It’s Sunday evening by now. I have whiled the day away and now I am in a hurry. As usual 
This images is from a short trip on Saturday afternoon. Saturday was warm and sunny, eating the snow away at enormous speed. The image is a composite of two exposures, one taken at f5.6, the other at f2.8.
The Song of the Day is “Sitting On A Barbed Wire Fence” by Bob Dylan. I have it on disc 2 of “The Bootleg Series, Vols. 1-3 : Rare And Unreleased, 1961-1991″. 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’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.
This and the image of the next post (that I’ll write in a few minutes) were both taken today, Sunday, on a short walk down along the river. I have made a few images on Saturday, but that was such an exceptionally dreary day, with fog, high clouds and then in the afternoon snowfall, that I really beg you to excuse me: I can’t possibly find a single usable image from Saturday.
I could have driven up the mountain for some spectacular images, but sometimes it is just fine to take a short walk in the neighborhood and look out for the more silent beauties. I like this way along river Gail, just before it joins river Drau. The fallen trees give you all sorts of interesting angles. I could probably have fiddled with local contrast in the foreground snow, but instead I chose to simply upload the JPEG from the camera. I guess there’s nothing really wrong with it.
The Song of the Day is “Winterwood” from Don McLean’s 1972 release “American Pie”. Hear it on YouTube. Sort of fits my mood today
21 Images? How on earth do you cope with that? Well, my solution is, to present most of them unedited. Only three have been tinkered with.
The Image of the Day, taken at a bus stop, needed some serious saturation enhancement and minor cropping, the image of the mirror (first of the thumbnails) needed minor cropping from the left, and the image of the flags was cropped and a vignette added. Everything else is, with the exception of automated resizing, presented as straight from the camera.
This was an experience that I had needed. A bright, cold winter day with fresh snow. Now I feel again, why I had enjoyed last winter so much.
I could have taken the car and looked for some untouched nature with virgin snow, but our culture is much too much obsessed with virginity anyway, and I wanted to have the simple joy of the real experience: just taking a walk in the neighborhood, down to the river, about an hour with me, my D300 and the Tamron 17-50/2.8 VR.
And now I shut up and leave you alone with the pictures 
The Song of the Day is “Simple” from “k. d. lang’s 2000 album “Invincible Summer”. OK, wrong season, still a nice song. See a live performance on YouTube.
You know this habit of mine, taking a song title, making it the title of the Image of the Day, making the song Song of the Day. Well, today is different and this is, because I got stuck in the middle.
I have a file with all my song titles. First I search this file for keywords that I feel match my image. When I have found something, I look if I can find a video, preferably on YouTube. I also check in my Index of the Songs of the Day if I have already used the song. If so, I may use it again or look further.
Today I had a very short time of about 40 minutes for photography. But still, I got into the mood quickly, and taking photos was an intense experience, almost meditative, out in nature, first on a small country road, then in a forest by the river. It was an experience of silence and joy.
Well, “silence” was one of the words that I looked for in my list of song titles, and when I found Shara Nelson’s album “What Silence Knows”, I immediately loved the idea. The problem is, that the title track was not available on YouTube. In fact, the only song from that album that’s on YouTube, is “One Goodbye In Ten”, and when I heard that, I knew I wanted it to be Song of the Day. It’s such an incredibly beautiful song, and if you don’t know the album, I can only recommend it heartily. Here’s the video.
Sorry for the delay, this is the post for Saturday. Both images are from Saturday morning, the Image of the day taken from my study, the other from the balcony. Nice sun, but that was the last we had that day.
The fog rose within minutes, and for the rest of the day it stayed as a grayish-white blanket in a height above 100 meters, and when it really thinned out for some minutes, I could see clouds above, thus it didn’t even make sense to drive up a mountain.
I had to go shopping that afternoon, and hoping to get some winter landscape images, I tried my luck down at the river.
It was depressing. Snowy winter landscapes can be a great sight, and you don’t need sun at all. Take for example “792 – Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow” or “778 – My! My! Time Flies!“. Both were made on bleak winter days, but at least there was a thick snow cover. The real problem with days like Saturday is, that there is not enough snow, and what there is, quickly goes away, leaving patches of brilliant white between dark, wet ground, wet wood and soggy dead leaves. It’s pretty hard to make interesting images of that.
OK, this should be enough to explain why I post these images: I have no others. I’ve tried and failed. But why this title?
On just that Saturday Paul Butzi posted an article about popularity, concluding that it
appears that if you want to get a large readership, the thing to do is write posts that take a contrary view on a social issue, write lots of equipment reviews, reviews of materials, and vitriolic rants about stuff that frustrates you
As I commented on Paul’s post, it’s the same here. At the moment I get more hits than usual, and the popular posts of the moment are those about the Tamron 17-50/2.8 VC. It’s pretty obvious why, because there is not much material on the Internet about this lens, and at the same time there is much interest, because the lens seemingly fills a gap, at least in Nikon’s lineup.
More or less the same happened when I bought the D300. I got it the day after it appeared, and my series of posts was one of the first sources on the Internet. I’ve tagged it a review, but of course it was mainly a set of observations of a user, but exactly that is what people are looking for, especially in a time when it is hard to tell journalism apart from PR.
Photoshop tutorials are another classic. I’ve posted a few, and they still contribute a substantial part of the hits.
