These are tools of my father. My father was a master carpenter and entrepreneur, though his business never got even mid-sized. In a way he was – and still is – always the working man.
It is years ago that I took this image. Just look at the file name or the URL: mid-August 2006! That’s before I began this blog.
I’m still here in Carinthia, beautiful autumn days outside, the trees in their most glorious colors, I confined to the apartment, sick of being sick. Well, not much longer. But of course I was not outside yesterday, thus the archive image.
For no particular reason I began looking for an image from the beginning, browsing my early D200 images in chronological order and … they suck. They really do. Most of them do. No that’s not really differentiating, most of my images still suck, but on any given day, I can be sure that I will have a workable image.
Not so then. Oh my! Not only did my images suck, I made so few of them! I didn’t even properly try to make them not suck.
I can best see it in framing. Today when I frame an image, I normally know what I do. I attempt a certain effect, and this is so pronounced, that even after a long time, even if I don’t remember the exact incident, I can immediately see why I framed the image as it is, I understand what I wanted to achieve, even when the image was ultimately a failure. They are my images and I understand my images.
It’s not that I don’t recognize my early images, sure I do, but so very often I recognize them through the locations. I know the places, I can remember many of the incidents, but what I don’t recognize is the style.
Style? Huh?? Bold word for someone denying having one!
Indeed. Uhhh … well … there’s not only black and white, there are shades in between. I am slowly accepting the idea of style being more than a marketing instrument. I am still convinced that much of what goes as “style” is nothing but self-inflicted artistic petrification, annihilation of creativity from fear of changing from a formula that has been found to sell.
There is a deeper meaning though. While the word style is commonly understood as a characteristic of a particular artist’s work, that can be recognized by the recipient, even without knowing the artist, i.e. understood as a distinguishable property of the work, there is merit in looking at style from the artist’s perspective. Here, style is not a result, it is a process, and ultimately it is a way of thinking, a way of analyzing the world. I may frequently change tools, change between color and b&w, change between realistic post-processing and Photoshop plugins like Alien Skin Snap Art, I may do that from one image to the next, may do it within one post and change back with the next, but I change my way of thinking, of analyzing the world, only very slowly, and only due to an ever ongoing learning process.
This is what I mean when I say I don’t recognize my style in these old images. When I see them, frankly, I have no idea what I thought then. There is not much continuity with what I do now. The images could as well have been taken by someone else.
It’s pretty interesting to see how it all began and where the roots are of how I work today. I have not gone back to the early 5 megapixal Kodak images, I guess I should view them systematically as well, but I guess it won’t make much of a difference. What finally made a difference, was when I bought my second SLR lens.
My first lens was a Nikon 18-200 VR, and when I bought the D200, this long range was actually a step back from the even longer range of the Kodak. I was just used to zooming and to the universal availability of all focal lengths.
My second lens was a Sigma 30/1.4, my first prime, and though I can’t remember why exactly I bought a prime at all, I suppose it was the “myth of primes”, it immediately made a difference. Constricted to a frame of a certain size, I began to compose. Not being able to zoom, made me work harder, think deeper, and from that time on I see images that I can identify with. These are images that I have put thoughts into, and the ways of those thoughts are still traceable for me.
Now, what can be learned of all that? Two things:
Productivity may not be the only key to improvement, but it helps a lot. My productivity increased tremendously, when I began to publish a daily photoblog. If you want to get better, there is no better thing than practice, and the rigid discipline of a daily blog is keeping you practicing more than you otherwise would. It’s not as intense as doing it as a job, but it leaves you more freedom to explore.
The second thing is: the “myth of primes” exists for a reason. Restrictions make you work harder, and that improves your work as well.
The Song of the Day is “The Working Man” from the 1968 self-titled Creedence Clearwater Revival debut album. Hear it on YouTube.
This is a house in Bleiburg/Pliberk, a small town in south-east Carinthia. We were there for genealogical reasons, to visit an old tombstone in the wall of the church.
I did not know Bleiburg, at least not its center. I have always taken the main road, but as I know now, this road circumvents the center for a reason: Bleiburg, although undoubtedly a town, has the small, narrow roads of a village. “Blei” means “lead”. This was a mining town, and it is obvious that it was rich during the 19th century. The whole architecture speaks of money, and the church is bigger and more splendid than you’d expect in a small town off the main traffic routes.
The weather didn’t hold though. Shortly after we arrived, the sun vanished behind dense clouds, and on part of the way back to Villach we had rain. Still, Bleiburg is a place that we’ll have to explore – when it’s warmer again, either this year, but sure the next.
