I can’t say that I’m very interested in modern, flawless, untainted architecture, but you can get me anytime with a little decay. Why? Inorganic things somehow get organic when they age. By falling apart, the lifeless begins to breath life. Funny, huh?
The Song of the Day is “A Long Time Ago” from David Byrne’s 1994 self-titled album. YouTube has a video for you.
Do I miss my D300? Sure. It’s faster than the D200, where preview is painfully slow. It has a bigger and better display and it has more dynamic range. All true.
And the images? They are different too, at least the JPEGs, but that’s something I don’t care about.
In the end my images get created as much in Photoshop as in the camera. Take this one. Colors were vastly different from what the D300 would have produced, and the tone curve has changed completely. In reality it makes makes no difference though. At any time I have a certain feeling of how my images should look like, and that’s what I make them look like, regardless of the camera used.
The Song of the Day is “Jungleland” from Bruce Springsteen’s 1975 album “Born To Run”. YouTube has a fine 1978 live version, ripped from an old B&W video tape that has been played much too often, complete with thin, hissing audio, but you won’t mind. Believe me, you won’t mind 
With quite some confidence and without much pleasure I can announce, that there will be no SoFoBoMo 2010 book from me. It’s not that don’t have the material, it’s not that I have technical problems, it’s simply that I run out of time. I have to choose between making a SoFoBoMo 2010 book and making the book that I want to make. I choose the latter.
Thus: There will be a book, the working title is “Sediments”, it is about a layering of disconnected pieces of culture above each other, about how that creates the reality that we live in, but creating such a book takes time.
At the moment I have between 20 and 25 images from Italy that I feel belong into the book. That’s not enough for SoFoBoMo, 35 would be the lower limit, and not all of them are processed to a final form. A book has requirements different from those of a blog. This year, just as with my first book, Tscheppaschlucht, a great deal of work runs into homogenizing the processing styles of the images.
This is the post for Saturday, an unbearably hot day, that I used to sweat on construction sites, and the few photos that I made, were images of an apartment that had been offered to us.
It was so hot, I didn’t even go swimming. I spent the rest of the day in front of my computer, re-processing images already processed weeks before, some of them not yet published. And just as with Friday’s image of the hidden gate, every picture tells a story. Sometimes it’s obvious, sometimes you need to listen, give up for a day, listen again.
This particular image is such a case. Here it was mostly a matter of finding out what spoke to me in the first place, and then cropping to the core. This originally was a vertical format, and while much spoke for it, what remains is a wide-screen horizontal. I was unhappy with the former, I am very satisfied with this one.
The Song of the Day is “Every Picture Tells A Story” by Rod Steward. I have it on the 1993 album “Unplugged….And Seated”. Hear the original version from the album of the same name on YouTube.
A house was torn down. It happened sometime in winter, I saw it, took some photos, and for months now I have taken images at that place. Only every few weeks, but again and again. One of them even made it (see “1323 – There She Goes, My Beautiful World“), but on average they were rubbish. I could simply have given up, but in such cases I frequently see a certain quality in a scene, a quality that attracts me, but I can’t necessarily explain what it is. Sometimes it is a detail, and often this detail can’t strictly be photographed. My mind isolates it and in my mind it it stands out to a degree, that light and reality can’t support.
I am not sure if it was always this gate, that has fascinated me, but today, when I took this image this morning, today I am sure it was.
Photoshop-wise I have used lots of “Fill light” and “Recover” in Camera RAW, Topaz Adjust’s “Spicify” filter, partially applied with a mask, but the real interesting thing was a “B+W/Blue” adjustment layer, that I put in “Difference” mode. That’s a cool combination, all the B+W filters produce different results, and I could have worked in many different directions. This was one that I really, really liked. Sometimes it’s a good idea to just fool around and see what happens
Is this a SoFoBoMo image? Maybe. I had planned to strictly use images from Italy, but I may make exceptions.
The Song of the Day is the beautiful “Heaven’s Gate” from Toni Childs’ 1991 album “House Of Hope”. Hear it on YouTube.
I am still in Carinthia. Our car needs an overhaul and I had to take a day off.
These two images were taken in the morning when I walked back home. At the moment I use the Nikon 18-200 VR, and it really has its advantages to have such a big range. Chromatic abberations can be quite high (depends upon focal length) and the distortions are very high as well, but both can be corrected in software.
Actually I’m quite satisfied. It’s not a killer lens, it’s not a lens I would buy again, but having it does not hurt at all 
It’s mid-afternoon, I’ll go fetch the car in a few minutes. The day has turned from overcast/hazy to wonderfully sunny, so I may make some more images, but I really want to get this post done. I’ll have to work on my Programming blog in the evening on the train
The Song of the Day is of course “Salt Of The Earth“, the last song on the 1968 release “Beggars Banquet”, maybe the best Rolling Stones album ever. Hear it on YouTube.
