Sep 132012
 

Weather was predicted to be bad and bad it was indeed. The mountains around Villach are all snow-capped, I’d estimate the snow to go down to about 1700 meters. That’s pretty bad for mid-September :)

We had rain down here, I just left the apartment to buy some food and my new Asus/Google Nexus 7 tablet.

Yes, I know, I didn’t need one. It’s just so, so … enticing :D :D :D

In reality I don’t even have a use for it. The preliminary plan is to learn programming for Android. Somehow I’m interested in sexy direct manipulation GUIs for boring corporate back-end systems. Maybe it’s only to stay in touch with current technology. It’s so easy in my job lose the connection to not only the bleeding edge, but if you don’t take care even to the mainstream. Suddenly you end up being the equivalent of a Cobol programmer :)

Of course I did not take images today. Not a single one, but here’s one taken yesterday instead. It looked unbalanced in color, but using B&W and lightening up the blues extremely did the trick. Suddenly I had a nice distribution of tones to play with, instead of a dark blob on the left side.

The Song of the Day is “A Little Bit Later On” by Ella Fitzgerald. Hear it on YouTube.

Sep 122012
 

Here’s an image taken Monday afternoon in Vienna’s seventh district, the center of alternative lifestyle.

I’d really love to have an image without that cup, but when I tried in a second attempt, a woman arrived by bicycle and slowly began to fasten it to the railing. I was in a hurry and couldn’t wait, thus we have to live with the cup :)

Just like in “1758 – The Pink Cart“, the Song of the Day is “cartwheels” from the 2004 Patti Smith album “trampin’”. Hear it on YouTube.

Aug 232012
 

It was so easy. I processed that sunset landscape image, looked for a title and found Sophie Zelmani’s “Before The Day’s Gone” in my collection.

Then I began preparing this post, but when I had one more look at today’s images, I could not help but prepare another image, one taken into a fountain in Villach. And so it happened: it became Image of the Day, the title does not fit any more, but I am too tired to look for another one.

Before The Day’s Gone” is from Sophie Zelmani’s 1998 album “Precious Burden”. Hear it on YouTube.

Aug 202012
 

The first thing I did this morning was to process another one of yesterday’s images. This kept me relaxed, I knew, if all else failed I’d still have an image for today’s post. It turned out out I wouldn’t have had to worry.

Driving to the lake I stopped the car near Rosegg, slightly before the power station that we had recently. It’s just a place at the edge of the forest, situated in a double bend, an opportunity to hold the car, but only if you know the place. At normal speed it’s normally too late to react. You see an interesting place from the corner of your eye and say to yourself “next time”.

Well, this time was it. After having driven by a few hundred times, I was finally aware of the spot in time, stopped and found – nothing. What had looked interesting from the corner of the eye looked plain when I stood there. But then, you have always the option to focus on the sun shining through the trees, or you just look up to the canopy and marvel at nature. Really, time and place are not so important, it’s what you do there.

The last image, the free standing tree in the pasture, framed by overhanging branches of the tree under which I was standing, that’s the image taken yesterday.

The Song of the Day is surprisingly again by Jimmy Witherspoon. Hear “I’m Just a Country Boy” on YouTube.

Aug 182012
 

As I’ve said a few times, Carinthia is famous for its wayside shrines. This is a pretty beautiful one that I discovered today.

Driving to the lake, this time coming not from Villach but from the other side, from Klagenfurt, Carinthia’s capital, I saw this oak tree by a side road, a few meters from the main road. It was not standing freely, but I figured it would probably look good from below. Guess it does. As I already was in that side road, I decided to follow it, and that’s how I finally discovered the shrine.

Btw, two days ago I listed my Olympus E-P2 with EVF and 17/2.8 at eBay. It took five minutes and then it was sold for the “Buy It Now” price of 400 €. I guess I should sell more of my old equipment :)

The Song of the Day is “Travelin’ Prayer” from Billy Joel’s 1973 album “Piano Man”. Hear it on YouTube.

Aug 052012
 

Every time I drive to the lake for swimming, I pass by a church in Augsdorf, a small village, the church standing a little off the street, always tempting, but for some odd reason I’ve never been there.

It is a typical rural Carinthian church, nothing out of the ordinary, merely a nice specimen of the ordinary.

Yesterday I decided to make some images there. I had just left the car when suddenly the sun vanished behind a not so big but surprisingly stationary cloud.

Well, I changed my mind and took photos of the cloud. The second image is of another cloud, an hour later, when I drove back from swimming.

The Song of the Day is “Change Your Mind” from Neil Young’s 1994 album “Sleeps With Angels”. See and hear it on YouTube. It’s almost a quarter of an hour but time well spent :)

Jul 142012
 

After a long break here’s the post for Wednesday at last. I’d been held up by too many images and no clear idea how to use them.

In the recent past I have tended to avoid those kitchen sink posts, because they tend to bury everything but the Image of the Day. Instead I’ve created separate posts, more than one for a day. It helps focusing the post, makes writing easier for me, though I think the two times I did it, nobody really cared. This time it’s back to the kitchen sink, for no other reason than that I’m lazy :)

In the two images at the beginning I was struck by symmetry. It’s not perfect symmetry, but it is a kind of symmetry that we encounter very often and ignore almost always. I kinda like it.

This would have been it (and in fact the Image of the Day is my favorite image in this post), had I not been in Salzburg for a concert of Hubert von Goisern. Hubert is one of the most interesting Austrian musicians, mixing traditional Austrian music with all kinds of world music and a heavy dose of American style Rock and Blues. He sings Upper Austrian dialect, so you may have trouble understanding him, even if you speak German, but you may still like his music. In this video you’ll at least recognize the melody :)


These images are not good examples of concert photography. I really should have brought the Sigma 150/2.8, this would have given me two stops over the Olympus 40-150, reducing ISO to 1600. The two images with Hubert and the bassist were taken with the 45/1.8 wide open and they are extremely tight crops.

On the other hand, using the big and heavy 150/2.8 would have been much less convenient and the camera would have been less easy to keep under the rain coat during the occasional showers :)

The concert ended too late to return to Vienna the same day, thus I had time for a night stroll through Salzburg.

Salzburg is a city on the edge of the Alps, a flat space with a river running between two big rocks, with steep mountains rising just behind. As long as you avoid the “rocks” (one of them with the famous fortress Hohensalzburg) and the mountains, the city itself is a fine place for casual cycling, and therefore I found a rich hunting ground.

Hubert von Goisern’s latest album is “Entwederundoder” (“Eitherandor”). The song that gave its name to the current tour is “Brenna tuats guat” (“But it burns well”), a song about how everybody knows that money does not grow on the meadows, but that it burns well, just as the food that we burn for fuel, while elsewhere people die of hunger. Here’s the official video. That’s also the lineup of the current tour.

Jun 302012
 

The Image of the Day is from Wednesday. I took it at the railway station, immediately before boarding the train to Carinthia.

The other four images were taken one day earlier. Maybe I like the b+w image of the chairs best, and that’s probably because I was pretty surprised when I tried a conversion “just for fun”. In color the chairs are much more isolated in front of a bluish gray background, but in b+w it all becomes kind of a pattern. I like that.

Yeah, and then there is this image, taken in an Underground station. I had been swimming, I was tired, and I took the image only because, well, because I always take images. Interestingly enough it is my so far most successful image on Flickr. Why? Don’t ask me, I don’t know :)

The Song of the Day is the fantastic “Why” from the 2003 Devil Doll album “Queen of Pain”. Hear it on YouTube.