Photography has always been expected to say something about reality.

So, you want reality? I give you some reality. That’s how it looked here today. All day. Really

The Song of the Day is “Real Life Hits” from the 1981 Carla Bley album “Live!”. See a video on YouTube.

OK, after Sunday’s sunny splendor, Vienna felt like a shock. I arrived late Sunday night in light snowfall, and in the morning most of it had been washed away by rain.

Mind you, the emphasis is on “most”. Even today, Tuesday morning, when I look out of the window, the snow is not completely gone. The slush will stay with us. How do you like that, Mr Cedric Canard?

Nevertheless, treating the day like a lemon, I was able to squeeze something out for you. We had those mannequins a few times, notably in “829 – Dedicated Follower Of Fashion“, “948 – Hit The Road To Dreamland” (as one of the additional images) and “1006 – The Great Song Of Indifference“. Here I had just to wait a little, until the approaching cars provided the right light.

The Song of the Day, well, this was an obvious one. We already had the song some time ago, though not the exact title. “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” from one of Bob Dylan’s early masterpieces, the 1966 double album “Blonde on Blonde”. Hear it on YouTube.

This is not an image of today, this is another image of Friday, still from Vienna, taken from the rear of the tramway as I approached the railway station. Today I was lazy, played computer games, slept in the afternoon, and in the evening I attended Andreas Frei’s annual Christmas party.

I mentioned Andreas several times, he is the guy who just made the post-production for the movie “Mount St. Elias” (where he contributed two songs), recently produced singer Jean Nolan’s album “Born Ready“, is a great musician himself – and just a good friend. It was a great evening, except for photography

On the other hand, in a way this image is also an image of today, because only today I remembered that I had taken it at all. It was still on the camera, because at the time that I took it, I had already decided to make yesterday’s “1155 – Born To Be Wild“.

The Song of the Day is “Leaving The City” from Róisín Murphy’s 2005 album “Ruby Blue”. Hear it on YouTube.

It’s still raining. I am on the train to Carinthia and here is an image of this morning.

It’s funny what you look at when you desperately need an image. This speck of concrete in the asphalt of the sidewalk caught my attention. Somehow it looked like a wild animal, most likely a gorilla, angrily crying.

The Song of the Day is “Born To Be Wild”, but not the Steppenwolf version from Easy Rider, no, a version from Romanian brass band Fanfare Ciocarlia’s 2007 album “Queens and Kings”. If you don’t know them, you’ve missed something, and if you possibly can, try to see them live as well. I have and it was incredible. Hear it on YouTube.

I don’t know if you like that image. I do. I like the man in the background and how he is in exactly the right position. Would it disturb you to know it, if this were a composite?

I sometimes do such things. I take a series of images of, say, a bicycle, and then I find that I can’t get a satisfying background. When the right side is perfect, someone is on the left side, when the left side is OK, a car comes in from the right. On a busy street, you can play that game for quite a while and still end up without the image that you are looking for. Sometimes in such a situation I may combine two exposures, say, one where the left side has a perfectly empty background and the right side has a person in the background, just in the right place, just in the right pose.

Do such things disturb you? Would you rather want to not know it? Imagine a situation when you can’t possibly find it out: would you want to be told or not?

The Song of the Day is “The Man That Got Away” from the 1999 Cher collection “Bittersweet: The Love Songs Collection”. Hear it on YouTube.

Rain in the morning, a beautiful day from 10am until sundown, night when I left work. Oh dear, I had a hard time finding anything at all.

I woke up at 4:45am, sat down at my computer desk and began trying to process an image. I didn’t have many to begin with, and all of the night images turned out as failures. This one was my safety net, the one I finally fell into. I better like it, because now it’s so late that I have to hurry for work. Damn it!

The Song of the Day is “Fallin’ Rain” from the 1990 Neville Brothers album “Brother’s Keeper”. No lyrics available. Hear it on YouTube.

Sometimes the titles won’t come. Train, rain, … I’ve had too many of them. It is late now, very late. This is an image taken early this morning from the rear window of the tramway train, line #5.

Yes, there are still some with real windows, windows that you can open. I love those trains and I always open the windows, take images while the train rumbles on. Not many of them find their way into this blog, but they are countless.

The Song of the Day is “No One Knows I’m Gone” from Tom Waits’ 2002 album Alice. Hear it on YouTube.

PS: Wanna see some good pictures? Head over to Emma’s blog. That’s some good pictures

What’s better, an old image or a bad image? You’d probably agree that in doubt I should go for the old one, so do I, but not today.

Yesterday I was dried up, much contrary to Vienna. I had had a 12 hour day at work, and when I walked home, it was dark, cold and very, very wet. I’ve made a lot of uninspired images on my way home, and some of the better ones came out to be not sharp or otherwise lacking. Basically this one is not much better, but it’s morning, too late now, I’ve got to go to work. You’ll have to take what I’ve got, I’ll try better today. Thanks for your patience and continued support.

The Song of the Day is “Silver Stallion“, originally by The Highwaymen, here in the cover version by Cat Power on her 2008 album Jukebox. See her perform live on YouTube. Oh dear, not even the title fits! Uhh, forget it

Rain and snow, and that the whole day through. Is it a wonder that I can’t offer anything real good?

On the other hand, although today’s images lack in quality, I somehow like these two pairs of wheeled transport devices.

Image #2, the two motorcycles, is curious in one respect: I couldn’t stand it at all and was about to throw it away, and then I remembered the two images that I had given critique today on Photo.net, a snail that was simply perfect, and a street scene, that I really liked, but where I felt something to be missing. The snail had a frame that was absolutely essential to the image’s effect, and after I loaded the street scene in Photoshop and added a white frame, I found the image much more satisfying. And really, adding a white frame to the motorcycles made them at least bearable.

It’s nothing that I do very often, but surprisingly it sometimes works wonders. Just something to keep in mind

For lack of a better title (or simply lack of time to search for one), the Song of the Day is once more “Just Friends” from the 2006 Amy Winehouse album “Back to Black”. See her perform on YouTube. It’s still as good as it was two weeks ago

It’s Friday morning. It’s stormy outside, just as it was yesterday, just as it was the day before. Meteorologists were right, we had snow yesterday morning. Only mixed into the rain, more the idea of snow than real, physical snow and nothing remained, but I’ve heard of parts of Austria where it piled up to 20cm. Isn’t that strange, given that we had 25 degrees Celsius about a week ago? More strange, given the fact that I was swimming on Saturday?

Well, that’s how it goes. I have no good image for yesterday, but I won’t shy away from showing you a bad one

I was in a hurry yesterday morning, I took the tramway line #5, and this image was taken through the rear window just before the last station, just before I left. When the train accelerates, water spills down from the roof and runs down the window.

The Song of the Day is “A little Rain” from Tom Waits’ 1992 album “Bone Machine”. Wow, is it really that long? Excellent as always. Hear a 1999 live version on YouTube.