First day out of the cage, and the day showed no mercy. Yes, it was sunny in between, that was while I sat at work in front of the computer

Anyway. This image is of one short moment in the morning, when I saw the reflection of a milky sun in a window. I tried my best, even shot a bracketed sequence, combined the exposures in Photomatix Pro, but really, I would have despaired without Photoshop. Two hours and many layers later I am not pleased with the image, but not disgusted either. I guess it’s OK, but then …

I’d probably have liked a dog in the foreground to the right, on a major diagonal, opposed to the light patch of the reflection, although, even if I had had a dog in the frame, it would have probably been the wrong pose and certainly a problem with the bracketed exposures. Well, this is an image where I woudl even copy a dog in, but alas, my dog library is rather scarcely populated

The Song of the Day is “Shine On” from James Blunt’s 2007 album “All The Lost Souls”. See a live version on YouTube.

Today I was tired. I had had some technical problems and had hunted for explanations all day, and although I had nothing original, I had little hope for inspiration on my way home. One should never give up though. In a way it is routine. Do it as long as I do, and you do it almost automatically. It does not need much consciousness.

I fooled around, switched ISO automatic off, held the camera firmly to a wall or a shop window, this way exposed for about a second, looked what I got, adjusted, repeated. I must have stood there for minutes, concentrated, experimenting, and suddenly all the day’s troubles were past. I was whole again.

The Song of the Day is “Night Life” from the 2008 album “Two Men With The Blues” by Willie Nelson and Wynton Marsalis. Fine album, we had it a few times, but not this song so far. Hear it on YouTube.

I’m neither creative nor productive at the moment. I’m not even polite. The unread blog posts pile in Google Reader, and where I read, I hardly comment. I have not much time. I play Morrowind again. It’s old, it does not have the latest effects, but it is still one of the best and most addictive Fantasy Role Playing Games of all times.

The Image of the Day was taken yesterday evening in Villach. I’m pretty sure I would have liked it better with less of a tilt, with much more above the left corner included (imagine the dark trees in the background straight), but I would have had to include lots of bright, white streetlights along the upper edge, and that would have ruined more than helped. Well, you can’t always get what you want

The Song of the Day is “By The Rivers Dark” from Leonard Cohen’s 2001 album “Ten New Songs”. Hear it on YouTube.

Interesting. This is the third time that I use this title (see “222 – Two Of Us” and “580 – Two of Us“), and it is the first time that it actually makes sense

We were in Udine today. Udine is just round the corner, one hour from Villach, the first city in Italy, with a population of about 100.000 it is slightly larger than Klagenfurt, almost twice as big as Villach. Udine is much more beautiful though. Udine is an Italian city.

Isn’t it strange, that this was my first photo trip to Udine? Many years ago, when Italian food was hard to come by or prohibitively expensive in Austria, we had bought olive oil and pasta here, but never had it occurred to us, to visit this city as tourists. Why? It is too near! 30 minutes longer and you are at the shores of the Adriatic, and the environment of Udine is really beautiful as well, whereas the outskirts of the city are the usual commerce and industry. And then there is the highway that makes you rush by, and then …

I don’t know. It’s pretty stupid to live near such a place and don’t spend time there. It’s inexcusable. Life is to short for such blunder.

Anyway. We have learned our lesson, we’ll be back more often.

The Song of the Day is once again “Two Of Us” from the 1970 Beatles album “Let It Be”. See the video on YouTube.

Postmen in Austria use such yellow trolleys. You’ve already seen one of them in “655 – On A Lonely Avenue“. It’s one of the images that I put on Fine Art Photoblog.

Ahh, Fine Art Photoblog! I probably don’t advertise it often enough (in fact I almost never do), but in its almost two years it has developed into a nice reservoir of interesting photography. It’s become more quite lately, we all have our own blogs, jobs, lives, but I promise I’ll again contribute more often. In fact I did just yesterday. Why not head over and browse a little? You can even buy prints there

Uhh … yes, sorry for that What else? Nikon Rumors told it for weeks, in only some hours it will be official: the Nikon D3s is coming. What that is? Well, just a D3 with sensor cleaning, video (only 720p) and ISO 12800.

