Harmony? Disharmony? Shooting landscapes in our modern times can be tough. Of course you can get out into the big national parks (Austria has quite some of them), and then you won’t be bothered by power and telephone lines, but then, why be bothered at all? Are they not an integral part of our life? Don’t we depend on them more than on anything else? Our heating system burns oil (hmm … another such folly), but without electric power it would stop. It is controlled by a computer, it can be programmed to start and stop at certain times of day, to target certain temperatures, whatsoever, but take away these ugly power lines that we photographers hate so much … and it stops.
If it must be, here is a harmonious image as well. Both were shot with the Sigma 70/2.8 at f11, in both I have cloned out some minor distractions. Disharmonious disharmony? Never!
The Song of the Day is “Have You Ever Been (to Electric Ladyland)” from Jimi Hendrix’ 1968 album “Electric Ladyland“.
Hmm … seems like the Song of the Day stays the same, and so does the subject of my images. Only one so far for today, I may add one or two later.
This image was shot with the Sigma 150/2.8 Macro. Much less a typical landscape lens than the 70/2.8, but that’s what I’m after at the moment: atypical landscape shots. This one is about a juxtaposition between a line of trees and a line of poles, and most of all it is about depth.
This entry could have been “Give’em Enough Rope” after the 1978 Clash album. On Thursday (yes, I’m two days late, this is the entry for Thursday) I went to take some images of the church of the small village Selpritsch.
The images of the church were not particularly interesting, but in front of the church, there is a playground with this rope dangling from a tree. I took the image with the Sigma 70/2.8 at f2.8 and from fairly near. Thus the DOF.
This entry could have been “Give’em Enough Rope”, but instead we are back to the power lines. Taking images of power lines has become something of a project lately. It is part of an examination of the tensions between tradition and the effects of modern life. This is all really at the very beginning and even I don’t know exactly what direction it will take. Let’s see.
The Song of the Day is still “Have You Ever Been (to Electric Ladyland)” from Jimi Hendrix’ 1968 album “Electric Ladyland“.
Two very different images, two very different treatments in post-processing. The Image of the Day was shot at the same place as “489 – Electric Ladyland III“, only some meters to the left and with a different lens. The landscape is completely dominated by masts and cables, dissonant as the rough, noisy finish that I have chosen. In contrast to this we have the undulating, horizontal lines of the other image, bucolic, soft, finished with a soft blur on top.
It would be about time to answer to Ted Byrne’s recent essay “What Do We Do After We Go “Wow”? The purpose of beauty in art photography“, and these two images could be an anchor, but it’s too late now. I’ll try it tomorrow 
In case you have not guessed it: The Song of the Day is still “Have You Ever Been (to Electric Ladyland)” from Jimi Hendrix’ 1968 album “Electric Ladyland“.
Time for another installment of my “Electric Ladyland” series. This time we are in Vienna, the image is from today (caught up!!) and again I don’t fight the ever present cables, the wires that keep our civilization running, again I use them. Apart from that I may have added some slight enhancements in Photoshop as well. I can’t help it, it just happens some times.
The second image is from the morning. That’s what I originally wanted to present as Image of the Day, before things got out of control
As always in this series: The Song of the Day is still “Have You Ever Been (to Electric Ladyland)” from Jimi Hendrix’ 1968 album “Electric Ladyland“.
I’ve spent most of my day sleeping and mulling over a title for yesterday’s entry, and what meager fruit I earned, I earned it late afternoon on my way to the lake. I was really in a hurry, thus I had no time to experiment. I settled with an image that I had already taken once and not used then. Today I used the new Nikon 70-300 VR at 112mm and f8.
As always in this series: The Song of the Day is still “Have You Ever Been (to Electric Ladyland)” from Jimi Hendrix’ 1968 album “Electric Ladyland“.
I spent the night in Salzburg and in the morning I took the train back to Vienna. This is some electric wiring over the place in front of Salzburg’s main train station. I took three images, but the first was it.
As always in this series: The Song of the Day is still “Have You Ever Been (to Electric Ladyland)” from Jimi Hendrix’ 1968 album “Electric Ladyland“.
