This morning I made some images that could probably have been usable, but then, in the afternoon, on my way back home, in the middle of a slight drizzle, I got pleasantly surprised by an enormous sunset.

It didn’t last longer than maybe 5 minutes, and all the while I made image after image, constantly hampered by the traffic. Finally I decided on this one, embracing the traffic instead of trying to avoid it.

Btw, you may have found my blog to be unreachable today and part of yesterday, and that’s because it was every once in a while. JustHost, my hosting company, had some trouble with my machine. It must have affected quite a lot of people, at least that’s what my stats say. I’m sorry for that, I hope it’s a singular event. If not, well, I’m really not inclined to pay more for something that I’ve bought anyway and that should simply work. But let’s see how it goes on.

It’s far from being the fourth of July, but the Song of the Day still is “Night Ride Home” from Joni Mitchell’s 1991 album of the same name. Great album, great song, hear it on YouTube.

One more image for today. Yesterday I felt slightly restricted by the Sigma 150/2.8 Macro. There were several moments when I missed images because I was always far too near and going so far back was not an option.

The problem with going back, even when there is space, is that the longer your lens, the more obstacles fit between you and your subject. In any case, I wanted something shorter for today. The morning was rather gloomy (it did get better though during the day), thus 1/200s, as I use with the Sigma 150mm lens, did not feel promising anyway. I really hate getting into high ISOs at daylight and even at f2.8.

Following that impulse, I decided to use the Sigma 50/1.4, one lens that I have not used in a long time. With it I took this image of a small copy of a greek sculpture. I found it in the window of a greek restaurant.

The Song of the Day is “Big Boy Blue” by Ella Fitzgerald. I have it on a 10 CD collection that I’ve got for 10€, but as that is not available elsewhere, I link to “The Platinum Collection”. Hear it on YouTube.

This entry comes a day late. Sorry, I was busy upgrading a hard disk. Gosh, formatting a 2 TB disk takes forever, and copying 1.1 TB of data … longer.

Anyway. It’s done, my computer in Vienna has almost 4 TB of storage now, I guess as long as I don’t begin producing HD video, I’m safe for almost two years

These are images of yesterday morning. Nothing special, just two images that I would have happily taken anytime, but lately, how should I say, lately I’ve become rather choosy.

I don’t know if there is a connection with SoFoBoBo and the more project oriented work that I did for my book, in any case I cringe when I combine two images like those of today. Well, I still do it, I don’t have anything else, but at least I recognize and I apologize: Sorry for that

The Song of the Day is “Flower Punk” from the 1968 Frank Zappa album “We’re Only in It for the Money”. Hear it on YouTube.

Now that I think of it, Wednesday was not so bad. I had a bad hangover from the night before when I had met my friend Manfred. We had been in a Pizzeria, later in a bar in his hotel, and then I had the idea to go to my apartment, just “for a couple of songs”.

We haven’t done that in years and he predicted that we would play music till 3am. Impossible, as I would have to work and he was on his way to Innsbruck. No problem, I said. Just half an hour, three songs each. He conceded under that condition, and off we went to my place.

You know, it was just about time. When there are two people who love music and love to play music to each other, and when they have not done that in years, it’s inevitable.

He used his iPod, I played from my CD collection, one song an answer to the other, time and wine went by, and we merrily played the last song at about … 3am

“Urban Dreams“, my SoFoBoMo project this year, it feels really good. It’s what I did all those years, actually it’s what I did all my life.

I have no idea if I can convince anybody that there is a system or a method in this haphazard heap of images, but in a way they are a part of me, of the way that I see, of the way that I look.

You can’t see without looking, you know? I think for all kinds of visual art you need a certain openness, a certain way of looking at things, a way of looking without prejudice, a way of looking without immediately attaching agreed upon meaning. You have to look at the things, not at the symbols they have become in our mind.

