This morning we had high fog, according to the weather report reaching up to 2000 meters, thus I planned to avoid Dobratsch (which is 2166 meters) and really go for the Sella Nevea trip. Of course I was late as usual, and as I was just about to drive out of Villach, the clouds broke up and I saw the summit of Mount Dobratsch in glorious sunlight.
I gave in, changed my plan and drove all the way up to 1732m, only to be greeted by dense fog. I put on my moon boots, gloves and the headband, marched on, and really, the fog went away in minutes, never to come back for the whole day. Sometimes it pays to be obstinate 
On the way up I met a young man, photographing with his two weeks old Canon 450D (that’s the Rebel XSi for you Americans), answered some basic questions about white balance, and so we went and shot together. He had to turn back early though, because he had wife and daughter (as far as I remember) waiting down at the inn. (Hey, I gave you my card, but I didn’t even ask for your name! Sorry.)
It’s really a pity, because from last year’s excursion “491 – Just In Time” I knew that the sundown at the top can be breathtaking. This was the last image that I took before we parted, then I began the long walk up to the summit, all the while people coming down, I being the only one going up. They don’t know what they miss, or they don’t care about the same things that I do, but I’m fine with that. It’s pretty overwhelming having a whole mountain for yourself.
The problem with the way up is, that in the afternoon you walk in the shade for a long time. Even worse, you don’t really see what’s ahead of you. It’s one long slope that the way crosses, and I remember when I first went up last year, I always asked myself when it would finally end.
The first time you really see the summit, it comes as a shock. It just has looked as if it were over, as if you had already made it, and then you reach the plateau and see the antenna tower and one of the two churches (yes, there are two churches on this mountain) in quite a distance. In reality it’s not as dramatic as in this image, this is really wide angle at 10mm.
The first four images are JPEGs straight out of the camera, shot at automatic white balance, the last two and the Image of the Day were edited. The image with the avalanche barriers and the antenna tower had a flare that I’ve taken out and this one needed some more local contrast in the snow.
All images were taken with the Sigma 10-20. There would have been some opportunities for longer lenses, I carried them with me, but I did not bother to change. In reality I knew what to expect at the summit and did not much care for any of the other pictures. I really went up for that one image, the Image of the Day, an HDR made of bracketed exposures shot from the tripod, and of course very wide. For this image I stood behind the church seen in “491 – Just In Time“, three steps from a cliff falling more than a thousand meters.
I could have stayed a little longer, it’s such a majestic and magical place and time, but it was really cold up there, thus I left after I had taken this image and made sure that it was technically OK. The night was extremely clear, half a moon lit my way down and I enjoyed it greatly.
Yesterday I wrote about James, and funnily enough, searching for a song to title this image I tried “top” and stumbled upon “Top of the World” from James’ 1990 album “Gold Mother”. See them perform live in Manchester. There is something magic with people performing on home turf, and this is no exception.
It’s the afternoon of December 25 by now. These are the images of yesterday. Quite a difference from my trip to the sea 
I wanted a Christmas image, more or less cliché with snow and mountains and all that, thus I knew that I would drive up Mount Dobratsch again. Of course I didn’t know how it would turn out, if a sudden cloud would shroud me once there, thus when I saw this scene, a way into the sunny, slightly foggy winter landscape, I took a series of these as safety shots. This is one taken with the Sigma 50/1.4, some other used the Nikon 70-300 VR, but only in this shot did I have the person in such a perfect position. Only later I discovered a second person, lost in the fog.
Of course the image was awkwardly composed, thus I decided for a cinemascape crop. This was nothing planned like Aaron Hobson‘s fantastic works, more an accident, but I didn’t want to throw the image away, less for its quality, but because it reminds me of a magic moment, even if it is not image enough to carry that over to you.
Once having something to fall back, I felt confident to take the risk and drive all the way up to the end of the street at 1732m, even though there would have been some nice and sunny lookouts on the way up.