I spent all of Wednesday hurrying between Klagenfurt and Villach, transporting things, coordinating work, buying furniture, well, you don’t want to know. I had already given up hope for an image, when on my return from Villach, minutes before sunset, the clouds in the west cleared and gave way to bright golden light. Normally you’d be glad about it, but while on the highway, busy driving? I had to get off and up some high place, for one of the hills north of Wörthersee.
Off the highway I got, but it was simply too late. Faced with a sun that had already vanished in murky clouds, I gave up, parked the car and in desperation made some photos of a tree and some power lines against the last of the red. Well, what finally made it is the product of more than a little Photoshop enhancement, but to my surprise it turne out quite well.
As always in this series: The Song of the Day is still “Have You Ever Been (to Electric Ladyland)” from Jimi Hendrix’ 1968 album “Electric Ladyland“.
It’s Thursday night, this is the entry for Monday. Private occupations and an inescapable, deep longing for sleep have caused this bad delay
Let’s see what we have. Monday was a sunny day. I could carry on where I stopped last week.
Of course dreams come in very different flavors. Some people dream of being rich, being on top, and for some, the dreams are much more basic.
For instance there is the dream of a bed. Do you know that those new, ugly benches in Vienna were especially designed to make it impossible for people to sleep on? How pervert is that? A society spends money on public furniture, and then cripples that furniture to a point where it hardly does its job, only to keep “social problems” out of sight?
Sure, we have a problem with beggars coming from eastern countries, but they come from the same countries where they had paid jobs under communist rule (with low incomes and still not much to buy, yes, indeed), and now those countries had the most radical economic transformation ever, and they had it, financed by our banks, directed by our consultants, forced by convergence criteria dictated by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund.
How surprising is it that some of those people end up here, washed to our shores, begging on our streets, violating our sense of beauty and order?
Both images were shot in the morning, and here is the next nuisance. I wish I could spare Ted the sight, but here’s again some of that other aesthetic evil of our times. Urgh! Graffiti!! Well, I just couldn’t resist the side light combined with the compression of the Nikon 70-300 VR.
All the other images, including the Image of the Day, are again about rooftops, balconies and the dream of being near the sky.
It’s interesting: I make a lot of these images, always made them, drew them in my youth, long, long before there ever were digital cameras, but I publish them rarely. It’s probably just because they are so frequent in my work. Still, there must be a reason why the recur.
Janine recently asked for more of my “Electric Ladyland” series. I didn’t want to use it as Image of the Day, but here it is: “Electric Ladyland IX”
The electric wiring of our cityscapes and landscapes is a much underrepresented subject, especially when you put it in proportion with how much we photographers are normally annoyed by it. The solution is: don’t fight it, use it 
So far, including these Monday images, I have processed 45 images out of 86 candidates for my SoFoBoMo project “Urban Dreams“. Some of them may not make it into the book, but the majority could and I would have no problem finding 35 images. I really could stop now, but of course I won’t.
I plan to produce a book template this weekend though. Basically an empty layout that I can use to try different sequences of images.
I won’t do anything fancy. The layout will be similar to last year’s, only this time I may even end up using blank left pages with an image title and very little if any text, and then on the right page the image. That’s about what Mark Hobson proposed in his series about POD photo books. Greatly recommended reading for everybody dabbling in SoFoBoMo.
Well, in fact everything on Mark’s site is great. At the moment I neglect reading other people’s blogs badly (sorry everybody), and Mark’s is always rewarding, not only for his imagery that I admire, but also for his witty and intelligent writing that never even tries to avoid controversy
The Song of the Day, “Top Of The City“, is from Kate Bush’s 1993 album “The Red Shoes”, a much underrated album, but for me her best work to date. YouTube has the video. And while you are at it, have a look at another masterwork and my favorite piece from this album:
Split me open
With devotion
You put your hands in
And rip my heart out
Eat the music
Power lines are a part of our modern landscape. You can try to avoid them, you can try to clone them out, but in the end the question remains: Why oh why should you do that? Do you clone out the mountains? Do you try to avoid the sky?
Here we are again, this is the tenth image in this series, thus the Song of the Day is again “Have You Ever Been (To Electric Ladyland)” from jimi Hendrix’ 1968 landmark album “Electric Ladyland”. I have linked to the American version, the one with the mutilated cover, simply because it’s cheaper. Of course you’d really want to get the one with the ladies
Hear it on YouTube.
