Nothing ages faster than science fiction, and when I saw this image, when I tried variants and ended up with this toned B&W, it immediately reminded me of 1950s science fiction movies.
Speaking of sci-fi, I’m still reading Orson Scott Card, and while “Ender’s Game” did not overly impress me, “Speaker For The Dead” brought up some real clever questions, and now I am in the middle of “Xenocide”. Seems like I will read the next one as well.
The Song of the Day is “A Better Future” from David Bowie’s 2002 album “Heathen”. Hear it on YouTube.
I guess you knew it after you read the last post. Some questions can’t be decided theoretically, you simply have to act. I did, and now I have a Tamron SP AF 17-50mm 2.8 XR Di II VC LD Asp IF.
Impressive name, huh? Well, I’m just as impressed with the actual lens. I have titled this post “Toys”, but in reality this is no toy at all. I had always thought of Tamron as a cheap, low quality brand of lightweight, plasticky lenses, but this beast is big, heavy, and it feels entirely solid.
The Image of the Day was of course not made with the Tamron. I took it in the morning with the Sigma 70/2.8, but the other two were made with the Tamron. Today was a gloomy, dark day. I took the playground image at noon, just after I had left the shop. It’s the original JPEG as it came from the camera. The image was taken at 50mm, f6.3, ISO 200 and 1/8s. Yes, that’s right, 1/8s! Just look at the pink lady between the bush and the tree. She was not running 
One thing is for sure, I can’t hold 1/8s at that focal length all of the time. I suppose the rate will be at or even below 50%, but that is no slouch either. At 17mm I would never have a problem at that speed. I think that’s quite impressive and just what I need in winter nights.
Why the decision for this lens and not for the Nikon 16-85 VR? Well, as I said yesterday, I really would have needed such a mid-range zoom in Udine, or in general, I need it when I am on a trip. On such occasions I invariably see things that I don’t have the chance to return to the next day. I have to take the image on the spot, or else I won’t take it at all. That means either compromising (like I did in Udine) or constantly changing lenses.
That alone does not explain my decision, but analyzing Udine, I realized that it had been not by chance that I had settled with the Sigma 28/1.8 and not with the equally available Nikon 50/1.8 or 70-300 VR. Both would have been perfectly possible, but on such trips, especially in cities, I tend to go rather wide than long. 28 was a compromise and I never wanted it to be longer, in doubt I would have liked it to be wider.
I wouldn’t have minded the bigger focal range of the Nikon, but the range of the Tamron seems to be what I need by far the most. On the other hand, while both lenses are stabilized, the Tamron is a whole lot faster. Not so much at 17mm, but at 50mm it’s two full stops.
So much for rationalizing my decision. The second image with the Tammy was made on the moving escalator. It’s been taken at 1/15s, the shutter speed that I have settled with as a lower limit before I let Auto ISO kick in. It was taken at f2.8, ISO 800, and I have used PTLens to correct the distortions, used Topaz Detail to add some local contrast to the in-focus areas, Noise Ninja to control the noise that Topaz Detail had left, added a silver toning, a levels adjustment, cropped the image slightly from both sides, and finally I added some noise
The Song of the Day is “Toys” from the 1983 XTC album “Mummer”. Hear it on YouTube.
OK, that’s better now. Yesterday I did two things: I took my time and I changed lenses.
Taking one’s time is pretty much a precondition for any kind of photography. I mean, sure, on some busy days I have made some images that were jolly good, and what may have looked like hard work had been no more than a minute of luck or two. But that’s just that, luck, and you can’t rely on luck. Detaching oneself and spending some substantial time in disconnectedness with one’s work and troubles is still the best recipe for creativity.
The other thing is the lens. I have changed to the Sigma 70/2.8 Macro, this fantastically versatile lens of highest quality, for sure one of Sigma’s best designs. I set it to f2.8 and for the rest of the day kept it at that. If this lens does not give me fresh views and ideas, then I’m probably dead. Thankfully I wasn’t
Speaking of lenses, there is a purchase that I’ve been contemplating for a long time now, I suppose at least half a year. I’m speaking of a mid-range zoom. I felt the strong urge for something like that when we were in Udine last Saturday. I carried the Tokina 11-16/2.8, the Nikon 10.5/2.8 fish, the Sigma 28/1.8, the Nikon 50/1.8 and the Nikon 70-300 VR, and after much changing around, I finally ended up using only the 28/1.8. It worked pretty well, but in many cases I had wished for something in the range of below 20 to at least 50, maybe more.
Of course I have the Nikon 18-200 VR, and normally I carry it with me when I’m on trips, I just don’t use it. Recently, while I was sick and at home, I had a look at old images made with the 18-200, and I found that it was never really sharp. I mean sharp like the Sigma 70/2.8 or sharp like the Sigma 28/1.8. I guess I’m just spoiled, but I don’t really like the 18-200 any more.
