The good thing is, I’ll be going to sleep pretty soon. The bad thing is, well, you know it, another short post.
I guess I’d have had another one or two usable images, but really, I’m just short of sleeping in front of the computer, and if at all possible, I’d like to avoid that 
This image is not a composite. It’s part of an advertising poster for a Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller retrospective in Vienna, and the left part is simply the street background. It’s one more of these half/half compositions that made a big part of my SoFoBoMo 2009 book.
The Song of the Day is “World Of Two” from the 2001 Cake album “Comfort Eagle”. Hear it on YouTube.
Jul 242009
Jul 192009
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.
Jul 062009
It’s really true, Vienna is on the wrong side of the Alps. On my first day back, we had two extended periods of rain, the first between 2pm and 3pm with massive downpours. After that it calmed down, only to begin again when I walked home
I made some images in the morning, but what really made my day, was this image of people waiting in the rain, with an advertising of our mayor, Michael Häupl, in a kind of stay-in-minds-between-elections poster, stating “Always a hit: summer in the city”
The old Lovin’ Spoonful hit “Summer In The City” is also the Song of the Day. I have it as a cover version on the much underrated 1997 Stranglers album “Written in Red”. Deezer does not have the album, Amazon has no samples, I didn’t find a video, thus I can only offer you the Lovin’ Spoonful version.
May 172009
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.
It’s Sunday morning, these are the images of Saturday. I’m in Carinthia, none of these images will go into my SoFoBoMo book.
Yesterday’s weather was mixed, and part of the day I was haunted by a cloud above me that seemed to track my movements. It’s pretty frustrating seeing a nice blue sky with interesting clouds scattered in between, but a landscape that lies in shadow. The result is a lack of color and a strong tendency to underexpose the landscape or overexpose the sky.
Sure, you can help yourself with split neutral density filters, you can do HDR (and the last image is one indeed), but it’s not just the same.
Still, I managed to get a few shots. The first image, the trees on the hill, is an unprocessed JPEG right out of the camera, the second is an HDR image mapped with Photomatix Pro’s tone compressor algorithm, the sky only a tad darkened in Photoshop.
The Image of the Day is of a house near one of our most favorite restaurants, “Hicks’es Wirtshaus” in Hart south-west of Villach, near Finkenstein.
The Song of the Day is “Blinded By The Light” from the 1973 Bruce Springsteen album “Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.”. Hear it on YouTube.
May 172009
Friday was another meager day. It only rained a little, not nearly as bad as Thursday, but it still forced me to use an umbrella.
Other than that, Friday marks the end of the first half of my SoFoBoMo effort.
I had two working weeks of shooting in Vienna, ten days, 63 processed images so far, almost twice as much as I need, some candidates are left to choose from, in case that I need a certain color or subject, and of course I won’t suddenly stop now, but I may ramp shooting down to the usual blogging level. This will save me a lot of time that would otherwise go into processing.
The Image of the Day shows a window hook in my stairwell in Vienna, thus the Song of the Day is “Leave It Open” from Kate Bush’s 1982 album “The Dreaming”. Hear it on YouTube.
On Sunday, the last day of my week in Carinthia, I felt a little bit exhausted from the two consecutive trips to Ljubljana and Salzburg.
I simply stayed at home, enjoyed a nice afternoon sleeping on the balcony, a golden evening view from my study, and at 8pm I was on the train back to Vienna.
The title is obviously a line from Tom Waits’ ballad “Train Song”.
We had it in “133 – Working Mode” sung by the master himself, in “798 – Train Song” in a wonderful rendition by one of my favorite singers of all time, the great Holly Cole, and this time it is the string version from the Spring String Quartet’s 2002 album “Train Songs”.
I couldn’t find a video, Deezer lists the album but does not play it, thus we are reduced to Amazon’s samples. Sorry. Still a great album
This is the entry for Saturday, May 2. We made a short trip to Salzburg, the fourth-largest city in Austria, with a population of about 150.000, almost half of that of London, Ontario, almost triple that of Lancaster, PA, and about the same as Savannah, GA.
Does Salzburg with that size qualify as urban? You bet!
We didn’t stay in Salzburg though. We only fetched Michael, and with him we made a round trip through the valley of the Lammer, following an alpine panorama road over Postalm, down to Sankt Wolfgang, and then via Mondsee back to Salzburg for dinner.
River Lammer is a small tributary to Salzburg’s main river Salzach. It runs east to west, and not far into the valley, near Oberscheffau, it runs through a narrow gorge called “Lammeröfen“.
