I haven’t been too well these last two days. I had a little bit of fever and my digestive system was … out of order.
I can’t know for sure, but I blame it to the steak tartare that I had for a starter Saturday evening. It was a pretty respectable restaurant, but it’s summer, and … well, as I said, I can’t say for sure, thus I won’t drop any names, but on the other hand, I won’t give them a second chance either 
Most of Sunday I spent copying image data from the old 1 TB hard disk to the new 2 TB one. The computer here in Carinthia must still run Windows XP, because we need a certain accounting program to run on it.
That “operating system” seemingly has some severe problems copying from a big drive that’s more than 99% full. It’s true: the problem was reading. After copying some 50 GB of data, it suddenly became extremely slow, to the point where it would have taken days to finish the copy job, and the only way to make it fast again, was to reboot the computer. Copy, stop, reboot, repeat. Have a nice day!
Yeah, that’s how I spent my Sunday, and when it was finally done, I went out to make some images. That’s where I recognized that I must have fever. I returned after only half an hour, but at least I discovered a Mexican restaurant, that I had not known about, and that’s only minutes away from home. That’s what became Image of the Day.
The Song of the Day is the “Cantina Theme” from Bob Dylan’s soundtrack to the 1973 Sam Peckinpah classic “Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid”. YouTube has it for you.
Yesterday evening the office chair in my study broke, and I spent most of today finding a new one. Well, I eventually did, but it took me a hell of a time. Once I even fell in a shop, because the chair that I tested, had been wrongly assembled. I tried to lean back … and suddenly the chair tilted over.
Actually that is not really funny. You sit in the chair, you lean back, and suddenly it topples over, and you feel like falling, and then you fall, and you try not to, but there is nothing in the world that you could do. You can only hope that you won’t break your neck.
Well, I didn’t, and I’m pretty glad about it. Now I’m sitting in a nice and comfortable new leather chair and all’s well again.
The Image of the Day was taken shortly afterward, while we sat in the garden of a pub nearby. While drinking a beer and relaxing, I saw this bicycle, the planks leaning against the shed, and I thought this could be a composition.
The Song of the Day is “On Saturday Afternoons In 1963” from Rickie Lee Jones’ 1979 self-titled debut album. Deezer has the album, and on YouTube is a video, albeit with inferior sound quality.
It simply had to happen. Today is the first day since November 21 that I have not shot a single image. Wet snow, a constant drizzle, fog below, clouds above, I don’t even feel bad about it
I spent a lot of time though, trying to get back into my bookmaking workflow, checking out Shutterfly (as recommended by Mark Hobson), trying to create a template, and so on and on and on. I guess you know how much time runs into those things, especially when you do them only once a year.
Basically this serves three purposes (“among my purposes are such diverse things as”): SoFoBoMo ‘09 is nearing, by then I want to have the process worked out, and this time I won’t stop at the PDF, this time I want to hold a book. #2 is that Mark Hobson recently teased everyone to make a real book, and #3 is of course that Ted constantly buggers me to finally make that god-damn bicycle book
Speaking of Ted, this is another image from that morning in fall 2007, when we met to shoot the sunrise at Firenze’s Duomo.
The Song of the Day, “Sisters Of Mercy” by Leonard Cohen, is part of the soundtrack of Robert Altman’s 1971 movie “McCabe & Mrs. Miller”. I am not sure if it was written for the soundtrack or not, but Cohen’s music greatly contributes to the overall atmosphere of this masterpiece. See a video on YouTube.
This is one for Ted Byrne. Not much art on my side here and nothing about DxO either. The review continues as soon as I have it installed here in Carinthia (it’s a pain over my slow and not very reliable connection), or otherwise am back in Vienna. Have a nice weekend.
The Song of the Day is “Oh, How The Ghost Sings” from the 1981 Lester Bowie album “The Great Pretender”. No video, of course, but the sound sample at Amazon will give you an idea
This morning was the first morning with fog here in the city. This means we’re headin’ for a fall gals! I’ve made some pictures of a foggy park, they are even not so bad, but I’ll spare us the cliché. It’s autumn, summer’s long gone and that must suffice.
This is an image that I shot on my way home. It is not the first image that I’ve taken of this venerable motorbike, but it is the first that gets published.
The Song of the Day is “Dirty Old Town” – not the David Byrne song from “Rei Momo“, not the Rod Steward version, no, it’s the Pogues that who have it on their 1985 album “Rum, Sodomy & the Lash“. See the video on YouTube. This is a true classic, you don’t want to miss it
Super Stupid Things To DoTM.