Joe Jarosak (sorry, you didn’t leave a link) replied to my comment, saying
Andreas please don’t play to your audience I enjoy your blog to hear why you might have photographed what you present. Same with Paul’s blog, I’m not interested in the tools so much but the results they produce and the thinking behind them.
And the music of course.
Thanks, very appreciated. I promise, I won’t post any “10 Top Point’n'Shoot Cameras Of This Winter”, and I will also not write about the “Rule of Thirds” and other “rules” of composition. Basically I know how to get hits, I know what draws them, but ultimately it does not matter that much to me. I try to post things that interest me, try to get some feedback, try to connect with people, but not at any price.
On the other hand, as Amy Sakurai wrote in her comment to Paul’s post,
readership numbers greater than zero are about all I look for… otherwise I can just keep my babblings locally on my own computer
Well, this goes right to the heart of blogging. Why do we do that? Why do I do it? I mean, for at least some people, blogging is a source of income. Mike Johnston comes to mind and of course Ken Rockwell. Other people use their blogs to advertise their main business. Just think of David Ziser or Joe McNally.
I don’t do that. I don’t support a business. If you want a print of one of my images, you can just contact me and we’ll arrange something, or of some images you can get them via the Fine Art Photoblog. If you don’t want my prints, well, we can still be friends
Do I do it for the ads? Oh dear, don’t be silly. There is no money in that either. I suppose it gets interesting when your readers number in the tens of thousands, but what I write is read by a small number of hundreds per day. So far my ads have not generated enough income that I even have bothered to collect it
Then why do I do it?
I think a part of the answer lies in my desire to communicate with people who are interested in the same things that I am interested in. Or variations thereof. The problem is, you can’t communicate with yourself only. You need an audience. It’s the first hurdle that every blog has to overcome.
When I began blogging, I was relatively active at the forums of the now gone Radiant Vista, and my trick was to change my forum signature daily, always containing the titles of the three latest posts as links. It took some time, then people noticed and began to visit.
With this and similar PR, I have managed to come into safe territory, having a readership definitely beyond zero, and that while doing what I want to do.
And suddenly we are back to Saturday’s pictures. If you look closely at #2, the house, you see my Imaginary Friend, the friendly snowman. It’s only about two weeks until Christmas, and you see an incredible lot of decoration here, all lit in the evening, and although this is kitsch of the worst kind, this snowman somehow touches me.
There is something symbolic in this mute, friendly smile of the plastic snowman, something deep, pointing to our desire to communicate, pointing to a certain remoteness, a remoteness that is also in blogging. We stand there on our balconies, smiling friendly, waving, hoping there’s someone, who will wave back.
That’s not bad and I like it
The Song of the Day is “Hope There’s Someone” from Antony And The Johnsons’ 2005 album “I Am a Bird Now”. See him live on YouTube.
Here is another HDR image from this afternoon. It’s again been tone-mapped with Essential HDR. I like the snappy look that this program produces.
I have labeled this post to be part of my review of the Tamron SP AF 17-50mm 2.8 XR Di II VC LD Asp IF, the lens that I have bought three weeks ago and that I use exclusively at the moment. I have no interesting sample images, but I thought I should relate another problem of this lens, a problem that I ran into just yesterday and that could influence your buying decision.
Lens flares, ghosts, all sorts of fancy colored things will haunt you when you point this lens towards the sun. It is as if light bounces around and gets reflected back to the sensor by every single element in this lens. In fact, I think that’s just what’s happening
This is no lens to shoot into the sun. Never. It’s not bad, it’s disastrous. Don’t do it.
I will look into this deeper, and I will give you samples. This will most likely not happen before next weekend. I need bright sun and some time for this. On the other hand, whatever my attempts at a more exact method may unearth, it won’t change the result substantially.
How does this change my verdict? Hmm … not really. I have bought this lens for two purposes, as a travel zoom and as a low light lens. I have not yet used it on any trip, especially not in bright sunlight, but from the sunny days so far I can say that it performs very well as long as you don’t have the sun in your frame. I guess I can live with that. And the low light part is just perfect.
Let me put it this way: Each lens is a compromise. The cheaper the lens, the bigger the compromises. By and large you tend to get what you pay for. If you look at it this way, and if you account for the fantastic low-light capability, the excellent sharpness and the stabilization, then this lens is certainly a fine purchase. It is a good overall performer, it is a low light wonder, the occasional autofocus hiccups are too rare to make much effect, distortions are so-so, and finally flares are a problem. OK, my advice is very simple: just use this lens for what it is best at. Use it, don’t abuse it. Avoid shooting into the sun and you’re OK. There are other lenses better suited for that. It’s a compromise.
The Song of the Day is “Sun Goes Down” from the 2003 Deep Purple album “Bananas”. Hear it 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.
The mornings tend to be very foggy now, just as in this first image, taken Saturday morning. It’s the playground as seen from my balcony in Villach.
It takes until around 10am, then the sun breaks through, at least on those days when it does
Saturday it did, and it ended up to be a beautiful day. Short but beautiful. We used it for a trip up the valley of river Gail, and from there, across a mountain range, to Oberdrauburg, and along river Drau back to Villach. The Image of the Day was taken pretty high above the valley, near Greifenburg.
This is a time of short days of precious light. What time could be better suited for “Daylight And The Sun” by Antony and the Johnsons? It’s from their last album “The Crying Light”. If pathos is not completely lost to you, hear it on YouTube
