River » Andreas Manessinger

1992 – Tanglewood

Apr 022012

When I looked at the diverse collection of Saturday’s images, I was slightly confused. Which one would be the Image of the Day? I had no idea.

The images had been taken before, during and after a short trip to a nature reserve south-east of Villach, a loop in river Drau, still connected with the main river, now a bird’s paradise.

And which images should I include in the first place? I had processed six of them, and at least the mountain was obviously made in a different place, while the black and white image was from the same place, but in a completely different style. And the blue boat?

In the end I decided to use all these images. I just have enough processed images that have already been uploaded, yet are still unused in a post. Let’s flush the pipeline, saving images is for wimps

This question out of my way, I still had the problem of deciding which image should be Image of the Day. As so often, the decision was more or less random. I began with the first, looked for a title, thought about entangled wood, and lo and behold, there’s a song called “Tanglewood 63″ from the 1971 album “Colosseum Live”.

I suppose what they meant was not a forest but the brand of guitars, but maybe I am entirely wrong. It’s hard to tell anyway, because although there are vocals, there is no text.

On the other hand, a damn fine piece of music it is. So fine indeed, that it made my decision: I just had to use this “song”. Hear it on YouTube.

1958 – Swan Song

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Feb 262012

The sun is setting right now, it will be spectacular again, but I won’t take images.

I went out at noon, to the center of Villach, and I took some images of swans on the river and of modern architecture along the shore.

In the end I processed five images, and I have decided to save the two architecture shots for another day. I like all of them and I wouldn’t want to bury either.

For all of you considering the new Olympus OM-D E-M5, I’d like to recommend a blog that I recently found, of someone who currently has the chance to actually hold and use this new camera. Yesterday Pekka Potka from Finland made some tests of the new 5-axis image stabilization (finding it impressive), and today he looks into dynamic range (with equally promising results).

I suspect he is still under NDA regarding image quality, but maybe not. In any case I’m eager to follow his blog. It makes waiting a tad easier

By the way, the OM-D’s user manual is already available for download, for instance from Olympus’ US site, although it does not look entirely finished. Bracketing specs are still dubious, but seemingly it will be possible to change aspect ratio with one of the function buttons. That’s good news, because I miss it on the E-P2.

The Song of the Day is “Swan Song” from Marc Almond’s 2010 album “Varieté”. Hear it on YouTube.

1957 – Orange Colored Sky

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Feb 252012

Today it was pretty clear that the sundown would be spectacular, I just couldn’t decide where to go.

My first impulse was Faaker See, a lake very near Villach, where I know a place that’s ideal for picturing the setting sun. There is still ice on the lake though, and because I wanted reflections in water, I finally chose the bridge over the river Drau/Drava in Rosegg, an old favorite of mine.

The Song of the Day is “Orange Colored Sky” by Michael Bublé. Hear it on YouTube.

Oh and, just because I stumbled upon it, here’s one song more: a fantastic “Blue Moon” by an early Frank Sinatra. SCNR

1909 – Far From Me

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Jan 082012

Working with the Sigma 150/2.8 on an Olympus PEN feels slightly unbalanced. It’s a very capable combination though.

Today I was out photographing for slightly more than an hour. I used only the 150 and the results were few and mostly mediocre. These two are the best. I guess I could get used to the angle of view, but due to the heavy weight and the slow process of focusing manually, it’s probably too tiresome to be worth it, except for very special occasions when I need a fast, long lens. Hmm … I guess that means never

The Song of the Day is “Far From Me” from Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ 1997 album “The Boatman’s Call”. Hear it on YouTube.

1876 – The Burning Bridge

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Dec 092011

I didn’t take any usable images on Tuesday, so here’s a Wednesday morning image instead. I tried it in DxO Optics Pro and finally settled with Adobe Camera RAW / Topaz Denoise / Photoshop.

It’s a slight improvement over the camera’s JPEG (not much, really), but it was much better than what I could get out of DxO, even after some experiments.

It’s interesting: I’ve spent much time with DxO now, and although I get excellent results with images taken with the D200 or the D300 (comparable to the best I can do in Photoshop), it’s almost always worse than the JPEG for the LX5, regardless of ISO.

The Song of the Day is “Burning Bridge” from Kate Bush’s 1985 album “Hounds of Love”. Hear it on YouTube.

1867 – Quiet Moments

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Nov 272011

Today was another sunny day and I went photographing at around noon. This is not what people call “good light”, but it’s plenty of light for the camera, and I wanted to see what kind of quality I can get when I’m not always forced into higher ISOs.

