Photography has always been expected to say something about reality.

So, you want reality? I give you some reality. That’s how it looked here today. All day. Really

The Song of the Day is “Real Life Hits” from the 1981 Carla Bley album “Live!”. See a video on YouTube.

Carinthia is covered in fog. Yesterday a look at the webcams made it clear: Italy was the place to go.

We started out late, and although we certainly enjoyed the sun, I didn’t make many usable images. I have some more, but definitely not of the “Sunny Italy” kind.

This particular image was taken under a highway bridge. The challenge was to both contain the tonal range and, on the other hand, to convey the sense of being blinded by the light. I finally ended up using black and white, with a combination of Photoshop’s “High Contrast Blue” filter for most of the scene, and “High Contrast Red” for some highlight regions, and I really like the result. It combines both the texture in the concrete (via the blue filter) and the dramatic contrast (via the red).

The color version is definitely more cheerful though, and because it better reflects yesterday’s mood, this time I leave you the choice.

The Song of the Day is “Under The Bridge” from the 1997 self-titled All Saints album. See a video on Dailymotion.

These are images of yesterday, Saturday. I took my time writing this post, because the weather forecast for today was pretty bad, and that made me suspicious I could need one of those images for today. Thankfully I didn’t, thus you get two takes on the old classic of the way leading into the center of the image.

The image with the bridge is an HDR image made with Essential HDR, one of my two HDR programs, Photomatix Pro being the other one. With HDR Darkroom there is now a third contender, again boasting superior tone-mapping algorithms. I can’t comment on HDR Darkroom so far, I’ve just bought it minutes ago

Why does he need three HDR programs, you ask? Well, they are quite cheap, at least Photomatix Pro and Essential HDR have distinct strengths and one time I like the output of the one, and for the next image I prefer the other. It’s about choices.

Anyway. I have a license now, I can already say that the current version has a bug, it always wants to run as administrator on Vista (and according to the forums on Windows 7 as well). Other than that I have just tried tone-mapping a single RAW file and the output was – garish

The Song of the Day is “So Many Ways” from the 1986 James debut album “Stutter”. See the video 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.

Weather is changing rapidly at the moment. I used a short period of sunshine, to go swimming and make some images. This is another experiment with the new plugins: Topaz Adjust and Snap Art. It is clear now that I will buy both. I still have to look into the other Topaz plugins, Clean and Simplify may be useful in some situations.

I always use these effects in separate layers, combine different effects from the same or different filters, and use varying opacities, sometimes dependent on tonal value (Blend-If sliders) and masks. You see, I’m pretty much afraid of using canned effects and producing generic looks

The Song of the Day is again “It’s A Green Dream” from Paolo Conte’s 2000 album “Razmataz”. This time I have a video for you. Love this song!

What did I say? Color again! Well, both images of today are from the archives. It was a decently nice day today, but I have not been out photographing. Hmm … that somehow gets routine on Sundays

The first image is from Friday morning and nothing special, just one of my umbrella images, because it rained like mad. I had composed with the handle of the umbrella going straight through the middle, because straight lines going through the center of a fisheye image stay straight. This is one of a series of five or six images that I made there, waiting for a satisfying constellation of people and/or trains and cars.

The B&W conversion is a mix of “High Contrast Red Filter” and “Maximum Black”, along with the familiar gradient and some dodging and burning. Again I have treated this image with Fisheye-Hemi™, and again the result is extremely satisfying.

In fact, that’s what I did most of the day: trying this new plugin on old fisheye images.

That’s really important. When you use such a beast, you have to get a feeling for what it does to your compositions, after all, you can’t see it through the viewfinder. Thus, to increase my hit rate, I have to get familiar with the mapping, have to acquire the ability to predict the final outcome.

Well, so far there is room for improvement. I can say though, that the mapping seems to be mostly just what I wish for. Kinda magic In any case I’ll go on like that for a few days, at least until I get the new Nikon 35/1.8.

Apropos get: when I was at the local electronics and media store yesterday, I saw a long-expected box tagged “LG Flatron W2452-TX”. This 24″ monitor is the new incarnation of the successful 2452-T, only this one is a wide-gamut monitor.

So far I have only “calibrated” it visually, using the supplied software and a couple of monitor test photos, but I am certainly impressed. Tomorrow or the day after, I’ll try to get the same monitor for Vienna. It has the ability to throw out almost obscene colors, it is evenly lit, has great contrast, and the stability against varying the viewing angle is much better than with the cheap Samsungs. For a price of €260 it is a steal.

