Today Michael and I have again worked in his apartment. This consumed most of the day, which was quite unfortunate, because it was sunny and beautiful, almost like Spring beginning. On the other hand we progressed nicely, so I really shouldn’t complain

I’ve taken the two daylight images in the morning. The obelisk is a monument for Dr. Karl Lueger, Mayor of Vienna around 1900 and anti-Semite extraordinaire. But that’s the way it is in Austria. I suppose the only reason why we don’t idolize Hitler is, that it would be bad for our image. But of course I may be wrong.

The other image is of a “Würstelstand”, one typically Viennese institution where you can eat hot sausages, Leberkäse and, as a concession to our internationality, Hot Dogs. They are hard pressed by McDonalds and all those Turkish Döner kebab stands, but so far they have survived. It’s probably not the most healthy diet, but the same could be said of McDonalds

The Image of the Day was taken at night when I went home. The church is the same that you see in the background of the image with the obelisk.

The Song of the Day is “Church On Sunday” from Green Day’s 2000 album “Warning”. Hear it on YouTube.

A big, fat rain cloud squats over Italy, Slovenia and Austria. All of Austria? No, today there was a spot in Austria’s utter east, Burgenland, where the sun still shone, and that’s where we sought shelter from the storm. It’s a bit crazy and completely irresponsible from an ecological point of view, but it sure felt good to sit in the car and drive 2.5 hours for a little sunshine.

We went to Güssing in the south of Burgenland. It’s a small town best known for its mineral water, featuring a castle atop of a hill and a Franciscan monastery. This image has been taken in the Franciscan church.

The Song of the Day is “Shelter From The Storm“, originally from the 1974 Bob Dylan classic “Blood on the Tracks”, unequivocally acclaimed as one of his best albums, and a live version is also available on the 1976 release “Hard Rain”.

YouTube has the album version and a 1976 live video. Well, I’m a fan, I love both, but when you press me hard, I’ll take the live version.

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.

These are images of yesterday, our first day spent entirely in the center of Kraków. The Image of the Day features the cupola of the small church of sw. Wojciech (St. Adalbert), located in one corner of the vast central market square.

The chain looks gruesome, but it is no more than a simple chain, hanging in front on the Dominican Church. On the other hand, were the Dominicans not the order assigned with the duty of the Holy Inquisition? Maybe the chain is not so wrong after all.

The final image was taken when we sat in the patio of our hotel, drinking a glass of beer and enjoying the last rays of the sun.

For most of the images, and especially for the three shown here, I used the Sigma 28/1.8. A marvelous lens and clearly my current favorite as a “normal” lens.

I have made many, many more images, most of them much more characteristic of this city, but it’s the same old story: I tend to go into “documentation mode”.

Most images will help me remember the place. In fact, from many of my past journeys I remember almost nothing but the places where I have taken images, although those I remember well. Thus a yield of 3 out of 200 does not particularly worry me

The Song of the Day is “Thou Art Gone Up On High” from Handel’s “Messiah”. As always I recommend the 1990 recording conducted by Trevor Pinnock, though you can’t go wrong with John Eliot Gardiner or William Christie either. Hear it on YouTube.

Saturday began with rain. Much rain.

Again there were floods in parts of Austria, and the air cooled down by about 15 degrees Celsius. High mountain roads above 1500 meters were impassable without snow chains, in other words, it was a rather unusual high summer weekend.

In the afternoon the eastern part of Carinthia seemed to be sunny, so we took the car, drove down to Saualpe, a north-south mountain chain in eastern Carinthia, and explored the country roads.

Carinthia is not densely populated, but certainly denser than all that gorgeous nature would demand. In this certain part though, there are only some small villages far and between.

It’s really a wonderful landscape up there on the mountain, but of course it has a reason that not many people live there. You are far away from every supermarket, not to speak of a real city, and what looks so wonderful in summer, is quite a problem in winter. Winters up there are long, and to live there probably means to be snowed in a couple of times a year.

