I’m back in Vienna. And no, I didn’t take any images. I made one though.
Do you remember Camogli? This light-flooded dream of every photographer?
Don’t ask me what I thought, don’t ask me how I feel. I’m fine 
I just had the desire to experiment, and to be honest, I like what I got. Beautiful Camogli, cracking and molding.
The Song of the Day is “I See A Darkness” by Johnny Cash. Hear it on YouTube.
One more image, this one is from today. Sometimes I really love my 70-300 and the compression at that focal length. How wonderful must a 400/2.8 be? But then, can you imagine me hauling such a bazooka around on the streets? No, even if we completely disregard the difference in price, I guess I can be very happy with what I have 
The Song of the Day is “Don’t Stop” from the 1977 Fleetwood Mac album “Rumours”. Hear it on YouTube.
No, this image was not taken with my Tamron 17-50/2.8, but I have made this post part of my review series, because I think you should know, that I have sent it in to Tamron one more time.
You remember the last time, when my bag had fallen from negligible height and the lens barrel broke? Tamron has repaired the lens, the autofocus error is gone, but instead a new problem had appeared:
Often when I turned the camera on, the first image was severely overexposed. Well, this became very frequent in the last few weeks, to an extent where I could be almost certain that the first image or even the first few images would be unusable.
Further study has revealed, that the lens fails to stop down during exposure. You know, while metering and while you look through the viewfinder, the lens is always wide open, in case of the Tamron this means f2.8. Only for the actual exposure the lens stops down to the aperture selected. Or it does not, just like mine. When that happens, the camera exposes for, say, f8, but the lens faultily stays open at f2.8. The result is an overexposure by three full stops.
Now, when I look back, this lens, while it works, is extraordinarily versatile, and the image quality is pretty good as well. On the other hand, I had this autofocus problem (that seems to have been corrected with a firmware update when I sent the lens in the last time) and now I have this problem, that makes the lens completely unusable for street photography.
Would I buy it again? Maybe. Not all of them can be that flimsy, and optically it has brought me through the dark winter like no lens before. Nikon simply has no alternative. I guess it all depends on how well the upcoming Sigma 17-50/2.8 OS will perform. It has just become available for Canon and may come out for Nikon within the next month. Less and less can I imagine to be able to resist
Being without the Tamron, I had to switch to another lens, and in this case it was the Nikon 70-300 VR. For a few days I had seen this image, but the Tamron was not the right lens. This cried for a serious telephoto lens. Yesterday I finally took the image. This is one of two exposures. It’s a tad awkward standing in the middle of a crossing
The Song of the Day is “Let’s Get High” from Lenny Kravitz’ 2001 album “Lenny”. Very recommendable. Hear it on YouTube.
I do have a few images of today (well, yesterday actually, as it is 4:15 in the morning now), nothing really good, so I don’t bother spending an hour in Photoshop, trying to wrestle it into a form that I can accept. Instead I have another image from Italy, taken in Sestri Levante while we spent an hour, hungrily waiting for the first restaurants to open. But at least it was not Madrid, where you’re frowned upon, when you come as early as 9pm
The Song of the Day is “Six O’ Clock” by The Lovin’ Spoonful. Ten years ago I bought a double CD with “Everything Playing” (where this is on) and “Do you Believe In Magic”. Can’t say I have heard it much, but here it is. I have no idea who’s really interested in that “Song of the Day” thing that I do, but I can tell you, I benefit greatly: I dig through my own music
YouTube has the song.
The seventh and last post for today. Well, technically it’s already well past midnight, but what counts, is that I have caught up and it feels pretty good!
Hmm … a week of posting in one day, that is a first and probably a tad insane
This is the post for today, and because I did not do much more today than working on the blog and processing images, I’ll give you three more pictures from Sunday, June 20.
These images were taken in Lorsica, a small hamlet in the Ligurian mountains, famous for its production of the finest damask. A few houses, a church, and below the road, under the street, the terraces of the graveyard. Well, I guess when you’re dead, you don’t particularly care where you rest, but anyway, what a place!
