New Year’s Day. We were out to lunch with my parents, and on the way back to Villach, I decided to take smaller roads.

We had a thick cloud cover, and around a height of 500-600 meters there was a layer of fog. That’s what I was heading for.

You know my obsession with ways leading into the image, well, here are three variations on the theme, all rather typical of today.

Fog is a little bit challenging, photography-wise. Automatic white balance is frequently off. Take the image of the Day: I had to shift it way into the greens. Now I guess it’s pretty what I saw.

I’ve also made it darker. Fog images have low dynamics, thus the dynamic range of our digital cameras is more than enough. The D300 had placed the histogram more to the right. Of course I could have corrected it in-camera, but then, I prefer to rather expose to the right and later tone it down, than otherwise. Keeps the noise down.

The other two images are just JPEGs from the camera.

The Song of the Day is “A Foggy Day” in the rendition from Charles Mingus’ 1956 album “Pithecanthropus Erectus”. Hear it on Nate. Seems to be a South Korean site, though I admit I don’t understand anything.

Sorry for the delay, this is the post for Saturday. Both images are from Saturday morning, the Image of the day taken from my study, the other from the balcony. Nice sun, but that was the last we had that day.

The fog rose within minutes, and for the rest of the day it stayed as a grayish-white blanket in a height above 100 meters, and when it really thinned out for some minutes, I could see clouds above, thus it didn’t even make sense to drive up a mountain.

I had to go shopping that afternoon, and hoping to get some winter landscape images, I tried my luck down at the river.

It was depressing. Snowy winter landscapes can be a great sight, and you don’t need sun at all. Take for example “792 – Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow” or “778 – My! My! Time Flies!“. Both were made on bleak winter days, but at least there was a thick snow cover. The real problem with days like Saturday is, that there is not enough snow, and what there is, quickly goes away, leaving patches of brilliant white between dark, wet ground, wet wood and soggy dead leaves. It’s pretty hard to make interesting images of that.

OK, this should be enough to explain why I post these images: I have no others. I’ve tried and failed. But why this title?

On just that Saturday Paul Butzi posted an article about popularity, concluding that it

appears that if you want to get a large readership, the thing to do is write posts that take a contrary view on a social issue, write lots of equipment reviews, reviews of materials, and vitriolic rants about stuff that frustrates you

As I commented on Paul’s post, it’s the same here. At the moment I get more hits than usual, and the popular posts of the moment are those about the Tamron 17-50/2.8 VC. It’s pretty obvious why, because there is not much material on the Internet about this lens, and at the same time there is much interest, because the lens seemingly fills a gap, at least in Nikon’s lineup.

More or less the same happened when I bought the D300. I got it the day after it appeared, and my series of posts was one of the first sources on the Internet. I’ve tagged it a review, but of course it was mainly a set of observations of a user, but exactly that is what people are looking for, especially in a time when it is hard to tell journalism apart from PR.

Photoshop tutorials are another classic. I’ve posted a few, and they still contribute a substantial part of the hits.

Joe Jarosak (sorry, you didn’t leave a link) replied to my comment, saying

Andreas please don’t play to your audience I enjoy your blog to hear why you might have photographed what you present. Same with Paul’s blog, I’m not interested in the tools so much but the results they produce and the thinking behind them.

And the music of course.

Thanks, very appreciated. I promise, I won’t post any “10 Top Point’n'Shoot Cameras Of This Winter”, and I will also not write about the “Rule of Thirds” and other “rules” of composition. Basically I know how to get hits, I know what draws them, but ultimately it does not matter that much to me. I try to post things that interest me, try to get some feedback, try to connect with people, but not at any price.

On the other hand, as Amy Sakurai wrote in her comment to Paul’s post,

readership numbers greater than zero are about all I look for… otherwise I can just keep my babblings locally on my own computer

Well, this goes right to the heart of blogging. Why do we do that? Why do I do it? I mean, for at least some people, blogging is a source of income. Mike Johnston comes to mind and of course Ken Rockwell. Other people use their blogs to advertise their main business. Just think of David Ziser or Joe McNally.

I don’t do that. I don’t support a business. If you want a print of one of my images, you can just contact me and we’ll arrange something, or of some images you can get them via the Fine Art Photoblog. If you don’t want my prints, well, we can still be friends

Do I do it for the ads? Oh dear, don’t be silly. There is no money in that either. I suppose it gets interesting when your readers number in the tens of thousands, but what I write is read by a small number of hundreds per day. So far my ads have not generated enough income that I even have bothered to collect it

Then why do I do it?

I think a part of the answer lies in my desire to communicate with people who are interested in the same things that I am interested in. Or variations thereof. The problem is, you can’t communicate with yourself only. You need an audience. It’s the first hurdle that every blog has to overcome.

