Instead of an image taken on Saturday, here’s an old one. Two years ago on a pond in mid-Carinthia, a sign reminded me to stop here and not go any further. Not that I would have liked to do so 
The Song of the Day is “The Stopper” by Sonny Rollins and The Modern Jazz Quartet. Hear it on YouTube.
By chance I found three Lightroom “HDR presets” on Matt Kloskowski’s site.
I just had to try them, and looking for an image I found these two, taken in mid-November. Actually I didn’t like the strong vignetting of the original presets at all, but they were a start, and with some experimenting I arrived at what you see.
The result looks pretty natural to me, pleasing and without the oversaturated look that you see so often. I can remember having tried to work on one of those images the day I took them, but then I came to no conclusion and instead took another image.
“Untold Stories” is from Sinead O’Connor’s 2005 album “Throw Down Your Arms”. Hear it on YouTube.
The Tokina 11-16/2.8? Easily one of my most under-utilized lenses. It’s fine for interiors and low light, especially when you neither want to go ultra-wide (ultra like in Sigma 8-16) nor need a big zoom range. DxO supports it.
This is a DxO conversion again. By accident I had used f4 and wasted a perfectly good stop, thus the image is at ISO 900 and more noisy than would have been necessary. I like DxO’s trademark fine noise though.
The Song of the Day is “Search For Life” from Ornette Coleman’s 1995 album “Tone Dialing”. Ornette Coleman. Not everybody’s taste for sure, but definitely mine 
Hear it on YouTube.
My single creative achievement of Saturday was a Gumbo that I cooked for a pre-Christmas party with friends, and when I tried to take some images on Sunday, I was greeted with a gloomy, rainy day.
I took out the Nikon 35/1.8 (supported by DxO) and made some images. Here I used Photoshop again, utilizing different curves layers on different parts of the image. Although DxO is an excellent tool for working with tonal values, it always works globally. You make your global adjustments and you either like them or not. Of course there’s no reason why you shouldn’t take a DxO conversion to Photoshop.
The Song of the Day is “Searching For Madge” from the classic Fleetwood Mac album “Then Play On”. If they only had
Hear it in the jam session at the end of this video.
Interesting: from memory I would have considered the Tamron 17-50/2.8 VC a better performer when it comes to shooting into the sun. Still, I like it.
Photoshop again.
The Song of the Day is “Soul Searchin’” from the late Solomon Burke’s 2002 comeback album “Don’t Give Up On Me”. See a live version on YouTube. Wonderful!
I’m not sure if I tried this image in DxO as well, I suppose, but in the end it was Photoshop that made it. This is the D300 again, and while I like DxO for its ability to handle difficult tonal situations, I find it much easier to arrive at satisfying colors with Photoshop.
Just for the record: All of the images that I process in DxO get a finish in Photoshop, and in almost all cases it is color that I enhance. Thus, what I am considering is buying DxO as an alternative RAW converter, not as a replacement for Photoshop.
The Song of the Day (and the Day would have been Friday, although this is a Thursday image again) is “In Search of Peter Pan” from Kate Bush’s 1978 album “Lionheart”. Enjoy it on YouTube.
It’s very early Tuesday morning. After a long weekend I am finally on the train to Vienna again. I really need to flush the pipeline, so please allow me to post a quick succession of images, three from Thursday, the only sunny day this weekend. Here’s the first one.
As to the title, this and all of the following four posts will be titled “Searching”, because I am still searching my way around in and trying to work with DxO Optics Pro 7, an occupation that really ate all of my time that I would normally have spent posting
This image, taken with the D300 and the Tamron 17-50/2.8 VC, has been processed with both Adobe Camera RAW and DxO, and although I probably would have been able to get a very similar result with ACR and Photoshop, DxO was clearly the winner. The lens is supported, its distortions are perfectly corrected, and what I really liked is the ease with which I was able to preserve the highlights, get excellent shadow detail and still have punchy mid-tones. Again: I could probably have managed to get there in Photoshop, but only with much more effort, and at least what I created in a first take (and probably would have settled with normally) looked worse.
This again shows that DxO is a good choice for DSLR images. Probably its effectiveness is greater than with LX5 RAW files, because it has much more dynamic range to work with, probably its algorithms are tuned to work best with wide dynamic range.
The Song of the Day is “Searching The Desert For The Blues” by Blind Willie McTell. Hear it on YouTube.
Funny, I couldn’t remember what a lousy performer the Sigma 28/1.8 is when the sun is in your frame. It’s such a wonderful lens otherwise, and of course such an incredibly useful focal length on APS-C.
Here’s an HDR with the green reflexes edited out (mostly), and the result, while vastly different from what the sensor with any single exposure records, looks remarkably like what I believe to have seen. Same workflow as yesterday.
The Song of the Day is “Further On (Up The Road)“, and of course it’s the spectacular version from Springsteen’s “Live In Dublin” with the Sessions Band. Enjoy the video on YouTube.
I made a couple of images this afternoon, some are plagued by dust bunnies (LX5! How I miss ya!) and one of them, this one, is an HDR image. That’s one more trick a DSLR’s has in its sleeves. I gave it a mild treatment based on Photomatix Pro’s Dynamic Range Compression tone mapping method. This is particularly well suited to soft sky gradients. Due to the subject matter we are clearly again in Electric Ladyland.
As always the Song of the Day is “Have You Ever Been (To Electric Ladyland)” from Jimi Hendrix’ 1968 album “Electric Ladyland”. Hear it on YouTube.
On the train to Carinthia. 6 pm and outside it’s darkest night. Here are two Urban Dreams captured in the morning.
Both of these images wouldn’t have been possible with a small-sensor camera like the Panasonic LX5. The image on the left was of a reflection, taken at f1.4 and with the focus somewhere in the weird lines of the reflection. In post-processing I’ve equalized the tones (the left side was much darker), pushed colors and partially contrast, but nothing of that is regarded as particularly non-photographic.
The Image of the Day is almost completely a result of Photoshop work. I took an image of an advertising poster with extremely shallow DOF and played around with it, pretty aimless, until I had the idea with the stripes, and from there it became a flag, a turmoil, something burning, a window into a world of warring nations. In the end I liked the result better than the straight photograph, and this is how it ended up as Image of the Day.
The Song of the Day is “Flags And Banners” from the 1973 Faces album “Ooh La La”. Beautiful song. Hear it on YouTube.