I regularly infuriate Ted Byrne when I post images like this, and in a way I can understand it, imagining him scrubbing graffiti from his house’s walls. Yup, it’s destruction of private property, and especially, but that won’t make a difference to Ted, when it’s not even remotely artistic.
Yet I can’t imagine a city without these marks. No, I can’t even wish for it. It wouldn’t feel natural. You can threaten, you can punish, doesn’t matter. It still happens. You can’t prevent it – and that’s good. Look at that image, look at the layers. This is the closest our cities get to being natural, fractal, organic, aging, decaying. It’s not always nice, but neither is a carcass in the wilderness.
I’m still at home, still sick, still posting past images. This is from March, 1st and though I hope to be out again sometime this week, we could go on like that for a few hundred days. It’s interesting plundering the archives.
The Song of the Day is “Dirty Old Town“. We had a song of that title in “739 – Dirty Old Town“, but that were The Pogues. This time it’s David Byrne with a completely different Song from his landmark latin/crossover album “Rei Momo”. See a rare live performance, David Byrne some 20 years ago, on YouTube. A real gem.
Giving titles. Even (or because of) my habit of using song titles, it can be really hard.
Sometimes it takes me as long as working on the image. Here I had three of them to choose, none of them a clear winner.
In the end I decided for the one that gave me a Song of the Day. Actually I would have rather taken this one: a damaged bicycle with an infinitely twisted wheel, but really, among 34000 songs, there is exactly not a single one called “Infinity”.
Or the other one. I would have expected “Obscure” (at least that’s what I read: “Obskur”) to be a word that occurs at least once in 34000 song titles. Nothing.
Of course “Blue” was the cheap way out. 1557 songs, most of them Blues 
The Song of the Day is “Perfect Blue Buildings” from the 1993 Counting Crows album “August and Everything After”. Hear it on YouTube.
I’ve just nuked my laptop. Really. I did.
After two installations of Windows 7, performed on two different desktop computers, one from scratch in Carinthia (you remember the hard drive failure?) and one upgrade in Vienna, I had become reckless: I decided to do it on my Laptop, a Sony VGN-Z21MN, as well.
The laptop had come preinstalled with Windows Vista Business 32 bit, and I wanted to run Windows 7 64 bit (I really intend to use all of my 4 GB RAM). I didn’t want to ever go back to Vista, thus I decided to make no recovery disc. Reckless. Did I say “reckless”?
While installing, Windows 7 did not give me any option to keep the recovery partition, so I simply opted for the possible, wiping everything that was there, installing Windows 7 from scratch.
I couldn’t have been more wrong. Windows 7 installed, and then it rebooted into … a black screen. Oops! Uhhh … this Sony has two graphics cards, an Intel chipset on the motherboard and a separate NVidia graphics adapter, some 9300 or so. Switching (via a hardware switch) to the Intel graphics adapter at least gave me back my display, but then I got a crash a little later.
Well, the new installation did not work. It says something about an unexpected crash and that it needs to reboot, and upon reboot it just gets to the same point again. The Visa installation is gone, Windows 7 can’t install, the Windows XP DVD, that came with my laptop, does not even boot. My laptop is a brick. A brick, that has cost me 1400€.
No reason to panic. I will find some solution. Probably. Wish me well. I need it.
The Song of the Day is “The Cost Of Freedom” from the 1993 Marla Glen album “This Is”. Hear it on YouTube.
I’m back in Vienna. Remember when I said it’s only six days and then the days will get longer again? Oh my, time flies, from tomorrow they will.
Image #1 is a morning image. I was late and very much in a hurry. Hmm … how are these called? It’s not exactly graffiti, it’s more like someone’s tag, a signature. I guess “an annoyance” would Ted say But still: how do you call something like that in English?
Anyway. I focused on that orange something, waited a second or two until the man was just in the right position, and then I took the image. I don’t even have an idea what it is about. It’s just an arrangement that appeals to me – something that I do time and again. Must mean something, huh?
The Image of the day is one of those cases when I like to use Nikon Capture NX 2. I liked the colors and tones of the JPEG from the camera, but I wanted to crop the image slightly. In such cases I don’t crop the JPEG and save as JPEG again, no, I always use the RAW file. The problem is, that I currently use ProPhoto RGB as my working color space, thus the camera profiles in Adobe Camera RAW do not match as they are supposed to do. Capture NX 2, on the other hand, perfectly reproduces the look of in-camera JPEGs.
The Song of the Day is “Feeling Blue” from Eric Burdon’s 2006 album “Soul of a Man”. Hear it on YouTube.
