Amazing! Have I really never had a song by Amy Winehouse?? Seemingly, at least that’s what my index says.

The Song of the Day is “Just Friends” from the 2006 Amy Winehouse album “Back to Black”. See her perform on YouTube.

Any this image? Well, I guess I’ll stop using the 150/2.8. It’s not the time of the year. It’s too gloomy. ISO 3200 at not even 6pm, and that at f2.8, this is not funny. I’ve just mounted the Nikon 24/2.8, let’s see what comes of that today.

This is a shop in Vienna’s 7^th district. I have not looked what they sell or do. They are called “Less is More”, and as I looked at the nice neon sign, I thought that the distribution of lights would make for a nice square. It took me a time to arrive at the final crop, it is still not perfect, but it’s what could be done with a crop. Everything more would necessitate going back, and then I’d probably find that there is not more in the subject anyway. Thus I’m leaving it at that.

Did I sound optimistic yesterday? Well, wouldn’t have been necessary

Today my categories and tags vanished. Or maybe not. They are still there in the WordPress database. WordPress still sees them, counts them, tells me how many I have, but it is unable to list them. Even worse, category links and tag links find nothing.

Seemingly there are many other people affected, but there is no obvious pattern and for many people it comes and goes. Suddenly tags and categories are gone, suddenly, sometimes days later, they reappear. And maybe vanish again. Isn’t it ironic that I left Blogger because of a label problem?

The Song of the Day is “Love-Less” from Paul Weller’s 2000 album “Heliocentric”. Hear it on YouTube.

This image is more than a month old. After working on my portfolios (already seen them? I’d really be interested in your opinions) all through the night, I was not really inclined to go out, and when I finally changed my mind, weather changed its, deciding to spoil the afternoon with a little rain.

Well, it was not only the portfolios that kept me from sleep, basically I have inspected pretty every one of the past 1100 posts, correcting URLs where the conversion process had mangled them, uploading missing pictures, you get it: the tedious kind of work that you delegate if you can.

Six posts still lack images and I didn’t have them in Carinthia. These were typically images that I had processed Sundays on the train from Carinthia to Vienna. Five of them fall within two months after I had bought my Windows Vista computer in Vienna. It took me some time to recognize that with Vista, Microsoft had subtly changed the semantics of the Advanced Search dialog. In XP you searched by default for files changed after a certain date, including that date, in Vista you search by default for files created after a certain date, excluding that date. Thanks guys, very helpful

In other words, there are still some posts without images, but all those layout-garbling errors that have plagued the blog for two weeks now are gone.

In retrospective, it was a tremendous amount of work, I can’t imagine how anybody without solid computer education could possibly do that, but I don’t regret it at all. After more than two weeks Blogger still has a hard limit of labels per post. They have raised it from 10 to 20, but obviously their code now requires a limit. And SmugMug? Well, their outages continue. I’m still subscribed to their service blog. Makes me feel good

The Song of the Day is “Deep Within The Corners Of My Mind” from Melody Gardot’s 2009 album “My One and Only Thrill”. Hear it on YouTube.

That’s the best I’ve got for Monday.

In the afternoon, while walking home, I saw a crane lift a heavy weight of concrete. I waited for the moment when the container would be exactly between building and sky, and that’s what I’ve got.

Nothing special, but it gives me a reason to recommend the Song of the Day: “Lifted” from the 1999 Eurythmics reunion album “Peace”. Nice song. Hear it on YouTube.

Don’t fear, this is the last post for today, a short one, showing two bicycle images that I shot in the morning, and two afternoon images from my way to the train.