As regards the blog, you may notice that there is now an “About” page, the index of the Songs of the Day has found its way from Blogger as well, and this weekend I have added the first four portfolios. At the moment there is one portfolio of 12 images for each year, beginning with 2006, roughly one image from every month, the year 2009 not yet finished. Other portfolios will follow, and of course there will be a bicycle portfolio. I’ve used SmoothGallery from JonDesign, which itself uses the mootools JavaScript framework.
The Song of the Day is “Bel el Madhi (The Gate of the Past)” from Souad Massi’s 2003 album “Deb (Heartbroken)”. Excellent Arab/French music. Enjoy it on YouTube.
I’m on the train to Carinthia right now and we’re just crossing the first ridge of mountains. There’s snow outside. Not as yesterday, not a mere idea of snow, nope, this is a white, wet blanket of coldness.
I took this image on my way to the train. It’s the cart of someone who posts advertising posters. The interesting thing is only, that there was nobody around.
I’m back to a lens that I have not used in a long time: the Sigma 30/1.4. Well, probably it’s not really necessary to have a 28/1.8, a 30/1.4 and a 35/1.8. Of these three lenses the Sigma 28/1.8 is probably the most versatile. It is not the cheapest, that’s the Nikon 35/1.8, but it is sharp (OK, that’s true for all of them), can be used on FX, and most important, it focuses almost down to the front lens. Anyway. All three lenses are quite fine and now I use the 30 again. It’s the fastest, and that not only means the maximum aperture, no, it has also the fastest autofocus.
Oh, and, by the way, I missed it, but two days ago this blog had its third birthday. Three years. Wow! It was never planned as a 365 days project, I always wanted to make this an institution, but of course you never know. Well, I’m not tired yet. I don’t feel what I do as repetitious, it did neither become an obligation nor a job, no chore, no routine. It is still an adventure and I hope you keep following me 
The Song of the Day is “Glamorous Glue” from Morrissey’s 1992 album “Your Arsenal”. See a video on YouKu.
It’s Friday morning. It’s stormy outside, just as it was yesterday, just as it was the day before. Meteorologists were right, we had snow yesterday morning. Only mixed into the rain, more the idea of snow than real, physical snow and nothing remained, but I’ve heard of parts of Austria where it piled up to 20cm. Isn’t that strange, given that we had 25 degrees Celsius about a week ago? More strange, given the fact that I was swimming on Saturday?
Well, that’s how it goes. I have no good image for yesterday, but I won’t shy away from showing you a bad one
I was in a hurry yesterday morning, I took the tramway line #5, and this image was taken through the rear window just before the last station, just before I left. When the train accelerates, water spills down from the roof and runs down the window.
The Song of the Day is “A little Rain” from Tom Waits’ 1992 album “Bone Machine”. Wow, is it really that long? Excellent as always. Hear a 1999 live version on YouTube.
Sometimes you find strange things. When I went to work today, I saw this pair of shoes, standing neatly on a big plant pot on the sidewalk. They were not new, but they didn’t look particularly damaged either. Sometimes you find strange things.
Talking of strange things, Nikon is a strange company. Sometimes they do things that nobody can really understand. Yesterday’s announcement was such a thing. They’ve coupled the high-end FX format professional photojournalist camera D3s with a DX format consumer macro lens. Reactions were negative across the board, but let’s just look closer: Is this AF-S DX Micro NIKKOR 85mm f/3.5G ED VR really such a stupid lens?
At an announced price of $530, this lens is clearly positioned against the Sigma 70/2.8 Macro and the Tamron 90/2.8. Both of these lenses are highly regarded for their image quality, both cover the full 35mm frame (FX), both are half a stop faster, neither has image stabilization.
Let’s look at maximum aperture first. Neither the Sigma nor the Tamron has f2.8 in the macro range. Both use have a smaller maximum aperture below 10 feet, f4.8 for the Sigma at closest focus distance. This is not uncommon, this is how most macro lenses work, this is how the high-end Nikon 105/2.8 VR lens works, I suppose this is how the new 85/3.5 will work as well. Thus I think there will not be much of a difference in the macro range.
For portrait use it is different. There you normally want to photograph wide open. Half a stop does not make so much of a difference in DOF, but even f2.8 is not as wide as you would ideally want. You’d normally look for f1.8 or f1.4. Obviously this is no portrait lens.
That leaves us with street photography. Some people may consider 85mm (127.5mm eq.) a strange choice for street photography, but I strongly disagree. I’ve made some of my best images with lenses around that focal length, and once you get used to it, this kind of photography allows for nice isolation of interesting details, but without the problems that you have with even longer focal lengths. With the 150/2.8 I often find myself in a situation where I have to actually go back. I see something, want to react, and then I find that I am much too near. The field of view of a 70 or 85mm lens very much conforms to the distance at which interesting scenes and details come to my attention.
