1345 - Mixed Emotions

Tamron 17-50/2.8 VC 1 Response »
Jun 202010

Good news! I’m in Italy, and the place, Sestri Levante in Liguria, is really beautiful. It’s not a new town, actually it goes back to Roman origins, and you really see that although this place has known tourism for a very long time, certainly more than a hundred years, it has been rich before that.

As to the journey, it was uneventful, with lots of sunshine along the way, only in the end, when we arrived at the Ligurian Riviera, we were back to rain. On the other hand, that’s just as predicted, thus I won’t complain … yet :)

The images are from a short walk along the beach and through the historic center. Ted recently had the idea for my SoFoBo book, that I could look at how here in Europe (and where when not in Italy), the new is always layered upon the old. The idea is to reveal old layers, to juxtapose the ancient and the modern. Well, I had planned to try just that in Genova, but due to the rainfalls we skipped that part of our trip. But then, maybe I can do something similar down here? We’ll see.

The Internet connection here is a mixed experience. I can say (and you can see) that it works, but certain domains make trouble or seem to be blocked. For instance I can’t get YouTube to work. No idea why. I can search, but playing videos is impossible.

The Song of the Day is “Mixed Emotions” by Dinah Washington. You can get it on a collection called “The Complete Dinah Washington On Mercury Vol.2 (1950 – 1952)”. YouTube is supposed to have it, though I can’t check :)

Posted by andreas at 3:03 am Tagged with: , , , , , ,

1341 - Come Home

Sigma 8-16 4 Responses »
Jun 162010

Sometimes I have no idea how I come up with Images of the Day.

Firstly, I have no idea why I took this particular image at all. It’s just a typical house in Villach. Something of the kind a lawyer or physician might have built at around 1900. There are lots of them if you look in the right neighborhoods, not only in Villach, this is typical Austrian architecture of that time.

Secondly, I have no idea why this was the first of yesterday’s images that I tried to work on. I just followed an impulse. With the foreground in shade and the bright, marbled sky, I quickly decided to take it to black and white, following the process outlined in “1338 – Pieces Of A Past Life I“. This time the black and white conversion took four different layers. The filters were “High Contrast Red” for the sky, “Maximum Black” for most of the architecture, “Infrared” for most of the vegetation and “Blue” for part of the street. Add some “Darkening” curves, a “Lighten” curve, both modified, maybe one more curve for contrast, a selective blur layer, a vignette, a toning layer and some sharpening. I liked the result, and so it ended up as Image of the Day. But still, don’t ask why :)

The Song of the Day is “Come Home” from the 1990 James album “Gold Mother”. Hear it on YouTube.

Posted by andreas at 1:50 pm Tagged with: , , , , , , ,

1338 - Pieces Of A Past Life I

Sigma 8-16 2 Responses »
Jun 142010

Actually, when I think of it, I have no idea why we got our Dylan tickets for the show in Linz. Linz is about four hours by car from Villach, and yesterday was a hellishly hot day. We could as well have seen today’s show in Ljubljana, Slovenia, only about an hour from here.

Anyway, it was good as expected, he finished with a beautiful – and strange for me – “Forever Young”. Incredible how this man constantly re-invents himself.

We left for Linz early, intending to take the shortest way to Leoben, and then slow roads up to Eisenerz. Eisenerz is a small mining town north of “Erzberg”, a mountain that is so rich of iron ore, that it was viable for surface mining.

The population of Eisenerz peaked out at 12.679 in 1956, and was down to 5.566 in 2007. As a result, you see lots of empty places, houses that speak of former wealth, and although nothing is ruined, although you see restauration efforts here and there, the whole place is hauntingly empty.

This image was taken on the outskirts. I’ll post one more image from the center in the next entry. Somehow black and white with a bit of color toning seemed appropriate to me. The technique is one that I developed last year. Basically I use a strongly blurred layer (radius 50 pixels), add a mask, and then use a big, soft brush to selectively reveal the unblurred image. Finally I set opacity of that blur layer to abount 70%. I like that process, because by painting on the mask, I can very directly set accents and influence how the eye moves. Sometimes I may add a vignette (not here), most of the time I add toning (subtle like here or deft as I used to do last year), and most of the time I add noise.

The Song of the Day, “Pieces Of A Past Life”, is by a band called “The Postmen” from Geneva, Switzerland. Hear them on Jamendo.

Posted by andreas at 2:36 am Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,

1323 - There She Goes, My Beautiful World

Tamron 17-50/2.8 VC 2 Responses »
May 282010

Yesterday I asked the flippant question “hey, why not just make a video and upload it?”. Well, for instance because I have no right to do so :)

I wrongly believed that the copyright for those pre-1955 Jazz recordings that I had bought with “The Ultimate Jazz Archive” (or the more recent purchase of those 500 Jazz CDs) had already expired, but that is not so. It may have expired in some countries, but it certainly has not in the US. It took about one hour until the audio track for my “video” was claimed by WMG, and idiot that I am, I even filed a dispute through YouTube’s form.

