Yesterday was actually a beautiful day, but I felt uninspired and tired. We drove around a little, I made some pictures, but nothing that I’d normally post.

So what? Instead of taking one from the archives, I decided to post one of these “been there, this is how it looks” images. Castle Rain near Klagenfurt in winter. That’s how it looks. Maybe it looks even exotic to some of you

The Song of the Day is “Instead” from the 2009 Madeleine Peyroux album “Bare Bones”. Here’s a live performance.

Oh dear! This habit of using song titles, it’s killing me! I’ve just whiled four hours away because of all that associations that connect me with this song.

But first things first: Here’s another image from the gardens of castle Miramare. I simply forgot to use it two days ago.

Of all lenses that you could have on, while you encounter a seagull, sitting on a wall, of all those lenses, a wide-angle, even if moderate, is one of the most awkward. Imagine me with the Nikon 24/2.8, trying to silently approach this bird, and just as I get too near, just as it takes of, I manage to release the shutter. Well, it could have been worse: only minutes later I changed back to the Tokina 11-16

Actually I like the image. The tips of the wings already show some motion blur, but the moment is just right. With the Nikon 70-300 this could have been a really great image. But then, if I had tried to change lense, I most probably would have ended up with no image at all.

The Image of the Day shows part of the window of a long-since closed shop. The yellow frame and the blue paper attracted me, and it was only during post-processing, that I recognized the text. “Revolution”, “Love”, the guitars, that immediately triggered memories, and while my first impulse was “Revolution #9″ by John Lennon, I finally settled with Marc Bolan and “Children Of The Revolution“.

And then it happened. I searched for a video, found the classic performance with Elton John on piano and Ringo Starr on drums, another video with the album version, and then I began to follow links.

I couldn’t stop for almost four hours, and the trip took me all that impossible way from Marc Bolan via British glam rock band Sweet (my most favorite band when I was 10), to Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Tom Waits.

Really, I love YouTube and the influence that this website has on our culture. It’s really a great place to find things, that with traditional distribution models would be impossible to come by. I’d say, from time to time, just do yourself the favor and listen to some music from your childhood. You deserve it.

It’s Sunday evening, I’m on the train to Vienna, and here are the images from our second day in Italy.

After breakfast I went swimming, and at 10am we left the hotel for castle Miramare. Maximilian had a strong interest in botany, and the castle gardens are lush evidence of his passion.

The castle itself has an interesting ground plan. These two images actually show the same building. In one it looks like a sturdy tower, almost like a cube, while in the other you see the long front that faces the harbor.

Originally all ways in the park seem to have been paved in this typical Italian way with small stones, but today most ways are bituminized.

There are loads of tourists, but the area is so big, that they blend in, and you have hardly a problem getting images without them. Apart from that, the whole park is a paradise for cats, thus you better have some cat cookies with you. Of course we had

The last image looks back from the park, over the harbor of Grignano, to the shore where just right from the middle, you can see the tower in front of our hotel, the tower with the lift down to the beach, the tower from where I took yesterday’s images.

It was extremely hot (well, at least that was my view) and after our visit to the park of Miramare, we simply drove home. In Carinthia I went swimming one more time, and we finally concluded the day on our balcony, sipping delightfully cool Prosecco

The Song of the Day is “In The Garden” from Bob Dylan’s 1980 album “Saved”. Hear it on YouTube.

EDIT: After much consideration, I have just replaced the Image of the Day with a slightly warmer version.

Every once in a while the amazing power of digital image processing makes even me speechless.

Today was one of those Sundays when I rise late and when I’m reluctant to go out shooting. In fact I did not, and I was already determined to use one image from the archives.

Just as I was about to sit down and browse my images of lately, I looked out of the window and saw a cloud looming over the mountains behind the ruins of castle Landskron. Hmm … strong oblique lines, the castle at the bottom, the cloud in the upper right corner … it looked like a composition.

I mounted the Nikon 70-300 VR, and really, its magnification was just enough to fill the whole frame with what I had imagined. But, oh my, the contrast! Imagine one of those wonderful, warm, sunny days that have only one problem: haze at the horizon. The image had very low contrast and the shadows had a sickly bluish cast.

Like always, even when I know that I’m going to B&W in the end, I tried it in color first. With two different versions from RAW, selective Photoshop photofilters applied and with some selective color manipulation, I managed to get an image that would be OK for documentary purposes. Nothing special, but the colors were not too bad.

That was the basis for the B&W conversion. It’s always easier to convert from healthy colors, because this way the B&W adjustment layer gives you many more possibilities.

The rest is my usual B&W process, with only one twist: The slightly mottled look was created with two strong contrast curves layers, each at 50% opacity, one in luminosity mode, one in normal blending mode, and each having a mask created with “Filter / Render / Clouds”. I have used two different masks for the two layers, in order to make the effect a little less obvious, and the two different blending modes were used to get a certain amount of contrast with a little bit of color shift, but not as much as one 100% layer in normal mode would have yielded. Well, that’s it: a Sunday image from out of nowhere. It’s not a masterpiece, but, hey, shooting it cost me only a minute and I could stay at home

The Song of the Day is “From Out Of Nowhere” from “Inquisition Symphony”, the Finnish heavy metal string quartet Apocalyptica’s 1998 second album. See them perform live on YouTube.

It’s Tuesday evening now and this is the image of Friday. I’m not exactly catching up, but I’m not falling further behind either. One gets so humble

Actually there was not much material and I was lucky finding anything at all. This image, taken with the Sigma 30/1.4, was shot when I had just arrived in Carinthia. As you may remember, my father had been in Vienna for two weeks, and we returned together, me driving his car. He’s 73 after all.

Traffic was modest, all the accidents (two exactly) were on the opposite lanes, and so it was rather relaxed. When we crossed the border to Carinthia, even the sun came out. Unfortunately this didn’t help me much, because driving on the highway you are at least as unable to take photographs as on the train.

In post-processing I have cropped the image to be symmetric, cloned out some distractions, and re-adjusted contrasts between sky and earth, mimicking an ND gradient filter. Basically that’s it.

The Song of the Day is “In The Forest” from the 2004 Coral album “Magic and Medicine“. Sorry, no video found.