I really love these small children’s bikes. I took the images in front of the same school/kindergarten in Vienna’s Josefstädter Straße where I made “727 – The Gang“

I like both of these bicycle images. The love theme in the Image of the Day was obvious, but I don’t know exactly what to make of the other one. Neglect? A father leaving his child? Or nothing at all like that? Maybe the small bike only fakes being tied to the railing? What if this bike is spying upon the man? Could this bike be a detective? There’s certainly something in his pose, that reminds me of a young hero …

The other two images happened on my way to the train, the “Karma” image just before I went down into the Underground, the other one just after I had re-emerged. “Karma” is basically the same kind of composition as the Image of the Day or so many of the half / half images in my SoFoBoMo ‘09 book “Urban Dreams II“, only not horizontal but vertical.

The second image, the one with the tramway tracks and the giant advertising in the background, somehow appealed to me, wanted to be taken. It’s something about the keen lines and the surreal effect of the giant legs. I don’t know, I can’t really tell why I took the image. I saw it and the urge was there. I’m pleased with the result though.

The Song of the Day is “Love Or Something” by Bob Geldof & The Boomtown Rats. I have it on the collection “Loudmouth: The Best Of Bob Geldof & The Boomtown Rats”. See a nice video on YouTube.

Some very interesting cameras have appeared recently, and due to all that web site fuzz I have not yet commented on that.

It’s interesting, digital photography seems to get to a point where it’s more than good enough. When i bought my Nikon D200, I knew that, short of the high-end pro models, I had probably the best camera one could buy, with only one exception: the sensor was a little bit too noisy at high ISOs. It was still at least as good as film, but the Canons were better.

With the D300 that all changed. Suddenly Nikon had a first league sensor, and the camera itself had become ergonomically and feature-wise more or less perfect.

Sure, the D700 brought even less noise and full-frame, but in the end I decided to save the money. Full-frame would have sky-rocketed my lens costs, I would have lost the 100% viewfinder that I loved so much from the first moment, and the D300’s high ISO image quality is just good enough.

Additionally I would have lost the long reach without gaining anything on the short end. The point is this: the wide-angle problem for APS-C sensors is solved, there are plenty fine ultra-wide lenses. They may be not as good as the Nikon 14-24/2.8, but they take filters, cost half of it and ultimately they are again good enough. On the long end though, switching to full-frame would have had enormous impact. On the D300, my Nikon 70-300 VR has enormous reach. It’s equivalent to a 450mm lens. Ok, Nikon’s 400 and 500mm lenses are faster and of higher quality, but apart from the fact that they cost between 10 and 20 times as much, you can’t even carry them. Oh, and need I say that for my application, mostly street photography, the 70-300 is good enough?

With the new D300s (that’s a suffix, not a plural, thanks Nikon), the decision was even easier. I don’t need or even desire video, and apart from that, the D300s has nothing relevant to offer.

How about other brands? Not that I have any desire to change, but we have seen some interesting cameras in the last month. With the 7D, Canon finally have their answer to the Nikon D300. It has a much improved autofocus module (in this respect toppling the more expensive 5DMkII), has higher resolution, at least on paper it seems to offer excellent high-ISO noise, it has 18 megapixels, thus a whole lot more than the D300, they have even given it the 100% viewfinder. There are no reviews yet, but when they have not fumbled badly, this camera is bound to sell and give Nikon a headache. If I would begin today, I’d strongly consider the Canon 7D. As things are, it is just another excellent camera that’s more than good enough.

What else? Of course, the new Leica M9. This beast is totally and utterly out of reach, but I suppose if I had enough money to burn, I would buy one. Finally and after a long odyssey, Leica has arrived in the digital age. I am impressed.

And then? What about the Leicas for the poor man? What about those big sensor / non DSLR cameras that have appeared recently? It’s strange, they all have their strengths, but none of them is really interesting yet. The Sigma DP2 has improved upon the DP1, nevertheless it’s still much too slow. The Olympus Pen E-P1 is a nice camera, good looking, charming even, but its autofocus is much inferior to any DSLR and even to Panasonic’s Micro Four Thirds offerings. On the other hand, Panasonic has brought a too big, too DSLR-ish first offering with the G1, followed by a much nicer GF1, a camera of about the same type as the Olympus, but why on earth have they decided to set on stabilized lenses instead of a stabilized sensor?? That’s stupid! About the only argument in favor of lens stabilization is, that it stabilizes the image in an optical viewfinder. Apart from that it is only more expensive and adds complex elements that can fail. On a camera that does not even have an optical viewfinder, lens stabilization is pure folly.