Now that we may conclude that 85mm can indeed be a useful focal length for street photography, the question remains, whether this new Nikkor is a good choice or not.
Well, I assume that its optical quality is as good as that of the Sigma 70/2.8 and better than the Nikon 85/1.8. I further assume that it is sharp wide open. Nikon is certainly able to produce such a lens at that price, and I suppose they’ll be willing as well. If not, the lens would be pointless, but the high quality of the extremely competitively priced Nikon AF-S DX 35/1.8 clearly shows where they want their DX offerings to be positioned.
If all this is true, the new 85/3.5 should perform extremely well on the streets. Losing half a stop is not a problem, f2.8 is rather shallow for that use anyway. It won’t be an action lens, but with image stabilization it should be usable down to at least 1/30s, if you’re willing to gamble maybe even 1/15s. In contrast, I use the 70/2.8 always at least at 1/100s. Not all images are sharp at that shutter speed, the majority is. We’re talking 1 1/2 to 2 stops here, that’s the difference between ISO 400-640 and ISO 1600, and that’s a visible difference, no question. Or another example: ISO 6400 is not really usable on my D300, at least not for color. For B&W no problem, for color not really. ISO 1600 or 2000 is no problem though. Thus there are a lot of scenarios where the new Nikkor makes the image and the other lenses don’t. I guess this definitely looks like a market niche, and maybe this lens is not such a silly choice at all.
The Song of the Day is “Last Pair of Shoes Blues” by Memphis Slim. As so often, I have it on disc 53 of “The Ultimate Jazz Archive”. If you look for something cheaper (though it won’t have 168 CDs), I suggest the collection “Grinder Man Blues”. Sorry, no video on YouTube or elsewhere, but Deezer has the song.
This is an old image. One from my archives, one from mid May last year. We had pouring rain today and I have not made a single image.
Sometimes when I already have an image of the Day and when I am tired, lazy or when I have no time, I put promising images that I can’t process on a TODO list.
This is one of these images, and I guess that I got a better result today than I could have got last year. One of the reasons is a micro-contrast adjustment made with Topaz Detail, and then I may have gained some experience since then. I ended up with an 18 layer job and an image that I am quite satisfied with.
The Song of the Day is “Remember The Time” from Michael Jackson’s 1991 album “Dangerous”. Hear it on YouTube.
These are images of Thursday. I took some in the morning and then late in the evening. All images were converted with DxO 5.3, but with the exception of the last, none was shot at particularly high ISO values.
Speaking of DxO, I’m just speeding through the documentation to get an impression of what a workflow with this tool could look like.
My first impression, just from working with the program without any consultation of the docs, was one of overall simplicity. There are two versions, a standalone program and a Photoshop/Lightroom plugin. I don’t have Lightroom, thus I can’t say how it’s activated there, but in Photoshop you get into the plugin via “File / Import”. Makes sense after all.
Once in the program, regardless which version, you are first presented with a file browser where you can select the images that you want to process. DxO is a batch/pipeline oriented program and employs a “Project” metaphor. A project can contain any number of images. Those get processed in a batch and the result is either that all images are opened in Photoshop (plugin) or get stored in a format of your choice, in the same or a different directory as the original (normally RAW) files.
As I said, I’m just now looking into the documentation. All images so far were processed in “experimental mode”, and I can say that the user interface is intuitive and simple. You begin on a “Select” screen where you include images into your project, walk through a “Prepare” screen where you can specify how each image is to be converted and then start the conversion on a “Process” screen. On my quad-core processor, processing was two images at a time, we’ll see what it does on a dual-core processor when I have installed it in Carinthia.
Speaking of multiple installations, the program has to be activated and activations can be transferred from one computer to another, but as far as I have seen, activation on at least two computers is permitted by one license. That’s quite OK. The idea is to have it on one Desktop and a laptop. We’ll see how that finally turns out for me, because I regularly use two desktops and a laptop.
DxO has one fully automatic mode, a lot of image presets, e.g. for slightly low or high key processing, one tuned for high ISO images, presets for different saturation/contrast combinations, etc, and of course you can set everything manually and save that as a preset.
Whatever you do on the “Prepare” screen, manually setting details or applying presets, it is always immediately displayed in a big preview that can be zoomed in up to 200%, thus you always exactly see what you do.
If you don’t set anything at all, the image gets converted in fully automatic mode, and what that does is usually quite OK. It may not be your desired look, but so far it has always produced a usable result. Automatic processing includes geometry correction for supported lens/body combinations. Some of my combinations are supported, some not.
All of the images in this post were converted by the plugin version using presets. Then I have added further processing in Photoshop, but usually not much.
