1396 - Bigmouth Strikes Again

Sigma 20/1.8 No Responses »
Aug 112010

These are the last images with my D300. It’s gone. I mean not really gone, not that gone, but well, gone nevertheless, at least for a week or two.

Remember that cursed Tamron 17-50/2.8, this sweet lens that works so well, at least as long as it works? Remember that I sent it in for service, because it increasingly often failed to stop down upon exposure, resulting in terribly overexposed images? Well, the Tamron service insists on having the body to match the lens to.

It’s a tad stupid, because if I upgrade to a D400 in a year, I simply expect my lenses to work.

Anyway, that’s how it is, today I sent the D300 in, and for the next one or two weeks I will be using my old D200.

The Song of the Day is one of the biggest hits of The Smiths, “Bigmouth Strikes Again“, originally from their album “The World Won’t Listen”, but as that is not available as digital downloads, and as “The Sound Of The Smiths” contains pretty much everything from that album plus much more, I am going to recommend the collection. YouTube has many live versions as well, but here is the original.

Posted by andreas at 12:45 am Tagged with: , , , , ,

1386 - Notes From The Underground

Sigma 8-16 4 Responses »
Aug 012010

I like to take small roads that I don’t know, like to see where they take me. On Saturday one of them has taken me to this place where the highway crosses the railway. Actually, now that it’s Sunday evening, now that I am on the train back to Vienna, I must have come through that place just minutes ago. I noticed too late though.

The Song of the Day is “Notes From The Underground” from the 1987 Manhattan Transfer album “Brasil”. YouTube has a live performance, and to judge from their looks, it must be from about that time.

Posted by andreas at 8:26 pm Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,

1384 - The Pink Wall

Sigma 28/1.8 4 Responses »
Jul 302010

I’m still without my Tamron 17-50/2.8 VC – and I miss it. It’s such a versatile lens, and if it were actually working, it would be perfect :)

Well, I guess it will take at least another week until I get it back from repair. Until then I use lenses that I’ve not used in a long time. We had the Sigma 50/1.4 last week, we had a few images with the Nikon 70-300 VR, and at the moment it is the Sigma 28/1.8, another fine lens that’s just a little wider than normal on my D300. I’ve even tried the Sigma 8-16, but ultra-wide is not my thing right now.

My programming blog finally gets quite some traffic, and that is an interesting thing. It’s a low-volume blog where I publish very selectively. There is almost nothing personal, it’s mostly short essays about software, about programming, and then there is this really huge tutorial that I’ve written. Obviously it is not that bad, because in the meantime it got linked to from Sun/Oracle, it was recognized by the very developers of the software that I write about, and in Google you find it on the first page when you search for “GlassFish”, “Eclipse” and “tutorial”.

This tutorial and the followup, where I looked into what has changed with the recent software updates, draw almost all the traffic, and that amounts to pretty much the same as my photoblog. Cool :)

I have announced the tutorial on Good-Tutorials.com and Pixel2Life.com, two tutorial sites that bring in some traffic as well, but on the other hand, stumbling the tutorial is absolutely ineffective. Why? Too much text, too specific. If you’re looking for it, it’s exactly what you need, but if not, you couldn’t care less.

Bounce rates are lower as well and in general people tend to browse around. It’s also interesting that the tutorial draws a constant stream of visitors, and it has been doing this for more than three weeks now. When I do the same thing on my photoblog, publish a tutorial and announce it, I get a spike for about two or three days and then it’s over. Funny how different blog categories behave differently :)

The Song of the Day is “Juicy John Pink” from the 1969 Procol Harum classic “A Salty Dog”. Hear it on YouTube. Hmm … couldn’t remember this song at all :D

Posted by andreas at 6:07 pm Tagged with: , , , , , ,

1315 - Old Red Eyes Is Back

Tamron 17-50/2.8 VC 3 Responses »
May 212010

Some days are better than others. Today I was not exactly blessed with spare time, but at least I could relax a little while going home. The bicycle images are a result of that.

Both bikes somehow attracted me, and in both cases I decided to go for details. That was a conscious decision. You know, photographing with a zoom does not always mean that you use the whole range of the lens or use the lens for all that it can be used for. At least for me it’s more like a lens that morphs from being one kind of prime to another, and not only that, I also tend to fall into a certain kind of seeing. Whenever that happens, when I find that I feel uninspired or begin to repeat myself, I just try something different. This time it was going in, taking bicycle details.

