What’s that you ask? Well, that is one way how newspapers are sold in Austria on weekends. Pouches with newspapers are mounted at signposts, with an attached receptacle for money, and people who take a paper are expected to insert the appropriate number of coins. By and large this even seems to work.
I have seen some more mechanic solutions where you would not get the paper without inserting money, but those vending machines seem to not have survived the currency change that happened in 2002, when Austria gave up on its Schilling and embraced the Euro. In fact it was the same with most vending machines in low profit businesses. The cost of adapting the machines to accept the new coins was prohibitive and caused many goods to not be sold this way any more, or in the case of newspapers, it brought a revival of trust. What a nice effect 
The title? Well, those two newspapers “Die Presse” and “Der Standard“, hanging there in concord, are two of the best newspapers in Austria, one strictly conservative, one liberal, and they both compete for the same small market of highly educated people who don’t submit to the yellow press. Of course they try to be different, just look at the colors of the money boxes
And there is more irony to it. The red sticker in between, reading “Krone Hit Radio”, advertises for a radio station owned by the biggest and one of the worst of Austria’s newspapers, “Kronen Zeitung“. What a rare display of unity.
Let me close with one more bicycle, one more Puch. Both of these images were shot with the Nikon 85/1.8, both wide open. When I left work yesterday (yes, it’s morning again) at 7pm, it was so dark that I decided to change from the slow 70-300 to something real fast, and I feel that the 85 is underused. I’ll be off for work in about an hour, and I’ll keep this lens mounted for now. Weather has not improved anyway.
Some time passes … nope, I will not. I just come from the bathroom, and while I was indulging extensively in the joys of hot water, weather has considerably improved. The sun is shining again, it’s got to be back to the 70-300
The Song of the Day is “Two Of A Kind” by Memphis Slim. I have it on disc 53 of “The Ultimate Jazz Archive“, but if you look for something more … well … slim, I’d suggest the 1961 album “All Kinds of Blues“.
These are images of yesterday, Thursday. As I have nothing for today yet and plenty of time at the moment (I’m currently on the train from Vienna to Carinthia, a four hours ride), I felt the temptation to use one of them for today. Well, I resisted. There is still time and I intend to get lucky
The Image of the Day was taken only seconds after I left my appartment, while still on the same floor. This is something I really believe in: One should never dismiss a subject on the ground that it has been used before. I had quite some Images of the Day made in this very staircase, and while I would not spend an hour shooting images here, a few every few days tend to be fun and the routine is productive as well.
The umbrella has not been arranged by me, it was simply there, someone seems to have forgotten it. As always when I have a new lens, I currently use the Nikon 85/1.8 almost exclusively, and as always with fast primes, I mostly play with shallow depth of field.
This image surprised me quite a lot in post-processing. The original out of the camera was dark and moody, but when I clicked “Auto” in Adobe Camera RAW, I found that I liked this light look much better. A comment on SmugMug, my photo hosting site, described this as “a very lovely shot”, and indeed there is something serene in this shot that I did not anticipate originally. Well, some people may be disturbed when their images begin to acquire unintended sense, but I am a great believer in the process of discovery. I think it’s honest. I believe that much of what we see as coherent in the work of other artists is only what has been arranged that way.
Let me conclude with two more images, the first one being a morning image as well. This is another product of Puch, the Austrian manufacturer of bicycles, motorcycles and cars, that I have already written about or its products shown more than once. Just like the car recently, these scooters were old-fashioned in the Seventies, but I remember having seen a lot of them in my youth, all of them in the posession of old men.
The last image is from the afternoon. This is a park along the street where I work, and there are always flowers. I tried to get a nice distribution of verticals and asense of depth. Nothing special, but I like it.
The Song of the Day, “True Love Tends to Forget“, is from Bob Dylan’s 1978 album “Street Legal“. Funnily enough this was the first Dylan album that I bought. Hear the Song on YouTube.
