Oh my, I’m on the train again, traveling through a white winter landscape. This is an image that I made an hour ago, while going from work to the Underground.

The Song of the Day is “Impressions”. I have it on a double CD called “The Mastery of John Coltrane Vol. IV, Trane’s Modes”, but as this collection seems to be unavailable by now, I link to the 1963 release “Impressions”. I’m pretty sure it’s the same material anyway

See a live performance on YouTube.

1200? Nice number, huh? Sorry for the delay, I would have written this post in the morning, but instead I have upgraded a WordPress plugin, and that caused my portfolio pages to fail. No big problem though, after a comment on the author’s site, he provided another upgrade that fixed the problem. In fact it took him less than five hours to find the problem, fix it and roll out a new version. This is quite remarkable, try to get that from Microsoft, Oracle or any other big company. I love Free Software. No useless management, instead competent people who care

This image is one more proof for the concept of never being without a camera. The kiosk is at a tramway stop, at a crossing just opposite from where I work. There are people all the time. In this place it would even be uncommon to see a bicycle on the sidewalk, and I sure have never seen a scooter there. It’s one of those shots taken almost unconsciously

The other image, the Image of the Day, well, in a way it connects to Ted Byrne’s comment to “1198 – Under The Bridge” and to my answer. Ted wrote that

Monochrome has an inherent melancholy bias. Yes it can be overcome, but it’s as if the artist starts up a hill with a bag filled with lead.

Yes, but there can be quite some melancholy in color as well, and in some cases, color may even express it stronger. I guess this is such a case. It needs the colors and it needs them faded, in order to express such yearning for a summer past.

The Song of the Day is “Summer Kisses, Winter Tears” by The Blackeyed Susans, a group from Australia. It’s on their 2001 album of cover versions, “Dedicated to the Ones We Love”.

I have found no video of the song in their version, thus I must direct you to the original by Elvis Presley.

I’m falling behind for no reason but being tired. It’s Thursday morning and this is the image for Tuesday. I made it while my friend Christian and I returned from dinner, and before we heard music until 2am. After that I was not exactly in the mood for image processing. Yesterday I came home late, processed it, chose a title, and then decided to lay down for only a short nap. And here we are: two days behind

Esther Emma and Flo asked me how I did the post-processing in “1158 – Sophisticated Lady“. Well, here we go:

It’s two versions from RAW, a dark one for the background, a lighter one for the foreground, and then in Photoshop I used some plugins: Noise Ninja, Topaz Detail and Topaz Clean. I used Noise Ninja on both versions, and by painting on the mask I used the light version for the face. With Topaz Detail I added some local contrast to the face, giving it more definition, but of course that raised noise again. I countered that with a skin beautifier effect in Topaz Clean, added some neutral blur (described towards the end of “571 – Them There Eyes II“). Somewhere in the mix there is also a push in saturation, done with my usual combo of Hue/Saturation layers in different blending modes, described in “683 – Welcome To The Republic“. Throw in a light vignetting layer and you’re done.

You see, there is not so much variation in my processing technique these days, and the reasoning is simple: When I change light in part of the image, I must change local contrast as well, otherwise it would look unnatural. When I do these things, I have to counter noise. Using the skin beautifier from Topaz Clean is a bit radical, but for a mannequin it is OK. On real people you have to be very careful with it, at least when you want to keep them recognizable. Topaz Clean tends to make them years younger, and that’s not always what you want, or better, that’s what you don’t want most of the time. But again, on this mannequin it was a very effective way to eliminate noise, the blur mostly adding glamor. As Flo recognized, the lights of the shop’s decoration in the background look like a pearl necklace, and that adds to the glamor as well.

That’s it. As for this post’s image, well, that’s a face stenciled upon a shop window, and behind the window is an add for a clearing out service. You see parts of the words “Entrümpelung”, “Dachböden” and some more, plus some phone numbers. I saw it while Christian and I walked to my place. I had some other images, but this natural overlay of graffiti and text struck me as an interesting detail. I love it how you can focus near with the Tamron 17-50/2.8.

The Song of the Day is “I Can’t See Your Face In My Mind” from the 1967 Doors album “Strange Days”. We didn’t have The Doors in quite some time. That’s bad, but it can be remedied

YouTube has the song.

Just like most Sundays, this was a slow day. I left home shortly before 2pm, at a time when you already have to worry about the sun.

My first way was towards the center of Villach, searching for some rectangular, modern architecture, something big and grid-like, something that I could use as a target for calibration images for PTLens, but I’m afraid that is not as easy as I had thought.

What I need is a pretty big building, one that fills the frame when photographed at 17mm from at least 20 feet away. I need it to have regular vertical and horizontal features, and they must be narrowly spaced, such that the image contains enough of them, even at 50mm.