In the meantime I did some research, and although I hardly know what I’m talking about (so take this with more than a grain of salt), it seems that contrary to my believe, neither the date 1955 nor any number of years play a role here. In the US there is a national law regulating copyright for sound recordings made after 1972, and seemingly everything before is under various (and different!) state laws, and it is so until 2067. “Legal Impediments to Preservation of and Access to the Audio Heritage of the United States” by the US Music Library Association explains it in gruesome detail. They also have an out-of-date but nevertheless informative FAQ about copyright, but as they warn us,

copyright laws are both complex and subtle, and the penalties for mistakes can be severe

and there seems to be no simple, clear and reliable explanation of the situation in the US.

I’m not up to date with what the situation is in Europe. Seemingly we had a copyright expiration after 50 years, and as this would put early Rolling Stones and Beatles recordings into the public domain, the recording industry urges the European Commission to extend copyright to 95 years. I don’t know yet what the current status is (does anybody know?), but it could be that the struggle is still going on. Maybe the people simply lost though.

On the other hand, in our age of the Internet, even the legal situation in the whole of the European Union may be essentially irrelevant. In the case “Capitol Records, Inc. v Naxos of America, Inc.” it was common law of New York that trumped over British copyright law. Of course Naxos was only prohibited of selling the CDs in question in the United States, but it is easy to see an argumentation that YouTube is owned by Google, Google is under the jurisdiction of the US, and therefore common law of New York is applicable to musical content uploaded to YouTube.

Now the question is, what does it mean that Google negotiates with the recording industry? If WMG claims copyright to the song that I uploaded (and contrary to my stupid ideas of yesterday I fully believe them), how do Google’s contracts with WMG change the legal situation? Was it legal for me to upload the song (“Google already paid for it”), or was it infringement anyway? And what is my legal situation? Can they go after me? They most probably wouldn’t, but if they wanted to, could they? What exactly is the nature of the protection that comes from Google’s contracts with the recording industry? Do they protect only Google or does the protection include the uploader?

Wherever you look, everybody who explains the sitaution (even Google themselves in their help pages on YouTube), makes all too sure that nothing is legally binding in any way. As you can imagine from the nature of this blog, these are very important questions for me. Any pointers that you can give me are welcome. Basically the question is, can I go on uploading “videos” of songs that I use as “Song of the Day” on my blog?

So far my practice was, to use only songs that already are on YouTube. Of course that’s a coward’s position, and now I really want to figure it out once and for all time.

The Song of the Day is “There She Goes, My Beautiful World” from the truly sensational 2004 Nick Cave double album “Abattoir Blues/Lyre Of Orpheus”. No need to step out of my comfortable safety, YouTube already had the song :)

Posted by andreas at 8:45 pm Tagged with: , , , , , ,

1300 - The Kids These Days

Tamron 17-50/2.8 VC 4 Responses »
May 052010

No colors today, sorry. The weather around here stays cool and rainy. I was in a hurry in the morning, I was in a hurry in the evening, I consider myself lucky having an image at all.

Hmm … I wonder what goes on in the mind of someone who calls a children’s bike “Puky”? It’s completely beyond me :)

The Song of the Day is “The Kids These Days” from Paul Heaton’s 2008 album “The Cross Eyed Rambler”. Hear it on YouTube.

Posted by andreas at 10:01 pm Tagged with: , , , , , ,

1294 - Family Kitchen

Tamron 17-50/2.8 VC No Responses »
Apr 302010

Back to the Tammy. Hmm … it’s like it always is when I switch lenses. It’s irritating. Nothing looks as it used to, especially after a 150/2.8. The wonderful thing with this Tamron lens though is, that you have so many options. At 50 mm and focused near it is almost a macro lens, at 17 mm it is pretty wide, with its stabilization it works wonders in low light, it is sharp, has a satisfying bokeh, really, I see no major weakness.

I’ve experimented a lot today, there’s not much that I deem worthy, but I certainly like the whimsical effect of the distortions in this image. B&W seemed just right for it.

The Song of the Day is “Bring My Family Back” from the 1999 Faithless album “Sunday 8pm”. Oh dear, this is real good music. Guess I need more of them :)

YouTube has many versions of the song, I guess this is the album version.

Posted by andreas at 1:27 am Tagged with: , , , , , ,

1289 - Roy's Choice

Tokina 11-16/2.8 1 Response »
Apr 252010

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.

Posted by andreas at 11:30 am Tagged with: , , , , , ,

1273 - More News From Nowhere

Nikon 70-300 VR 6 Responses »
Apr 092010

Funny, I did not intend to make even a single one of these extremely tall images, and in the case of the first, I spent a lot of time with different variants until finally I ended up with this extreme crop, the image reduced to the absolute essence.

In fact, I lost quite some attractive things on the way, for instance color was not completely wrong, to the contrary, there was some nice color contrast between the upper and the lower half of the image, but then, B&W allowed me contrast adjustments that would break color.