I changed to my moon boots, took the tripod, less as camera support than as walking stick, and walked up the next hill from the car park, just in time to get some last sun.
More than usual I switched between lenses, mostly the Nikon 70-300 VR, that I used for these images of the far mountains, and the Sigma 10-20, my workhorse for winter landscapes on the mountain, yes I even switched to the Sigma 50/1.4 once for a few images of the eastern sunset.
These are the times when I am thankful for one of the major advances in camera technology in the last years, namely sensor cleaning. The more it seems absurd that the latest and greatest Nikon, the D3X, still has no sensor cleaning system. Pretty stupid, because Canon and Sony can do it with 100% viewfinders on full-frame sensors as well, why shouldn’t Nikon be able to do it. Seems like a lame excuse to me. On the other hand, that’s not my problem, it’s that of those people who shell out $8000 for a camera 
I really stayed up there until the show was over. I could have gone on using the tripod for what is really its job, but at 5pm it was enough. I had to return for some major cooking, involving red cabbage, dumplings, cider, apples, thyme and a duck. Besides, Michael had announced to join for dinner
Without either risk or hesitation I drove down, and only 25 minutes after entering the car, I was back, ready for culinary action.
Post-processing yesterday’s images took me most of this day, light is already gone, I have no idea what I will shoot for today’s entry. We’ll see.
The Song of the Day is “Till The End Of The Day” by The Kinks. I have it on their current best-of collection “Kinks (The Ultimate Collection)”. Hear it on YouTube. Happy holidays to you all. I may or may not get back to you tonight
Well, I shouldn’t promise things that I can’t deliver. These are images of yesterday afternoon, and when I posted the lens index, I had all of them already taken but none post-processed. Doing so took me until mid-afternoon today, but I guess it was worth not rushing things, and there are even lessons to be learned.
Weather in Carinthia is crazy at the moment. Villach has about a foot of snow, Klagenfurt has none. They are 40km apart with a height difference of 50 meters. There is only a lake in between, no mountain range, no nothing. For all practical reasons they should have the same weather. It’s only they don’t. This was the third weekend in a row, that I arrived in Villach during snowfall. The only reason that the snow does not pile up higher, is that we are too low. Half of the snow does not make it down to us and ends up as rain.
Unfortunately rain makes the snow quickly fall down from the trees, and somehow this looks bleak and sad. I wanted to have real snow, freshly fallen or at least looking like that, and so I took the car and drove the street up Mount Dobratsch. You know it by now, it’s that mountain that broke apart during an earthquake in 1348, the year when the Great Plague arrived in Europe. As if the plague wouldn’t have been fun enough.
From 700 meters on the road was solid snow, but I had no problem driving all the way up to 1750 meters. From there I could have gone up to the summit, but as I had entered dense fog at 1600 meters, I was not sure if it would be a good idea to go any higher. I took some images up there, made some wrong steps and was suddenly in deep snow up to my chest, in short: it did not look promising. Not winter wonderland, only winter, fog and no view. And here comes one of the lessons:
Every now and then someone posts about how RAW is inconvenient, how they don’t see a difference, how much less hassle JPEG is, while it provides superior or at least comparable image quality, and so on and so forth. Ken Rockwell is famous for it (and for all other sorts of interesting viewpoints, some remarkably lucid and some simply ridiculous), but even David Ziser did it for some length of time (Lightroom had him converted), and my friend Paul Lester does it still.
Actually there is nothing wrong with that, as long as it works for you. It certainly did for David as a highly successful wedding pro, and it obviously does for Paul. For me it does not.
JPEG is much too restrictive for me. I like to do extensive post-processing, enjoying the work in Photoshop almost as much as the actual shooting, but that is not my point today. The point is that without a RAW file, a good RAW converter and an arsenal of tricks in Photoshop, some images would not be possible at all. This is one of those images.
Take your time, click on the two versions, the second, the pale one being what the camera saw (and I as well, to be honest), and the first one what I did in DxO and Photoshop. Can you do that with a JPEG? No, you can’t. You would have to stretch the image so far beyond its capacity, that half of it would suffice to render it a mess.