I found nothing. When I gave up, I took this image of the bored cat (“fad” means “boring” in Austrian dialect), drove a little around in the countryside, made some uninspired images, and finally concluded the day with the other image, the temporary container, that is our local McDonalds while they rebuild the restaurant, catching the last rays of sunlight. Why this choice when the McDonalds image is clearly the better image? Well, I just happen to like cats more than burgers, that’s the reason

The Song of the Day is “Honky Cat” from Elton John’s 1972 album “Honky Chateau”. See him live in Ephesus in 2001.

I’m on the train to Carinthia right now and we’re just crossing the first ridge of mountains. There’s snow outside. Not as yesterday, not a mere idea of snow, nope, this is a white, wet blanket of coldness.

I took this image on my way to the train. It’s the cart of someone who posts advertising posters. The interesting thing is only, that there was nobody around.

I’m back to a lens that I have not used in a long time: the Sigma 30/1.4. Well, probably it’s not really necessary to have a 28/1.8, a 30/1.4 and a 35/1.8. Of these three lenses the Sigma 28/1.8 is probably the most versatile. It is not the cheapest, that’s the Nikon 35/1.8, but it is sharp (OK, that’s true for all of them), can be used on FX, and most important, it focuses almost down to the front lens. Anyway. All three lenses are quite fine and now I use the 30 again. It’s the fastest, and that not only means the maximum aperture, no, it has also the fastest autofocus.

Oh, and, by the way, I missed it, but two days ago this blog had its third birthday. Three years. Wow! It was never planned as a 365 days project, I always wanted to make this an institution, but of course you never know. Well, I’m not tired yet. I don’t feel what I do as repetitious, it did neither become an obligation nor a job, no chore, no routine. It is still an adventure and I hope you keep following me

The Song of the Day is “Glamorous Glue” from Morrissey’s 1992 album “Your Arsenal”. See a video on YouKu.

Friday morning I was in a real hurry. Weather had also changed, it had rained a little, the sky was overcast, and on top of all that I was uninspired. In those situations it does not make sense to try with force. You will only block yourself. Thankfully the routine of making at least one image per day makes me creative in overcoming creativity blocks, and as soon as I recognized a problem, I unconsciously and automatically switched into a kind of “free association mode”. I let loose, let my mind wander, and suddenly there was an inspiration: I would make an experiment.

These kinds of experiments are normally something crazy, something completely against the rules, against normal procedure, and this time it was setting the camera to manual focus, focusing very near and simply making pictures, open to what may come. In that case you have two possibilities: You can make deliberately unfocused images and play with lights, colors and vague forms, or you can go very near to things, until you find something that comes into focus.

This image is of the latter category. It’s part of an advertising at a tram station. The lights in the background are inside of a train.

The Song of the Day is “My Eye On You” from the 1983 Bette Midler album “No Frills”. See a video 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.

This is the second (and last) post for today. The image was taken on the construction site in front of the railway station in Vienna. It is again one of those old advertising posters that we saw in “1022 – Past In Present“.

The poster shows a red baby buggy on yellow background. I really would have liked to show the whole poster, but unfortunately it was mostly covered by construction materials. I had the Sigma 28/1.8 mounted and no time, thus what you see here is a radical crop to about 4 megapixels. Still, the image was unbalanced with its vivid colors on the left side and dull stone on the right, and even more so, as the image was visually open towards the left. Going to B&W fixed all that.

The Song of the Day is “Shades Of Time” from the 1968 self-titled Santana album. Hear it on YouTube.

As I always say: some days are better than others. Yesterday was particularly good.

I post no more than three images, because I am one day behind, but I have tagged three more as TODO, meaning they will very likely turn up on some meager day.

Today I have two half/half compositions for you. One, the torn advertising on a lamp mast, is obviously a straight photography, the other, the Image of the Day, is as well, although in that case you simply have to believe me

There was a lot of glass involved, I was standing in the entrance of a shop, the woman is an advertising poster behind glass, the dark edge in the center is where two sheets of glass meet. I can’t remember the exact configuration. In any case, this is the same shop that brought us “362 – Fashion Victim“.

Along with the third image, the furniture on a balcony, these could all be from my SoFoBoMo book “Urban Dreams II”. Obviously I am not yet done with that series

The Song of the Day is “Proud Mary” by Tina Turner. In March, when I used “River Deep Mountain High” as a Song of the Day, I bought Tina Turner’s 3 CD “Platinum Collection”. That’s what I’ve linked to. See a fantastic live performance on YouTube.

The good thing is, I’ll be going to sleep pretty soon. The bad thing is, well, you know it, another short post.

I guess I’d have had another one or two usable images, but really, I’m just short of sleeping in front of the computer, and if at all possible, I’d like to avoid that

This image is not a composite. It’s part of an advertising poster for a Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller retrospective in Vienna, and the left part is simply the street background. It’s one more of these half/half compositions that made a big part of my SoFoBoMo 2009 book.

The Song of the Day is “World Of Two” from the 2001 Cake album “Comfort Eagle”. Hear it on YouTube.