This horizontal image exactly captures what caught my eye: boldly oblique lines and elegant curves. I had already decided to make this the Image of the Day, but then I began working on the other bicycle image and it won.

The colors and the rust made me think of, well, rust, and the logical Song of the Day would have been Holly Cole’s “Don’t Let The Teardrops Rust Your Shining Heart”, but alas I couldn’t find the song online.

I searched and searched, but in the end I decided to split it and take the Song of the Day and the title not from the Image of the Day but from the morning image.

“Old Red Eyes Is Back” is originally from The Beautiful South’s 1992 album “0898 Beautiful South”, and there are two different live versions on the double CD “The BBC Sessions”, one sung by Jacqui Abbott, the other by Paul Heaton. YouTube has the album version, Paul Heaton singing lead, Briana Corrigan and Dave Hemmingway singing background vocals. Briana left the band after that album, and when Jacqui Abbott replaced her in 1994, she really became the female voice of TBS.

Posted by andreas at 2:19 am Tagged with: , , , , , ,

1314 - Together Till The End Of Time

Tamron 17-50/2.8 VC No Responses »
May 202010

^

This is one of the only two images that I made yesterday, both of the same subject. Oh dear, it’s the same old story of being in a hurry in the morning, and struggling with rain in the afternoon. This was made in the rain :)

The Song of the Day is “Together Till The End Of Time” from “The Live Adventures Of Mike Bloomfield And Al Kooper”. Hear it on YouTube.

Wonderful. Obviously this is not my version but that on “Fillmore East: The Lost Concert Tapes 12/13/68″, and actually I like it better. Much better :)

Posted by andreas at 11:16 pm Tagged with: , , , , ,

1267 - I Go To The Rock

Sigma 28/1.8 2 Responses »
Apr 022010

This morning I was surprised. It had obviously rained through the night and so the streets were wet.

The sky was not yet clear, it was very hazy, but at the same time the overall impression was one of light. The first image, an HDR may give you a feeling for what I mean.

This is another one of these tripod-less HDRs, and Photomatix Pro has done a marvelous job eliminating a person crossing the street in the background.

The second image, well, it’s just one of these texts out of context.

The Song of the Day is “I Go To The Rock” from the soundtrack to “The Preacher’s Wife”, sung by Whitney Houston. Damn fine gospel, and the Georgia Mass Choir does no harm either. Hear it on YouTube.

Posted by andreas at 6:14 pm Tagged with: , , , , , , ,

1253 - Too Much Of Nothing

Tamron 17-50/2.8 VC 2 Responses »
Mar 192010

I took this image today, in the morning, on my way to work. I really like it, but it is one of those images that are bound to a language. “Wert” is German and means “value”.

See what I mean, this juxtaposition between the word and the way it was written?

But then, I don’t really understand why those kids are doing it anyway. Maybe it was meant just like that, maybe it was not “meant” at all.

The Song of the Day is “Too Much Of Nothing“, and I mean the original. Bob Dylan & The Band on “The Basement Tapes”. Hear it on YouTube.

Posted by andreas at 6:15 pm Tagged with: , , , , ,

1250 - Thank You

Tamron 17-50/2.8 VC 1 Response »
Mar 172010

Hey, it’s not exactly Christmas, but it’s always nice to get a present :D

I found that today on a wall in Westbahnstraße. I haven’t anything better, so this will have to do. But it’s not only an ironic “Thank You” to the anonymous sprayer, no, it’s also a heart-felt Thank You to you all. We just had #1000, and now it’s already a quarter of a thousand more. Time flies.

I recently mentioned a new project. Well, at least one thing is clear now: I will create a new blog just for programming-related things. If you are interested in program design, model driven architectures, code generation and Java, stay tuned, I intend to go live around next week.

The decision to create another blog is motivated by the fact that I want to have separate RSS feeds, and the second reason is, that though black backgrounds are fine for photography, they strain the eyes when the content is mostly text.

The Song of the Day is “Thank You“, again from Dido’s 1999 album “No Angel”. Hear it on YouTube.

Posted by andreas at 12:55 am Tagged with: , , , ,

1243 - Dirty Old Town II

Tamron 17-50/2.8 VC 5 Responses »
Mar 092010

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.

Posted by andreas at 7:38 pm Tagged with: , , , , , ,

1236 - Perfect Blue Buildings

Tamron 17-50/2.8 VC 4 Responses »
Mar 032010

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.

Posted by andreas at 6:39 am Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,
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