Today was a beautiful day, but for various reasons I couldn’t manage to get out photographing before 3pm, and it was clear that the sun was not going to last until sundown, that it would vanish in dense clouds very soon.
I know I didn’t have more than one chance, and I was already taking risk by trying a new road, one that I already have driven, but not with the intention to take photographs.
There were two reasons for it: When I set out, that was the direction that looked most promising, and the road would take me up to 1000 m above sea level, 500 m above Villach, to a height where probably all precipitation of the last two days would have been snow.
In the end I took two series of bracketed images, and one of them I processed as HDR. It was long before I reached the highest point of my route, but it was literally the last moment. Only minutes later the sun had gone, and it did never come out again today.
The Song of the Day is “This Moment” from the 1970 Incredible String Band album “I Looked Up”. See a live video on YouTube.
Behold! You look at one of the three images that I made yesterday, Friday. The day was supposed to bring snow, but instead it hung in limbo.
Imagine a day of snowfall, just without snow. Or try it this way: Imagine the moment just before snow begins to fall, only stretched out endlessly, filling a whole day.
The Song of the Day is “What Power Art Thou“, the song of the Cold genius from Henry Purcell’s “King Arthur”, made popular in 1981 by Klaus Nomi.
Looking it up on YouTube let me dicover some more interesting versions. How about this powerful rendition by Matteo, or maybe Harnoncourt’s production from the Salzburg Festival, hilarious (I was there, I’ve seen it and I have the DVD), but, judging from the comments at Amazon, obviously not so popular with the English crowd. Of course, for the purists I can always recommend John Eliot Gardiner. Enjoy.
This and the image of the next post (that I’ll write in a few minutes) were both taken today, Sunday, on a short walk down along the river. I have made a few images on Saturday, but that was such an exceptionally dreary day, with fog, high clouds and then in the afternoon snowfall, that I really beg you to excuse me: I can’t possibly find a single usable image from Saturday.
I could have driven up the mountain for some spectacular images, but sometimes it is just fine to take a short walk in the neighborhood and look out for the more silent beauties. I like this way along river Gail, just before it joins river Drau. The fallen trees give you all sorts of interesting angles. I could probably have fiddled with local contrast in the foreground snow, but instead I chose to simply upload the JPEG from the camera. I guess there’s nothing really wrong with it.
The Song of the Day is “Winterwood” from Don McLean’s 1972 release “American Pie”. Hear it on YouTube. Sort of fits my mood today 
Sundays, you know? This lazy feeling, and then on a day like this. According to the web cam on mount Dobratsch, even above the dense fog cover, it was cloudy and the light was flat. No reason to drive up the mountain, instead I have squeezed one more image out of yesterday’s collection.
The result is maybe not too bad, I have even made it another wallpaper in my small collection of downloadable wallpapers. The problem is, most of my images are composed for exactly the format that they are published in. In this case, with the trees that are cut off anyway, it was possible to produce wallpapers in the most common sizes, without really changing the character of the image.
They are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License, so feel free to use and share them.
It’s interesting: the wallpapers are the most popular content on this blog. Of course I have expected them to be popular, but the extent took me by surprise 
The Song of the Day is one more time “Postcards From Italy” from the fantastic 2006 Beirut album “Gulag Orkestar”. See the video on YouTube. It’s a somehow melancholic song and I like it greatly.
These are images of yesterday, Saturday. I took my time writing this post, because the weather forecast for today was pretty bad, and that made me suspicious I could need one of those images for today. Thankfully I didn’t, thus you get two takes on the old classic of the way leading into the center of the image.
The image with the bridge is an HDR image made with Essential HDR, one of my two HDR programs, Photomatix Pro being the other one. With HDR Darkroom there is now a third contender, again boasting superior tone-mapping algorithms. I can’t comment on HDR Darkroom so far, I’ve just bought it minutes ago
Why does he need three HDR programs, you ask? Well, they are quite cheap, at least Photomatix Pro and Essential HDR have distinct strengths and one time I like the output of the one, and for the next image I prefer the other. It’s about choices.
Anyway. I have a license now, I can already say that the current version has a bug, it always wants to run as administrator on Vista (and according to the forums on Windows 7 as well). Other than that I have just tried tone-mapping a single RAW file and the output was – garish
The Song of the Day is “So Many Ways” from the 1986 James debut album “Stutter”. See the video on YouTube.
Days get shorter, the leaves are falling, fog lingers in the mornings and stays almost until noon. Yesterday was the last of October, a spooky event in the American world, a beautiful and peaceful day around here.
This is another image that I have published as a free wallpaper. I don’t do that with all my images. Most of them don’t lend themselves to being cropped to pre-defined formats. In this case I spent quite some time to make variants that look good in the various popular desktop sizes. The sizes are those that the vast majority of my visitors use, 1920×1200 being the biggest. Hope you enjoy them.
The Song of the Day is “Fall Foliage” from Soap & Skin’s 2009 album “Lovetune for Vacuum”. Hear it on YouTube.
That’s a pretty funny number, when you think of it
Today’s picture was taken, well, today!!! I’m back in the game. I already feel pretty well, and I have decided to take off for the rest of the week, to stay in Carinthia, relax, and be able to photograph again. Wow, that feels much better now!
