Postmen in Austria use such yellow trolleys. You’ve already seen one of them in “655 – On A Lonely Avenue“. It’s one of the images that I put on Fine Art Photoblog.
Ahh, Fine Art Photoblog! I probably don’t advertise it often enough (in fact I almost never do), but in its almost two years it has developed into a nice reservoir of interesting photography. It’s become more quite lately, we all have our own blogs, jobs, lives, but I promise I’ll again contribute more often. In fact I did just yesterday. Why not head over and browse a little? You can even buy prints there 
Uhh … yes, sorry for that What else? Nikon Rumors told it for weeks, in only some hours it will be official: the Nikon D3s is coming. What that is? Well, just a D3 with sensor cleaning, video (only 720p) and ISO 12800.
Wait a minute, didn’t the D3 already have ISO 25600??? Uhhh … yes, it did, but it’s highest nominal ISO was 6400. 25600 was Hi3, the highest “boost” value. Now with the D3s, ISO 12800 is nominal and the highest “boost” ISO value is … 102,400!!! Holy smoke 
On the other hand, it’s not that much more. It’s just four stops better than my D300. On the other hand, four stops, wow! That’s pretty much! Imagine the difference between photographing at 1/4s and 1/30s! That’s normally the difference between to hold and not to hold. Or take 1/30s and 1/500s: that’s the difference between motion blur and freezing the action. Quite impressive.
Of course I won’t buy one. Can’t afford it. You would have to buy a damn lot of images over at Fine Art Photoblog to make that possible
I’ll tell you a secret: I’ll have a camera with that sensitivity, and I’ll tell you more: you will as well. We only won’t have it right now. We’ll have to wait maybe two years, maybe three, then we will have it in affordable cameras. It’s only that we will not value it, because at that time we will drool about a D4’s or D5’s ISO 409,600 
The Song of the Day is “The Letter” from Joe Cocker’s unforgettable 1970 live album “Mad Dogs & Englishmen”. See a video on YouTube.
This is the guy we first had in “1034 – That Look You Give That Guy“, and then recently in “1089 – He’s The Keeper” and “1090 – Feelin’ The Same Way“.
For no particular reason I have changed to the Sigma 20/1.8, a long-time favorite, and when I used this title for the first time, it was with the very same lens. So what? Is this a rain lens?
This is one of the images that I had envisioned as a square. I had approached the bike, more or less centered the focused headlight, and it was clear to me, that I would do the final composition while cropping. It’s not uncommon that I crop, and thanks to Ted Byrne and Mark Hobson I have developed a loving relationship with the square, but what IS uncommon, is that I make an image with the intent to crop to a square. Normally these are afterthoughts.
It’s rainy now. Meteorologists even expect snow this week, possibly down to 300 meters. Wow, swimming on Saturday, snow by mid-week! Well, let’s not assume the worst
The Song of the Day is one more time “Rainy Day Blues” by Willie Nelson and Wynton Marsalis. Hear the song from their 2008 album “Two Men With The Blues” on YouTube.
As far as I’m concerned, SoFoBoMo is over and I’m feeling a little exhausted. This is the reason for my delay.
I’ve done three things yesterday:
First, after shooting long lenses for a month, I have mounted a wide lens.
My Sigma 10-20 is showing signs of wear, I recently found that it frequently has problems focusing correctly, and it even seems to have some misalignment, because I have seen images where the left half was in focus and the right was not. I can’t remember having particularly abused it, but at the moment I don’t trust this lens.
Therefore I have mounted another lens, not so wide, but sweet with its wide aperture and its short minimum focus distance, the Sigma 20/1.8. Both images of today were shot with it.
Second, I have installed the new Blurb BookSmart 2.0, and I have used it to create a printed version of “Urban Dreams II“. I just followed the instructions on the Blurberati blog, and with one small glitch all went well.
The glitch was, that the PDFs from my InDesign template, when imported into Photoshop, produce images that instead of a white background have transparency. Imported with standard settings, the pages are cropped to the bounding box enclosing all objects on the page, but not the empty borders. Thus all page sizes were different.
Obviously there must be something wrong with my template, but in Photoshop’s import dialog simply choosing “Crop to Media Box” instead of “Crop to Bounding Box” gave me even sizes for all pages, and an action did the job of flattening the file (making the background white again) and exporting it to PNG. I’ve bound the action to Ctrl-F12, thus it was still tedious calling the action 120 times, every time typing a number for the file name, and after saving, closing the file, but it was bearable.
