I’ve not been outside today, I am still not feeling completely well. This is an image from the recent trip to Poland, taken when we made our way over small roads from Kraków to Auschwitz.
I suppose this plane is not in use any more, and why someone would have a jet plane in his garden, I really can’t tell. I just found it curious.
Apart from that, there are some new things on this website. If you read this in Google Reader or some other feed reader, you will have to click through to my site to see them.
The first thing are the portfolios. See the menu on top? There have been portfolios for the last four calendar years for a while now, the recent addition is a bicycle portfolio.
The other thing is that I am just beginning to offer free wallpapers of some of my images. They are released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License, which means that you are invited to use and share them, as long as you don’t sell or change them.
Of course you may already have discovered the new NEWS widget on top of the side bar. This is where I will post announcements from now on.
The Song of the Day is “The Garden” from the 1996 Einstürzende Neubauten album “Ende Neu”. Einstürzende Neubauten, this is Blixa Bargeld’s own band, his other major involvement was of course with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. See a video on YouTube.
There are some image titles that I use once a year. “Summertime” is one of them (I kinda missed it this year) and another one is of course “Summer’s Almost Gone”.
I took this images yesterday on my way to the lake. The water level is unusually high for this season, but it is still warm enough to enjoy ten minutes of swimming. This is late sun falling between the trees of a rural orchard.
The Song of the Day is again “Summer’s Almost Gone” from the 1968 Doors album “Waiting for the Sun”. We had it last year and the year before. Actually it was interesting for me to compare the pictures, but in a way they all seem to carry the concept over.
Hear the song on YouTube.
Yesterday evening the office chair in my study broke, and I spent most of today finding a new one. Well, I eventually did, but it took me a hell of a time. Once I even fell in a shop, because the chair that I tested, had been wrongly assembled. I tried to lean back … and suddenly the chair tilted over.
Actually that is not really funny. You sit in the chair, you lean back, and suddenly it topples over, and you feel like falling, and then you fall, and you try not to, but there is nothing in the world that you could do. You can only hope that you won’t break your neck.
Well, I didn’t, and I’m pretty glad about it. Now I’m sitting in a nice and comfortable new leather chair and all’s well again.
The Image of the Day was taken shortly afterward, while we sat in the garden of a pub nearby. While drinking a beer and relaxing, I saw this bicycle, the planks leaning against the shed, and I thought this could be a composition.
The Song of the Day is “On Saturday Afternoons In 1963” from Rickie Lee Jones’ 1979 self-titled debut album. Deezer has the album, and on YouTube is a video, albeit with inferior sound quality.
Well, that’s not really suburbia, at least has not been for 150 years now 
This is in Vienna’s 8th district, very near from where I work, very near to the heart of the city.
Are these dreams? Does any of these images qualify? Actually I don’t know. I am struggling with “Urban Dreams“, my SoFoBoMo book. No, it’s worse, I am struggling with the very basics: How do I get a sequence out of a bunch of images?
I have played around with grouping in Adobe Bridge and with manual “Lighttable” sort in IMatch, my image database, but that will only take you so far. 
I guess my problem is not grouping. After all, when I have found groups, what am I supposed to do? Sequence inside of the groups and then string the groups together?
Apart from the obvious problem, that the applied categories are not sharp, have overlaps, it sounds rather boring to me, a little bit like pointing with fingers, and it gives up on possible dramatic effects, on implied stories. It’s not what I’m going to do. But then, what else?
At the moment I have 85 images processed and published since May 4, the day that I began shooting with the project “Urban Dreams” in mind. Some more sleep unprocessed and I could pull them out if I need more of a certain kind. I will make some more in the remaining 12 days, today included, although three of those days will be spent in Carinthia, thus we’re down to 9. If I happen to come up with good candidates, I really plan to make changes until the last possible moment. That makes for at least about 100 images.
My next step will be to simply begin a book. I will use the measurements that Blurbs specifies for their 8×10 inch landscape book. This is not very big, in fact it’s rather small, but I just held a book with polaroids by Manual Alvarez Bravo in my hands, and I found it to be very comfortable to hold.
