Sorry for the delay. Yesterday I had one of those rare meetings with my friend Christian. Actually I had forgotten the date, and when he met me at work, I was pretty surprised and embarrassed, because I was supposed to be the host.

Thankfully the shops were still open and I could go the the next supermarket to fetch some edibles and some wine. It left me damn short time for photographing though. In fact this image was taken while I walked back home. Note to self: Never go out without a camera, even if it’s only to the supermarket

The Song of the Day is “The Golden Age” from Beck’s 2002 album “Sea Change”. See the video on YouTube.

The good thing is, I have slept long and well. The bad thing is, that I have no time to write a longish post now

The Song of the Day is “I’ll Be Your Mirror“, originally from the Velvet Underground’s banana album. I have it on disc 1 of the remastered “Gold” collection of 2005. Nice song, hard to find.

Deezer can’t play anything from the Velvets, on YouTube the song is “not available in your country” (many thanks to the music industry, yes, of course I’d rip it from YouTube), but in the dark forests of Romania I have finally found it

Mark “The Landscapist” Hobson did it again. He wrote one of his usual rants against what he calls the “pretty-picture crowd”, and as so often, I mostly agree.

He argues with the two Japanese concepts of “hade” and “shibui“. Both mean a form of beauty, “jimi” being a third one, with shibui being roughly the ideal middle between flashy, gaudy hade and dull jimi.

From “The pursuit of comparative aesthetics” by Mazhar Hussain and Robert Wilkinson we learn that

Restraint is one of the ingredients in shibui. Shibui art objects are unobtrusive, unostentatious and modest with understatement as a characteristic style. An underlying notion is, that the less powerful object will probably be the more artistically effective.

For Mark, the full saturation mindset of the “pretty-picture crowd” is of course hade, and he insists that hade, while not intrinsically wrong, is only endurable against a backdrop of shibui. So far, so good, and I agree, but it may be worth looking deeper.

First it is worth to notice, that hade and shibui are not necessarily connected to certain levels of saturation. Mark oversimplifies. Vincent van Gogh’s pictures probably have more characteristics of shibui than of hade, but when you see them hanging on a wall, you are almost blinded by the saturated colors.

Furthermore we can’t reduce hade and shibui to purely aesthetic categories, they are as much defined as behavioral concepts, as lifestyles, which probably best explains the attributed relative values, and as I understand Mark’s attitude, his gripes seem to be more with behavior and intent than with measurable physical qualities like (over-)saturation.

I guess what we artistically pursue, hade or shibui, it all boils down to why we do it. It’s not even a matter of being a leader or a follower, we all are always both of it to a certain extent. No, it’s a matter of why we pursue art. Do we do it essentially for ourself, meaning: are we free, or do we do it to impress, meaning: are we dependent upon positive feedback, do we strive for admiration?

The more we depend on others, the more we will compromise, the more we will try to please, and pleasing in a Koyaanisqatsi world always and at first means getting seen at all, something that hade perfectly accomplishes.

But even if it is shibui that we pursue, we must ask ourselves why we do it. Is it for us or is it to impress, because there can also be vanity in modesty. Less obtrusive, but only to a degree, and it does not even cater to a different crowd, only to a smaller one

I think another aspect of the same thing is, that we should realize we have time, how much time we have, and that it is OK to take time. When I begin to express myself in any creative way, I have all my life to fool around, to try things, to change, both myself and how I work, and I have the freedom to allow myself to do that.

I don’t mean to pray isolation here, that would seem quite ridiculous for a blogger, but I do pray being a little more relaxed. It’s OK when I don’t get raving comments on every photo, and it’s OK when some of my blog posts are met with indifference or are simply ignored.

Relax. Whatever the crowd does: keep doing what you do if you like it and feel compelled to do so.

I also don’t mean to play down the value of feedback, positive or negative. Feedback is OK and it is important as a means to determine where we are in relation to others. It only does not nourish us. What nourishes us, what gives our efforts substance, what gives us freedom, is to stand deeply rooted in our own experience and our own judgment. Other people can help us find out where we are, but it is up to us to know where we want to go.

Having said all that, I notice that my latest images were far from being public successes on SmugMug. Still, they indicate a turn from the playful experiments with Snap Art to an exploration that centers more around content and ambivalence, and this is exactly what I chose as my current side-project. At the moment I like it and feel compelled to do so

The Song of the Day is “Seen And Not Seen” from the 1980 Talking Heads album “Remain in Light”. Hear it on YouTube.

Yesterday I commented on “Inertia” by Paul Lester, and out of a whim I announced the idea of trying to follow side-projects, a kind of thematic or stylistic pursuits, that would have a more project-like feel, but that would not completely occupy my time.

