After the rather lengthy third part of the review of my new Tamron SP AF 17-50mm 2.8 XR Di II VC LD Asp IF lens, let me finish the day with a much shorter post.
I made this image in the morning on my way to work. It was mostly dry, with only a tiny hint of the slightest drizzle. The image shows a little more noise than I’d like to see, because I had forgotten to reset the -0.7EV that I had dialed in yesterday evening. It’s not too bad though, even though I have raised noise in the dark fence by applying a little Topaz Detail to it in Screen mode. I am glad anyway, that I have made the image, because in the afternoon the slight drizzle has changed to solid rain.
By the way, concerning this lens, I am pretty through with those aspects that interested me most. If there is anything more that you want to know, simply leave me a comment, I’ll try to look into your questions.
The Song of the Day is “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me” from the 1962 Quincy Jones production “Nana Mouskouri in New York”. This is a stellar album and it came as an absolute surprise to me. Hear her on YouTube.
Sorry for the irregular posting intervals. At the moment I am pondering a major overhaul of this blog, and most of my time goes into reading web reviews of web hosting services, comparing hosting plans, etc.
Anyway. Yesterday was supposed to be a mostly rainy day and it actually turned out to be not. There were high clouds towering on all horizons, but most of the day it was warm and sunny in central Carinthia. I was even swimming.
The Song of the Day is “Under A Stormy Sky” from Daniel Lanois’ first album, the 1989 release “Acadie”.
To my great surprise YouTube has multiple videos, for instance a live performance, another that’s part of a documentary, where Daniel explains what this song is about, and finally another documentary about the Canadian “Mariposa” festival, where he performs the song in a manner very similar to the album version. Pretty nice coverage 
Sometimes very simple things are enough to produce an image that pleases me. In this case it is a storehouse of a local hardware shop, seen through a bunch of yellow flowers.
I took the image on my way to the lake. Most of today was sunny and I decided to go swimming. At this time of the year you never know. Every time could be the last time. Due to the excessive rain before we left to Poland and in the last two days, the level of the lake has risen by at least 30 cm (one foot) in less than two weeks. The lake is now full and begins to spill over. The forecast announced more rain until Sunday, thus we’ll probably see floods.
The Song of the Day is “Simple Things” from The Crash’s 2001 album “Wildlife”. Hear it on YouTube.
Btw: I said I would catch up and I just did. For the first time in a week this is again an image posted the day it was made
Does it happen to you as well? Does it happen to you, that you come to a place that has long been your home, and that your inspiration is simply there, no effort needed?
Today I needed an image and I also wanted to go swimming. I had enough time, and so I decided to make a detour through the region where I have lived for 20 years. 
It’s so much easier there. I don’t need to search for places, I know them. I know where the flowers are, where the water is and I know what to expect under what conditions. It’s home.
And although I know the places, there are still some puzzles left: I have made many images of this fence, and I have not liked a single one. These I do, because they show the essence of this fence, the roughness of old wood, the repetition of the always different, the straight and the crooked.
I don’t mean to imply that one should not go on travels, I’ll do next week, and I don’t mean to say that all people are equal, but at least for me, these home places are much more important for my work than all travels. Sometimes it takes you years to find out how you want or need to photograph a place. How can you expect to go abroad and get it right the first time?
The Song of the Day is “Old Love” from Eric Clapton’s 1991 live album “24 Nights”. See him perform on YouTube, here is part one, and there is part two.
Sunday again. I’m on the train, and this time the image is already up on SmugMug, with only the writing left to do.
Today I set out for swimming, but leaving at 4:30pm was too late. I drove around a little for an image, and this is what I ended up with. It’s the Sigma 28/1.8 again, with rather straight processing.
The Song of the Day is once more “Sitting On A Fence” from the 1986 Housmartins album “London 0 Hull 4″. See a video on MySpace.
I could have gone out today, really, but instead I preferred sleeping on the balcony. Nice Sunday activity, I tell you
Well, you and I have not missed anything. Weather was a mixture of dense, dark clouds, dense dark clouds with rain and not so dark but still dense clouds without rain. Only in the evening I have considered going swimming one more time. I did not, because time is short and I am off to Vienna in the evening. Instead I’m writing this entry.
This is another image from yesterday. Seeing what the weather was, I have already processed it in the morning. It’s a composite of two vertical exposures that both were a bit off of my intended composition. The place is again old grounds, and the processing uses the same tools as yesterday, Topaz Adjust and Snap Art, along with various masks and opacity settings.
