Yup, nothing wrong with the Tamron. It works better than ever. QED. I guess I can go back to the manual focus primes soon 
The Song of the Day is “Drive My Car” from the 1965 Beatles album “Rubber Soul”. YouTube has it, but you know it anyway. Not a bad match for a battered old Mini Cooper, if you ask me 
Today I got a phone call. My camera was back and with it the Tamron 17-50/2.8 VC. I didn’t mean to, but I left work early nevertheless.
Uhhh … what can I say? It works. Everything works. Autofocus on my D300 works again, the Tammy works again, no, the camera wasn’t even dusty. And … my, does this lens try to impress me!
And it does. Still, I wouldn’t feel comfortable to recommend this lens any more. I’ve made my experiences and I wouldn’t want you to suffer like I did. But then, so far this particular specimen works absolutely flawlessly. No focus problems, no problems with the aperture blades not closing down, no problems at all.
I’ve tried it. I’ve tried setting the zoom to 50 mm, pointing it rapidly into one random direction, at something at a random distance, and it just worked. Yes, there were some images that were blurred, but setting the minimum shutter speed to 1/30s and/or waiting just a fraction of a second to let the stabilization lock on usually sufficed.
Do I feel fine? You bet
I made an excellent image of a bike rider. I tracked him, I took an image at f2.8, he looked at me, a little surprised but not hostile. The image was taken in bright sunlight, it was sharp, had dramatic shadows, and somehow it was just the place and the moment. Everything came together, fell in place. I loved that image. It was just the product of an impulse, seeing, raising the camera, focusing and releasing the shutter, all together in one moment.
Then I deleted the image. Accidentally. I mean, I’m no idiot, but every once in a while I do such outrageously stupid things. I didn’t take any more images and at home I tried to recover the file, but it was too late. I couldn’t find it. It was gone.
Some while later, when I already sat in my living room and tried to use one the files left, I saw this amazing light outside.
My living room looks to the east, and when the sun sets, when its rays come really low, they reflect in the windows of the buildings on the other side of the garden, and this reflected light fills my living room with a sudden flood of warm gold. It doesn’t last very long, only a minute or two, but during that time it is breathtaking.
The Song of the Day is “Goodbye Sunshine” from the 1993 Ceremony album “Hang Out Your Poetry”. Ceremony was a band around Chastity Bono, and they made no more than that single album. What a shame. I absolutely love the album.
I couldn’t find the song on YouTube, and so I took the liberty to upload it. Seems like I didn’t offend the copyright gods this time
Again I had precious little time yesterday, with no photographic results worth mentioning. It may even go on like that for a few days.
Here’s another image from Italy, taken in beautiful Camogli. For lack of time and a better name, the Song of the Day is again “Canzone Della Strada” from the 2004 album of the same name by Quadro Nuevo. Here’s it on YouTube, and they have other pieces from the same album as well.
Today is Sunday, and for today I really have no image at all. Let me show you one more image from Italy instead.
Trompe-l’œil murals are very common in Liguria, and while most of the time they only give the illusion of a more elaborate facade than there actually is, sometimes it goes far beyond that. This is such an example from near Sestri Levante.
The Song of the Day is “An Illusion” from the 1995 Stiltskin album “Mind’s Eye”. Hear it on YouTube.
This is the image for Friday, obviously not made on Friday. It’s Rapallo in Liguria, Italy again. I like Rapallo, because it is big enough to have a population not working in the tourism industries.
We are in the process of searching for a a more permanent abode in Villach, and I arrived one day earlier, because we had a meeting with a very competent woman from the construction company. We are looking for an apartment, but of course nothing fits just right. Thus we spent three hours in front of AutoCAD, and now we are quite confident.