Look at the JPEG from the camera: there is no contrast at all, no texture in the snow, and from that image alone, you’d get no idea of what it looks like up there. Sure, sure, I said I didn’t see much more than the camera, so why would I want to make an image that would not be true to reality? But that is the wrong question.
If I only had the JPEG, I wouldn’t need to bother showing it at all. This gray mess, what it is about? Well, not much more than bland grayness. You can’t really tell how the snow covers these barns, you can’t see how it smoothes out any jagged form, the picture is a complete waste of storage. As a JPEG shooter you’d have to throw it away.
So, obviously there is a reality of soft, ondulating forms up there on the mountain, and shooting JPEG, the true-to-reality plain JPEG, you can’t show it. Well, in RAW you can.
When I work on such an image, I always try to get the best RAW conversion possible. I know I’ll have to stretch the image contrast beyond believe, and I know that all flaws in the RAW conversion software, all flaws in my own technique will be amplified and thus revealed. Knowing that, I always begin as solid as possible, and since almost two months this means to convert the RAW in DxO Optics Pro. I have already written a lot about that program, I am still satisfied with it, and at the moment I use it for all high ISO and for all snow images.
Why for snow, you ask? Well, the reason is, that I need to stretch contrast, and often also to dramatically increase saturation. RAW conversion artifacts and lens flaws like chromatic aberrations would become dominant in such an image. I have experienced that once with a conversion done in Adobe Camera RAW (I believe it was this image), and when I then tried the same process based on a conversion by DxO, it was dramatically better.
DxO reaches that level of precision by doing much of its work before de-mosaicing. One good example is noise. In all these images I begin with a straight conversion in DxO, using one of the presets. I use the Photoshop import plugin to pull it as base layer into Photoshop. Then I duplicate that layer, push local contrast using Photo Lift, multiply this layer with reduced opacity and normally also a mask, often apply a photo filter adjustment layer to fine-tune colors, strongly saturate with “Hue/Saturation” layers in various blending modes, apply levels and a contrast curve globally, may add further local contrast with a masked curves layer, and finally apply a vignette.
All that of course increases noise, even if the original image was taken at base ISO (which is true for all these images), and in case of the barns covered in snow, I even had to apply a surface blur to the Photo Lift layer, but still, when you amplify so much, some noise is inevitable, and then it is of utmost importa
nce how this noise looks like. The noise that remains in images converted by DxO looks … crystalline. Not like digital noise at all. It does not harm any image, but it actually enhances snow images.
Most of these images were made using the Sigma 10-20, a fine ultra-wide lens for DX format sensors, the one exception is the barn image, for that I used the Nikon 18-200 VR. Have you ever changed lenses standing up to your chest in snow and not knowing how to best get out of it? Funny, I can tell you
The Image of the Day was taken on the way up, at a height of about 1100 meters, at the same place where I shot the last of the series, on my way down, like all other images.
There is another lesson though. Just look one more time at these images. They all look slightly different, don’t they? Just rightly so, I’d say, given that they were taken in different places and over the time of about two hours. And still, they make no proper series. Remember my SoFoBoMo book? There I had shot all images in an afternoon, but it has taken me weeks to post-process them in a way that they had the same look.
All the images on this page look fine individually, but were I to make them a true series, for example a book, I would have to invest much more in visual coherence, probably giving up individual “truth” for the flow of the series.
The Song of the Day is “Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow” from the 1992 Manhattan Transfer “Christmas Album”. Hear it on YouTube.
Today was more working in the new apartment. A new cabinet and a door for another one had arrived and you know how assembling furniture takes time. This is one of only three humble images that I shot this morning through the window of my study. Having a camera where 300mm give you an equivalent of 450mm is not so bad after all
The mountain, Gerlitze, is one of the three mountains around Villach. Mittagskogel is for the looks, Dobratsch for walking and enjoying a nature reserve, and Gerlitze is for skiing. As a mountain it is least attractive, but otherwise it has its charms.
