four hours, and the trip took me all that impossible way from Marc Bolan via British glam rock band Sweet (my most favorite band when I was 10), to Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Tom Waits.

Really, I love YouTube and the influence that this website has on our culture. It’s really a great place to find things, that with traditional distribution models would be impossible to come by. I’d say, from time to time, just do yourself the favor and listen to some music from your childhood. You deserve it.

It’s Monday noon, this is an image of yesterday’s short trip to Slovenia. Well, at least it was meant to be short, but one should never underestimate Slovenia’s small mountain roads. At least this time we were not bucked off

It took me so long to post that image, because in the meantime I have made a book. No, it is not “Urban Dreams II“, my SoFoBoMo book, but it is the promised “Urban Dreams I”, made of most images of last years exhibition, along with some other images that I thought would fit.

I used the Adobe InDesign template, that I have created for this year’s SoFoBoMo. The book was made in about six hours. Of course the images were all ready to be taken, and most of the time went into finding a sequence with a certain flow, writing the introduction and, most tedious, writing the captions. Clicking on the thumbnail will bring you to Issuu.com, where I have uploaded the book.

As there is much concern about file sizes on the SoFoBoMo blogs, I can tell you that at least with InDesign you should have no problem. This book contains 46 images, two of them twice, I have not resized the images, I have just dragged the final JPEGs into InDesign graphics frames. Upon export, I have used the “High Quality Print” preset and only changed the image quality settings from the default of “Maximum” to “High”. The resulting PDF is still no bigger than 13MB and the image quality is absolutely satisfying.

The Song of the Day is “Mountain Greenery“, this time not by Mel Tormé, this time it’s the great Ella Fitzgerald. I have it in a box of her complete songbook recordings (which is very recommendable), but of course the Rodgers & Hart Songbook is also available separately. YouTube has a very nice 1979 live video.

No, this is not a SoFoBoMo image

We were in Hermagor today. Hermagor, a small town in Carinthia’s south-western valley Gailtal, is the heart of Carinthis’s bacon production, and every year there is a Bacon Festival. We ate Frigga, the traditional lumberjack meal made of bacon, cheese, onions and potatoes, served with polenta or bread.

I made only a few images, well knowing that I wouldn’t have the time to process them anyway. Still, when I saw this seller of knife sharpeners, I could not resist. He sold a sharpener, I got an image

This is one of those images that are very easy to process in B&W and without extensive background treatment hard to do in color. I had the Nikon 24/2.8 mounted, thus no chance to work with shallow DOF, and of course it is also impossible to get a clean background with all the crowds around. The dress of the woman was brightly red and as distracting as it gets, but the B&W conversion together with some blur nicely took care of that.

The other image is of the parish church in Hermagor. I made some more from the inside, but nothing really convincing.

The Song of the Day is “Selling That Stuff” by McKinney’s Cotton Pickers. I have it on disc 13 of “The Ultimate Jazz Archive”, the 168 CD treasure box that I bought for 99€. You can still buy it for around that price in Europe, while in the US it sells from $220. Still a nice price for that number of CDs

The other possibility is a CD called “McKinney’s Cotton Pickers 1928/1930″, selling from $20 used and $73 new. Ouch! Deezer has that album for you to hear.

Finally you can download this song (and supposedly many others) for free from the audio archive of the Internet Archive. You can hear it there as well.

Today it was summer. I don’t know the exact temperatures, but I know how summer feels. This was positively summer

After last night’s editing and posting frenzy, I slept long, and then I did some SoFoBoMo-related research on blurb.com, I found out that things are pretty much as they were last year. Their bookmaking software BookSmart still does not export PDF (or anything that could be converted to PDF), thus there is still no way around using some kind of layout software, exporting the PDF to a bunch of JPEGs, one for each page, and then importing those JPEGs into a blank layout.

OK, thus the road is clear: I’ll do the layout in Adobe InDesign, create a PDF, upload it to Issuu.com and to SoFoBoMo.org, and then I’ll try to get it on paper. I’ll try Blurb this time, as they really let you sell the book online. Not that I expect to sell any, but simply being able to offer it is tempting. I vaguely remember that you can even get an ISBN and sell it via Amazon, although I currently find no hint on their site. Or was that another service? Anybody knows?

Anyway. That’s where I am at the moment. I guess tomorrow I’ll create an empty template in InDesign, that will just happen to have the right dimensions for a medium size landscape book on Blurb.

I spent the rest of this beautiful Sunday on the road. The plan was to drive to our lake for some swimming, but I was so immersed in photographing and zig-zagged along only the smallest roads, that in the end I had to turn return before having arrived at the lake.

I made quite some images, some more would have had potential, but I’m tired and leave it at that: a lonesome forest road and some spring flowers. Hope you like them.

The Song of the Day is “Lonesome Road“. At first I tried to find the Anita O’Day version online. Bad luck though. Thankfully I happen to have it by Madeleine Peyroux as well. It’s on her second album “Careless Love”. I found a live version on YouTube, but it’s overlayed by loud clapping that completely destroys the song. Just go to Deezer, they have the whole album in very good quality.