The Song of the Day is “Up In the Graveyard” from the 1994 Walkabouts album “Setting the Woods on Fire”. I couldn’t find it on YouTube, thus I have uploaded it myself.
Tuesday. I haven’t been very productive this week, mostly trying to get some order into my images from Italy.
Still, I made some images, and this is again an experiment with the Nikon 70-300 VR.
It’s quite simple: put it to 300 mm and point it right into the middle of some grass, always towards the setting sun. These images, for example, were all made around 8:15 pm.
Now manually scan through the focus range … and enjoy the endless variety. Success rates are not skyrocketing, but who cares? That’s what digital cameras are for
The Song of the Day is “Golden Brown“, originally from the 1981 Stranglers album “La Folie”. Hear it on YouTube.
On Monday I had business near our old home, in the country (not that it’s far from where we live now), and of course I had the camera with me and took some images.
There would probably be at least two more that I were inclined to use under normal circumstances, but excuse me please, I’m in a hurry to catch up
The Song of The Day is “Give Me The Simple Life“. I have it on “Twelve Nights In Hollywood”, the recently published collection of four CDs with previously unpublished material, those “Twelve Nights In Hollywood”, that were the first music, that I bought as digital downloads only.
YouTube has a later version from Montreux 1969, but it is very similar in phrasing, it won’t make that much of a difference.
Saturday we left. I did not take any images. The car was full, my camera bag safely stowed in the back, and the return home were six hours on the highway, thus I wouldn’t have been able to take images anyway.
All images presented here were taken on Sunday afternoon, shortly before we had dinner, not in the restaurant depicted, there we had been the day before.
Anna Maria, a friend of Michael’s from Milano, had asked him why we had exactly picked Sestri Levante for our vacation. Well, you have to pick some place, do you? Now, looking back, I can say that the choice was excellent, and I can say it with much confidence.
It is our way of traveling, to visit sights, and Sestri Levante being in the middle of the Riviera Levante, the part of the Riviera east of Genova, was an ideal place. It has a highway exit and a train station (Michael arrived from Milano by train), but contrary to many other towns and villages on the Riviera, neither highway nor railway are obtrusive.
While Camogli was much more beautiful, it was much easier to get out of Sestri, and that’s not a bad thing when you do it daily. The beach was directly in front of the hotel, thus I could swim in the morning and before dinner, so, all in all I’d say Sestri Levante was a fine place for people with our interests.
The Song of the Day is “I’m Going Back Home” by Nina Simone. I have it on a four CD collection “Four Women: The Complete Nina Simone On Philips”. Hear it on YouTube.
Thursday we began with a museum in La Spezia‘s Castello San Giorgio. They have one of the two biggest collections of pre-historic “statue stele” in Liguria, most of them having been found in the region of Luni. Photographing the collection was forbidden, of course I did, but please understand that I don’t want to post the images here.
La Spezia is an ugly city with a population of roughly 100,000. There is much heavy industry, an enormous caloric power plant, a military harbor and lots of military everywhere. I suppose the city has been bombed heavily during World War II, at least that’s the impression.
After a short odyssey up the hill to the castle/museum (did it ever occur to you that your blind spot for direction signs only goes away after you have found your target?) and the actual visit, we quickly left for San Terenzo south along the coast (that’s where I took the images of the arrows), and then via Lerici and Marina di Carrara to our main destination: Carrara, home of marble, from ancient times to distant future.
Along the way I spotted the thing on the picture to the left. I have no idea what it is. Remotely it reminds me of Orthanc, though I admit, it is not of black stone but of rusty iron.
Whatever. Carrara was our destination, a small town at the foot of a mountain consisting wholly of marble, and not just any marble, no, the purest and most beautiful marble in the world, quasi the all-time reference of what marble is supposed to be.