The Song of the Day is “Cloudburst” from one of my all time favorite albums, “The Hottest New Group In Jazz” by Lambert, Hendricks & Ross. Hear it on YouTube.
Today was an extraordinarily bright day and a little bit warmer again. My first idea was to watch a sunset on mount Dobratsch, the mountain where I’ve watched the sun rise and set many times, but I did not manage to get up in time, and it wouldn’t have been spectacular anyway, as the sky was completely clear.
Instead I took the car in the early afternoon and drove half way up to slightly below 3000 ft, where I parked on the side of the road and tried my luck in the forest near the abyss.
I decided to leave all other lenses in the car and only take the camera with the Sigma 50/1.4 mounted. Actually I had no idea that I would spend almost an hour in that place, shooting forest landscapes, patches of snow, rocks, grass, details and big vistas.
I was not far from the road, but there was almost complete silence and peace. It was like stepping out of your life, forgetting everything before and after, only breathing the magic in this mountain wilderness.
I have explained the details before, but it is always fascinating to think of the fact that this mountain broke apart twice, once in prehistoric times and once due to a devastating earthquake in 1348. Therefore the southern flank is a steep abyss.
Standing up there, looking down at the highway below, it’s hard to avoid a fit of vertigo.
The Song of the Day is “Mountain Hare Krishna” from Krishna Das’ 1998 album “Pilgrim Heart”, a duet sung together with Sting. Hear it on YouTube. I spare you the lyrics, they are sort of … simple
Dobratsch is a mountain that we had quite often now and I won’t bother you again with the story of the catastrophe of 1348 (no, not the plague). If you have not read it yet, just have a look at these past entries.
Today when I was ready for photographing, it was already mid-afternoon. I could have gone out again to shoot power lines or farm houses but, knowing that it would be my last opportunity for a week, I decided to drive to Villach and up the mountain Dobratsch again. At about 4pm I parked the car, changed to winter boots, mounted the Sigma 10-20, took the Lowepro slingshot with my gear, shouldered the tripod, and then I began climbing the mountain.
Well, climbing is a big word. Actually there is a well prepared way up the mountain, but there was still snow, the summit is 300 meters above the parking area and several kilometers away. Sundown was predicted for 5:30pm, thus I had plenty of time. At least that’s what I thought.
I’ll show an image of the way up there tomorrow when I’ll be writing about a new tool I have. The whole way is on the shadow side (well, at least in the evening), and when you finally think that now you’ve got it, the summit must be very near, you realize that you have reached only a platform, and there it is, the summit, far away, impressively looming in a distance.
It took me 90 minutes to reach the big broadcast station (mercifully omitted here) and the ridge between the two churches. Yes, there are two churches up there, and I happily admit that I cowardly refused to follow the ridge past the cross and to the western church. This last image may give you an impression why
The way down was comparatively fast. The moon cast strong light, and even without my headlamp I would have had no trouble getting down, merely the wind was a tad chilly. Afterwards I heard on TV that the temperatures on Dobratsch had been at around -12 degrees Celsius, and that together with the wind this would correspond to -26 degrees. Oh well, so that’s why it felt cold
All images were shot with the Sigma 10-20 at 10mm and as sequences of seven bracketed shots. The merging to HDR and the tone mapping were made in Photomatix Pro, the final touches in Photoshop.
Oh yes, one more word about the temperatures. Most of the time I carried the camera in the slingshot, and when I had it out for a longer period of time without actually shooting, I had the battery removed and wore it near to my body. Batteries discharge much faster when in the cold. I simply did not want to take a risk. During actual use everything worked completely normal.
The Song of the Day is Nina Simone’s “Just In Time“. I have it on the “Tomato Collection“, a double CD compilation with somewhat mixed acoustic quality, that nevertheless is absolutely recommendable. Hear another, equally good version on YouTube.