I regularly infuriate Ted Byrne when I post images like this, and in a way I can understand it, imagining him scrubbing graffiti from his house’s walls. Yup, it’s destruction of private property, and especially, but that won’t make a difference to Ted, when it’s not even remotely artistic.
Yet I can’t imagine a city without these marks. No, I can’t even wish for it. It wouldn’t feel natural. You can threaten, you can punish, doesn’t matter. It still happens. You can’t prevent it – and that’s good. Look at that image, look at the layers. This is the closest our cities get to being natural, fractal, organic, aging, decaying. It’s not always nice, but neither is a carcass in the wilderness.
I’m still at home, still sick, still posting past images. This is from March, 1st and though I hope to be out again sometime this week, we could go on like that for a few hundred days. It’s interesting plundering the archives.
The Song of the Day is “Dirty Old Town“. We had a song of that title in “739 – Dirty Old Town“, but that were The Pogues. This time it’s David Byrne with a completely different Song from his landmark latin/crossover album “Rei Momo”. See a rare live performance, David Byrne some 20 years ago, on YouTube. A real gem.
Here’s one more of yesterday’s images. I was too lazy to go out today. Sorry
This is an abandoned house not far from Klagenfurt, located in a wonderful spot, obviously belonging to an estate not far away, a solitary house, abandoned and closed, with an “Entrance forbidden” sign on the door, of use for no one.
The Song of the Day is the Beatles song “For No One“, sung by Anne Sofie von Otter on her collabration with Elvis Costello, the 2001 release “For the Stars”. Hear it on YouTube.
Follow your instincts, huh? This post is named “Twilight”, because the image of the light on the chair in front of a shop in Vienna was destined to be Image of the Day, but when I looked at this uncertain, wavering path between all obstacles, I felt again why I had taken the image in the first place, and I just couldn’t reduce it to a thumbnail.
This is probably more about me or about life than everything else. This is the Image of the Day.
The second image is another one that I took this morning while walking through Villach’s outskirts, on my way to the train. I suppose these old houses will be gone by next year, replaced by a modern apartment block like those behind.
I took more images like this. It’s hard for me to tell what the point is. It is simply that I walk and look and see, and suddenly an inner voice tells me to “photograph this”. It reminds me of Paul Butzi’s recent post “Fuzzy“.
Read it if you haven’t yet. It’s about rationalizing the photographic process after the fact. It strikes a chord for me. Seeing is not analytic. It’s Go, not Chess.
When I changed the Image of the Day, the Song of the Day, “Twilight” from Vanessa Carlton’s 2002 album “Be Not Nobody” should probably have been changed as well, along with the title, but then, I like it, and thus we go on with the incongruity
Hear it on YouTube.
Oh dear, even when the sun is out (as you see it was yesterday morning), its light comes in so flat an angle that you better live high above to see it at all.
Remember yesterday’s question about image composites? Well, obviously the real question is, what is photography – if photography is what I make at all. But it is not a game of names, in the end we will probably care more about the thing itself than its name. Help me please to understand the nature of what we are talking about here:
What exactly is it that could make a composite an objectionable photograph or could take away its photographic nature at all? This is obviously directed more at Paul Maxim, but the notion, that there is a credibility problem with composite photographs, is quite common. Is it credibility?
Or is it something about an image that does not look like it has looked “in nature”? Remember my usage of fill flash some days ago? How does this all relate to flash? An image with flash certainly looks very different from what it “looked in nature”. Is flash OK? But if so, why? Because it is “photographic”? Because flash has been used in all of photography’s history? Because it is a non-manipulated capture of a moment when the world was lit with flash? So many questions
The Song of the Day is “Live High” from Jason Mraz’s extraordinary 2008 album “We Sing, We Dance, We Steal Things”. Hear it on YouTube.
It’s Friday again, I sit on the train to Carinthia, half the distance is past and I have two images for you.
The first, this image of the car on the street, well, I really like its composition. I think it’s very dynamic.
To tell the truth, this is very much a random image. I took it in the morning while crossing the street, with the camera dangling from my hand. Thus: no compositional effort, no nothing. On the other hand, it was no accident either. I do this from time to time, to make images while walking. It is not concealment what I want, no, it is that kind of random element that sometimes bears interesting results.
The Image of the Day was taken near the train station. The whole area is a construction site now and will be so for the next years, while a completely new central train station is built.
Straight from reality the image did not work, because the red arrow pointed out of the image. Thus I flipped the image horizontally, and then the posters again. Much better now
The Song of the Day is “Past In Present” from Feist’s 2007 album “The Reminder”. See a video on Dailymotion.