This is not meant deprecatingly, there is nothing wrong with automatically attaching meaning, with categorizing, with sorting things onto our shelves before we even fully realize them, to the contrary. This is just what intelligence means, to be able to sort things out. This is the way we communicate. We do it by exchanging symbols. It’s the nature of language, the basis of knowledge.

It is only not a good way to be creative in an artistic sense. In order to do that, I have to step back, to strip the things of their normally pre-attached meanings, to not see them as the symbols they have become. I have to look at the raw materials. I have to put my hands in, I have to feel them running through my fingers, and only then can I put things together in a new way.

Readers of Mark “The Landscapist” Hobson’s blog may recognize the sentiment: it’s what Mark calls “plain seeing“. It shows in different ways, as “dense photography” in Mark’s work, a concept that I like to dabble in at times, and more often in my own work it’s about selection. Which ever way it turns up, it’s always about a very central question, namely what do we deem worthy of our attention?

Maybe this explains a little about today’s collection of images, if not you can always blame them to the influence of alcohol and wild music

Apropos music, when I looked up the word “busk”, I got “to make street music”, and that immediately triggered the association with Fanfare Cioc?rlia, a brass band from north-east Romania. I had the pleasure to see them last year, and after the official concert they simply concluded in the foyer, with all people dancing around them. It was magic, irresistible.

The Song of the Day is “Manea Cu Voca” from their 2000 album “Baro Biao: World Wide Wedding”. See a video on YouTube.

I have no idea what the lyrics mean, Romina over at “skinny dippin’ photography [a dream catcher society]” will certainly know. She’s from Bucharest, has a very nice photoblog, makes awesome photos, and I wish she would post much more often.

Hi everybody. It’s Friday afternoon, I’m on the train from Vienna to Carinthia, and this is the post for Tuesday.

Tuesday was really the day when the weather began to deteriorate. Most of the week we had rain at least in the morning. This will certainly show in the number of usable images. Not that I’m concerned, I should have enough material for my SoFoBoMo effort by now, it does not really affect me, but it’s still annoying.

The first image was taken on the tram. Raindrops and smeared bird droppings on a window. Oh well. It’s still a nice composition in a way

Confronted with rain, I normally go into color seeking mode. In a shop window in Josefstädter Straße I found these funny guys. They would do nicely anyway, so the text “I dream about you” is a bonus. Apart from that, the right one really looks positively kissable

Btw, you may have noticed that I have changed the blog’s layout slightly. There is a blogroll again. You have to scroll a little bit down, it’s under the blog archive. It uses the standard blogger widget for blog lists.

This time it mirrors quite accurately what I read (or rather not at the moment), because I have imported my subscriptions from Google Reader. All in all over 120 blogs and news feeds. Don’t worry if you don’t find your’s, the widget shows only the 25 most recent posts, but you can get the whole list by clicking “Show All” at the bottom of the list.

I hope this removes all complaints. The manual list that I had before, was hopelessly outdated, and there was simply no way to make a fair ranking. Now it’s easy: the more often you post on your own blog, the more often you are in the top part

On a side note: I know that some Bloggers are “following” my blog, and so far I have not followed anybody. It’s all a matter of volume and maintainance cost. As soon as you have more than a hundred links, everything gets tedious.

But really: does anybody have experience with the benefits of following or being followed? Is the effect different from linking and being linked to? Do I miss something?

The other thing is, that I have made the layout a fixed width again, and on wider screens it is centered. This makes my embedded thumbnails a bit less prone to shift around when the paragraphs in between are too short.

It now looks nice on everything from a width of 1024 pixels up. It may be a problem on net books though, but I suspect they will have had a problem in the past as well.

Still, I’m interested in your feedback to these changes.

The Song of the Day is “Jungleland” from the 1975 Bruce Springsteen album “Born To Run”. Hear it on YouTube.

It is Sunday afternoon, I am still processing images of Thursday.