The quarries in the mountains above Carrara number by the hundreds, and when you take the winding road, that is used today for transporting the blocks by truck (as opposed to using sledges and ox-carts from Roman times until only 150 years ago), you get the sincere impression, that they are systematically taking apart the whole mountain.
And still, considering the thousands of years, even taking into account the acceleration of the past century, there is so much left, it’s hard to imagine an end to this treasure.
Pretty much at the highest point of the road, at least the highest point that is accessible to the general public, there is a marble museum, a shop and an underground mine that you can visit. We didn’t, we even skipped the museum, but we bought a mortar and pestle
The interesting thing in Carrara is, that every quarry looks exactly as if the mountain consisted of nothing but marble. It even may, but then the sheer number of quarries is puzzling. It looks like a whole army of ants trying to eat a mountain, from all sides, chaotic, seemingly without system or order. It’s fascinating.
And in the middle of all that, a village. Colonnata, home to the cavatori, citadell of anarchism, home of the famous Lardo di Colonnata, a white bacon, cured with rosemary in troughs of pure marble.
It’s delicious. Not as salty as bacon is here in Austria, and it is served warm on toasted bread. While we ate, I took the image of the stairs, of course constructed from marble as well.
In fact, the whole village is made of marble. There is a big monument dedicated to “Al Cavatore”, and behind it a small church, all made of marble, and there are these two (and maybe more) inscriptions:
Well, here in the mountains, in this village, then so far off of any city, they found a retreat.
Unlike communism, anarchism never could muster broad support. It’s in its principle, I guess. Not enough organization, too much individualism. Well, having just finished Heinlein’s “The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress”, those marble plates, commemorating the “anarchist companions, fallen on the road to freedom”, somehow touched me deeply.
The image of the truck and the building was made up at the highest point of the street, where the marble museum and the shop are.
The image to the left is an HDR, made from five bracketed exposures. The sun was already low when we stopped at the cemetery, and without HDR, the valley would have been in deep shadows.
Speaking of the cemetery, this is extremely impressive as well. It was the wrong time of the day, I suppose I should be there in the morning, no later than noon, depending on the time of the year. I did not go in, it would have taken me at least an hour, it was already late, light was bad and we had a long way back to Sestri Levante.
I just made a series of images from the other side of the valley, six exposures taken with the Nikon 70-300 VR, and then stitched in Photoshop to this panorama. The “thumbnail” links to an image of 4181 x 768 pixels, the original is 14069 x 2584 pixels. Hmm … I really should try to print it
The Song of the Day is a cheap pun: Gershwin’s “Too Marvelous for Words“, interpreted by Frank Sinatra. I have it on “Concepts”, this collection of songs that I bought for, I don’t know what, five Euros? May have been a mistake on Amazon’s side, because some days later it was back to $180
YouTube has the song in a version seemingly taken from a TV show.
Hmm … did I promise a shorter post in the last post? Guess I did. Maybe next time
Today is Tuesday and I am almost a week behind. Sorry, can’t help it. At least I am forced by chance to stay one more week in Carinthia, which gives me more time for working on images, than I would have had in Vienna.
Wednesday last week was mostly about Camogli, a small town north of the peninsula of Portofino, but on the way there we made a short stop in Rapallo.
With a population of around 30,000, Rapallo is more than just a small tourist center consisting mostly of hotels and restaurants. It’s a place where real people live, who don’t work in the tourism industry. The day before I had seen some places where I wanted to photograph, but in the end it was just this one with the biker and the scooter that remained. I like the movement in this image, and how the different directions of the biker and the scooter take up the zig-zag of the street decoration.
After leaving Rapallo, we crossed the peninsula and made a short deviation to its highest peak. From there, using the Nikon 70-300 VR, I took some images of Camogli below. Here is one at 84 mm, before and after processing.