Another thing is, that in BookSmart I have chosen hardcover, but I could not set the color of spine and flaps. I’ve left them white with black text on the spine. I guess it will look awful, but at the moment I have ordered one book only, just to see how the quality is. It should arrive in about one or two weeks, and until then I should have figured it out
The third thing is, that I have bought a replacement for the Sigma 10-20. The options were the new Nikon 10-24/3.5-4.5, the Tokina 11-16/2.8 or maybe the announced but not yet available Sigma 10-20/3.5.
After much agonizing about these options, I have decided for the Tokina, mainly due to the amazing constant f2.8. That makes a big difference. This morning, before sunrise, I have made some test shots. OK, ISO went to 3200 and the exposure time was one full second, but it was really only dawn outside and practically dark inside. I was lying on the couch, holding the camera in a very stable position, and what I got was a perfectly focused, sharp image. I’m impressed. Light was so much lower than normally on the streets at night, that I will be able to use ISO 200 at 1/4s without any problem. 1/4s is what I can hold from a stable stance at 11mm most of the time, and almost all of the time when I can lean against a wall or a sign post.
On the other hand, this lens has three drawbacks as well. It is not as wide as the two contenders, and at these focal lengths, every millimeter makes a difference. It has a very limited “long” end, and what is most annoying for me, it focuses only down to 30cm, that’s six more than the 24cm of the other two lenses, and in that regard it can not even touch the Sigma 20/1.8 with its minimum focus distance of 20cm.
Remember: the focus distance is measured from the sensor plane! The Sigma 20/1.8 is quite a big lens, thus it focuses so near that you can almost touch the front lens. But even the 24cm of the Sigma 10-20 and the Nikon 10-24 are much better. With the Tokina, it is much harder to use something like a small flower as an unproportionally large foreground. We’ll see. I guess I’ll get accustomed to that lens soon
The Song of the Day is “Stealin’ Apples” by Roy Eldridge. I have it on disc 76 of “The Ultimate Jazz Archive”, and if you don’t want to buy this 168 CD box (though you should, it’s a steal), you can get it on the album “Little Jazz” as well. YouTube only has it from Fletcher Henderson, but Roy Eldridge has played with Fletcher Henderson, thus the two versions are very similar.
Weather plays dirty tricks with us these days. Yesterday it rained most of the time, and when I finally went home, the rain turned to snow. When I left home an hour later, it was rain again. What a waste!
It’s the same thing as the last weekend in Carinthia, where rain had wasted away all the wonderful clean snow that had fallen the days before. Sometimes nature is a poet, sometimes nature is a barbarian.
Or rather: nature is. Neither poetic, neither barbarian, mindless instead, without purpose, not a consciousness, only a coincidence of circumstances. It’s we who want someone to blame.
Oh, by the way: the reason why I left home later, was to pick up the Nikon 24/2.8 that I just got from eBay. It’s an AF 24/2.8, not an AF-D, thus it sends no distance information to the camera’s matrix metering system, but that’s OK. It’s the second version, the one with the wider focus ring. Like all older Nikon designs it is really small and light, and I like that for a difference. Seems like this was the last image with the Sigma 20/1.8 for some time
The Song of the Day is “What A Waste!” by Ian Dury & The Blockheads. The CD that I have is not available any more, but it was a collection anyway. A nicely priced collection available is “Reasons to Be Cheerful: The Very Best of Ian Dury & the Blockheads”. See them live on YouTube.
Another one. It took me six or seven frames until it would fit smug into the frame. Took a little, gave a little in Photoshop, that’s it
The Song of the Day is “Time After Time” by Dinah Washington. It’s from her classic 1959 album “What a Diff’rence a Day Makes”. Amazon has no samples, but Deezer has the whole album for you to hear, though they require you to log in now.
I have pondered if I should drop Deezer as a music source altogether, but I guess as long as they don’t require you to pay, I’ll go on referring you to them if I don’t find anything on YouTube. The sound quality is excellent and you can hear the whole songs. So, it you want to hear it, head over to Deezer, register, log in, and then click this link for the album.
Today weather was as unpleasant as it could be. Steady drizzles to heavy rains, eating away the new snow that has fallen during the week, but cold enough not to melt the old snow. 
I was out there just once for the supermarket, made some images there and in front of the house, not overly inspired, and finally gave up. This is the kind of weather where you may be lucky and get a spectacular sky, but there is absolutely no chance in predicting anything.
If it happens, and if by chance you happen to be in the right place, a wonderful image may come together, although the time is very short, because these images were all shot at around what would have been sundown on a brighter day.