The Song of the Day is “Canzone Della Strada” from the 2004 Quadro Nuevo album of the same name. YouTube has it, I suggest you give it a try. Quadro Nuevo are an Austrian band, but this feels real Italian. More than real I might say
I was not in a photographing mood. I did take photographs today, a lot even, but almost all of them were textures. Walls, stone, cracking paint and the like. When I made yesterday’s “1381 – I See A Darkness“, I blended in a texture of cracks in a big block of wood, and while I browsed my collection for textures, I realized that they were not only poorly tagged in the database, but also that I don’t have as many as I thought. This averted my view today and made me mostly look at old walls
OK, that’s today’s excuse for why you get another picture from Italy
Here is Camogli again, same place as yesterday’s darkness, same time, only here I use the 17-50 and look towards “Santa Maria Assunta”, St Mary’s, the church directly at the beach.
The Song of the Day is “Marys Of The Sea” from Tori Amos’ 2005 album “The Beekeeper”. Only live versions float the net, so here is one on YouTube.
It’s Sunday night, already past midnight. I am still in Carinthia because we were in Graz today, about 150 km from Villach, capital of the neighboring province of Styria. We were there for a concert and scenic interpretation of Claudio Monteverdi’s eighth book of madrigals. The “Combattimento” performed live, how much better can it get? Needless to say, it was fantastic.
There’s nothing new on the photography front. I made some images, though I have not even copied them from the camera yet. Maybe I would have had something anyway, but here is one more image from Italy instead.
The funny thing is, during post-processing I did something that I normally don’t do: I deliberately introduced an error. This image is not real. It can’t be. No, it’s not the processing style, of course the colors, the local contrasts, the partial blur, all that are not “real”, but then what is? No, I mean something else. Can you see it?
But then, even though I broke the laws of physics, this image looks exactly like what I remember. In fact it does much more so than all the images that I took in this district of Rapallo.
The Song of the Day is “I May Be Wrong” by Chick Webb and his Orchestra. I have it on Disc 132 of “The Ultimate Jazz Archive”. Hear it on YouTube.
It’s Saturday, we had a cool, mostly cloudy day and I have done … nothing. Therefore I can only offer you another image from Italy, taken in Santa Margherita Ligure, and to be precise exactly here. Oh dear, Street View is probably one of the most useful applications ever
The Song of the Day, “That’s Your Red Wagon” by Anita O’Day and Cal Tjader, released on their 1962 album “Time For 2″, was not available online, thus I have uploaded it to YouTube. Great song, great album, and the latin touch harmonizes perfectly with Anita’s relaxed style.
It’s Tuesday night, this is the entry for Monday. It’s the same image as in “1346 – Someday After A While“, processed differently, along with another image of the same house, taken the next day at noon. I suppose I will use these two images together on a spread, and while the first one was always meant to be on the title page, I think the second would be nice for the back cover.
Hmm … well, maybe it’s a bit premature to talk about covers, as long as I don’t have an idea what to put in between
Have you ever searched Amazon’s MP3 search for “Both Sides Now”? Can you believe this? This Joni Mitchell song may easily be the most covered song of all times, and if it is not, it can’t fall short
The Song of the Day is a version from the 2003 album “Undercovers” by Maria João and Mário Laginha. Hear it on YouTube.
Having totally given up makes things so much easier
This is another image from Italy. It’s not Liguria but neighboring Toscana. It’s been taken in the small village of Colonnata, situated in the mountains above Carrara. See “1350 – The Marvel Of Marble” for some more images. I really like that image and I guess it will end up in the book.
As to having given up, well, this does not make me stop processing images from Italy. Not at all. I still work on them, every day I add some, some will go into the book, some will not, and what really happens is, that it occupies me, keeps me from photographing. I can’t help it, the way I currently work, I am much faster at photographing than I can ever process the images. Thus, at the moment I have also given up upon my goal of publishing photos taken at the same day. This is not permanent, I’ll return to the previous régime, but unfortunately my day has only 24 hours, some of them I like to sleep and some I have to work. Hope you understand
This is the post for Sunday, and I had another reason for not taking any pictures: Sunday we had rain. Oh dear, how I enjoyed the drop in temperatures by almost 20 degrees Celsius! Today, Monday, it was still relatively cool, but by Thursday we’re supposed to be back at up to 36 degrees Celsius again.
The Song of the Day is the Stranglers classic “Hanging Around“, interpreted by Hazel O’Connor on her 1980 album “Cover Plus”. Hear it on YouTube.