There are plenty of churches up on the mountain, one in every village, sometimes for not more than maybe ten houses, some solitary, and one of the churches, Sankt Leonhard, is even off the road in the middle of a forest. That’s the one with the walls in the Image of the Day.

The images were taken with three prime lenses, 24, 35, 70, and two zooms, 11-16 and 70-300. This was lens changing day

All images were treated with a combination of Topaz Adjust and Alien Skin Snap Art. For the high-contrast images with lots of sky, I have normally taken two differently developed versions from the same RAW, combined with a mask. I love these effects on landscapes.

It’s probably Kitsch, but it triggers something in me. Those images look like a certain kind of illustrations that I liked in my books when I was a child, a kind of illustrations that completely came out of fashion in the 1970s.

The Song of the Day is “In A Country Churchyard” from the 1977 Chris De Burgh album “At the End of a Perfect Day”. Hear it on YouTube.

This is the church of Longarone, Italy. Longarone is a small town north of Belluno, and if we hadn’t seen a documentary on Arte about an enormous landslide and flood catastrophe, that had occurred there in 1963, we probably never would have bothered to visit the place.

And if we hadn’t, we would never have seen one of the most interesting examples of modern sacred architecture. The church was built between 1966 and 1976 by the Italian star architect Giovanni Michelucci, in order to remind of the more than 2000 victims of the disaster.

The church has a central room with circular rows of benches, that rise more like in a theater than in a traditional church. There are side rooms with the baptistery and an open room looking east to the valley of Vajont, from where the flood had come, that almost completely destroyed the old village of Longarone. In fact, the only building that had survived the event, was the steeple of the old church. For some time the old steeple was left standing beside the new church, but in the meantime it must have been torn down, it’s not there any more.

On top of the church, reached by a spiral ramp, there is another arena, and that’s what you see in the Image of the Day, looking east. On the left you see a cleft in the mountains, that’s the entrance to the valley of Vajont, that’s from where death came in the form of an enormous wave of tens of millions cubic meters of water and mud.

The catastrophe of Longarone, better known under the name of Vajont, was not a freak accident of nature. It was a case of human error and reckless greed. There’s more to that in the next entry.

The Song of the Day is the “Requiem” by Johannes Ockeghem, maybe one of my most favorite Renaissance composers, not as well known as Machaut or Josquin des Prez, successor to the first, predecessor to the second, creator of the most wonderful “L’Homme Armée” mass of all times. I have several recordings of this “Requiem”, and although I have no way to check from here in Carinthia, I believe the one that I’ve linked to is one of them. YouTube also has a version.

No, this is not a SoFoBoMo image

We were in Hermagor today. Hermagor, a small town in Carinthia’s south-western valley Gailtal, is the heart of Carinthis’s bacon production, and every year there is a Bacon Festival. We ate Frigga, the traditional lumberjack meal made of bacon, cheese, onions and potatoes, served with polenta or bread.

I made only a few images, well knowing that I wouldn’t have the time to process them anyway. Still, when I saw this seller of knife sharpeners, I could not resist. He sold a sharpener, I got an image

This is one of those images that are very easy to process in B&W and without extensive background treatment hard to do in color. I had the Nikon 24/2.8 mounted, thus no chance to work with shallow DOF, and of course it is also impossible to get a clean background with all the crowds around. The dress of the woman was brightly red and as distracting as it gets, but the B&W conversion together with some blur nicely took care of that.

The other image is of the parish church in Hermagor. I made some more from the inside, but nothing really convincing.

The Song of the Day is “Selling That Stuff” by McKinney’s Cotton Pickers. I have it on disc 13 of “The Ultimate Jazz Archive”, the 168 CD treasure box that I bought for 99€. You can still buy it for around that price in Europe, while in the US it sells from $220. Still a nice price for that number of CDs

The other possibility is a CD called “McKinney’s Cotton Pickers 1928/1930″, selling from $20 used and $73 new. Ouch! Deezer has that album for you to hear.

Finally you can download this song (and supposedly many others) for free from the audio archive of the Internet Archive. You can hear it there as well.

