It took me a time to figure out whether I have an image for Friday, or if I need one of these two for the next post. Turned out I have one, here’s both Thursday images in one post 
I have already shown images of that place, some even from the same vantage point, it’s of course Mount Dobratsch again, the mountain that broke apart, because it couldn’t stand seeing people die, then in 1348, the year of the great plague.
I like both of these images. The choice is only because I had to choose. The one with the sun in the frame is an HDR again, again of the more subtle kind. The Image of the Day is of course from a single exposure.
I haven’t been up there for very long, and in fact when I reached the upper end of the street, 450 meters below the summit, the sky was already veiled.
And the rest of the day? Installing software, what else? That’s why I am in Carinthia after all 
The Song of the Day is “Solid Rock” from the 1981 Dire Straits album “Making Movies”. The Dire Straits and Mark Knopfler, obviously their label tries to get all their music off YouTube (how stunningly clever!), but I have still found at least some live versions. Here’s one from 1992.
This is a wayside shrine in a rural livin quarter on the outskirts of Villach. This one is for Bill. I boldly claimed that our trees here in Carinthia still have leaves in their most glorious colors, but it is wearing thin. Nevertheless, I searched and found some for you
Finding a Song of the Day is not so easy. It must match in title or some line in the lyrics, I must own it, I want it to be available on YouTube, and I want to link to the lyrics. The latter is normally the least problem.
The Song of the Day is “‘Tis Autumn” from the stellar 1976 album “Fitzgerald & Pass…Again”, but although the lyrics are seemingly on every lyrics site on the planet, it’s always the text of “Autumn in New York”, regardless of where you go. Sometimes I really wonder
Hear it on YouTube.
I took this image yesterday evening, on my way back from swimming. This is one of the three or four possible roads, one avoiding the highway.
I know this place. This is a sundown place. I don’t use it very often, but yesterday I didn’t have anything compelling, so I tried my luck. The Tokina 11-16 was still mounted and two test images confirmed, that I best would use a sequence of bracketed images, or otherwise I would have to choose between detail in the sky and detail in the landscape.
My soft edge split neutral density filters would not have helped me here. Through this ultra-wide lens, the transition would have been much too soft. They would at most have darkend the top too much, doing almost nothing to the sun. The right traditional tool for the job are Singh-Ray’s reverse graduated ND filters. Maybe I should get one, I suppose it would have worked very well.
With no filter available, I resorted to HDR. This is an image made of four out of a sequence of nine exposures. I tried Essential HDR first, and when it had problems aligning the images, I switched to Photomatix Pro. Both are excellent programs, none is perfect, but normally one of the two works fine. I don’t care that much which it is, I go to Photoshop anyway. Of the two tone mapping modes in Photomatix Pro, this is the more conservative, called “Tone Compressor”.
In fact I can imagine very different ways to process the image, with this one just one possibility. The “Detail Enhancer” tone mapping made the scene much less peaceful, more dramatic, and even in Photoshop there are so many different ways to go. There is no single right way and on another day I probably would have produced a very different result.
The Song of the Day is “Dream River“, again by the Mavericks, but this time from the 1998 album “Trampoline”. Hear it on YouTube.
Swimming in the morning, in a quiet lake, that’s still warm enough, driving a dramatic mountain road to heights of over 2000 meters in the afternoon, Carinthia is a stunningly beautiful and surprisingly diverse country.
You could tell from these pictures and the many that you’ve seen over the course of the last almost three years. This stunning beauty is marred by the presence of ghosts though.
The Carinthians are a fearful people. The ghost that haunts them most, is the danger of immediate annexation by communist Yugoslavia. Their fear is still awake, more than 60 years since the victorious partisans in Yugoslavia last tried to wrestle parts of Carinthia away from Austria, and in fact 20 years after the end of communism in Yugoslavia and in fact the end of Yugoslavia itself. Spooky, those ghosts, huh?
It all began much further in the past. After the slavic invasion, Carantania was what could be called the first Slovenian state. It emerged in the middle of 7th century and lasted for almost 200 years. Since then, the largest part of what is now Carinthia, was always populated by slavic-speaking people. Christianization of Carinthia was directed from Bavaria though, and soon the ruling class was german speaking as well.
That’s how it ever was until the end of the 18th century. The 19th century brought the same kind of industrialization, mobility of workers and rise of the urban middle classes as everywhere else, and in that process, the Slovene language was increasingly seen as the language of the peasants, and either through active suppression or through economic forces began to wane everywhere but in the rural areas.
