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.

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

I’m neither creative nor productive at the moment. I’m not even polite. The unread blog posts pile in Google Reader, and where I read, I hardly comment. I have not much time. I play Morrowind again. It’s old, it does not have the latest effects, but it is still one of the best and most addictive Fantasy Role Playing Games of all times.

The Image of the Day was taken yesterday evening in Villach. I’m pretty sure I would have liked it better with less of a tilt, with much more above the left corner included (imagine the dark trees in the background straight), but I would have had to include lots of bright, white streetlights along the upper edge, and that would have ruined more than helped. Well, you can’t always get what you want

The Song of the Day is “By The Rivers Dark” from Leonard Cohen’s 2001 album “Ten New Songs”. Hear it on YouTube.

It’s Sunday night, I am on the train to Vienna. Just like in the last post, these are images taken yesterday, Saturday. Yesterday’s images, the “Silver & Gold” and the baptistery in a local church, were taken while I waited for one tire on our car to be changed.

So were the first two images of this post. Much contrary to today, yesterday was a beautiful day. You know this slightly milky light, this November light that does not warm you, but that nevertheless warms your soul. That’s how it was.

I had to wait for an hour, walked around in the neighborhood, entered a local church (that’s yesterday’s baptistery), took photos of some more industrial aspects, of street corners, a former sawmill and much more, in other words, I had a jolly good time.

Waiting for something, that’s normally nothing that I easily bear. I am not a patient man, but being forced to wait on a day like that, holding a camera in my hands, that’s pure pleasure.

I tried to find out what it is with that autofocus problem that I reported in the last post, but I did not come any further. It sometimes happens, I believe it happens mostly after I have turned the camera on, but – honestly – I am not even sure of that. It just does not happen often enough and I can’t provoke it.

For the afternoon, clouds were predicted to come from the west, thus we decided to make a trip to Carinthia’s eastern end, the region around Lavamünd / Dravograd,where river Drau / Drava leaves Carinthia and enters Slovenia. The wayside shrine is somewhere on this way.

Ask me why of all these images, I made an image of some shrubs beside a river my Image of the Day. I can’t tell. It’s something in this image, some silence, some peace, that mightily appeals to me.

It is some quality of summer lost, some quality of sweet bitterness, some sting of death, some melancholy, some essence of fall. I can’t properly explain it but I feel it when I see this image, when I remember being there, and I hope you can feel it as well.

“Roll River Roll” from Richard Hawley’s 2007 album “Lady’s Bridge” is probably not a bad match, but judge for yourself.

This is the first in a series of entries about my newest lens, the Tamron SP AF 17-50mm 2.8 XR Di II VC LD Asp IF. These images are from Saturday, a day that began with rain in the morning and ended as a wonderful autum day. In the first two posts I want to look into two questions, bokeh and sharpness. So far I have made no formal tests, no charts, no brick walls, nothing standardized. Let’s begin with bokeh.

In the morning I had brought the car to the repair shop for a check. I used the 40 minutes to take a walk through a residential area down to river Gail. There I made the Image of the Day. While walking, I constantly made images, many of them I deleted immediately, some make good examples for what this lens is capable of.

I have bought this lens although I have seen some examples of remarkably bad bokeh. They were in a Japanese review with many images, and some of them don’t just look bad, they look outright ugly. Thus my expectations regarding bokeh were very low.

Now, if you look at the image of the red berries on a hedge, wet with rain, the image taken at f5.6, then this does not look bad at all. I have linked this image to the full-size original straight from the camera. See for yourself.

The next pair of images, linked to the originals as well, was taken at f2.8 and f8, and finally there is another pair, the one with the twigs crossing, taken at f2.8 and f5.6, all images so far at a focal length of 50mm and focused near.