When we reached that place, I decided to go in for a few minutes and take some images. At that time it rained, but Michael assisted with an umbrella. We payed 6€ each, which is quite heavy, but what you get is an excellently and unobtrusively built walkway through the most spectacular part, the so-called “Dark Gorge”. After a few minutes the rain stopped and we even got some rays of sunlight.
All in all that reminded me strongly of last year’s SoFoBoMo book “Tscheppaschlucht“. Given enough time, I can always pull off a book in such places. The variety is enormous, and this time I was only in for quarter of an hour with a single lens and a polarizer
In fact, the temptation was strong to say goodbye to “Urban Dreams“, return on Sunday, me, a bag of lenses and a tripod, pay another 6€, this time for six hours, take a hundred shots and be over and done with it. This way I could finish in two weeks.
But that’s nonsense. SoFoBoMo is no race and repeating last year’s tour de force is no challenge either. Still, this gorge is a nice place and I really want to return for an extended shooting.
We didn’t follow the river to the valley’s main community of Abtenau. Instead we took a small mountain road through an alpine region called Postalm, crossing over to Wolfgangsee, already in Upper Austria, one of the region Salzkammergut’s more beautiful lakes, best known through the operetta “Im Weißen Rößl“.
We took a coffee in Sankt Wolfgang, in its core a really picturesque village, but totally encrusted in its touristic infrastructure. It is far from high season at the moment, but when we arrived, the big parking area nearest the center (yes, there is more than one) was half full with private cars and tourist buses.Actually the place reminded me strongly of places of pilgrimage like Lourdes with all their accumulation of kitsch and trash.
Anyway. Here’s an image taken with the fish and as usual corrected with Fisheye-Hemi™. This is the restaurant/hotel that claims to be the White Horse Inn of the operetta, and in fact didn’t contribute anything but its name.
The Song of the Day is “Take Me To The River” from the 1978 Talking Heads album “More Songs About Buildings and Food”. See them perform live in a video clip from the movie “Stop Making Sense“. Not only for the title, no, it’s as well for contrast to all the alpine kitsch
It’s been slightly delayed, but here is the post for May, 1st. Remember my SoFoBoMo project? It’s going to be called “Urban Dreams“. Well, this day marks the begin of the earliest possible “fuzzy month”.
I’m still in Carinthia and making trips to the surroundings. On Saturday I thought I’d start right away, and I would do it on a trip to Ljubljana, Slovenia’s capital, a city with a population of about 270.000, and thus certainly qualified for the term “urban”.
Boy, did I fail! We started by visiting the castle on top of the hill in Ljubljana’s center, there in the park I made the Image of the Day. When we finally got down into the city, we had only a very short time, as a thunderstorm was approaching.
When we returned to Villach, we did not take the direct route through the tunnel, but instead left the highway at Jesenice, from there followed the river Sava up to Kranjska Gora, and via Podkoren we crossed over to Carinthia at Wurzenpass. 
The river image is from river Sava, again you see the typical color of the water in the region.
The view of the mountains is from the ascend to Wurzenpass, looking back to Kranjska Gora, and the final image, the road with the fence, was already taken in Carinthia.
Where does this leave me relative to SoFoBoMo?
I like all four of today’s images, the mountain image is quite a bit conventional, but I like the other three a lot. On the other hand, clearly none of them qualifies as an “Urban Dream”. My original idea was, to use mostly images of Vienna, and thus to start on Monday, when I’m back again. In any case, one thing is clear: I have not started SoFoBoMo on Saturday
The Song of the Day is “It Shouldn’t Happen To A Dream” from the 1962 Anita O’Day / Cal Tjader album “Time for Two”. Deezer has the album.
Yesterday it rained most of the time. I used a short pause in the afternoon to make some forest images.
I’d have more but, you know, it’s forest
I used a very expensive B&W polarizer, and as always it turned out to be a lot of work in Photoshop to get it looking like I wanted it to. I think it was worth the effort though.
I am pretty proud of the second image as well. It’s the 35/1.8 at f6.3 and 1/15s, handheld, and it is tack sharp.
I used this song once, almost a year ago, but when it makes sense, why not make use of the powerful force of repetition 
The Song of the Day is one again “All The World Is Green” from Tom Waits’ 2002 album “Blood Money“. See him perform live on YouTube. The video is the same as last year, only the link had stopped working, “due to terms of use violation”. Let’s hope they get tired of stupidly removing videos that sell their products. Well, at least this one has the complete interview with Letterman