Basically I see two candidates, the Tamron 17-50/2.8 VC, a stabilized low-light champion, nice for winter nights, and the highly regarded Nikon AF-S VR DX 16-85mm 3.5-5.6G ED. Both are stabilized, the Tamron is faster, the Nikon has a better range. Both cost about the same. See my problem? I can’t really decide what I need. In Udine, in that wonderful, bright light, the Nikon would have been the clearly superior choice, in winter nights in Vienna the Tamron might allow me to stay in low ISOs. So what’s that? A winter lens and a travel lens? Do I need both? None?
The Tamron may be better for the coming season, but don’t my primes suffice on Vienna’s streets? Is a stabilized 50/2.8 any better than a non-stabilized 50/1.4 or even a 50/1.2? Hardly, huh? And is a zoom really what I use in Vienna?
You may find me mulling about that much longer, or I may make a quick decision, I have no idea. Let’s wait and see.
The Song of the Day is “Cold Blue Steel And Sweet Fire” from Joni Mitchell’s 1972 album “For the Roses”. Hear it on YouTube.
I read an article about jazz today, about the festival in Saalfelden, Austria, and about how jazz is completely accepted as art. You can’t provoke a scandal with jazz anymore. This made me think. Do we need scandals?
The history of the visual arts is a continuous progress towards ever more perfection, and it reached its high point during Renaissance. There was no way to get more realistic, no way to get more detailed, and from then on, it went the other way: towards abstraction. You see it begin in Titian’s colors, how he mixed red and green, you see it much stronger in Tintoretto, Rubens used a rougher brush with longer strokes, El Greco and the late Goya pointed up to our times, impressionism re-invented color, expressionism warped it, and with Kandinsky and Mondrian that second progression finally came to an end.
There was always a tendency to mix art and scandal, because scandal sells almost as good as sex, but the art of the 20th century was especially characterized by the tendency to shock the viewer and that is very much due to the fact that art had to search for a new orientation. The gesamtkunstwerk was born.
I understand all that and I understand how necessary this was in many cases, but there is also the question of what becomes of a piece of art, when the performance is over, the shock has worn off. Is it still art? Does it keep its value? Can it persist in spite of being isolated from the original context?
This weekend I have got my copy of “The $12 Million Stuffed Shark” by Don Thompson. I have not read it yet and won’t do so during the next weeks, but I guess this book will answer some of my questions, at least from the point of view of economics.
For me the most important point is, that we live in a post-modern world. Of course this is old news, but it is essential to realize, that this gives us enormous freedom. The river has come to an end, there is no more need to swim with or against the current, there is no current any more, we are floating in an endless sea of possibilities. This is scary but liberating.
It is possible to take up pieces from older times, it is possible to combine, it is possible to simply do what you feel you need to do, regardless of trends and fashions. There is nothing to win by trying to swim with a current when there is no current at all. You can as well be you and be happy with it. In an age of ubiquitous and instantaneous communication you may not get rich, but you will find your audience.
The Image of the Day is one more bicycle for the book, and the frogs were hanging outside of a shop. A sad and a happy image, that’s it for today.
The Song of the Day is “Sad Song” from Lou Reed’s 1973 album “Berlin”. What a wonderful song. Hear it on YouTube.
It’s late, much too late to say many words. I’m in Vienna again and tired now, and by the way, did I mention it’s late?
I took this image in the maybe two minutes that I had for photography today. It’s a combination of two exposures, one at f5.6 for some depth, and one at f2.8 for the soft background.
The Song of the Day is “Sunday” from the 1992 Cranberries album “Everybody Else is Doing It So Why Can’t We?”. See a live video on YouTube.
Saturday began with rain. Much rain.
Again there were floods in parts of Austria, and the air cooled down by about 15 degrees Celsius. High mountain roads above 1500 meters were impassable without snow chains, in other words, it was a rather unusual high summer weekend.
In the afternoon the eastern part of Carinthia seemed to be sunny, so we took the car, drove down to Saualpe, a north-south mountain chain in eastern Carinthia, and explored the country roads.
Carinthia is not densely populated, but certainly denser than all that gorgeous nature would demand. In this certain part though, there are only some small villages far and between.
It’s really a wonderful landscape up there on the mountain, but of course it has a reason that not many people live there. You are far away from every supermarket, not to speak of a real city, and what looks so wonderful in summer, is quite a problem in winter. Winters up there are long, and to live there probably means to be snowed in a couple of times a year.