Basically I can see nothing that would be wrong in these images. Obviously this lens does not have a serious bokeh problem at the long end. This is very fortunate, because exactly at the long end it is, where we are most interested in creamy bokeh. Well, this is certainly not a Sigma 50/1.4, but I think the examples don’t put Tamron’s zoom to shame either. I’d regard this bokeh as at least neutral.

Unfortunately this doesn’t mean everything’s perfect though. Let’s have a look at this cute little cat. I met her on my way down to the river, and obviously she expected some cookies from me, because she constantly thwarted my efforts to take an image of her by clinging to my feet. I took a series of images holding the camera down to her, most of them are focused on my feet or on the background, but this one came out quite well, even though I’d have liked the right paw to have been completely inside of the frame. Anyway, the cat’s pose is more than cute, and the image perfectly shows where this lens’ problem with bokeh lies. Look at the hedge in the middle of the upper edge. I can’t say for sure what the light points are, maybe it’s simply sky shining through, but those points are decidedly donut-shaped. The manhole cover in the background, left behind the cat’s face, looks almost equally ugly.

Is it that bad? I’d say no. Of course I’d have liked the bokeh at 17mm to be creamy as well, but normally when I am photographing at 17mm, I am not looking for bokeh, I am rather going for depth of field. And if I’m not, if I am forced to use f2.8 just to get as much light as I can, honestly, then bokeh is normally not my first consideration either. These are the cases of getting the shot or not.

All in all, when it comes to bokeh, I am pleasantly surprised by the performance at 50mm, while the results at 17mm are about as expected. This is it for bokeh, the next post will be about sharpness and distortion.

The Song of the Day is “Cream” from Prince’s 1991 album “Diamonds and Pearls”. See an acoustic performance on Dailymotion.

I took this image yesterday evening, on my way back from swimming. This is one of the three or four possible roads, one avoiding the highway.

I know this place. This is a sundown place. I don’t use it very often, but yesterday I didn’t have anything compelling, so I tried my luck. The Tokina 11-16 was still mounted and two test images confirmed, that I best would use a sequence of bracketed images, or otherwise I would have to choose between detail in the sky and detail in the landscape.

My soft edge split neutral density filters would not have helped me here. Through this ultra-wide lens, the transition would have been much too soft. They would at most have darkend the top too much, doing almost nothing to the sun. The right traditional tool for the job are Singh-Ray’s reverse graduated ND filters. Maybe I should get one, I suppose it would have worked very well.

With no filter available, I resorted to HDR. This is an image made of four out of a sequence of nine exposures. I tried Essential HDR first, and when it had problems aligning the images, I switched to Photomatix Pro. Both are excellent programs, none is perfect, but normally one of the two works fine. I don’t care that much which it is, I go to Photoshop anyway. Of the two tone mapping modes in Photomatix Pro, this is the more conservative, called “Tone Compressor”.

In fact I can imagine very different ways to process the image, with this one just one possibility. The “Detail Enhancer” tone mapping made the scene much less peaceful, more dramatic, and even in Photoshop there are so many different ways to go. There is no single right way and on another day I probably would have produced a very different result.

The Song of the Day is “Dream River“, again by the Mavericks, but this time from the 1998 album “Trampoline”. Hear it on YouTube.

One more post for today, then I give up. It was a long night last night and I am pretty tired.

This is an image of Sunday afternoon. I took it on a slightly unusual way to the lake. Weather was beautiful, I was swimming, and in the evening I missed my train to Vienna. Well, bad time management. While I prepared dinner, time really slipped away. In the end I had the choice between eating and catching the train. Dinner won, I took Monday off and returned to Vienna the next day.

The Song of the Day is the Jimmy Cliff classic “Many Rivers To Cross“, today from the 2002 Blind Boys of Alabama album “Higher Ground”. This is an interesting song. I love their version, but I equally love all those other versions on YouTube as well. It’s really hard to choose a favorite. Here are Jimmy Cliff, Joe Cocker, Lenny Kravitz, Annie Lennox, Cher, Eric Burdon and The Animals, Bruce Springsteen, …

Well, maybe Annie Lennox. Does not happen that often, that a song moves me to tears.