After the end of World War I, Carinthia was the place of continuing civil war between a slovenian nationalist faction that proposed incorporation of the southern part of Carinthia into the new Yugoslav Kingdom, and the now german speaking majority. After two years, an internationally controlled referendum decided that a unified Carinthia would continue to be part of Austria.
From then on the Austrian/German nationalist faction in Carinthia continued to play an important role as the guardians of Carinthia’s unity. With nationalism being such a defining part of carinthian history, it is no wonder that this same faction became involved in National Socialism almost from the beginning, and during the six years of Nazi reign, the slovenian population was a target of ethnic cleansing.
With the downfall of the Nazi Empire the leading class in Carinthia should have been disqualified, but surprisingly this was not the case. Now communist Yugoslavia tried one more time to incorporate southern Carinthia, and this was no more than a short episode, ended by Allied occupation, but still the danger was felt again. Carinthia rallied around nationalist leaders and protected war criminals. The ghosts of 1918 were stronger than any revulsion against Nazi crimes.
After World War II Carinthia was ruled by the Social Democratic Party, and many former Nazi members simply changed membership books. In the 1970s Carinthia was in the headlines when the government tried to install constitutionally guaranteed bilingual signs at the borders of towns and parishes. You find those bi- and even trilingual signs all over Europe. It’s no problem in Italy, Switzerland, France or elsewhere, but in Carinthia it caused unprecedented riots and the signs were forcefully removed. The ghosts were back.
Since then there have been countless trials by the government to come to a peaceful resolution. To no avail. The rise of Upper-Austrian Jörg Haider to Carinthia’s political leader was possible to a big part because he instrumented nationalist feelings and hate against Slovenia. A solution would have been against his interests and those of his party. Now, even after Haider’s death, his party rules supreme and it looks as if this could go on and on.
Stupid, huh? Modern Slovenia is part of the European Union, all borders have fallen, there is no cause for conflict any more, and still the ghosts haunt us. I wonder how long this can go on.
The Song of the Day is “Ghost Of Yesterday” by Billie Holiday. I have it on a 10 CD collection that I bought for 10€. It’s not available elsewhere, thus I suggest the collection “Canciones” that I’ve linked to. Hear the Song on YouTube.
Do you know that feeling, that whatever you do, it comes out wrong? Today’s images (actually images of Thursday) are such a case.
We visited Kraków’s royal castle, the Wawel, saw the fantastic renaissance architecture of the castle’s big courtyard, saw the exhibitions, saw the cathedral, … and I made no single good image there.
OK, you are not allowed to take images inside castle or cathedral, but there was so much wonderful architecture there and … nothing. Not a single original image.
I am not sure what exactly causes this … block? No, it’s not a block, it’s maybe more that I feel these places have been photographed from every possible angle, there is not much chance to come up with anything original, at least not while on a short trip, certainly not within an hour or two. It’s a kind of resignation.
I don’t say that you can’t make good images there, but at least for me it would take more time and leisure than I can muster at such times. It would mean to go there, look, go away, sleep a night over it, come back, look again, and then I think I could find one or the other new and original view. Probably.
The other thing is, that on travels you are at the mercy of the weather and all kinds of external or self-imposed schedules. You make plans for visiting this and that, and when you get to the Wawel in brightest noon light and under a clear, blue sky, you have a pretty hard time to produce anything that does not look like the typical tourist picture. My image, the one of the cathedral, certainly does.
Being in such a place, you basically have the choice to hunt for moments when nobody stands between you and the monument (and the wider the lens, the less likely that will be), or to make images not about monuments, but about monuments and the people viewing these monuments. I mean, the way to go is pretty obvious: don’t avoid the people, use them. Make images of people and their interaction with monuments. Show them viewing, show them photographing.
Sometimes I try these things, but most often I do them when I am on home turf. Here, on vacation, more often than not I can’t help but act as a tourist myself. Plenty of room for improvement, I guess
All other images but one were taken in Kazimierz, the district formerly inhabited by a lively Jewish community, but of course that was before the Nazi barbarians made an end to it. Today you still feel a shadow of the past, and of course there are many Jewish tourists, but the Jewish infrastructure of today is only touristic.
The last image, this gentle landscape, is from outside of the city. We concluded the day with a short trip north, just to get some different views. I actually used one of my split neutral density filters to darken the sky, and although I managed to make the sky quite dramatic, I ended up cropping most of it away. Just like so often, a square made for better balance.
The Song of the Day is one more time “Past In Present” from Feist’s 2007 album “The Reminder”. Hear it on YouTube.
