Mittagskogel. You know this mountain, it’s a landmark just south of Villach, I have had it on quite some image, but it’s actually not so easy to get a good view on it.

This afternoon I was out, hunting it down. You know, I have no real problem with power lines and such, when I can’t avoid them, I make them a subject, but in order for that to work, I need to be able to choose my point of view. With still so much snow and no proper shoes (OK, this was idiotic, don’t tell me ), I didn’t have that freedom, thus I had to look harder.

These two images are what I came up with. Both of them are HDR, processed with Photomatix Pro, for the Image of the Day I also used a polarizer. I like both.

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

First day out of the cage, and the day showed no mercy. Yes, it was sunny in between, that was while I sat at work in front of the computer

Anyway. This image is of one short moment in the morning, when I saw the reflection of a milky sun in a window. I tried my best, even shot a bracketed sequence, combined the exposures in Photomatix Pro, but really, I would have despaired without Photoshop. Two hours and many layers later I am not pleased with the image, but not disgusted either. I guess it’s OK, but then …

I’d probably have liked a dog in the foreground to the right, on a major diagonal, opposed to the light patch of the reflection, although, even if I had had a dog in the frame, it would have probably been the wrong pose and certainly a problem with the bracketed exposures. Well, this is an image where I woudl even copy a dog in, but alas, my dog library is rather scarcely populated

The Song of the Day is “Shine On” from James Blunt’s 2007 album “All The Lost Souls”. See a live version on YouTube.

Funny that I’ve never used that song. This is an HDR made yesterday morning. In reality it’s no way “out of town”, it’s only the yard of one of those old tenement ensembles that make up so much of Vienna. Still, it looks almost rural to me or at least small-town.

The Song of the Day is Cole Porter’s “Get Out Of Town“, sung by the great Holly Cole on her 1996 live album “It Happened One Night”. Typical me: I’ve waited for so many years to see her live, in two weeks she plays in Vienna, now guess who has no tickets???

See a live performance on YouTube.

This is an image of yesterday morning. Michael had bought some used furniture via Internet, we had organized a transporter for over the weekend, and the original plan was to return it on Sunday.

Unfortunately one of the two closets that we got as a set for 25€ turned out to be too big to get into his apartment. We could disassemble the other one, but the only option for this one was to throw it away.

The problem is, in an Austrian city you can’t throw a cabinet away on a Sunday. The waste disposal sites are closed, thus we needed to keep the car till Monday morning, rise early, get rid of the damn thing and return the car before 8am.

This image is an HDR that I took as I went to work. There’s nothing special with it apart from the fact that all the cars were moving. I’ve used Photomatix Pro, and this program did a great job deciding for each moving object which version to keep. I was absolutely and thoroughly impressed.

The Song of the Day is “Early In The Morning“. This time it’s not Clapton like in “819 – Early In The Morning“, this time it’s John ‘Sonny Boy’ Lee Williamson. I have the song on disc 49 of “The Ultimate Jazz Archive”, but if you’re not interested in buying 168 great CDs for almost nothing, you can get it on the collection “Vol. 12-Story of Blues” as well. Hear it on YouTube

Another weekend is over, I’m on the train back to Vienna. Like on most Sundays I slept long, relaxed, and when I got out, it was already 4pm. I drove to a supermarket on the other side of Villach, located in a winter sports area, where shops are open even on Sunday afternoons, and when I returned and took a small detour through this village, the sun was almost gone.

This is again an HDR image, tonemapped with Photomatix Pro and then finished in Photoshop. This is actually the second version. The first was tonally OK, but much too garish. This is much more believable, I guess.

The Song of the Day is “Sunlight” from Pat Metheny’s 1992 album “Secret Story”. Hear it on YouTube.

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.

It took me a time to figure out whether I have an image for Friday, or if I need one of these two for the next post. Turned out I have one, here’s both Thursday images in one post

I have already shown images of that place, some even from the same vantage point, it’s of course Mount Dobratsch again, the mountain that broke apart, because it couldn’t stand seeing people die, then in 1348, the year of the great plague.

I like both of these images. The choice is only because I had to choose. The one with the sun in the frame is an HDR again, again of the more subtle kind. The Image of the Day is of course from a single exposure.

I haven’t been up there for very long, and in fact when I reached the upper end of the street, 450 meters below the summit, the sky was already veiled.

And the rest of the day? Installing software, what else? That’s why I am in Carinthia after all

The Song of the Day is “Solid Rock” from the 1981 Dire Straits album “Making Movies”. The Dire Straits and Mark Knopfler, obviously their label tries to get all their music off YouTube (how stunningly clever!), but I have still found at least some live versions. Here’s one from 1992.

It’s Friday night by now. No, I haven’t fallen into a hole and I didn’t vanish from the face of the planet. I was just a little busy.

Remember that I came back to Carinthia on Wednesday? Well, this is an image from Wednesday afternoon. When I arrived in Villach, it was a wonderfully clear, sunny day, and I just checked what the most likely cause of the computer problems would be, decided to buy a new system disk and a copy of Windows 7 Home 64bit, and then spent two hours drivinng around and photographing. What you see here is another HDR, the image was processed today, already on the new system.

The Song of the Day is “When Sunny Gets Blue“. Among other versions I have it as part two of a medley on Sheena Easton’s 1993 album “No Strings”. Of course it’s not available on YouTube, but maybe Anita O’Day’s version can console you. I don’t have it, but it’s, well, Anita

On the other hand, I wouldn’t easily dismiss Sheena Easton. She is not usually associated with Jazz standards, but this album is different. Very different. And not bad at all.

OK, here’s the second post of today’s series. After the plain modesty of the last post, here’s some pompous HDR for a change.

In fact, this image is not without some serious imperfections. I had made the seven bracketed images in high-speed continuous mode, meaning in only a fraction more than a second, but if you look at 100% (which I won’t let you), you see that Photomatix Pro can’t eliminate the subtle displacements of the twigs’ reflections in the water. The program has a box that you can check, and it’s supposed to be able to cope with water, but in fact it can’t. It’s easy to understand why, because the problem is insolvable in general. There may be cases where it works, but in general it does not.

Anyway, I’d say for web presentation it’s good enough, in fact it is good enough when viewed on screen at 50%, so I prefer to ignore the fact. Still, it’s important to know that you still can’t really depend on such algorithms. They invariably let you down at times.

The Song of the Day is “River” from Natalie Merchant’s 1995 album “Tigerlily”. Funny, I always thought that gal sounded like the singer of the 10000 Maniacs

Hear the song on YouTube.

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.