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 
You may or may not object to it, but resistance is futile. Today an image is what you make of the raw data that the sensor captured.
These are two images of Saturday, our last day in Poland. We had been visiting Ko?ciuszko Mound in the morning (the image of the spiral stairs is from there), later the salt mines of Wieliczka, and finally, late on that overcast and gloomy afternoon, we drove a little bit around, and that’s where I made the other image.
As to the Image of the Day, I could not really decide what I like better, the B&W version, concentrating on tonal density and contrast, or the color version, concentrating more on the Yin-Yang aspect. I like both. You decide.
The other image is presented in two versions, to the left straight out of the camera, and to the right what I made of the RAW file. This is not a particularly good image, it’s more that I tried what I can do with it and myself was surprised about the result. I post it as a reminder to all those JPEG shooters. You miss something
The Song of the Day is “Your Own Choice” from the 1970 Procol Harum album “Home”. Hear it on YouTube.
By the way, I had a hard time with yesterday’s image of the town hall in Tarnów. I finally decided to give it an overhaul and have cropped it from below. The result finally has the balance that I was looking for. See for yourself. You may have to reload the page to see the new image.
Oh dear, it’s 1am and I am just beginning to write Well, some days are bicycle days, and today certainly was one of those. 
All three of these images took me four or five trials until I got a sharp exposure with the intended framing. That’s pretty much what you get for using such a long and heavy lens as the Sigma 150/2.8 Macro.
I already use a shutter speed of 1/250s, but at times even that is not enough. And then, of course, there is the fact, that with an unstabilized lens, the image in the viewfinder is incredibly shaky, just like your hands. That’s probably the only bonus of in-lens stabilization line Nikon and Canon use, against in-body stabilization, like all the rest uses: you get a steady viewfinder image. Not a bad thing for composing.
Anyway. This is not a stabilized lens, neither is the Nikon 200/2.0 AI that I saw today in a shop. Used, good condition, 1300€. No, I won’t buy it, but I know for sure I’ll regret it
The Song of the Day is “Let The Bells Ring” from Nick Cave’s 2004 double album “Abattoir Blues / Lyre of Orpheus”, for sure one of his best works. Hear it on YouTube.
If you don’t know the album and you have six minutes to spare, there is another video with a compilation of four songs from the album, and it even begins with “Breathless”, my absolute favorite
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.
It was extremely hot yesterday. We had intended to go to Salzburg to visit Michael, but thankfully I remembered that at this time school holidays in southern Germany start, and that means hours of delay due to traffic jams in front of the two big tunnels on the highway that crosses the Alps.
We used the time for shopping and then for a short trip down top Italy, just across the border, near Tarvisio, where we wanted to drive up to Santuario Monte Lussari.
There is a church on a mountain with a spectacular view. According to our street map, a road goes up there, coming from the Saisera valley. Fact is, there may be a road, but neither did we find it, nor (if it exists at all) is it open to the public. The first image was taken near the end of the valley.
The other image, the Image of the Day, was taken much later. We had returned from Italy and driven straight to our lake for swimming. After we left, the sun was not yet down, but beginning to vanish in clouds and haze in the west. I stopped at a meadow full of flowers and took a series of images, trying to capture that feeling of a summer evening. While I had used the Tokina 11-16 in Italy, this image was made with the new Sigma 28/1.8.
The Song of the Day is “In Summer” from Jon Hendricks’ 1990 album “Freddie Freeloader”. See him perform it live in 1986 on YouTube.
Just a white flower and a bicycle, nothing more. 
I had taken the flower image in the morning, and when I took the bicycle image, my thoughts were no more with photography. I had already decided to buy a new graphics card, a Radeon 4870. I have begun to play computer games again lately, and the card that had come with my computer was not really adequate for Unreal Tournament 3 in 1920×1200, with all effects set to max
I also needed to upgrade the power supply, because today’s graphic cards need so much extra powers, and the power supply of my stock HP computer was inadequate for the new graphics card. Now the case is actually inadequate as well, but somehow I managed to put it all in
The Song of the Day is the Procol Harum classic “A Whiter Shade Of Pale“, interpreted by Annie Lennox on her 1995 album “Medusa”. See a video on YouTube.
OK, so now we know it for sure: the Sigma 28/1.8 has nine blades and they are not rounded 
This does not impact its bokeh though, not in any way. That’s a gorgeous lens, and I am always amazed that Sigma seems to be the only lens manufacturer that puts such a strong emphasis on minimum focus distance.