What Adobe Camera RAW does and DxO seemingly not, is the automatic elimination of hot pixels. This is a bit of a bummer, but no worse than Capture NX.
EDIT: Sorry for the false information, by now I have found out that DxO in fact can automatically eliminate hot pixels, it’s only a tad hidden and not on by default.
One final thing that may be interesting from a workflow perspective: The standalone version of DxO can produce linear DNG files, i.e. DNG files that already contain a demosaiced image. These files can be processed by Adobe products and retain the flexibility of RAW files. I’m not really sure about the consequences, but this could mean that it would be possible to batch-convert all your files and e.g. apply only demosaicing and noise reduction. Anyway. We’ll see soon.
That’s it for today. This series of posts about DxO will continue as long as I learn useful things. Stay tuned.
The Song of the Day is “Just Another Day” from Brian Eno’s 2005 album “Another Day on Earth”. Hear it on YouTube.
OK, finally there’s one image of Wednesday, almost plainly out of DxO 5.3. It’s ISO 1600 from a Nikon D200 with Sigma 30/1.4, a combination that is supported by DxO for automatic lens correction. I think you won’t be able to tell from this resolution (even if you click on the image for the higher resolution) how much better the RAW conversion is, especially compared to Adobe Camera RAW. Nikon’s own conversions are slightly better but still inferior. I shall post some examples as we go along with a series of blog posts that will end up as a sort of review of DxO 5.3, but upfront I can already say that the examples on their website don’t lie. The quality improvement is dramatic.
They achieve this by removing noise not after demosaicing but before, directly on the RAW data. This makes sense, because a conventional Bayer sensor uses a pattern of interwoven pixels, half of them green (where the human eye is most sensitive), and a quarter each red and blue. That means that the actual resolution of the sensor for green is half of what you’d expect from the pixel count, and for red and blue it’s only a quarter each. Demosaicing is a process of interpolation, where the full resolution red, green and blue channels are reconstructed from the actual data in the reduced channels and from luminance information from the neighboring pixels of another color. Scary, huh? That’s for precision.
The only sensor type on the market that does not use such patterns at all (some by Kodak and Fuji use different patters or variations) is the Foveon sensor used in Sigma’s cameras, although at the price of much reduced actual pixel resolution. Those pixels upscale well, but an image resolution of 2640×1760 (4.6 megapixels) does not look so sexy today. That impression is further marred by a light sensitivity that’s slightly below today’s standards.
But let’s get back to Bayer sensors and the process of demosaicing. We’ve seen that the actual image is reconstructed from greatly incomplete data. I’d even say much of it is invented. Of course this technology is not new and the algorithms are fairly mature, but it is also clear that at high ISO noise starts to spread out. When neighboring pixels are used to reconstruct the exact color channels per pixel, then noise in those neighboring pixels comes into the equation. This sums up, and the result are ugly blotches of color or strong de-coloration as a consequence of noise reduction algorithms.
This is where DxO sets in. They reduce noise on the original pixels before they get combined in demosaicing. Therefore the noise in one pixel does not spread out to neighboring pixels. What exactly they do and how they do it is not known to me, is most probably patented or secret, but the results are clearly better than everything else that I’ve seen so far, producing very fine grain without much loss of detail and without much loss of color at high ISOs.
It’s really like a camera upgrade, i.e. the improvement is about the amount that you’d expect by going from one camera generation to the next. The Imaging Resource has quite a lengthy interview where these things are explained and where a D700 image is shown, taken at ISO 6400, underexposed by 3 EV and pushed to 51,200 equivalent. Crazy? Yes, but surprisingly there is still usable output.
The Song of the Day is “Tell Me You’ll Wait For Me” from Ray Charles’ 1959 album “The Genius of Ray Charles”. Sorry no video, but Amazon has samples.
I made these images in the morning, using the Sigma 30/1.4, a nice lens, slightly on the big side, but still a tad smaller than the Sigma 50/1.4 that I bought today. I guess you will see more images at 50 mm soon 
The Song of the Day is “Runnin’ Blue” from the fourth Doors album “The Soft Parade“, without doubt by far their least popular album, for a reason, but I have a hard time trying to be objective when it comes to The Doors. They were simply so good. Hear the Song on YouTube.
We like our tram stations red, because Vienna is a red city. It has always been, ever since after the first world war.
This is how we get rid of our paper. An when the bin is full, we stack it neatly atop. We are pedantic, we love our waste bins to be perfectly posed, just to keep our photographers happy.
And if that’s not enough (things rarely are, huhh?), we throw in another bicycle 
For no particular reason the Song of the Day is “We Are Each Other” from the 1992 Beautiful South album “0898“. Hear it on YouTube.