There are plenty of churches up on the mountain, one in every village, sometimes for not more than maybe ten houses, some solitary, and one of the churches, Sankt Leonhard, is even off the road in the middle of a forest. That’s the one with the walls in the Image of the Day.
The images were taken with three prime lenses, 24, 35, 70, and two zooms, 11-16 and 70-300. This was lens changing day
All images were treated with a combination of Topaz Adjust and Alien Skin Snap Art. For the high-contrast images with lots of sky, I have normally taken two differently developed versions from the same RAW, combined with a mask. I love these effects on landscapes.
It’s probably Kitsch, but it triggers something in me. Those images look like a certain kind of illustrations that I liked in my books when I was a child, a kind of illustrations that completely came out of fashion in the 1970s.
The Song of the Day is “In A Country Churchyard” from the 1977 Chris De Burgh album “At the End of a Perfect Day”. Hear it on YouTube.
It’s already Sunday and I’m so much behind. Sorry for that, I ran pretty out of time. That’s for quiet weekends
This image was taken Friday morning on my way to work. I actually thought all the time I would take another image, one of the current mirror series, but when it turned out worse than expected, I instead found that I really like this one for a certain quietude in it and for its composition in general.
The Song of the Day is “Morning Glory” from the 1967 Blood, Sweat & Tears debut album “Child Is Father to the Man”. Hear it on Deezer.
It’s done. I almost would have given up for today, but now it’s done. “Urban Dreams II” is up on SoFoBoMo.org and on Issuu.com.
I finished it one minute after midnight, thus the date in the introduction says Wednesday, June 3.
This time it took me seven hours. Again I spent most of the time writing the captions, actually the technical data. There must be something more tedious, but – believe me – at the moment I can’t imagine anything worse 
Contrary to last year’s process, this year I have not even tried to bind the images together by a common visual style. Instead I took them just as they had been published here on this blog, with only two exceptions: I have added some saturation to the Image of the Day in “957 – Remix!!“, and today’s Image of the Day had a real problem with moiré.
While the print raster behaves fine on this web page, there were ugly moiré patterns in the PDF. I had to make a separate version for the book, that instead of sharpening even had a blurred layer. It mostly fixed the problem for the PDF, but on Issuu, the page still looks ugly. I hope it will look OK in print.
Apropos print. Today Blurb have released version 2.0 of their bookmaking software BookSmart. According to the press release they have greatly improved their workflow, but sadly they still can’t simply import from PDF. You still have to make the detour through Photoshop. I am not sure if this is very clever, but they may have their reasons.
The Song of the Day is “Sugar Baby” from the 2001 Bob Dylan album “Love and Theft”. See him perform on YouTube.
It’s Thursday morning, these are yesterday’s images.
No, I’ve made no SoFoBoMo bookmaking progress, I wanted to, but I went to sleep early (just for a nap, just for one and a half hours, just …) and woke up at 6am. That’s not so bad though. The layout is basically done, what I now need is a balanced choice of images.
The poster for my original “Urban Dreams” exhibition last year showed this image, and in a way its composition, basically a landscape format with two halves, was an inspiration for this year’s whole effort.
I already have some of those images, yesterday’s is an example, but I found that I need more of them. They represent the dual nature of the dream concept: not what people in the city dream to have or to be, rather my own visual dreams of the city. This is an aspect that is important to me.
On the other hand, when I selected those anchors, images that undeniably need to go into the book, there was no bicycle among them. This could well mean that I leave the bicycles for Ted’s bicycle book
The Song of the Day is “Maria Maria (Wyclef Remix)” from the 2003 album “Ceremony – Remixes & Rarities” by Carlos Santana. See the video on YouTube.
And now I’m off to work
It’s Sunday morning, these are the images of Saturday. I’m in Carinthia, none of these images will go into my SoFoBoMo book.
Yesterday’s weather was mixed, and part of the day I was haunted by a cloud above me that seemed to track my movements. It’s pretty frustrating seeing a nice blue sky with interesting clouds scattered in between, but a landscape that lies in shadow. The result is a lack of color and a strong tendency to underexpose the landscape or overexpose the sky.
Sure, you can help yourself with split neutral density filters, you can do HDR (and the last image is one indeed), but it’s not just the same.
Still, I managed to get a few shots. The first image, the trees on the hill, is an unprocessed JPEG right out of the camera, the second is an HDR image mapped with Photomatix Pro’s tone compressor algorithm, the sky only a tad darkened in Photoshop.
The Image of the Day is of a house near one of our most favorite restaurants, “Hicks’es Wirtshaus” in Hart south-west of Villach, near Finkenstein.
The Song of the Day is “Blinded By The Light” from the 1973 Bruce Springsteen album “Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.”. Hear it on YouTube.