Why this is important? Well, it may not be important for everybody, but for me it is. A short focusing distance is the most important factor for getting shallow depth of field, far more important than focal length and maximum aperture.
The other two images for today show some graffiti, and the first of them is again a two-halves composition.
I guess I’ve used Topaz Adjust in all four images, at least in the “rough” parts, and of course in the Image of the Day Alien Skin Snap Art was involved as well.
Well, that’s it for today. The Song of the Day is “Shine” from Cyndi Lauper’s 2005 album “The Body Acoustic”.
See a video on YouTube.
One more post tonight, this time with the images of today. 
The first image is just one more example of how wonderful this new Sigma 28/1.8 performs in the macro range. This is an image straight from the camera, I couldn’t have added anything in post-processing.
The other image, the Image of the Day, is one more from that series of compositions consisting of two halves. I find myself trying that very often now. I can’t really tell what fascinates me and makes me do it, but fascination it certainly is. There’ll be more of that.
The Song of the Day is “Both Sides Now“, originally from the 1969 Joni Mitchell album “Clouds”, but I have it on the 2000 release “Both Sides Now”, an album that I actually bought for the songs “Stormy Weather” and “I Wish I Were In Love Again”. See her 2000 live performance on YouTube.
Oh dear, so much has happened since the last post! Where shall I begin? OK, I’ll begin with answering some of the comments to that rant about style.
Ted, I guess we disagree much less than you think we do
I looked up Reed Dixon, and I very much appreciate what he does. If for any reasons he will still do the same kind of images in 30 years (or if he did it that way all through the last 30 years), I most probably wouldn’t.
What I did in my post, was to define the word “style” (for me!!!). I am aware of the fact that style is frequently used to denote outward attributes of an image that can best be characterized as mechanical. I mean things that could be cast into a Photoshop action. Other people call that “effects”. To call something like that a “style”, does not make sense to me at all. The only meaningful definition of style that comes to my mind is connected to a way of seeing. If anything, for me, just like for Paul Maxim and Ove, style is an attribute of personality.
We have a photo book in Carinthia, a very expensive and very beautiful book with portraits done by Henri Cartier Bresson. On Sunday I took the opportunity to have an intense look at these images, and what I did was looking for the signs of a distinct style.
Frankly, I didn’t find anything that would allow me to pick out an HCB from the mass of photographs. There are some hints though, for example that he didn’t seem to care much about the “Rule of Thirds”, and if he did, he frequently placed the head of his subject in the lower third, including a seemingly undue amount of background. In other words, he didn’t follow rules, he broke them.
Unfortunately he didn’t break them in any consistent manner, thus taking away the fun that we could draw from instantly recognizing him.
It goes on like that. It’s easy to recognize the Erwitts as long as there are dogs in the image, but if not? I doubt it.
But this is not specific to photography, it’s just by accident that we discuss it in that context. In my eyes style, when that word makes sense at all, is a certain way of seeing the world, of judging one’s own work, ever evolving until we die. Style is a statistical entity that can be seen as an inconsistent and evolving, but still recognizable pattern in the background of a large body of work. If it is not evolving, well, then the artist probably has found something that sells.
The market does abominable things to artists. Capitalism is not everything, and from a perspective of art it fails miserably. Why? Because it tells artists to stick to their recipe, to basically repeat themselves, or better, to repeat whatever they found that sells. THAT’s the reason why some Artists continue to produce the same things, over and again, for 30 years and more.
Hopefully this has cleared things up a bit. Enough of that.
As I said, so many things have happened, and although I’m late to the party, I should at least send you over to Cedric’s blog, as he has written a very clever post about artistic ambivalence and ambivalence in general, all circling around the question what photographs tell about the photographer.
As to these pictures, well, they were all taken with my new (and cheap!) Sigma 28/1.8, and they demonstrate perfectly why I like this lens: With its ability to focus down to the front element, it opens up a completely different world. Nice bokeh, huh?
The Song of the Day is “Living In A Different World” by “Honeydripper” Roosevelt Sykes. I have it on disc 57 of “The Ultimate Jazz Archive”, and if you aim for something cheaper, you can get it as well on his “Complete Recorded Works, Vol. 8″.Hear the song on Deezer.