Oh, in all that chatter I completely forgot about the Image of the Day! This is an image of yesterday. I stood in the middle of a bridge and tried to capture as much of the sky as possible. Pretty nice clouds, huh?

If you have ever tried to take such an image with a fisheye, you know that the horizon at the lower end is invariably curled. In this case I have composited two versions of the same image, one with Fisheye-Hemi for the land and the clouds immediately above the mountains, one with the original fish for the clouds, because I really liked the curl at the top. I think that’s pretty neat. Best of both worlds. Of course you can’t do that all of the time. Normally you won’t find a smooth transition, but here there was just enough blank blue sky to make it work.

The Song of the Day is “In The Sky” from Mark Knopfler’s 2007 album “Kill to Get Crimson”. Nice song, nice album. Here’s a video.

Have you ever driven 100km in one direction, just for a sundown? Well, yesterday I did

More and more often I rely on Google Maps for scouting photo locations. Sure, it does not give you the full picture, height information is missing, but if you are aproximately familiar with the environment, it’s a fantastic way to find out how to get somewhere, because it will show you small roads that might even be missing from your maps.

In case of yesterday’s trip, from sight I knew that east of where the highway A23 crosses the river Tagliamento for the second time (counted from the North), there is another bridge over the river, and that was the place where I wanted to go. I intended to leave Villach at 2:15pm, but for various reasons I couldn’t leave before 2:45.

Thanks to Google Maps I knew exactly where to go, and from the moment I left the highway at the exit Gemona/Osoppo at 3:30, it took me no more than ten minutes to get to the bridge, just in time for the sundown.

Basically I was there for an image looking east, over the river and to the gourgeous peaks of the Julian Alps. I had not expected to be able to get down to the river bed, and when I found out that there is indeed a way down, it was already too late. Anyway, that’s for next time.

The bridge was narrow with two lanes and not much space for a photographer to stand, making changing lenses a rather awkward experience. I did it anyway, one more time using my Lowepro Slingshot (this time the 200) like a tray, dangling in front of me. It’s a funny feeling juggling lenses over an abyss, but you get used to it

The images were shot with two lenses: the Nikon 18-200 VR, my travel lens, and the Sigma 10-20.

I often read that those super zooms like my 18-200 (or Paul Lester’s new Tamron 18-270 VC) are derided by prime snobs, and although I like to use primes a lot, while traveling I mostly stick to the 18-200, just because you never know what you need, and when you don’t travel alone, permanently changing lenses makes your company even more nervous than the permanent stops do anyway.

Apart from that, both lenses, the Nikon 18-200 VR and the Sigma 10-20, are supported by DxO Optics Pro in combination with the D200 and D300, thus I get lens correction as well, not only of distortion, but also of CA and vignetting. Pretty nice, if you ask me. OK, in post-processing I put the vignette in again, normally much more so than there was in the first place, but there’s nothing better than a clean start.

I concluded with some images into the sundown, and only half an hour after having arrived, I made my way back to Villach. A tad crazy the whole story, but absolutely satisfying

The Song of the Day, “Look Down Off A Bridge”, is from Jay Leonhart’s 1983 album “Salamander Pie”, a CD that has become famous because a German HiFi magazine used it as reference CD in their tests of high-end audio equipment during the early 1990s.

Indeed the CD is not only exceedingly well recorded, it is also a fine example of very relaxed bar jazz. Wonderful music to listen to, sipping on a glass of whiskey, but even without the whiskey it’s very nice

CD Baby has not only sound samples, they even let you hear the whole song, and at the moment they have the CD in stock.

Sunday saw me back in Carinthia. On my way to Keutschacher See for some swimming I made a slight detour to Selkach. The narrow bridge over the storage lake of river Drau was completely rebuilt last year. It’s metal construction is brightly yellow, but being in the shade and indirectly lit by the water below, made it ghastly yellow-green, the color of slime, and I had the strong urge to go B&W. Well, here it is, one of my more complex conversions, done in Photoshop. It could have been done in less than 17 layers, but that’s what it has. I guess I like it

There can be no doubt that “Bridge Over Troubled Water” is the Song of the Day, and of course I had the album as LP, but interestingly enough I currently don’t have it by Simon & Garfunkel at all, but I have it by Roberta Flack on her 1971 album “Quiet Fire“.