It’s really challenging to get anything out of these images. We have fairly long distances, atmospheric haze, due to the heat twisting and bending light in fancy ways, low contrast and a blue cast in the distance, so I guess it is not too bad what I got out of post-processing. It’s more an illustration than a real photograph, but at least it illustrates something
The next image is from the same point of view, zoomed further in, and finally with the Image of the Day we are all way in at 300 mm, an effective focal length of 450 mm on my D300.
Camogli is really the most wonderful of places, a dreamland for any photographer. As you can see, it’s a narrow strip of beach, and then everything is built into the mountain. It takes quite some minutes down along the winding street, until you reach the lowest parking area. Most of the town consists of these long, high buildings, and in the center, the roads are narrow, many of them not accessible by cars, with the historic core a pedestrian area anyway.
The image of the little waterfall was taken down from a bridge between the area of the Hotel Cenobio dei Dogi, probably the most beautiful hotel that I’ve ever seen, and the old town.
The complex at the far end of the beach, as seen in this image on the left, that is the Cenobio dei Dogi. We didn’t stay there
Actually I think that Camogli is an excellent place to stay for some days. Only don’t expect to leave very often. This town has everything: hotels, restaurants, a medieval center, art, a fishing harbor (last image in this post), enough beach, and everything is integrated with the past.
This is not your typical tourist town, some remains of the past, surrounded by an uncontrolled sprawl of bad architecture. Camogli has character, and I guess this is mostly because there was is no space to extend, no way to build modern roads. They would have had to tear down the whole town. Thankfully they didn’t, and so we can still enjoy one of the most beautiful places in the world.
Whatever you associate with the magic words “Italian Riviera”, Camogli has it, and in all its splendor it is not posh. Sure, the Cenobio is pure luxury, but there are all sorts of price classes here, and everything is in walking distance from the beach.
It’s a big difference between Camogli and Portofino, the latter being a former fishing village, now an overpriced and snobbish assembly of designer shops. Dior, Armani, Zegna, Ferragamo, Gucci, all are there, and upon entrance to Portofino, you are greeted by several juweler’s shops. The big 50 m yachts of Portofino, they are missing in Camogli as well, but the one thing that Camogli has and Portofino has not, that’s life.
I spent about one and a half hours photographing in Camogli. First I went along the beach, down to the church, using nothing but the Sigma 8-16, most of the time at 8mm. Then I changed back to the Nikon 70-300 VR for some images of the cliff-like facades. I took them from the farthest point, near the church.
Finally I changed to my most favorite lens, the Tamron 17-50/2.8 VC. At this day I really needed all three lenses. Believe me, in Camogli you have a Manhattan problem. Granted, the buildings are not that high, but this is made up by how narrow everything is.
Take the image on the right, of the people walking in front of these buildings. OK, the foreground is obviously exaggerated, but the buildings in the back, it would do absolutely no good to cut them off at the top. This is what you feel, this is what it looks like when you’re there.
Same thing with the church. Of course when you see those things in reality, you may see only part of them at any time, but the way our mind works, we put everything together, create one impression that is made up of so many images. That’s where the 8 mm help. Actually Camogli was the first time at all, that I felt a need for 8 mm.
Camogli. I could have spent much more time in this town, days even, and I think I may return one day, but for that afternoon I was completely exhausted. It was a hot day under a glaring sun, and when I returned after those 90 minutes of concentrated photographing, I was glad to give up and have a drink.
The title of this post and of the Song of the Day, Gershwin’s “How Long Has This Been Going On?“, is inspired by the long time that it took me to come up with it.
What did I do? Well, I have made about 1200 images, many of them documentary, the greater part made with SoFoBoMo 2010 in mind, many variants, and wading through all that costs me time. That’s the reason. But don’t worry, I won’t build up another post like this one. I hope to catch up soon.
The Song of the Day is a cover version by Jon Bon Jovi, taken from jazz harmonica player Larry Adler’s Gershwin album “The Glory Of Gershwin”. Singers include Sting, Elvis Costello, Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush, Oletta Adams, Elton John, Cher, Sinéad O’Connor and many more. Fabulous album, highly recommended. YouTube has the song.