Leaves the new Leica X1. Oh well, no need to salivate about this. Leica’s appeal are the M lenses. A fixed-lens Leica X1 is just another overprized camera soon to be obsolete.

All in all it seems that the category is not yet there. The cameras are either not good enough, or if they are, they are irrelevantly expensive.

Let’s look into the other direction, let’s look at medium format and the new Leica S2 system. This is even more out of reach than the M9, but again, if I had the money to burn, I would probably lust for a Leica S2. It’s not bigger than a pro DSLR (which most people would already consider too big to carry around at all times), but it should give us much better image quality. Indeed, the 100% crop shown on The Luminous Landscape hints at probably the best image quality ever seen in a digital camera. Impressive again.

In a way even the big medium format backs from Phase One and Hasselblad impress me, although those cameras are completely unusable for my type of photography. And then there is it again: my 12 megapixels are just good enough for me. They suffice even in those cases where I don’t invent half of my pixels with tools like Alien Skin Snap Art. And there is more to it: with 12 megapixels and the corresponding file sizes, my storage problem is solved. Hard drive space increases faster than I can make images, even though I save all my multi-layer Photoshop files, with some of the bigger of them being around half a gigabyte. I can still keep all my images so far on one single inexpensive drive, and I will be able to do so forever. Going medium format would set me back not only financially. Find a laptop that can edit a 60 megapixel image with ease. Well, you may find some extremely expensive MacBook Pro to come near, but then show me one of them that weighs 1.5 kg. No chance.

So do I care? Heaven, no! Times have changed. This is not the early digital age. Cameras keep their value now. Mind it, I don’t mean monetary value, that one goes down as it used to, but they keep their inherent usage value. I have no idea when I will change cameras. Should the D300 fail or get destroyed, I would of course buy a newer camera, but other than that I see no reason to change one good enough camera with all features that I could ever need, against another good enough camera with the same or similar features. Fact is, the D300 is already more than I need.

These images are from yesterday morning, thus the title. The Song of the Day is “Morningshow” from fellow Austrian Fuzzman’s self-titled first album. See a video on YouTube.

I’m learning. We all do, and that pretty much all of the time, but I am learning about image resizing now.

For my new site I need downscaled versions of my images. I think I’ll provide the same sizes as SmugMug does. Using my image database IMatch, I have copied all my JPEG files tagged “Submissions.SmugMug” to a new directory. From there I want to batch-resize them into directories 0150×0150, 0400×0400, 0600×0600, 0800×0800 and 1024×1024. The obvious choice for that job is Photoshop’s Image Processor. At least that’s what I thought.

I had already done all those conversions for all sizes, but when I compared my results to the images on SmugMug, they were pretty poor. Well, you can say all sorts of things about SmugMug’s current stability, but one thing is for sure: they damn well know how to resize images. I tried for more than an hour to get similar results in Photoshop, I tried to vary the JPEG quality, I tried to apply different levels of sharpening, all in vain. SmugMug’s images still looked better. Not by much, but it was noticeable.

Finally I had the idea to try IrfanView, my favorite image viewer. And really, not only does it have a batch facility that can resize (and a hundred things more), not only that the quality matches that of SmugMug’s versions, no, it is also much, much faster than Photoshop, uses less resources and does not block the computer while it runs. In fact I am converting 2164 images to a bounding box of 600×600 pixels right now, in the background and while I write this blog entry. OK, one problem solved

The Song of the Day is “Ribbon In The Sky” by Stevie Wonder. I have it on the collection “Original Musiquarium I”. For whatever reasons it was never followed by a number two. Hear it on YouTube.

One more post for today, it is a short one, and that’s more than fitting. It is well past midnight now.