The Song of the Day is “One More Time, Chick Corea” by the 1970s German A-Capella band Singers Unlimited. I have a 7 CD boxed set called “Magic Voices”, and you can also get the song on a cheaper 2 CD collection called “Complete A Capella Sessions”, mind though, that these sessions are far from complete
Go to Deezer to hear them. You won’t regret it.
Friday was another meager day. It only rained a little, not nearly as bad as Thursday, but it still forced me to use an umbrella.
Other than that, Friday marks the end of the first half of my SoFoBoMo effort.
I had two working weeks of shooting in Vienna, ten days, 63 processed images so far, almost twice as much as I need, some candidates are left to choose from, in case that I need a certain color or subject, and of course I won’t suddenly stop now, but I may ramp shooting down to the usual blogging level. This will save me a lot of time that would otherwise go into processing.
The Image of the Day shows a window hook in my stairwell in Vienna, thus the Song of the Day is “Leave It Open” from Kate Bush’s 1982 album “The Dreaming”. Hear it on YouTube.
It’s been slightly delayed, but here is the post for May, 1st. Remember my SoFoBoMo project? It’s going to be called “Urban Dreams“. Well, this day marks the begin of the earliest possible “fuzzy month”.
I’m still in Carinthia and making trips to the surroundings. On Saturday I thought I’d start right away, and I would do it on a trip to Ljubljana, Slovenia’s capital, a city with a population of about 270.000, and thus certainly qualified for the term “urban”.
Boy, did I fail! We started by visiting the castle on top of the hill in Ljubljana’s center, there in the park I made the Image of the Day. When we finally got down into the city, we had only a very short time, as a thunderstorm was approaching.
When we returned to Villach, we did not take the direct route through the tunnel, but instead left the highway at Jesenice, from there followed the river Sava up to Kranjska Gora, and via Podkoren we crossed over to Carinthia at Wurzenpass. 
The river image is from river Sava, again you see the typical color of the water in the region.
The view of the mountains is from the ascend to Wurzenpass, looking back to Kranjska Gora, and the final image, the road with the fence, was already taken in Carinthia.
Where does this leave me relative to SoFoBoMo?
I like all four of today’s images, the mountain image is quite a bit conventional, but I like the other three a lot. On the other hand, clearly none of them qualifies as an “Urban Dream”. My original idea was, to use mostly images of Vienna, and thus to start on Monday, when I’m back again. In any case, one thing is clear: I have not started SoFoBoMo on Saturday
The Song of the Day is “It Shouldn’t Happen To A Dream” from the 1962 Anita O’Day / Cal Tjader album “Time for Two”. Deezer has the album.
This is an interesting little image. I shot it late Thursday afternoon at about 6:30pm. Weather was gloomy, it rained a little, I had no really usable picture so far, and in my desparation I began to take images of this fence corner that juts out a little into the street. It’s hard to tell what made me begin. There is something in the rhythm of light and dark, of entrance and wall, pillars and fence, trees and figures on the pillars, something that caught my eye.
The problem with these shots is, that they need something to balance them on the other, here the left side. Normally I try to use the vanishing point of the street, but this was impossible here. This view goes slightly downhill, and there was too much sky visible, sky that at that time of the day was very much brighter than the buildings. OK, I could have overexposed the sky, it didn’t have much detail anyway, but even then the view along the street was cluttered and did not lend itself at all to my purpose.
The next strategy that I often fall back to, is to use a wild tilt. Not a little bit off level, no, a wild angle that makes some people sea-sick.
Just as I was working in that mindset, I saw this couple come along. I had already focused on the corner of the fence, thus I only had to wait for them to get into the right position.
Now, you don’t have much choice in such a situation. You do what you do and it works or it doesn’t. There is no second chance. In this case it did not work. Not at all.
I still had that angle. Not very wild, but when I later looked at the image, I found that I wanted the fence slightly hanging to the left, and about the middle between door and first fence post to be vertical. Instead of hanging, the fence was rising to the left.
Normally that’s no problem. You just have to rotate the image. On the right side this was absolutely OK, but on the left side, the couple was too near the edge of the frame, and the corner of the door was also very near the top edge. Cropping the image would have meant to cut away the woman and the corner of the door frame. This would have been completely counter-productive, thus I grudgingly accepted the only alternative: major surgery.
Basically I had to fill up a narrow triangle along the lower left edge and a big triangle along the left upper edge. The small triangle was only sidewalk, thus I selected a rectangle, copied it to a separate layer, streched it out to cover the triangle, applied a mask, and in seconds I was done with it.