What about some of that? Uhhh … what could I come up with? Wait a minute … yes! That’s it. Traveling with a bag full of lenses, but leaving your camera behind! Oh dear, I’ve left my D300 along with the Sigma 50/1.4 in Carinthia, only to be recovered on Friday.
There are two roads from here
Probably I’ll never get a better excuse for buying a D700. On the other hand, reason tells me that I currently spend so much money in that moving adventure, that I’d better not.
Normally I’m strictly adverse to listening to reason, but this time I did. When I sold my D200, almost a year ago, I secured the option to borrow it back should need be. Then I had thought of the D300 being sent in for service or such, but now it comes handy as well.
Here we are. Today’s images were shot with a D200. It’s still an incredibly capable camera. Apparent differences are the LCD and the much more sluggish scrolling in full zoom, but when I had it, I did not miss any speed. It’s only that the D300 is much faster and you get accustomed to that.
Both images were shot within five meters distance where Burggasse meets Sankt-Ulrichs-Platz and I’m quite pleased with both of them. The leaves were not arranges, but I admit having removed some peripheral distractions, most of them physically while being there
The Song of the Day is the incredibly beautiful “Map Of The Stars” from Melissa Etheridge’s 2007 album “The Awakening“. Make sure you see her perform live on YouTube.
Yesterday afternoon it was sunny and there was a hint of summer, at least in the light. I had only some minutes, and the one thing that immediately caught my attention, was a group of these yellow flowers that we now have all around.
They are a kind of sunflower, grow in brushes of up to two meters high, and the flowers are much smaller than those of the archetypical sunflowers.
I don’t know when these flowers turned up in Austria, but I am quite sure that we did not have them here in my youth. I suppose they came as garden flowers and now grow in the wild, or maybe they were mixed with seeds. Everything is commercial now, and of course no farmer seeds from last year’s crop today. Whatever the reason is, they seem to feel well here. Can anybody enlighten me as to their origin?
The Song of the Day is “Indian Summer” from the 1970 Doors album “Morrison Hotel“. I had the vinyl album and have just ordered the CD. See a video on YouTube.
I’m late again. The apartment in Villach is far from ready, there is … hmm .. half a kitchen now, part of the book shelves, parts here, parts there, a lot of work and I have not much time to spare for photography. These are the images for Friday. I had taken a day off, intending to take an early train.
These images were shot while still in Vienna. There is a big club/bar in Neubaugasse, “Stylez”, that is all red and orange with some black, and as I stood there, I experimented with focusing near, using various foregrounds and angles on the bar.
The Song of the Day is not exactly a song, it’s a serenade by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, called “Posthorn Serenade”. I have it on disc 7 of volume 3 of Mozart’s “Complete Works“, a 170 CD box, digitally recorded, partly by second tier orchestras, but nevertheless quite OK. In any case it’s a fine reference, and even more so for the price of €99 that I’ve paid. Amazon sells it quite expensively, so I’d try an alternative source from their marketplace, where you get it new for $117 at the moment.
Yesterday, Thursday, was bicycle day again. First I found the one in the Image of the Day, standing on the street in the morning light, the plastic box on the baggage holder glowing against the sun, while its owner delivered newspapers. Remember when the monopolies of the public postal services in Europe fell? They were right! 
Newspaper distribution is cheaper now. It is now done by swarms of Pakistani (at least I suppose, by their looks, sorry if I hurt anybodies feelings) on bicycles. Hmm … now, what exactly could be the reason for the cheaper services? Huh??
The second image is … strange. I suppose it’s kind of a joke, at least the bicycle was just hanging there in five feet height.
The final image, the snake, is part of a window grill of the basement windows of Vienna’s Palace of Justice. Looks dangerous, no?
The Song of the Day is again the Beatles classic “Carry That Weight“, originally from “Abbey Road“. We had it in “340 – Carry That Weight“, but today we look at the somewhat peculiar version on “Beatles Go Baroque” by Peter Breiner and His Chamber Orchestra. I love that album, and when you’ve heard into the sound samples at Classics Online, you will as well
Yesterday I left work late, night had fallen, and though I had a usable bicycle, shot in the morning, I did not stop looking. I finally found a yellowish/orange Vespa scooter, but it would not pose as I needed it. It was impossible to separate from the grown-up motorcycles around it, and thus I used it as a diffuse foreground.
The Song of the Day is “The Way You Look Tonight” from Bryan Ferry’s wonderful 1999 album of standards, “As Time Goes By“. I have no luck with this album, nobody put the song on YouTube and the sound sample from last.fm covers only the instrumental intro, but at least if you are a resident of the US, you may be able to hear it on Rhapsody.com. At least that’s what I think, I can’t check.