And not only that: had I included more from the left side, I would have had a bicycle rider in the image, and he was quite nicely balanced with the couple, and had I included him, I would also have had a nice sweeping curve of street lights above.

But then, fully concentrating on this couple, two people full of tension, dancing their Tango on the streets of my mind, concentrating radically on the unfathomable meaning of a chance meeting, I just had to give in, had to give up what was not absolutely necessary.

The other image is of the fringe of the red marquee of that very bar that we last had in “1258 – Walkin’” and before in “908 – At The Break Of Day“. I took a series of eight or ten images, pretty unusual for me, but that’s the problem with things that move in the wind :)

The third image is a good illustration for the only really annoying effect of working with such a long lens: You are constantly tempted to make images of long perspectives, but here in this image there are at least 50 meters between me and the two people out on the street. This is not a very busy way, but even here it can task your patience.

Originally I just wanted the dog and no person in the view. The problem was, that constantly someone was either walking into the image, slowly all the way through, or a van held out on the street, just in front of the door, or this person on the right simply would not vanish, and then a second person came from the left. From time to time I made an image, actually more to bide my time, waiting for the people to go on, and when they finally did, and when I finally wanted to take my image, a woman came out of the bakery and led the dog away. Life can be hard with a long lens :D

The Song of the Day is “More News From Nowhere” from the 2008 Nick Cave album “Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!”. Damn fine music. The video on YouTube will cost you 7:58 minutes of your life, but believe me, it’s worth every second. Oh, the T-shirt, oh the mustache! And besides, there’s nothing wrong with the dancers :)

Posted by andreas at 12:41 am Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,

1249 - Chasing Shadows

Tamron 17-50/2.8 VC 3 Responses »
Mar 162010

Well, “chasing” is probably too strong, let’s say I found them. These are two very different images, and the first one does not even really belong here, but, you know, in the service of bringing you fresh pictures, I’m always twisting my rules :)

Number one is another image from Sunday afternoon. I had just driven over a bridge, stopped the car and went back. Somehow I liked the water, but then, it was absolutely impossible to keep my shadow out of the image. On the other hand, I liked the shadow as well, thus I took the image. The colors are largely imagined, recreated from memory, or what ever you’re willing to believe. Fact is, that white balance was a complete mess and color variation almost non-existent.

The second image is from Monday morning in Vienna. This is a case where I would have needed a 70 or an 85, thus I didn’t take much care framing the image, as I knew, I would have to crop anyway. The image had to go B&W because of some aggressively colored reflections. The toning is a combo of two vanilla Photoshop photo filters, 60% “Deep Yellow” in the highlights, 100% “Deep Blue” in the shadows.

The Song of the Day is “Chasing Shadows” from the 1969 self-titled album “Deep Purple”. Hear it on YouTube.

Posted by andreas at 5:05 am Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

1242 - It Could Happen To You

Tamron 17-50/2.8 VC 1 Response »
Mar 092010

I’m back in Vienna, but I’m sick and at home. I’ve slept most of the day, and although I made a few images out of the window this morning, I’ll spare you the results.

These two images were both taken last week on the same day as “1237 – I’m Gonna Lock My Heart“. The first image is actually a failure. I probably should go back and try it again. The problem is, that I took two exposures with that walking man in the frame, one too early and the other, this one, too late. I’d have liked to have him a little bit more to the left, the scene less condensed, and then I would not have been forced to crop so much in from the left.

I’ve also played with some alternative crops, for instance a square that comes in even more from the left and that also cuts part of the scribble from the right, and although it is in some ways better, it does not satisfy me in the end. So this is a failure, but it is the kind of failure that interests me.

The Image of the Day was the other option from the same day, and I’m actually glad that I could finally use it. I would have forgotten it, but I really like the various strong lines in different directions, and the feeling of depth that they create.

Other than that, I’ve learned something. You know, here in the heart of Europe we have a political and social system that is very different from that in the US, and we tend to see the Republicans as evil, as being against freedom. Part of that is a fact that we’ve talked about often with Ted Byrne, namely that we associate completely different things with “left” and “right”, but especially with the political right. For me a Nazi is right, for him a Nazi fights for a system with tight governmental control, thus in his view Nazis are essentially left. Well, whatever. I guess in the meantime we have learned to appreciate each other’s positions.

But that’s something I had to think about, when I saw the recent TEDx talk by Lawrence Lessig. I really urge you to view this talk for three reasons:

First, I believe it carries an important message. I simply like what he says and I believe it’s true.

Second, it is enlightening on a completely different level, because it shreds some of my deeply ingrained prejudices. Unfortunately it also proves that politics are a damn complicated field. Well, and

Third, it is just an incredibly clever presentation. This man can really talk and this man really knows how to make a point. I heard it with interest and pleasure, hope you like it too.

The Song of the Day is one of my recent Sinatra acquisitions, the Johnny Burke / Jimmy Van Heusen composition “It Could Happen To You“. Hear it on YouTube.

Posted by andreas at 12:42 am Tagged with: , , , , , ,
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