This is the door of one of those countless small shops that remain closed. Their size is not fitting for today’s commerce. Sometimes I think, that the American mind-set of tearing down the old and building the new, has its merits. After all, most of these shops will never find any commercial use, and at the same time they are unfit to house people. Here in the 7^th district, home of Vienna’s artisans, at least some of those shops have been converted into small galleries and other art outlets, but even a big city can accomodate only so many of them.

The Song of the Day is “The Closing Of The Doors” from Róisín Murphy’s 2005 album “Ruby Blue”, so far one of the more original achievements of this young century. Hear it on YouTube. And if you feel that sounds like Moloko, you’re right, it’s the very same voice

It’s stupid. I shouldn’t do that. I really should work on my new web site.

But then, how could I have passed this playground without noticing the kids sitting in the cage, on top of the goal? How could I not have taken the image, how could I have restrained myself from processing and uploading it?

Or the tools of that chimney sweeper, whom I saw in the morning, vanishing in a shop, leaving them out on the street, prey to my Sigma 150/2.8 Macro?

Yes, I use the 150 again and it’s pure pleasure. It’s an awkward lens in many ways, but once you get accustomed to the fact that you are always too near for what you see, once you have found out that even then it sometimes pays off to get nearer, once you have acknowledged how sharp it is wide open, once you have begun to see in this peculiarly tiny frame: suddenly it feels natural like any other lens. Well, heavier maybe

So often I see people ask on forums what lenses they should buy for good bokeh, and then they get all sorts of answers from 50/1.4 to – of course – 85/1.4, but what so many people don’t recognize, is that near focus beats wide aperture all the time. That’s why this lens is so useful and that’s why the Sigma 70/2.8 Macro wipes the floor with the Nikon 85/1.8, although they have so similar focal lengths and although the are similarly priced.

Yesterday was one of these days. I have more images. At least one or two, and each of those shown here would have made it for Image of the Day on a normal day. I relish those days, even though they make so much work and even though it is so stupid and I should work on my server

The bicycle made it today. I think, yeah, that guy’s really funny. I saw him, and for whatever reason, he reminded me of a clown. There was something in the pose, and of course for me there is something in it that you can’t see: he had an orange saddle (you see the color, but you wouldn’t have seen what it is) and he has red handles on the handlebar, a handlebar that reminded me of the cap of a jester. Well, it was impossible to fully isolate this guy, thus you only see what you see. For the rest you have to believe me. He’s still funny enough I think, isn’t he?

The Song of the Day is “He’s Funny That Way” by Billie Holiday. I have it in my cheap collection of 10 CDs with early Billie Holiday recordings. I have it by Ella as well, but Billie is what I found on YouTube, thus she makes it.

Not my best day yesterday. On the other hand, it was a wonderful late summer day and I left work early to go swimming, thus I should not complain

Both of these images are from yesterday morning and both were taken with the Sigma 150/2.8 Macro. These are the last images with this lens for at least two weeks. At the moment I am on the train to Carinthia, on Sunday I’ll be on a week-long trip to Kraków, Poland, and then I’ll spend another week in Carinthia.

I have decided to leave the 150 in Vienna. It is too heavy and as a walk-around lens only useful when you have the chance to return to a place. My lenses for the next two week are the three zooms Tokina 11-16/2.8, Nikon 18-200 VR, Nikon 70-300 VR, and the three primes Sigma 28/1.8, Nikon 50/1.8 and Nikon 10.5/2.8 fisheye.

The 28 will be my “normal” lens, the fish may be useful when ultra-wide is not wide enough, and the 50/1.8 is in my Carinthian bag at all times since I bought the superior but heavier and bigger Sigma 50/1.4. Additionally I will have my tripod in the car and the Lee graduated neutral density filters in the bag. I hope the weather plays nice

The Song of the Day is “Power To The Meek” from the 1999 Eurythmics album “Peace”. See a video on YouTube.