I suppose up on the mountain it must have been very beautiful, because there the precipitation certainly came down as snow, but I did not dare driving up the road.
The Image of the Day was shot down in the garage. There is a ramp leading up, and I took some shots of of the light coming in through the grated windows. This near-square is what survived.
The Song of the Day is “The Bunker” from Beirut’s spectacular 2006 album “Gulag Orkestar”. If youz don’t already have it, don’t forget to hear it on YouTube. It’s well worth your time. Sorry, no lyrics available.
Oh dear, I’ve left you waiting again. This is a Friday morning image, it’s Saturday afternoon now, and I’ve played around with the image much too long. Here we are really back again, this is not dense, this is as much isolation as possible, and where not, it’s shameless cloning.
Actually I like this image pretty well. It began when I tried opening it in Adobe Camera RAW and, for no particular reason, put the “Clarity” slider all to the left. Well, this is an image taken with the Sigma 20/1.8 wide open, it’s focused on the front wheel, the background is in pretty much of a distance and already quite out of focus.
Take one of your images that are like that, i.e. have noticeable separation between a sharp foreground and a blurred background. Now take “Clarity” to the left. See what I mean? There is an increased separation. The background blurs out further, the foreground stays sharp, but there is kind of a veil over the image.
The effect alone is not very useful, the sharp parts suffer too much, but of course it can be used as one layer, for instance combined with another layer from a really good RAW converter, e.g. DxO, and a rough mask. I did not go for a precise mask (well, I tried, but it didn’t look good), I simply painted with the biggest, softest brush.
I’m pretty sure I could have had the same or a similar thing with two layers, one blurred and one not, but it’s always fun to try new things. For the finish I decided on tri-toning. Somehow it matches the mood.
So here we are. Another bicycle. So many of them are waiting out there, for whatever reasons, and if I find nothing else, there’s always one left for me.
The Song of the Day is “Reasons For Waiting” from the 1969 Jethro Tull album “Stand Up”. Hear it on YouTube.
It’s Friday afternoon, I’m on the train again, and after a week of fog and rain finally the sun came out, just when I was in such a hurry, that I could not shoot a single image any more. C’est la vie!
But that’s really something to complain about in the next entry, right? These are two of the images that I shot when I left work yesterday afternoon. It was a dull, cloudy day, and if it had not been, the sun would have been down anyway. I lusted for color, and here are the results: a yellow mailbox with some black graffiti and lemons on a tree in front of a flower shop. Heaven knows how they survive
The Image of the Day was originally a vertical with the black line being sharp where it ran into the lower right corner, but I finally decided to crop up to a square, making the image completely abstract.
The Song of the Day is “Colore Ma Vie” by the great Charles Aznavour, the title song of his 2007 album. YouTube has the song, and they also have a nice making-of video about the album.
I said it once, I said it twice, I say it again: I am a big admirer of Mark Hobson’s work, but there is one thing that always buggered me, I didn’t know why!
Sure, Mark’s images are brilliantly composed and that with a consistency that speaks of his long experience and of utter certainty of expression, but that is not all. There is something in his subjects that I could not identify, some quality of seeing, a way to look at the world, that absolutely bewildered me.
Now, in a recent post, Mark has shed some light on it, borrowing the term “dense photography” from a recent article by Matthew Summers-Sparks.
It was a revelation. Suddenly I not only saw that quality, suddenly I could name it, and it fascinated me so much, that I decided to give it a try. Wednesday night, on my way home, I wanted to make dense photos.
Oh my, that’s hard. In a way I have trained myself to see isolated subjects, to see details and to isolate them in my mind, and in this very process they become subjects in the first place.
Mark’s notion of “plain seeing” as I understand it, letting loose of attached meanings, diving into the world around us as a strictly visual world, has always felt natural to me, yes, if there is something like “my method”, then this is probably it, but photographing dense, that’s a completely different story.
The images of this post were made in the order presented, the Image of the Day first, and the Image of the Day is probably the best example for what I was after. Note, that I did not try to exactly copy Mark’s style, that’s not the point, I tried to find out what “dense photography” could mean to me, and in the Image of the Day you see all the elements.
On first view it is hard to tell what this photography “is about”. There are some cars, in fact there is an assortment of cars, all cut off, going from near to far, there is a street with a curve, or a crossing, you don’t know, there is a bicycle on the corner and a lit house in the background.