Yesterday I was shopping most of the day, then I was swimming for the first time this year. The lake may have about 17 degrees Celsius, the water feels definitely warmer than it was when I was there at the end of September.

In the evening I was held up, because the populist madness of censoring the Internet (allegedly for fighting child pornography only) has swapped over from Germany to Austria. I have spent more than two hours writing a long mail to one politician, Gottfried Hirz of Upper Austria’s Green party, whom I absolutely would not have expected to vote for that craze. I took great lengths to explain the situation, we’ll see what answer I get.

But anyway, let this be not about censorship, let it be about SoFoBoMo.

I’m pretty sick of playing catch up and always being three days behind. You know, when I am photographing, I always think a lot. I think about things that I could write, I have inner monologues about what I see, what I shoot, why I shoot it, why I shoot it this way, what I want to tell you, and when I get home, I forget all that, because what I find and what I need to write about, are the images of three days back. This is frustrating.

Thus, the new method is, that I won’t try to keep up the illusion that text and images were from the same day. If I need to talk about something that happened at the day that I write the post, I’ll simply do so.

Back to the images. I could really have gone on processing images of Thursday, there are at least four contenders left, but for now it’s enough.

All these images were shot with another favorite lens of mine, the Sigma 50/1.4. The Image of the Day is not exactly what I’d call a snapshot, but it was the only way to react to a certain situation. The machine moved, the train moved, seeing, composing, shooting, that was all within one second – and now I greatly like this cruel instrument.

The Bicycles? Well, maybe more my dream than anyone else’s, although Ove has similar obsessions

The graffiti images maybe need some explanation. The second one would have been the Image of the Day, but unfortunately I do not own the Elton John album “Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only the Piano Player”. If I did, I would have named this image (and the whole post) “Crocodile Rock”.

The third graffiti image is definitely an “Urban Dream”, although it presents the old problem of language. How do you cope with an image that contains text, written in a language that 90% of your audience won’t understand?

I have no ready solution but to explain it, and that may well lose the point. Anyway, the text means “Less work, higher wages, self-determination of workers”, a revolutionary, leftist parole, that looks so incredibly out-fashioned on this wall. It is not by accident that this is the wall of a house that belongs (or belonged) to our communist party. Communist romantics, in a way

The next image is more a puzzle than a dream. It contains a typical element of my photography, the bicycle, and then some signs seen from behind, and a poster spelling “Gesucht” or “Wanted”. I like this image. It is dense. It is opaque. It tries to keep you out. It breaks rules. I love it.

The last image is the only one that I didn’t process at all. It’s the JPEG right out of the camera. It’s colors are true to what I remember, but now that I see it, I might as well have pushed saturation a tad.

This also brings up the question if (or if not) these images are the final renditions that will go into the book. Honestly, like so much these days, I don’t know. Last year’s “Tscheppaschlucht” was really easy. Just shoot a bunch of images in a given sequence within a short time, all in one place, all under very similar lighting conditions, all within a small range of subjects, and then process it to a common look. Tedious but simple.

This time it can be everything. I may find a meaningful sequence of subjects and styles, I may have to re-work many of the images into a “look”, or maybe I can bind it with text. I have no idea, or rather, I do have ideas, many of them, but I don’t know yet which of them may apply.

The Song of the Day is “Sweet The Sting” from the 2005 Tori Amos album “The Beekeeper”. Hear it live on YouTube.

Today I set out to meet with my father in Klagenfurt. We needed to fetch a piece of furniture that had just arrived, and then to do some work in Villach that we had let come together. I expected us to be done with it by 2pm, and had planned to take him up on a mountain, most likely Dobratsch again, as he seems to like being with me while I take photographs.

Normally when I go down to the garage, I take the stairs or sometimes the elevator, but when I bring down the garbage, I enter through the ramp. Today I was about to do so, and just as I rounded the corner, I saw this poor little hydrant standing among all the dirty snow. Light was poor, the sky a solid cover of dense fog. Heck, I thought, I’ll be up on the mountain and shoot grand landscapes, but I can just as well start photographing here.