Sorry for the long silence. I’m not dead and I can’t blame my internet connection either. Must have something to do with being on vacation. In any case I have a real processing problem. Well, some images may turn up another day, when I lack anything usable.
What can you write about a place like Auschwitz? Can you take photos there? People do, and many of them make just the usual images, with their beloved or their friends posing, just not in front of a fountain, but in front of the remains of an electrical fence. That’s just how people are, just as places are what places are.
There is nothing like an evil place. It’s all about the people, and what can you say about a place that was a rural village for centuries, and then, all of a sudden, strangers came, performed their incredibly cruel deeds, turned the place into hell, stayed for five years and vanished again.
It is pretty impossible to conserve the horror. Yes, Auschwitz I, the original base camp, still has something sinister in it. It’s the contrast between neatness of architecture and the horror of the double electrical fences. If at all there is something left of pure horror then it’s there.
Auschwitz II, Birkenau, is different. It’s a vast area, mostly ruins, and it’s there that the masses were killed. It is much less graphic, but in its largeness there is an abstract monstrosity that suddenly makes all those big numbers of millions of killed people comprehensible. This is a place that obviously was built for that purpose, a place that had the capacity.
Still, the question remains: what can you photograph at such a place? Can you show anything meaningful beside the cliché? I don’t know. What you get today is a detail from a fence in Auschwitz II, a view from the monastery Tyniec on top of a hill overlooking the river Wis?a, and the Image of the Day is a birch tree shortly after sundown.
The Song of the Day is “Going Places” from Paul Weller’s 2003 album “Illumination”. See him perform live on YouTube.
Kraków, Poland, just as promised. My Internet connection is great, the only problem is, that I forgot my computer mouse. Editing images with a touchpad is, well, interesting. I’ll get one tomorrow
We drove all day, everything went well, but we arrived when it was already dark. I was tired from the road and only went out for half an hour to make some images.
These bronze soldiers stand on the small square just in front of our hotel. I have no idea who they were. There is an inscription at the bottom of the monument, but of course it’s Polish. I’ll ask at the reception tomorrow.
The Song of the Day is “Celluloid Heroes” by The Kinks. I have it on disc two of “The Ultimate Collection”. See a live video on YouTube.
It was extremely hot yesterday. We had intended to go to Salzburg to visit Michael, but thankfully I remembered that at this time school holidays in southern Germany start, and that means hours of delay due to traffic jams in front of the two big tunnels on the highway that crosses the Alps.
We used the time for shopping and then for a short trip down top Italy, just across the border, near Tarvisio, where we wanted to drive up to Santuario Monte Lussari.
There is a church on a mountain with a spectacular view. According to our street map, a road goes up there, coming from the Saisera valley. Fact is, there may be a road, but neither did we find it, nor (if it exists at all) is it open to the public. The first image was taken near the end of the valley.
The other image, the Image of the Day, was taken much later. We had returned from Italy and driven straight to our lake for swimming. After we left, the sun was not yet down, but beginning to vanish in clouds and haze in the west. I stopped at a meadow full of flowers and took a series of images, trying to capture that feeling of a summer evening. While I had used the Tokina 11-16 in Italy, this image was made with the new Sigma 28/1.8.
The Song of the Day is “In Summer” from Jon Hendricks’ 1990 album “Freddie Freeloader”. See him perform it live in 1986 on YouTube.
Yesterday afternoon we’ve been to Slovenia again. The idea was to take the “Triglavski cesta”, the small road from Mojstrana, a village between Kranjska Gora and Jesenice, south-west into the Triglav National Park.
I didn’t have the time to take a long walk or even climb up Slovenia’s highest mountain (2,864 meters), thus for us the road ended rather anticlimactic on a parking area in a forest, but actually that didn’t bother us at all.
The valley and the river along the road are incredibly beautiful, the water is icy cold and crystal clear, and as a bonus, I got to see one of the more impressive waterfalls.
The first image shows it from down by the road. The image was taken at an equivalent focal length of 24mm, which is quite wide-angle, and all the water in this fuming creek originates in the fall alone.
The Image of the Day was taken from the side, behind the fall, and it was pretty impossible to keep the polarizer dry for only just a second.
I suppose the fall is about 20 meters high. The enormous amount of water hits a deep pool where it constantly vaporizes and drenches the photographer more than 10 meters away. The pool then overflows and runs down the hill in form of the creek that we’ve seen in the first image. It’s utterly impressive to stand there within the roaring thunder. Wet, but impressive
The Song of the Day is “Waterfall” from James’ 2008 album “Hey Ma”. See a 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.