I will begin by selecting safe candidates that must go into the book. Then I will try to surround them with what feels good, makes sense, tells a story, juxtaposes them, whatever. Finally I’ll try to bring those strings into a sequence. We’ll see how far I get with that
If you wonder, today’s title is a line from the Sex Pistols song “Satellite“. I really like the version from their 1996 reunion tour “Filthy Lucre”, but your taste may be different. YouTube has a video of the original.
Since yesterday I’ve had a cursory look on the proposed text to that German censorship law, and as far as I could see, there is no obvious cancellation of the presumption of innocence. It was quoted as having been said by Attorney General Brigitte Zypries on the press conference together with Ursula von der Leyen, but according to Sueddeutsche Zeitung, there was much open disagreement between the two about the actual consequences of the law and of how it should work in practice.
Unfortunately there seems to be no video of the press conference (how’s that in our digital age?). Zypries is quoted more than once, but all quotes link back to my original source, the news site of heise.de. At least someone from Heise, Germany’s most prestigious technical news publishing house, has obviously been present, as they are on the forefront of resistance against censorship. There is at least a chance that they may have got the quote wrong, I doubt it though.
Anyway. That’s how it looks today. The problem is, that this in itself is only a piece of a puzzle. There are strong forces lobbying for a regulated Internet, modeled after the regulations imposed upon broadcast media like TV. How about having certain violent or sexually explicit content available only at certain times of day? As stupid as it seems in a net spanning a whole planet: It was proposed and is actively pursued by some law making initiatives. Oh my, stupidity is boundless!
The Song of the Day is “The Future” by Leonard Cohen. The censorship in the original video was intentional, and it works so well here. See it on YouTube.
Three posts in a day? Promised: I’ll keep this very short and apolitical, OK? I’m back in Vienna, I have all my images with me again but still no Photoshop installed. Oh my!
This is an image from today. I went into the garden and took some images of the Cherry tree that just now has wonderful colors. I’m afraid it will have lost its leaves by next weekend.
The Song of the Day is “The Garden” from the 1999 Faithless album “Sunday 8pm“. Hear it on YouTube. There are no lyrics, it’s instrumental
I’m back in Vienna, back to my apartment, and I feel much more comfortable now
I don’t really have time for photographing these weekends. A sweet little maple tree, seen from the balcony of the new apartment in Villach saved the day. It will take some more weekends until I have finally moved. Expect more weekends with boring images
Hmm … in hindsight I should probably have used the Nikon 18-200 VR and a polarizer instead of the Nikon 70-300 VR for which I have none. Damn!
The Song of the Day is “Sugar Maples” from Clarence Bucaro’s 2004 album “Sense of Light“. Sorry, no lyrics, no video, but a wholly enjoyable album by an astounding young man.
Landscapes with the fisheye, that’s still elusive for me, but using it in the typical wide-angle style with a prominent foreground works quite well. This image was taken at the entrance to our parcel of land at Keutschacher See, the lake where I normally go swimming and where I did so yesterday. Btw, this is a “Philadelphus Coronarius” or “Mock Orange” shrub
The Song of the Day is “Garden Of Earthly Delights” from the 1989 XTC album “Oranges & Lemons“. Hear it on YouTube.
In the end it seems we’re finally getting somewhere. This fisheye lens gets controllable, the number of usable images rises again
Well, not much more to tell, especially nothing book-related. I’m in a hurry. I’ve got to be off for work.
The Song of the Day is “In The End” from the 2002 Stranglers album “Coup De Grace“. Nobody seems to like this album, I do. Quite a different thing that this song wants to say, but it’s beautiful and the title fits my needs. I take it anyway
Hear it live on YouTube.
It’s Sunday night now and I write the entry for Saturday. Saturday afternoon I was out photographing for an hour, nothing special, only some wide-angle landscapes, but the really spectacular thing was, what I saw when I returned home.
Situations like these are really impossible to photograph. The dynamic range exceeds everything that sensors or film can record, yes, it exceeds even the range of the human eye. I had made two exposures, one with a completely burned out sky and a second with most of the sky intact, but everything else pretty lost in darkness.
The two exposures were from slightly different points of view and impossible to combine. I’ve decided to use the second one, the dark one. This is a 14 layer job with 8 distinct masks, but ultimately I think I made it. It’s pretty amazing what enormous reserves the RAW files of Nikon’s D300 have.
The Song of the Day is “Ray Of Light” from Madonna’s 1998 album of the same title. See the original video on YouTube.