It’s a mixed bag. For this particular image I have the feeling that its quality has been improved by working from RAW. It’s not free of noise, but it has excellent detail, rich colors, I got rid of the effects of haze nicely, so basically I’m perfectly satisfied.

This is not a general rule though. For some images Panasonic’s JPEG engine produces fairly nice images, and when I try to reproduce them from RAW (for instance because I want to fiddle with white balance) I fail. What I mean by fail is, that I smudge too much away with noise reduction, introduce too much noise by sharpening, and that in the end my result is noticeably worse than the JPEG straight from the camera. Of course this is disturbing and for me it is an indication that I’m always working on the edge. Image quality of the FZ-150 is fairly good, the camera’s JPEG engine is nothing short of impressive, but when you fiddle with the images, the smallest mistake is enough to make the image fall apart.

April asked me in a comment if the images are “print quality” and I confidently answered yes, but I really should note that the slightly lower quality, although probably not visible in prints, might prevent certain kinds of manipulations in Photoshop.

The Song of the Day is “Quiet Moments” from Chris De Burgh’s 1979 album “Crusader”. Hear it on YouTube.

Update: I’ve re-worked the colors and added some more contrast.

1841 – A Foggy Day

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Nov 012011

I was working most of the day in the new apartment, so I didn’t miss the sun that much, but when I finally found a little time in the afternoon, some streaks of sunlight would have been nice.

Well, it didn’t happen today and it didn’t happen during most of the weekend, with the exception of yesterday. This is typical November weather in Carinthia. High fog all day, but when you take the time to drive up a mountain, the sun comes out at around 1000 meters above sea level and you have beautiful blue sky. It’s only that I lack the time

The Song of the Day is “A Foggy Day” by Frank Sinatra and Willie Nelson, released on the 1984 album “Duets II”. Hear it on YouTube.

1790 – The Dead Marshes

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Sep 182011

Here’s some more images from Italy, this time from a trip to the Isonzo delta. The Isonzo or Soca, as it is called in Slovenia, was the stage for some of the most deadly battles on the southern front of World War I.

Hemingway’s “A Farewell To Arms” is set in this area or slightly north of it, as these images were taken in the “Riserva Naturale della Foce dell’Isonzo“.

Whatever it was that I saw here in the water, the scene immediately reminded me of the Dead Marshes in Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings”. I only had to use Photoshop to turn a bright sunny day into a scene of nightly gloom.

It took me two attempts, and only the second one, involving a B&W layer in “Multiply” blending mode, some color filters and who knows what else, convinced me.

The other images were taken in the surroundings, only the bike detail later on the street. Northern Italy is surrounded by mountains, but most of it is flat land and there are plenty of bicycles everywhere.

The Song of the Day is “Swampsnake” from the 1973 album “Next” by The Sensational Alex Harvey Band. Hear it on YouTube.

1740 – Mining For Gold

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Jul 252011

I guess you begin to see a pattern here: this is again no current image, again it was taken from the same bridge as the images in the last post and in “1731 – Dream River II“.

Straight from the camera the image did not do anything to me, but somehow I wanted to try what I can make of it in Photoshop. I think the result is pretty nice and although it does not at all look like what I saw, it feels like what it should have looked like

As to the idea of coloring, that’s clearly the result of my exposure to Roland’s images. Glad he has a blog at last

The Song of the Day is “Mining For Gold“, either from the Cowboy Junkies’ original 1988 “The Trinity Session” album, or from the 2007 “Trinity Revisited”. Great music, introduced to me by my friend Bill Birtch. I’ve linked to “Trinity Revisited”, but honestly, you can’t go wrong with either of them. Hear the original version on YouTube.

1739 – River’s Invitation

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Jul 252011

This should be an image taken Sunday, but it is not. We had pouring rain yesterday, snow down to 1800 meters, in other words, I did not feel like photographing. Well, actually I did. In the morning, when fetching breakfast from the local bakery, I made some images of puddles and raindrops on the windshield, but in the end there was nothing usable.

Instead here is another image taken on Saturday. It’s from the same bridge as “1731 – Dream River II“, only looking the other way, downstream.

While the last post featured a slightly enhanced image, this one was processed to look as natural as possible.

The Song of the Day is “River’s Invitation” from the 1969 album “Soul ’69″ by Aretha Franklin. Hear it on YouTube.

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