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.
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.
This is the second day that I try this shot, it’s time to post it now, it won’t get any better. Tuesday morning I tried it with the Sigma 20/1.8, yesterday morning I did it with the Nikon 24/2.8. Not that anybody would care. Rather odd way to introduce a new lens, huh?
There are many ways I could have gone in post-processing, B&W would have been one of them, and even there I would have had a hard time deciding between “Infrared” and “Maximum Black”. I finally settled with color, because I wanted it to be more like a strange, undecided dream than like a nightmare.
The Song of the Day is “Innocent When You Dream” from Tom Waits’ 1987 album “Franks Wild Years”.
YouTube has a brilliant live performance with questionable sound quality, and it is outright the best version that I’ve ever heard. You don’t want to miss it, if for nothing else, then for the introduction.
This morning was the first morning with fog here in the city. This means we’re headin’ for a fall gals! I’ve made some pictures of a foggy park, they are even not so bad, but I’ll spare us the cliché. It’s autumn, summer’s long gone and that must suffice.
This is an image that I shot on my way home. It is not the first image that I’ve taken of this venerable motorbike, but it is the first that gets published.
The Song of the Day is “Dirty Old Town” – not the David Byrne song from “Rei Momo“, not the Rod Steward version, no, it’s the Pogues that who have it on their 1985 album “Rum, Sodomy & the Lash“. See the video on YouTube. This is a true classic, you don’t want to miss it
We live in a time of big shopping centers. Malls, some central streets, they collect all the traffic, and many of the small shops near our living quarters had to close. This is in a way regrettable, but if everybody who regrets it now, had gone out in the past to actually shop there, they wouldn’t have had to close in the first place. That’s how we feel: we cherish the sentiment for a past that we would not want to live in.
“Uhren” is German and means “clocks” as well as “watches”. The Song of the Day is “Out Of Time” from the 1966 Rolling Stones album “Aftermath“. I’ve linked to the UK version of the album, because that’s what I own. Hear the song on YouTube.
On a construction site in Kaiserstraße, very near to where I live, I found this charcoal drawing on the wall of a building being demolished. A Jokerman, once drawn by a hopeful young revolutionary, and this reminds me of Ted Byrne’s current blog entry, “Quarry“, where he muses about salavging “something that soon won’t be anyplace but in an image”. John Henry Mills or the Jokerman, one will wither with time, one will be torn down with force. There are stories behind both, and though the stories will be lost, these images remain, and they will begin to tell their own stories.
“Jokerman” is the opener (and I think it was the hit) on Bob Dylan’s 1983 Return-From-Jesus album “Infidels“. See it on YouTube.
