I took a series of images here, most with some kind of tilt. Finally I ended up straighten this one. It gave me a tight crop, about to the view that I’d have had with the Tokina 11-16 
The Song of the Day is “Bed Of Roses” from Bette Midler’s 1995 album “Bette Of Roses”. Hear a live version on YouTube.
It is sunday morning and this image is from Saturday afternoon. The day began mostly cloudy, but in the afternoon the clouds dispersed and we took a short trip to a nearby valley and then a detour along a mountain ridge. This is on the road winding up.
Contrasts seemed so harsh, that I took a bracketed burst of five images, but foliage of that amount is obviously the point where HDR programs can’t handle variation any more. Both Photomatix Pro and HDR Essentials failed miserably, and so I took two exposures, one underexposed, one overexposed, into Photoshop, let it align them, put the darker to the bottom and blended the lighter one into the shadows. Look at the image: the shadows are mostly static. Things that don’t move, or at least unnoticably so at that focal length. We are at 11 mm after all.
It worked immaculately. Even at 100% I can see no obvious ghosting. I fully expected it, but no. Of course the two exposures that I used are only two apart in the burst, but then, when leaves move, they move extremely fast.
Anyway. The Tokina 11-16/2.8 is definitely prone to ghosts when you shoot directly into the sun, but it really depends on the exact position of the sun in the frame. Here I had no problem at all.
The Song of the Day is “We Came Along This Road” by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds. It’s on their 2001 album “No More Shall We Part”. YouTube has at least a live version.
In little more than an hour I have to leave for the train. It’s Friday, yesterday was a public holiday in Austria (well, Catholicism is not ONLY about old men and young boys, you know) and I used the time to get a little outside of town. Here’s one of the few usable images. Processing went along a little of its own, and when I saw what I got out of Photoshop while experimenting, I liked and kept it.
The Song of the Day is “Down The Road” from Marcia Ball’s 2005 album “Live! Down The Road”. Finally we begin to see more of her on YouTube. Here is the song, audio could be less muffled and there is indeed a version with better video and clear sound available, only it is not the same song 
If you need something, without a doubt a shopping mall is a good place to go. Interestingly enough this holds true for Images of the Day
When I arrived in Vienna I was in a hurry, and besides, the weather was real bad, which was a letdown after sunny Carinthia. It even drizzled slightly and I thought, well, the ultra-wide was perfect on Saturday in that shopping mall in Carinthia, why not try to pull the same stunt here?
So I went there for shopping, in the hope to come back with food and a nice B&W image, but this time color won, and that’s just another good point for not discarding color early.
The Song of the Day is “Shoplifters Of The World Unite“, originally from the 1987 Smiths album “The World Won’t Listen”, but as that’s not available for digital download in the US, I have also linked to “The Sound Of The Smiths”, a collection of 45 songs including 15 out of 18 of “The World Won’t Listen”.
The video on YouTube seems to be from some TV show: obvious playback and not even a halfhearted attempt to cover it. I have no idea how TV stations ever got away with that
Today most images are made with digital cameras and all of them in color. Even when you set your camera to B&W mode, it won’t affect the RAW file, which will still be in color. That’s a good thing.
This image has been converted to B&W using two of Photoshop’s B&W filters and a mask, one filter “High Contrast Red” and the other “Maximum White”, The mask on one filter determining where the other takes over.
It still didn’t look as I had imagined. I wanted a darker sky and a feeling of warm afternoon sun in the dome, but without burning out highlights, and without drowning the lower part of the image in black.
What I did was the following: I copied the original layer and took it to Topaz Detail, where I used a garish filter called “Blue Sky”, that I rarely use at all. I vaguely remember having used it once and to great advantage, but I can’t remember the image. Anyway. What this filter does, is lightening greens, shifting them strongly into the yellows and darkening the blues. The idea seems to have been to use it on landscapes to give them a sunny, polarized look, but you can’t ever use it on landscapes at all, so bad does it look. Here in a technical, architectural image, it gave me a stronger contrast between the yellowish panels and the blue sky. Of course now the panels were so bright, that they would burn out in B&W, with the additional saturation that I had applied below the B&W layers. Removing the saturation would not give me the desired look, thus I doubled the “Blue Sky” layer, applied one in “Multiply” mode blended in the highlights, and the other in “Soft Light” mode, blended in the shadows. Finally I toned down the light reflex on the wall, sharpened the image slightly, added a silver tone and this is it.
It wouldn’t have been possible to take this image on film, regardless of what filters I’d have used. It could only be made in digital post-processing. And still, it looks perfectly natural. Digital photography has given us a lot more choices, and it’s our’s to make them.
The Song of the Day is “Roy’s Choice” from the 2001 De-Phazz album “Death by Chocolate”. If you’re going to buy only one De-Phazz album, this must be it. If you’re in the US, I have to recommend plastic, because the album is only available as CD import for a steep price – and it’s worth every cent of it. But hear yourself on YouTube.
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.