Well, connecting to yesterday’s mirror image, I went out and looked especially for mirrors and reflections. That’s the starting point of the first such side-project, but I guess it need not be restricted to mirrors only.

The idea is more along the lines of “unusual or puzzling views”, but the whole thing is so new, I won’t even take that as a working title. Who knows, maybe I’ll kill the project off in two days

I got several images that I could have taken, this street scene is just one of them. Actually I selected it more because I really like what I could make of this low-contrast and noisy reflection in the dark rear window of a van.

Really, if there is one thing that those Snap Art filters are great at, then it must be their ability to make every image usable, regardless of technical quality.

The Image of the Day was taken on the sidewalk in front of the same shop where I took the image of the mannequin, that ended up near the end of this year’s SoFoBoMo book “Urban Dreams II“.

Again I have not used Snap Art in this image, but I have used the “Skin Even” filter in Topaz Clean. Basically that’s a skin beautifier, that works great on females and most of the time not so great on males. Here I’ve used it with a mask and lowered opacity. And this reminds me that the trial periods for these filters will be over in a few days, and that I will have to part with some money. So far the shopping list contains Alien Skin Snap Art, Topaz Adjust and Topaz Clean.

The Song of the Day is “The Great Song Of Indifference” by Bob Geldof. I have it on a collection called “Loudmouth: Best Of Bob Geldof & The Boomtown Rats”. YouTube has a video.

It’s Sunday evening, a short weekend is over, I’m back on my way to Vienna. From the train I just saw a breathtaking sundown, a little provocative after a steamy, hot day with dull, overcast sky

I don’t really care though. I was exhausted from yesterday anyway, I could not even convince myself to go swimming. Accordingly, the image that you see here was not shot today. It’s out of my SoFoBoMo reserve, one of the images that I made on May 4, the day that I began my fuzzy month.

And now please excuse me, I want to use the rest of the time on the train to define the layout for my book. This time for real

The Song of the Day is “Mirror” from the 1997 Beautiful South album “Blue Is the Colour”. YouTube has it for you.

Pretty obvious that I’m back to Vienna, huh?

Post-processing of this night image of yesterday is inspired by the recent work of Bill Birtch. My original idea to set the camera to long exposures in the range of one or two seconds and to use in-camera motion blur came from seeing recent entries on Juha Haataja’s blog, and of course such experiments were greatly evangelized by Marti Jeffers and Craig Tanner.

Seems like community is not an empty word. Thanks to you all

The Song of the Day is “Trains And Winter Rains“, the single from the new Enya album “And Winter Came”. See the video on YouTube. Isn’t it a nice trend that labels begin to creatively use YouTube instead of trying to sue them?

Yesterday morning up until mid-afternoon we had rain, and when it stopped, I took the rain cover off my bag and stowed the umbrella, looking forward to unencumbered night shooting on my way home. Well, it turned out to be wishful thinking.

On the other hand, rain is not so bad. I have shot quite some good images in pouring rain, the only thing that’s a pain, is holding the umbrella. What you gain though, especially at night, are colorful reflections on the ground.

The first image is again an example of why it’s a good idea to shoot RAW. I understand that you can adjust white balance on location, but it is inconvenient, to say the least. As a result I use automatic white balance much of the time and certainly so at night. The only problem is, no camera in the world will produce a good automatic white balance on this image, because not even the light when you’re there looks good. I remember having been shocked by what I saw on the rear LCD, all orange, but when I looked up, that’s what there was. The sodium vapor lights effectively killed all color. And still, after the fact, experimenting with the RAW file, I was able to get my greens back. Quite remarkable.

The second image is another poser, leaning against a lamp post. I did not like the output of DxO, and instead of fiddling around there, I took the problem over into Photoshop. This image has very shallow DOF with basically only the front of the front tire sharp.

I found that a blurred layer (five pixels, I guess), along with a sharpness mask did a very good job eliminating noise, and that without any artifacts. I have already mentioned it some times, a sharpness mask is an edge mask as used in sharpening, strongly blurred and with levels and curves adapted so that it masks where the original image is sharp. The radius of the blur greatly depends on what you want to mask, and for some uses you will want to invert the mask. I often use these masks to bring out a foreground by warming it up, increase its contrast or lighten it slightly.

The Image of the Day finally is one where I tried a color conversion with DxO and failed spectacularly. Toned B&W in Photoshop did it nicely

Well, what does that mean? It seems that there are certain images that work exceedingly well with what DxO does (yesterday’s is a good example), and others don’t. Add to that the fact that I am much more proficient with Photoshop and you see the pattern. At the moment I try everything in DxO, and when I don’t like the first results, I tend to fall back to Adobe Camera RAW. In any case I finish the image in Photoshop. Maybe I should always do demosaicing and noise reduction in DxO, then produce a DNG file and open that in ACR. We’ll see.