When I began blogging, I was relatively active at the forums of the now gone Radiant Vista, and my trick was to change my forum signature daily, always containing the titles of the three latest posts as links. It took some time, then people noticed and began to visit.

With this and similar PR, I have managed to come into safe territory, having a readership definitely beyond zero, and that while doing what I want to do.

And suddenly we are back to Saturday’s pictures. If you look closely at #2, the house, you see my Imaginary Friend, the friendly snowman. It’s only about two weeks until Christmas, and you see an incredible lot of decoration here, all lit in the evening, and although this is kitsch of the worst kind, this snowman somehow touches me.

There is something symbolic in this mute, friendly smile of the plastic snowman, something deep, pointing to our desire to communicate, pointing to a certain remoteness, a remoteness that is also in blogging. We stand there on our balconies, smiling friendly, waving, hoping there’s someone, who will wave back.

That’s not bad and I like it

The Song of the Day is “Hope There’s Someone” from Antony And The Johnsons’ 2005 album “I Am a Bird Now”. See him live on YouTube.

The mornings tend to be very foggy now, just as in this first image, taken Saturday morning. It’s the playground as seen from my balcony in Villach.

It takes until around 10am, then the sun breaks through, at least on those days when it does

Saturday it did, and it ended up to be a beautiful day. Short but beautiful. We used it for a trip up the valley of river Gail, and from there, across a mountain range, to Oberdrauburg, and along river Drau back to Villach. The Image of the Day was taken pretty high above the valley, near Greifenburg.

This is a time of short days of precious light. What time could be better suited for “Daylight And The Sun” by Antony and the Johnsons? It’s from their last album “The Crying Light”. If pathos is not completely lost to you, hear it on YouTube

It’s Friday morning and this is a picture from Monday. I’m still struggling to catch up. Like I said, I missed the train on Sunday and took Monday off.

This image was taken from the window of my study in Villach, Carinthia. The rest of the day turned out sunny and beautiful, but in the mornings we see fog now.

Like every year this time of the year, the song of the Day is once more “The Morning Fog” from Kate Bush’s 1985 album “Hounds of Love”. Hear it on YouTube.

Oh dear, it’s the middle of the night again. Once you have a rhythm, it’s hard to get off it

You know, I really try hard to provide you with fresh images, to shoot daily, to always find something new, and there are days when it’s easy. On other days everything in me writhes at the pure thought to go out. This was such a day. We had high fog and the light was so incredibly drab, it was disgusting.

I slept long, skipped breakfast as being pointless, did some shopping at the local super market, in other words, I did what I could to avoid going shooting, but finally, about an hour before the time of a theoretical sundown, I took my gear and drove up Mount Dobratsch. I knew that there would be sun at the summit, but I also knew that I would be too late for the 1.5 hours march up from the end of the street, thus it was a bit of a gamble.

When I finally got out of the fog, it was at a height of about 1200 meters and suddenly I felt like a million miles away from home. The sun was already setting, but there was blue sky and glittering sunlight on bright snow.

The first time I stopped, the sun was still out and lighting the trees on the rim. I put on my moon boots that I always have in the car and probed my way through the snow. Thankfully it has not snowed much in the last weeks, thus the snow has already compacted. After the big snowfalls I would have sunk in in a second. I know, it happened to me, and it’s a funny feeling to stand in deep snow up to your chest, not knowing if and how you’ll get out without help

Anyway. I took some pictures and then drove on to my final destination, a lookout platform reaching out from the cliffs where the mountain broke apart in 1348, at a height of 1400 meters. You better don’t suffer from vertigo when you stand on the platform, nothing but a metal grate between you and the rocks some hundreds of meters below.

There I watched the sundown, together with some other people, but of course everybody had left when I shot these last images.

I set the camera to high-speed continuous shooting (not that that’s really fast on a D300 when shooting 14 bit RAW), bracketing of five frames with 1 exposure value distance, and made some exposure series. I had my tripod with me, but did not bother to use it. Current HDR programs have quite nifty algorithms to automatically align images. These two samples were made with Essential HDR. I really like their Detail Enhancer tone mapping algorithm, but I could as well have used Photomatix Pro. They are both top notch, and I take the result always to Photoshop anyway.

The Song of the Day is “A Million Miles Away” from David Byrne’s 1992 album “Uh-Oh”. Hear it on YouTube.

These are Monday images. I’m being held up here in Carinthia, and I even find some time to take pictures. Today’s were all shot in the morning. I had to pick up some letters at the old address, right at the time when the fog cleared.

Nice shoreline, huh? It’s only about a foot high, but it sure looks grown up. This is the bed of one of the countless creeks that come down the border mountains in the south. They are a limestone ridge all along Carinthia’s southern border, rising up only a little more than 2000 meters in their peaks, but due to their geology, they look incredibly impressive. Mittagskogel is one of them.