I’m falling behind for no reason but being tired. It’s Thursday morning and this is the image for Tuesday. I made it while my friend Christian and I returned from dinner, and before we heard music until 2am. After that I was not exactly in the mood for image processing. Yesterday I came home late, processed it, chose a title, and then decided to lay down for only a short nap. And here we are: two days behind
Esther Emma and Flo asked me how I did the post-processing in “1158 – Sophisticated Lady“. Well, here we go:
It’s two versions from RAW, a dark one for the background, a lighter one for the foreground, and then in Photoshop I used some plugins: Noise Ninja, Topaz Detail and Topaz Clean. I used Noise Ninja on both versions, and by painting on the mask I used the light version for the face. With Topaz Detail I added some local contrast to the face, giving it more definition, but of course that raised noise again. I countered that with a skin beautifier effect in Topaz Clean, added some neutral blur (described towards the end of “571 – Them There Eyes II“). Somewhere in the mix there is also a push in saturation, done with my usual combo of Hue/Saturation layers in different blending modes, described in “683 – Welcome To The Republic“. Throw in a light vignetting layer and you’re done.
You see, there is not so much variation in my processing technique these days, and the reasoning is simple: When I change light in part of the image, I must change local contrast as well, otherwise it would look unnatural. When I do these things, I have to counter noise. Using the skin beautifier from Topaz Clean is a bit radical, but for a mannequin it is OK. On real people you have to be very careful with it, at least when you want to keep them recognizable. Topaz Clean tends to make them years younger, and that’s not always what you want, or better, that’s what you don’t want most of the time. But again, on this mannequin it was a very effective way to eliminate noise, the blur mostly adding glamor. As Flo recognized, the lights of the shop’s decoration in the background look like a pearl necklace, and that adds to the glamor as well.
That’s it. As for this post’s image, well, that’s a face stenciled upon a shop window, and behind the window is an add for a clearing out service. You see parts of the words “Entrümpelung”, “Dachböden” and some more, plus some phone numbers. I saw it while Christian and I walked to my place. I had some other images, but this natural overlay of graffiti and text struck me as an interesting detail. I love it how you can focus near with the Tamron 17-50/2.8.
The Song of the Day is “I Can’t See Your Face In My Mind” from the 1967 Doors album “Strange Days”. We didn’t have The Doors in quite some time. That’s bad, but it can be remedied
YouTube has the song.
Funny how it goes. I haven’t had graffiti for months, and now two times in a row. I didn’t exactly look for it, swear, but when I saw the word “love” this morning, I figured it would be a nice excuse for the Song of the Day.
Some time ago, following up to “1102 – Love-Less“, I got an email from Paul Butzi, arguing against my choice of music. Paul recommended the song “Loveless Love“, originally from W.C. Hardy, a variation on “Careless Love” with a different text.
The version that he recommended was by Louis Armstrong from the 1956 release “Louis Armstrong Plays W.C. Handy”. Well, just two days ago I got it and Paul is absolutely right (not that I would have doubted), the whole album is extremely good.
My only problem is, that the song is not available on YouTube. The whole thing is complicated by the fact that there seems to be a Japanese TV anime series called “Loveless”, and that there is a “Loveless – Love Song” that everybody seems to post, frequently omitting the dash. Anyway, wading through 18 pages of search results, I found some interesting things: there are for instance two versions by Bob Wills, one by Bo Carter, one by Billie Holiday, and one by The Mills Brothers. The interesting thing is, apart from obviously Billie Holiday, I didn’t know any of them. I love those YouTube adventures
OK, after the quite elaborate last post, here is another short one with an image from this evening.
May Ted forgive me, it’s graffiti again
The Song of the Day, “Kiss With A Fist“, is from one of the best albums I’ve bought in 2009, Florence + The Machine’s “Lungs”. See the video on YouTube.
Just like most Sundays, this was a slow day. I left home shortly before 2pm, at a time when you already have to worry about the sun.
My first way was towards the center of Villach, searching for some rectangular, modern architecture, something big and grid-like, something that I could use as a target for calibration images for PTLens, but I’m afraid that is not as easy as I had thought.
What I need is a pretty big building, one that fills the frame when photographed at 17mm from at least 20 feet away. I need it to have regular vertical and horizontal features, and they must be narrowly spaced, such that the image contains enough of them, even at 50mm.
