Do I miss my D300? Sure. It’s faster than the D200, where preview is painfully slow. It has a bigger and better display and it has more dynamic range. All true.
And the images? They are different too, at least the JPEGs, but that’s something I don’t care about.
In the end my images get created as much in Photoshop as in the camera. Take this one. Colors were vastly different from what the D300 would have produced, and the tone curve has changed completely. In reality it makes makes no difference though. At any time I have a certain feeling of how my images should look like, and that’s what I make them look like, regardless of the camera used.
The Song of the Day is “Jungleland” from Bruce Springsteen’s 1975 album “Born To Run”. YouTube has a fine 1978 live version, ripped from an old B&W video tape that has been played much too often, complete with thin, hissing audio, but you won’t mind. Believe me, you won’t mind 
And if it’s not the forest but only my backyard in Vienna, oh well, it’s rain nevertheless 
Yesterday I told you about the latest quirk of my Tamron 17-50/28 VC lens, namely that it sometimes overexposes the first image after I have turned on the camera. This is what it looks like:
Both images have the same EXIF data. It’s 1/20s, f6.3 and ISO 200. They should look exactly the same but don’t, thus one of the values must be wrong. ISO and shutter speed are set in the camera, thus it must be the aperture setting.
This actually makes sense. Normally the lens is wide open, to make for a brighter viewfinder image. Only when I press the shutter, the lens is stopped down to the selected aperture, then the shutter opens, the image is exposed, the shutter closes, and finally the aperture opens up again. Seemingly my lens sometimes fails to react to the command to stop down. From f2.8 to f6.3, that’s two and a half stops, and this is about the amount the exposure is off.
As I said, my current strategy is to set the camera to continuous mode and make not one but two exposures. It works but is still a crutch.
The Song of the Day reflects today’s weather: “The Perfumed Forest Wet With Rain” from Abdullah Ibrahim’s 1979 album “Africa – Tears And Laughter”. YouTube has it.
I’m back in Vienna, and although I’ve slept on the train, it’s insanely late by now.
Here’s one more image of Saturday. I’ve made some images today (well, yesterday by now), but even though I like the compositions, they utterly lack subject, so I’ll spare us the embarrassment and bother you with one more flower
The Song of the Day is “Delicate” from Terence Trent D’Arby’s 1993 album “Symphony Or Damn”. Hear it on YouTube.
Yesterday began with fair weather. I was even swimming, though I already heard thunder in a distance. This is an image from our garden by the lake, not exactly in the rain as the title suggests, but really shortly before. The flowers are two types of columbines, aquilegia vulgaris the blue, and aquilegia × hybrida the pink in the background. They were planted 40 years ago.
The rest of the day was shopping for ingredients, and then about five or six hours of cooking Filé Gumbo, complete with home-made chicken broth, roux and imported filé powder
The Song of the Day is “Garden In The Rain” from Diana Krall’s 1997 album “Love Scenes”. Hear it on YouTube.
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