We had this particular creek quite some time ago in a slightly more realistic view. Its water is clear and icy cold.

A forest with fog just dissipating, that’s an interesting view. I did not have the time to venture forth, this is only one image taken from out of the car (no, not while driving) with the Nikon 18-200 VR at 200mm, but I love this filtered light and the depth that we see due to the remains of fog.

For a change, the image of the day is centered. Martin Gommel over at Kwerfeldein.de recently posted a reminder that centered compositions are by no means forbidden – and he is right. Sometimes it simply works and here it does.

The Song of the Day is “The Magnificent Tree” from the 2000 Hooverphonic album of the same name. Hear an admittedly weak live version on YouTube. Well, probably this kind of music simply ages faster than what I normally hear

That’s the view from my study, facing north-east. This morning I sat there, wrote yesterday’s blog entry, at times looking down on the street, waiting for the big red car of my father. He is a master carpenter, retired for 13 years now, and he is my big help these days. He is the one who knows when to do what, and how to do it.

The streak of sun down there is slightly … exaggerated, but it was there, if only that moment. I’ve seen it and it was the first and last sun today, followed by gloomy clouds and rain. There are days when I don’t mind working

The Song of the Day is “Ese Momento” from Mísia’s 2005 album “Drama Box”. Many people seem to have a problem with Fado, and if you feel like that (well, even more so if you don’t feel like that), I beg you to have a look at the video on YouTube. I should be surprised if you didn’t like it.

It’s Wednesday morning, change in the large is already here, for me it’s just happening. Today is the day of the final move to Villach. So far the weather is fine, let’s hope it stays free of rain.

The Song of the Day is “A Change Is Gonna Come” from the 1967 Aretha Franklin album “I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You”. Sorry, no time to search on YouTube. I have to shut the computer down. See you on the other side

Landscape photography is so much about chance, one can either despair or accept it with a shrug. This time I was lucky.

Yesterday morning I went out to take some images of the morning fog. I wanted to go for remote details, thus I took the Sigma 50/1.4 off and replaced it with the Nikon 70-300 VR. This was chance and happened out of a fancy.

Then I had zoomed out to 300mm to take an image of the trees on the pasture down by the side of the street. There was no sun and I intended a gloomy November image, but just in that moment a rift in the cloud opened and a streak of light rapidly shifted across the scene.

Arguably the arrangement of the three trees is not perfect, but every thought of moving only 20 meters to the left was ridiculous. The moment was over in seconds. I could only accept it with a shrug.

The Song of the Day is “New Morning” from Bob Dylan’s 1970 album of the same name. Hear it on YouTube.

Oh dear, that’s a ride! I sit on the train from Carinthia to Vienna, and the only car with electric current is one of these pre-mobile-phone-era cars that are almost perfect Faradayan cages. My internet connection is so flaky that it took me almost an hour to move this image to the proper gallery, assign keywords and write five lines!

Anyway. This is an image of Saturday morning, just befoe the sun came up, shortly before the fog rose. The rest of the day was work in the new apartment in Villach.

It’s funny, but we seem to have problems avoiding politics these days. Ted can’t keep his fingers off Sarah Palin and I have to come back to the recently departed Austrian master populist Jörg Haider.

Saturday was the Day of Jörg Haider’s funeral, and whatever you have read about the Carinthians worshipping him: it’s true! I hate to admit it, but Carinthia has fallen into a collective hysteria that I have never seen before. What they do is nothing short of creating a new Saint. Looking at it from a distance this may seem interesting and peculiar, a local phenomenon that meets astonishment even in Vienna, but from the perspective of a Carinthian-born thinking man it is absolutely disgusting.

It is bizzarre to see how fast history is re-written, how fast it is erased that this man’s strongest talents were to agitate the stupid against the weak and to spend our money with both hands.

So now, that’s our new Saint: a reckless politician who died drunk in his car, speeding at at least 142 kmh trough the fog. What a model for our youth! And still: people seem to love him! I can’t understand it. What is it?

People always adored his frank way of saying things that superficially resembled truth. He was daring. He is the only Austrian politician who was ever seen bungee jumping, one of the few who ran the New York marathon, he was a friend of Lybia’s dictator Gadaffi and he visited Saddam Hussein shortly before the US made an end to his régime. He was rich, independent, knew how to use the media, and in all that he made everybody think he was one of them.

Unbelievable? Yes, but that’s how it was, and though he certainly had liked to live on, what happens now would have pleased him. It’s pretty depressing that someone like him should triumph even in death.

Sorry for the rant, we instantly get soft again

The Song of the Day is “Dawn Is A Feeling” from the classic 1967 Moody Blues album “Days of Future Passed“. Hear it on YouTube.