I did so, and just as I did, one neighbor, German by sound (many Germans work at the Infineon plant just 500 meters away, thus we have an unusually big share of Germans here on the block), brought out some garbage as well and said to me “Oh, no need to photograph this hydrant. Drive up the mountains. The weather is gorgeous up there. I just saw it on the Internet. You’ll get much better motifs there”. “Thanks, but you never know”, said I.

It remained the only image I shot today. We spent much more time in Klagenfurt than expected, and when we were done with work, it was 3:45pm and just that tiny bit too late. I’m glad I didn’t dismiss this image for a grander future

The Song of the Day could have been “Little Boy Blue” just like in “682 – Little Boy Blue“, at least that was my initial impulse, but then I found “Little Blue” from the 1996 Beautiful South album “Blue Is the Colour” (hear it on YouTube), and I’m glad for that as well, because I learned two things:

Paul Heaton has a new album (old news, it’s been out for 7 months, but I didn’t know), and the Pound Sterling is on an all-time low, about parity with the Euro.

The album costs £12.98 at Amazon.co.uk, while it’s €17.95 at Amazon.de. That gave me this kind of buying frenzy, you know, and I ordered it along with all those James albums (the band from Manchester, we’ll get to that, sooner or later) that I had assembled on my waiting list at Amazon.co.uk, but never dared to order

Today, the first day of 2009, I did not go out. Yes, weather was fine, but I still preferred to process yesterday’s many images.

Apart from that I had to recover from the night before. Thus I spent this wonderful day partly in front of the computer, partly sleeping in bed – and I don’t feel bad about it

I had already made up my mind to use an archive image for this post, but then I thought, hell, that’s no way to begin a year. I mounted the Sigma 50/1.4, went out onto the balcony, shot an image of footprints in the snow, figured this would make a nice metaphor for the begin of a year, and back I went to bed

The Song of the Day is called “Footprints” in my European edition, “Long Time Ago” in the US version of Dee Dee Bridgewater’s Malian journey “Red Earth”, but it’s really the same song. Sorry, I have neither lyrics nor a video, but at least Amazon has a sound sample.

We had fog and snow all day, and that with temperatures significantly below freezing. I was out two times, both times by car, both times I expected to do some photographing, both times I did straight what I needed to do and then returned home.

But I tell you something: the apartment block in Villach has a basement with a garage (very convenient when it rains or snows), and there are … bicycles! I would have been better advised to reset my camera from an exposure correction of -2EV, but probably even my brain was freezing. DxO nevertheless did a good job.

Seinberg recently noticed the peculiar form of the head lights on so many of our bicycles here in Austria. Well, this is another one. Many of them are genuinely old, but the fact that people love this look, has caused them to be manufactured again.

The Song of the Day is is related to what I did today: “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” from “The Basement Tapes”. Dylan and The Band. Always a good choice. Hear it on YouTube.

We had another day of nice sunshine, much colder though, and again I was short on time for photography.

Of the few images that I made, nothing really impresses me much, but this one is maybe the best. This is a road that I drove often in the past, and on sunny afternoons, the pattern of light and shadow never fails to impress me. It’s even more pronounced in winter.

As for the Song of the Day, well, you certainly have been stumbling over the 10,000 hours rule lately and probably have seen the video of Malcolm Gladwell’s speech at the AIGA Business and Design Conference 2008 (if not, believe me, there are much worse ways to spend 39 minutes of your life), and you may remember that he argues with the career of Fleetwood Mac, and that it took them 16 albums of experimentation to finally reach fame.

That’s right, it makes a fine point, but he still has it all wrong. “Then Play On”, still with Peter Green, is the best Fleetwood Mac album ever, and the Song of the Day is “Coming Your Way” from that very album. Hear it on YouTube.