Bad weather is here. This is an image taken yesterday afternoon. It did not rain, but that is about all that can be said in favor of that day

The church of Maria Gail is just on the other side of the river, five minutes from here by car. It perches on a small hill, overlooking river Gail.

In weather like that, B&W is always a good idea, because it takes quite some contrast manipulations to get an even slightly decent image, and in B&W it is much easier to stretch an image beyond the point where in color it would lose its credibility.

This is the second time that I use “The Tower” as title, “587 – The Tower” was the first time, but it is the first time that Leonard Cohen’s “Tower Of Song” is the Song of the Day. See him perform live on YouTube. This clip is from the 2008 tour, but there are dozens from all phases of his career. Pick your favorite

It simply had to happen. Today is the first day since November 21 that I have not shot a single image. Wet snow, a constant drizzle, fog below, clouds above, I don’t even feel bad about it

I spent a lot of time though, trying to get back into my bookmaking workflow, checking out Shutterfly (as recommended by Mark Hobson), trying to create a template, and so on and on and on. I guess you know how much time runs into those things, especially when you do them only once a year.

Basically this serves three purposes (“among my purposes are such diverse things as”): SoFoBoMo ‘09 is nearing, by then I want to have the process worked out, and this time I won’t stop at the PDF, this time I want to hold a book. #2 is that Mark Hobson recently teased everyone to make a real book, and #3 is of course that Ted constantly buggers me to finally make that god-damn bicycle book

Speaking of Ted, this is another image from that morning in fall 2007, when we met to shoot the sunrise at Firenze’s Duomo.

The Song of the Day, “Sisters Of Mercy” by Leonard Cohen, is part of the soundtrack of Robert Altman’s 1971 movie “McCabe & Mrs. Miller”. I am not sure if it was written for the soundtrack or not, but Cohen’s music greatly contributes to the overall atmosphere of this masterpiece. See a video on YouTube.

At the moment the prevailing weather pattern in Carinthia is high fog, covered by even higher clouds.

Yesterday I was unable to locate any sunny destination that could have been reached within less than two hours. I tried my luck in Gailtal, in the valley along the southern border between Carinthia and Italy. They had the most snow this winter, and I hoped to find a freshly fallen cover, alas to no avail. Everything had this typical, dirty look of old snow. Without much enthusiasm I tried some landscapes, and this B&W conversion is the only one that I even bother to show.

It’s not a great image, but at I guess it’s quite OK from a technical POV, and it illustrates the most important thing when shooting snowy winter landscapes: not to let the snow burn out. Exposure is very critical in snow. Why? Because you want to strongly accentuate local contrast, and this would make burnt-out highlights much more obvious.

The image is a sandwich of two different conversions made with DxO, one darker for snow and sky, and one lighter for trees and distant mountains. Then I have run PhotoLift on a “copy merged” layer and set the result to “Multiply” blending mode, applying it with reduced opacity and a mask to the snow areas and the sky. I frequently try a B&W conversion to my images, and here it looked very well, because it took the occasional dirt color out of the snow. I think the result looks not too unnatural, even though the local contrasts are borderline high, and in color I would have had to tone them back.

The snow image is much better than reality, and in reality I was so disgusted with the conditions, that I decided to turn around and drive back home. I could do so, because I already had an image, taken in the small gothic church of Saint Peter, to fall back.

The Image of the Day was converted in DxO like almost all my recent images. I took it with the Sigma 20/1.8 (like all my recent images, I’d like to say), and that lens is certainly not free of distortions. DxO does not support it yet (and likely never will, it’s simply too exotic), but of course PTLens does, and this is what I used to remove the distortions and to slightly correct perspective.

The Song of the Day is (Surprise!!) by David Byrne. It’s a somewhat bizarre version of “Au Fond du Temple Saint“, the duet from Georges Bizet’s “Les pêcheurs de perles”, with David Byrne interpreting it together with Rufus Wainwright (some might say it’s the other way round). An interesting idea, demanding more than a price for courageous folly

You find it on David’s outstanding 2004 album “Grown Backwards”. Deezer has the album, and YouTube has a more orthodox version sung by Robert Merrill and Jussi Björling, recorded in 1950.