I found nothing. When I gave up, I took this image of the bored cat (“fad” means “boring” in Austrian dialect), drove a little around in the countryside, made some uninspired images, and finally concluded the day with the other image, the temporary container, that is our local McDonalds while they rebuild the restaurant, catching the last rays of sunlight. Why this choice when the McDonalds image is clearly the better image? Well, I just happen to like cats more than burgers, that’s the reason 
The Song of the Day is “Honky Cat” from Elton John’s 1972 album “Honky Chateau”. See him live in Ephesus in 2001.
OK, that’s better now. Yesterday I did two things: I took my time and I changed lenses.
Taking one’s time is pretty much a precondition for any kind of photography. I mean, sure, on some busy days I have made some images that were jolly good, and what may have looked like hard work had been no more than a minute of luck or two. But that’s just that, luck, and you can’t rely on luck. Detaching oneself and spending some substantial time in disconnectedness with one’s work and troubles is still the best recipe for creativity.
The other thing is the lens. I have changed to the Sigma 70/2.8 Macro, this fantastically versatile lens of highest quality, for sure one of Sigma’s best designs. I set it to f2.8 and for the rest of the day kept it at that. If this lens does not give me fresh views and ideas, then I’m probably dead. Thankfully I wasn’t
Speaking of lenses, there is a purchase that I’ve been contemplating for a long time now, I suppose at least half a year. I’m speaking of a mid-range zoom. I felt the strong urge for something like that when we were in Udine last Saturday. I carried the Tokina 11-16/2.8, the Nikon 10.5/2.8 fish, the Sigma 28/1.8, the Nikon 50/1.8 and the Nikon 70-300 VR, and after much changing around, I finally ended up using only the 28/1.8. It worked pretty well, but in many cases I had wished for something in the range of below 20 to at least 50, maybe more.
Of course I have the Nikon 18-200 VR, and normally I carry it with me when I’m on trips, I just don’t use it. Recently, while I was sick and at home, I had a look at old images made with the 18-200, and I found that it was never really sharp. I mean sharp like the Sigma 70/2.8 or sharp like the Sigma 28/1.8. I guess I’m just spoiled, but I don’t really like the 18-200 any more.
Basically I see two candidates, the Tamron 17-50/2.8 VC, a stabilized low-light champion, nice for winter nights, and the highly regarded Nikon AF-S VR DX 16-85mm 3.5-5.6G ED. Both are stabilized, the Tamron is faster, the Nikon has a better range. Both cost about the same. See my problem? I can’t really decide what I need. In Udine, in that wonderful, bright light, the Nikon would have been the clearly superior choice, in winter nights in Vienna the Tamron might allow me to stay in low ISOs. So what’s that? A winter lens and a travel lens? Do I need both? None?
The Tamron may be better for the coming season, but don’t my primes suffice on Vienna’s streets? Is a stabilized 50/2.8 any better than a non-stabilized 50/1.4 or even a 50/1.2? Hardly, huh? And is a zoom really what I use in Vienna?
You may find me mulling about that much longer, or I may make a quick decision, I have no idea. Let’s wait and see.
The Song of the Day is “Cold Blue Steel And Sweet Fire” from Joni Mitchell’s 1972 album “For the Roses”. Hear it on YouTube.
Don’t fear, this is the last post for today, a short one, showing two bicycle images that I shot in the morning, and two afternoon images from my way to the train.
I really love these small children’s bikes. I took the images in front of the same school/kindergarten in Vienna’s Josefstädter Straße where I made “727 – The Gang“
I like both of these bicycle images. The love theme in the Image of the Day was obvious, but I don’t know exactly what to make of the other one. Neglect? A father leaving his child? Or nothing at all like that? Maybe the small bike only fakes being tied to the railing? What if this bike is spying upon the man? Could this bike be a detective? There’s certainly something in his pose, that reminds me of a young hero …
The other two images happened on my way to the train, the “Karma” image just before I went down into the Underground, the other one just after I had re-emerged. “Karma” is basically the same kind of composition as the Image of the Day or so many of the half / half images in my SoFoBoMo ‘09 book “Urban Dreams II“, only not horizontal but vertical.
The second image, the one with the tramway tracks and the giant advertising in the background, somehow appealed to me, wanted to be taken. It’s something about the keen lines and the surreal effect of the giant legs. I don’t know, I can’t really tell why I took the image. I saw it and the urge was there. I’m pleased with the result though.
The Song of the Day is “Love Or Something” by Bob Geldof & The Boomtown Rats. I have it on the collection “Loudmouth: The Best Of Bob Geldof & The Boomtown Rats”. See a nice video on YouTube.