As you can see from the file name, this image is an HDR, combined and tone mapped in Photomatix Pro, and then taken over to Photoshop. There I’ve used some combination of Topaz Detail, my neutral blur, my saturation layers, a cooling filter, levels and contrast adjustments, some of them localized via masks, much of that modified by blend-if sliders to work mostly on the highlights or on the shadows, in other words, this image was quite some work.
Does it look like it looked while I was there? Nope. It looks better
The Song of the Day is “I’m So Free” from Lou Reed’s 1972 album “Transformer”, one of the best albums ever made.
Uhhm … this is not lightly said. I mean it. Let’s put it like this: When asked for the 20 best albums of all times, I may produce different lists on different days, no question, but I can hardly imagine a day when “Transformer” would not be on my list. And that’s pretty remarkable.
Hear the song in very good quality on YouTube.
On Wednesday we made a trip to the mountains south-east of Kraków, the region between the Beskides and the Tatra. In a journal from 2001 I have read about the region, that legions of its inhabitants had gone to America, especially to Chicago and Toronto, but that most of them never had given up their houses.
Indeed you see innumerable of the typical wooden houses being uninhabited. In fact it’s pretty easy to see why: Although the region is beautiful, there is not much work available, almost no industry. My impression is though, that in the meantime tourism has become a substantial pillar of the region’s economy, with Zakopane being the #1 winter sports center in Poland.
Personally I was not particularly impressed though. I am afraid I am spoiled by our own mountains.
Other than that, let me bring forth one gripe that I have with Poland: It’s the habit of the Polish to burn things. We have called this trip jokingly an olfactory trip into the past. Let me explain.
Sometime in my youth it became forbidden to burn junk and plant remains on the fields or in your garden. Neither I nor my parents had ever done such a thing, but it was pretty common among farmers, and I can vaguely remember the protest against the law. It worked well though, and here in Poland I can experience what it means to the environment to not have such a law: It’s crazy, you see fires everywhere, everybody seems to burn some hay, leaves or whatever, and the air is constantly – and pretty unnecessarily – filled with smoke that hangs over the landscape like fog. That’s rather unfortunate, because the pollution by the heavy industry seems to be well under control.
By the way, the final image shows the name of a village. Language is another problem here in Poland, if for nobody else, then at least for me. Normally when I read a name in German, English, Italian, Spanish and to a degree French, I know how to pronounce it, and when I see it, I can more or less immediately recognize it. Not so here. Polish spelling is in a certain way elaborate that makes recognition pretty hard for me, and in some cases, like with this village’s name, it takes some pondering before I even have an idea of how to pronounce it
The Song of the Day is “Close To The Borderline” from Billy Joel’s 1980 album “Glass Houses”. Hear it on YouTube.
Forest roads in bright daylight, that’s a worst case scenario when we talk about extreme contrast. Everything dark is very dark and everything light is extremely bright. The Topaz plugins Topaz Adjust and Topaz Detail can really help you here to model contrast and to re-distribute the tones more evenly.
And still, this is a 19 layer job, no single plugin in the world can do it in one click. You have to have a vision of where you want to go with your image, what it is that you want to accentuate, and then you have to do it. Those Topaz plugins or Alien Skin’s Snap Art are only tools. I’ve used all of them in this image, and then some tricks of my own. In the end I got an image that satisfied me.
Is this image true to what I saw? Hell, no! Not at all, but it resembles the image that I originally set out to make. Nature could not provide me with what I was looking for.
Over the last months you have seen many images that utilized a certain tool set, and although some of these images look as if they had been made in the same way, there is really no canned effect. I use the tools that I have, at times I add a new one, some get used less often, but with every new image I am again on the road to find out. That’s why it’s art, not engineering
The Song of the Day is “On The Road To Find Out” from Cat Stevens’ classic 1970 album “Tea for the Tillerman”. See him perform live on YouTube.
This is the third blog post for today, this time the images were really made today.
You will notice that none of today’s images uses the painting effects of Alien Skin’s plugin Snap Art, but on the other hand, all were processed with the help of Topaz Adjust, and one of them, the tractor from behind, also with Topaz Clean.
It’s not that I grew tired of the painting effects, and I could probably have used them well on the forest ground, but sometimes … well, maybe I did grow tired of them 
I had to fetch some things from two shops in Villach, and afterward I drove to our parcel of land at the lake. Actually that’s where those Mock Strawberries grow. After swimming I took a series of those leaves and berries images and thought that would be it, but on my way back, I drove behind a tractor.
At first it only annoyed me, because I could not overtake, but then I noticed the dog. Uhhh … I had the camera on the passenger seat and, yes, I shouldn’t have used it while driving. On the other hand, how could I have resisted?
But it’s not only that one shouldn’t do that, it’s also that the dirty windshield took away contrast, thus I overtook as soon as possible, and after some hundred meters I parked the car and waited for the tractor. I was lucky, it had not taken a side road, and so I got some more images.
Really, is that cool and is that dog cute? Obviously the driver did not mind being photographed, and neither did the dog.
For a short time I considered playing the game once more: overtaking, waiting, making more images, because that way I probably would have got an image with a less cluttered background, but I was already in a hurry and decided to go with what I’d got.
The Song of the Day is once more “Reasons For Waiting” from the 1969 Jethro Tull album “Stand Up”. Hear it on YouTube.