This is a place that I pass by almost once a day, and I have made many, many images at or around that corner, some of the house in the background, a hotel that in the evening is nicely lit with colored lights, but none of them has ever made it for Image of the Day. Well, one did, “629 – Electric Ladyland V” back in July, but that was not about the street, it was more about roofs.
Today’s Image of the Day is about the place, about what it is, about what it feels like to be there, and, interestingly enough, it is a perfect rendition of that. Well, we could argue that any snapshot could do that, as long as it were wide enough, and to a certain degree that is correct, but I wouldn’t be satisfied with any snapshot. With this image I am
I have no idea what “dense photography” means to Matthew Summers-Sparks, I have not read the article yet, but I have bookmarked it for reading later, probably today on the train. I do have an idea what it may mean to Mark Hobson, and now I certainly know what it means to me, and that is: context and relationships between things.
The world is a very complex place full of things. Any perspective reveals different relationships between those things, and the way we frame them emphasizes some of these relationships and cuts others.
Dense photography is in no way easy to do. Finding a perspective that gives a pleasant alignment of the things included, causes me to shift around much more than I normally do. I have often noticed, that I am satisfied with the initial perspective, i.e. I see an isolated detail, it tickles my fancy, I photograph it from that perspective, and when it happens while I walk, I might even take a step back to get to the perspective that I had when I saw it first.
Not so with dense photography. I want to frame the place as it is, but I want to align things the way I like them, thus I have to wiggle around and to change perspectives until I get a well balanced frame, and it is interesting as well, that a square frame seems to help a lot. All three attempts at photographing dense profited much from being cropped to a square. It could be Mark’s influence here, but maybe there is something to the square, a casual elegance of balance that is inherent to the format, and maybe it supports dense photography better than other formats. Or maybe I’m just talking nonsense here
The last two photographs were made on another corner, here I have let loose, they are more my usual style, but of course the last one is in a way dense all by itself. After all, it seems density is not so alien to me.
The Song of the Day is “What It Is” from Mark Knopfler’s 2000 album “Sailing to Philadelphia”. I had to look for quite a while until I found a video. Searching on YouTube lets you only find some videos that are all “not available in your country” (though I’m sure they work fine in the US), but then I noticed that Google offered a link Video on its search page, and here they were, all available in my country, most of them on YouTube, most of them not to be found by YouTube’s search. Oh well.
Of all the videos I prefer this one on DailyMotion for its good sound quality and perfect live feeling.
I am 44 now, 45 in 27 days. That’s as good a time as any to ponder about mortality, right?
Fact is, that I read about 20 books a year. Let’s be generous, let’s make this a whopping 33.3 or 100 in three years. This is a pretty optimistic average, but let’s pretend that when I retire, I will begin to read like mad.
Fine. That makes 1000 books in 30 years, 1500 books in 45 years. Now, you may remember that I mentioned some 3000+ books that we had to move to Villach and to shelve alphabetically. Begin to see the problem?
Of course there’s about more than half of the books that I won’t bother reading anyway. Many were not bought by me, many even are heirlooms. Hey, we even have an original copy of Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf”, and I have read that. Interesting thought that someone could have read this book and later pretend, he had not known what Hitler would do. But that’s another story.
And that’s not even all. There are some hundreds of books more in Vienna, and each year I buy about two thirds of the books that I read, thus the collection constantly grows. At the moment there is quite some shelf space left, but I guess this won’t last for more than three years.
It’s not only books either. Have you learned all the languages that you wanted to learn? Seen all the movies you wanted to see? Visited all the places that you want to visit? Heard all the music you wanted to hear? Been in all the museums and collections where your favorite painter’s images hang?
And if not, and if you’re brutally honest, do you believe you have any chance? How do you cope with that? How do you cope with the problem of a finite lifespan?
And are these not the very questions that make us ponder much too much about facts that are set, facts that we have no chance to influence, at least not in a decisive way? Is the answer to not care about it? But if we don’t care, are we even able to value? And if we don’t value what we have and do, who should?
For some people religion is the answer, and that’s indeed tempting, because it allows to pretend that the problem does not even exist. After all, there must be pretty much time to read books in eternity, huh?
And creativity? Art? It’s a way to leave something behind, isn’t it? It’s pretty sure that many more people know Vincent Van Gogh than ever knew him during all his lifetime. Do we create for eternity? And did he?
All of today’s images were shot in my living room in Villach, because weather was about as disgusting as yesterday and I did not want to go out. I used the Sigma 20/1.8, handheld at f1.8.
The Song of the Day is “All Good Books” from Paul Weller’s 2003 album “Illumination”. See a video on YouTube.