The Song of the Day is “I Can’t Stand the Rain” from the soundtrack of the 1991 Roddy Doyle adaptation by Alan Parker, “The Commitments”. If you love music, if you love humor, if you love soul and if you still have not seen the movie, this is for you.

The song has been sung by many people, Tina Turner among them, but originally (which I did not know until I looked it up today) it was a 1973 hit by Ann Peebles. Hear her version and some explanation about how the song came to be on YouTube. Not bad either

After a week of toiling in Carinthia I’m back to Vienna. It’s interesting to be on the streets again. One would think that a mere week can’t possibly make a difference, but, believe me, it can.

On my way to or from work I don’t have tons of time either, no, time is not what makes the difference. It’s the wild variety, some would say the chaos of the big city.

Unfortunately the joy was marred by the fact that I had some problem with my right contact lens. I had probably got something into the eye, it happens at times, especially with wind on the streets, and normally this goes away all by itself. This time I may not have had enough sleep the night before (which makes the eyes rather dry), or it may just have been bad luck, whatever, instead of stopping it got worse. I finally had to leave work early.

When I came out into the streets, it did not exactly help. The wind made the pain unbearable, and I had to go to an optician to buy a lens case and some lens fluid. I removed the right lens, stowed it away and then went home.

It’s funny, just at that day I had read an article about the “leading eye” and how many left-eyed photographers are trained to use their right eye (sorry, can’t remember where, it was a link on some of the 80+ sites that I currently follow, but not one of those sites itself). Now, my leading eye is the right, the one that was now practically useless, or maybe I should say blind at 7.5 diopters. Thus all the images that you see here were shot left-eyed

The Song of the Day is “Old Red Eyes Is Back” from the 1992 Beautiful South album “0898“. See the video on YouTube.

Slippin’ behind again. This is the image for Monday, taken Monday afternoon. Weird reflections on the pavement. I would have had some more images, but at the moment I am completely unable to process them

The Song of the Day is “Hello Sunshine” from Aretha Franklin’s 1968 album “Aretha Now“. Hear the sound sample there and hear Wilson Pickett’s version on YouTube.

Two images for today and not more in common than technical data. I shot both images with the Nikon 18-200 VR at 200mm and f10. I still go “long”. I even pondered about buying a new lens.

Of course this would be frivolous, considering that I bought the 85/1.8 only – what? – two weeks ago, but, to be honest, that was not what held me back. What really held me back were two things:

First, I have no idea which one. The Nikon 70-300/4.5-5.6 VR seems like a good idea. It is mostly considered a good lens, and it would buy me an equivalent of 450mm in a very light piece of plastic for a moderate price. But then, of course there is the Sigma 120-400/4.5-5.6 OS for not so much more. OS is Sigma’s equivalent to Nikon’s VR, Canon’s IS and Tamron’s VC. Oh well.

Or better the also new Sigma 150-500/5.0-6.3 OS?? Both of these lenses have not many reviews online, and what there is is rather less than favorable, but on the other hand, there is so much Sigma bashing on the forums with everybody complaining that these lenses do not compare well to pro grade lenses that are at least twice the price, my experience simply does not correlate. Yes, autofocus is off at times and frequently slow, but for the first problem I can compensate in-camera, and the second does not bother me. Apart from that, all my Sigma lenses are razor sharp. So what? You see, not knowing what you want can really hold you back

Second, this is even amplified by the fact that I do exactly know what I want, and that is really none of these lenses. The long weapon of choice is of course the Nikon AF-S VR 200-400mm 4G IF-ED, and what holds me back in this regard is only a tiny detail: €5720 for the cheapest offer. Uuhhh, and another detail probably: this beast weighs 3.275 kg. Right, with my camera body I would have to haul around about 4 kg. Well, at least you can’t complain that you didn’t get anything for your money.

OK, considering my confusion and the obscene price for my dream lens, it may not come as a surprise that I ended up buying nothing at all. Instead I went photographing (not a bad idea, really), pulled my meager 200mm to the limit, and that’s what you get for today. A reflection of some old architecture in some new, this time in color (see “645 – The Price You Pay” for something in B&W), and a man on the street using his mobile.

It’s not so long ago that almost nobody had a mobile. I remember 1996 when I got my first one, and at that time they were just getting cheap. Well, for some time I had two of them, and now I am back to one. Funny, for the still biggest part of my life I didn’t have such a thing and I didn’t miss it at all. So, these are the two fundamental technological advances of our time: mobile phones and the internet, and both are communication related. Seems like a pretty elementary need

The Song of the Day is “Everybody’s Talkin’“, a Fred Neil cover by The Beautiful South, released on their 1994 album “Miaow“. See a TV version on YouTube.