Forget about post-processing. Yes, I did some things and it’s been more or less random. I followed impulses, and as on another day the impulses would be different, so would be post-processing.

No, it’s not the procesing, it’s the crop. This is what took time, what made me try and go back, back and forth, many times, but now I am satisfied. I really like the balance in this image, and – interestingly enough – it’s a kind of hobsonesque balance that I originally set out to achieve with today’s image, and that I now enforced in this image of last Monday, our first full day in Poland, the day we went to Auschwitz. Obviously taking photographs and processing photographs are two very similar creative processes for me, cropping being very similar to the original process of composing through the viewfinder.

Why I post a past image instead of what I photographed yesterday? Easy to answer: I only made one image, a personal portrait snapshot. We had rain all day and that very fact sucked the creativity out of me

The Song of the Day is “Ride Across The River” from the 1985 (oh my, so long ago!) Dire Straits album “Brothers in Arms”. This is the very album that made the then new Compact Disc popular. Hear it on YouTube.

Sorry for the long silence. I’m not dead and I can’t blame my internet connection either. Must have something to do with being on vacation. In any case I have a real processing problem. Well, some images may turn up another day, when I lack anything usable.

What can you write about a place like Auschwitz? Can you take photos there? People do, and many of them make just the usual images, with their beloved or their friends posing, just not in front of a fountain, but in front of the remains of an electrical fence. That’s just how people are, just as places are what places are.

There is nothing like an evil place. It’s all about the people, and what can you say about a place that was a rural village for centuries, and then, all of a sudden, strangers came, performed their incredibly cruel deeds, turned the place into hell, stayed for five years and vanished again.

It is pretty impossible to conserve the horror. Yes, Auschwitz I, the original base camp, still has something sinister in it. It’s the contrast between neatness of architecture and the horror of the double electrical fences. If at all there is something left of pure horror then it’s there.

Auschwitz II, Birkenau, is different. It’s a vast area, mostly ruins, and it’s there that the masses were killed. It is much less graphic, but in its largeness there is an abstract monstrosity that suddenly makes all those big numbers of millions of killed people comprehensible. This is a place that obviously was built for that purpose, a place that had the capacity.

Still, the question remains: what can you photograph at such a place? Can you show anything meaningful beside the cliché? I don’t know. What you get today is a detail from a fence in Auschwitz II, a view from the monastery Tyniec on top of a hill overlooking the river Wis?a, and the Image of the Day is a birch tree shortly after sundown.

The Song of the Day is “Going Places” from Paul Weller’s 2003 album “Illumination”. See him perform live on YouTube.

At first I was not sure about these images, but the longer I see them, the more I like them. Today was just this: a beautiful and hot summer day. Hopefully there are more to come, but even if not, it will have been a great summer.

Searching for a Song of the Day I began with my newest CDs, and the title “Those Were The Days” stuck.

Recently, when I wrote “1019 – Both Sides Now” and searched for a video, I found out that this Joni Mitchell tune had been interpreted by countless people, among them Dolly Parton and Doris Day. This caused me to buy CDs of both of them, and today’s Song of the Day is the title track of Dolly Parton’s 2005 album of cover versions.

I also found a video on YouTube, and there disaster struck: Have you ever heard “Those Were The Days” by the Leningrad Cowboys and the Russian Red Army Choir? Live in Helsinki 1993?? The Total Balalaika Show???

Oh my, speak of definite versions

It caused me to immediately order the CD (get the double CD from Amazon.de!!) and the DVD. The DVD contains only half of the concert, but the problem is, you really have to see them. Unfortunately “Those Were The Days” is not on the DVD, but of course YouTube has it

And while you’re there, don’t forget to see some of the other songs from this concert. Basically you find the whole concert among the “Related Videos”.