The problem was the bigger triangle along the upper edge. Stretching over such a big gap would have meant to lose much detail, the perspective would be wrong and making a smooth transition with a mask would be impossible because in the transition area the original detail and the stretched detail would awkwardly overlap. Cloning, on the other hand, was impossible either, because in order to clone, you need material to clone from, and that was simply not there.
I decided for stretching, and consequently this pretty much forced me to use a strong, blurred vignette.
Next came the distribution of light. There was a very strong falloff from right to left, because the nearest light, the fixture inside of the door frame, was by far the brightest light around. And then there were the colors with their equal falloff from very warm on the right side to very cool on the left, in other words, though there was a balance in content, lights and colors were completely unbalanced.
I tried to light the area around the couple and to increase contrast there, to add some warmth in that part, at least in the lighter areas, and to balance that warmth in the highlights with cooler shadows, but whatever I did, it looked unnatural. And then it finally dawned at me: If that image was going to get any good, it would have to do so in B&W!
And really: suddenly all my problems fell away. Black and white is much more forgiving when it comes to drastic contrast changes, and with a combination of different “B&W Layer” adjustments and some masks I could tame the light on the right side, lighten the left, increase contrast along the edges of the fence posts and the fence’s base, making the edges that originally caught my interest come forward. Some added grain evened out the noise and increased subjective sharpness, a high-pass layer added real sharpness, and the tri-toning finally completed the image.
What’s so interesting in that, you ask? Well, it still fascinates me that I could get from an image that I did not like at all, to an image that I deem to be one of my better ones, and that all by working in Potoshop.
This works completely against common wisdom, you know, that kind of “If an image is no good without Photoshop, you can’t improve it there” attitude. This image was no good at all. This was not on the edge of not being a keeper, it was a clear and positive reject. And now, well, your judgement, but I sure like it.
The Song of the Day is “The Perfect Couple” from Paul Heaton’s first solo album, the 2002 release “Fat Chance”. See the video on YouTube.
Yesterday morning up until mid-afternoon we had rain, and when it stopped, I took the rain cover off my bag and stowed the umbrella, looking forward to unencumbered night shooting on my way home. Well, it turned out to be wishful thinking.
On the other hand, rain is not so bad. I have shot quite some good images in pouring rain, the only thing that’s a pain, is holding the umbrella. What you gain though, especially at night, are colorful reflections on the ground.
The first image is again an example of why it’s a good idea to shoot RAW. I understand that you can adjust white balance on location, but it is inconvenient, to say the least. As a result I use automatic white balance much of the time and certainly so at night. The only problem is, no camera in the world will produce a good automatic white balance on this image, because not even the light when you’re there looks good. I remember having been shocked by what I saw on the rear LCD, all orange, but when I looked up, that’s what there was. The sodium vapor lights effectively killed all color. And still, after the fact, experimenting with the RAW file, I was able to get my greens back. Quite remarkable.
The second image is another poser, leaning against a lamp post. I did not like the output of DxO, and instead of fiddling around there, I took the problem over into Photoshop. This image has very shallow DOF with basically only the front of the front tire sharp.
I found that a blurred layer (five pixels, I guess), along with a sharpness mask did a very good job eliminating noise, and that without any artifacts. I have already mentioned it some times, a sharpness mask is an edge mask as used in sharpening, strongly blurred and with levels and curves adapted so that it masks where the original image is sharp. The radius of the blur greatly depends on what you want to mask, and for some uses you will want to invert the mask. I often use these masks to bring out a foreground by warming it up, increase its contrast or lighten it slightly.
The Image of the Day finally is one where I tried a color conversion with DxO and failed spectacularly. Toned B&W in Photoshop did it nicely
Well, what does that mean? It seems that there are certain images that work exceedingly well with what DxO does (yesterday’s is a good example), and others don’t. Add to that the fact that I am much more proficient with Photoshop and you see the pattern. At the moment I try everything in DxO, and when I don’t like the first results, I tend to fall back to Adobe Camera RAW. In any case I finish the image in Photoshop. Maybe I should always do demosaicing and noise reduction in DxO, then produce a DNG file and open that in ACR. We’ll see.
The Song of the Day is “I Can’t Stand the Rain” from the soundtrack of the 1991 Roddy Doyle adaptation by Alan Parker, “The Commitments”. If you love music, if you love humor, if you love soul and if you still have not seen the movie, this is for you.
The song has been sung by many people, Tina Turner among them, but originally (which I did not know until I looked it up today) it was a 1973 hit by Ann Peebles. Hear her version and some explanation about how the song came to be on YouTube. Not bad either