Wait a minute, didn’t the D3 already have ISO 25600??? Uhhh … yes, it did, but it’s highest nominal ISO was 6400. 25600 was Hi3, the highest “boost” value. Now with the D3s, ISO 12800 is nominal and the highest “boost” ISO value is … 102,400!!! Holy smoke

On the other hand, it’s not that much more. It’s just four stops better than my D300. On the other hand, four stops, wow! That’s pretty much! Imagine the difference between photographing at 1/4s and 1/30s! That’s normally the difference between to hold and not to hold. Or take 1/30s and 1/500s: that’s the difference between motion blur and freezing the action. Quite impressive.

Of course I won’t buy one. Can’t afford it. You would have to buy a damn lot of images over at Fine Art Photoblog to make that possible

I’ll tell you a secret: I’ll have a camera with that sensitivity, and I’ll tell you more: you will as well. We only won’t have it right now. We’ll have to wait maybe two years, maybe three, then we will have it in affordable cameras. It’s only that we will not value it, because at that time we will drool about a D4’s or D5’s ISO 409,600

The Song of the Day is “The Letter” from Joe Cocker’s unforgettable 1970 live album “Mad Dogs & Englishmen”. See a video on YouTube.

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.

It’s already Sunday and I’m so much behind. Sorry for that, I ran pretty out of time. That’s for quiet weekends

This image was taken Friday morning on my way to work. I actually thought all the time I would take another image, one of the current mirror series, but when it turned out worse than expected, I instead found that I really like this one for a certain quietude in it and for its composition in general.

The Song of the Day is “Morning Glory” from the 1967 Blood, Sweat & Tears debut album “Child Is Father to the Man”. Hear it on Deezer.

It’s really true, Vienna is on the wrong side of the Alps. On my first day back, we had two extended periods of rain, the first between 2pm and 3pm with massive downpours. After that it calmed down, only to begin again when I walked home

I made some images in the morning, but what really made my day, was this image of people waiting in the rain, with an advertising of our mayor, Michael Häupl, in a kind of stay-in-minds-between-elections poster, stating “Always a hit: summer in the city”

The old Lovin’ Spoonful hit “Summer In The City” is also the Song of the Day. I have it as a cover version on the much underrated 1997 Stranglers album “Written in Red”. Deezer does not have the album, Amazon has no samples, I didn’t find a video, thus I can only offer you the Lovin’ Spoonful version.

Really got to get this entry out of the door. It’s already Sunday morning and this is from Friday

I got more or less accustomed to the almost daily rain/snow/gloom that we had in Vienna during the last two or so weeks, but it does slow me down. So, every time it rains, I hope to catch a short pause for my way home, in order to not have to shoot from under my umbrella, which is rather awkward when I carry a bag from shopping or for the weekend.

Friday morning I got nothing, but then in the afternoon, on my short walk to the Underground, I was lucky: There had been sun the hour before, new clouds were brewing, but it did not yet rain. I took some shots at a crossing, using cars as foreground, more or less inspired by Mark Hobson’s “urban ku # 192 ~ hiding in plain sight“. I ended up with two usable shots, one with the silver car in the foreground and the couple with child, the other with the rest of the image. Combined in Photoshop, this was about what I had looked for.

Booo, a composite, you say? Well, this is all a matter of time. Stand at a crossing for long enough, and you’ll get any configuration that you may want. It may be more “pure”, but once you know what you are looking for, it’s only a matter of clicking away. No more thought, no more creativity involved. A monkey could do that. Under the given circumstances of not having a monkey, having to catch a train and seeing the clouds, I opted for the composite

Twenty Minutes later, when I sat on the train to Carinthia, rain poured down and I was happily compositing.

The Song of the Day is “Every Time It Rains” from Randy Newman’s 1999 album “Bad Love”. Hear the whole album on Deezer or a not-so-bad cover on YouTube. And what a wonderful song this is!