Today was a beautiful day, but for various reasons I couldn’t manage to get out photographing before 3pm, and it was clear that the sun was not going to last until sundown, that it would vanish in dense clouds very soon.

I know I didn’t have more than one chance, and I was already taking risk by trying a new road, one that I already have driven, but not with the intention to take photographs.

There were two reasons for it: When I set out, that was the direction that looked most promising, and the road would take me up to 1000 m above sea level, 500 m above Villach, to a height where probably all precipitation of the last two days would have been snow.

In the end I took two series of bracketed images, and one of them I processed as HDR. It was long before I reached the highest point of my route, but it was literally the last moment. Only minutes later the sun had gone, and it did never come out again today.

The Song of the Day is “This Moment” from the 1970 Incredible String Band album “I Looked Up”. See a live video on YouTube.

These are images of yesterday, Saturday. I took my time writing this post, because the weather forecast for today was pretty bad, and that made me suspicious I could need one of those images for today. Thankfully I didn’t, thus you get two takes on the old classic of the way leading into the center of the image.

The image with the bridge is an HDR image made with Essential HDR, one of my two HDR programs, Photomatix Pro being the other one. With HDR Darkroom there is now a third contender, again boasting superior tone-mapping algorithms. I can’t comment on HDR Darkroom so far, I’ve just bought it minutes ago

Why does he need three HDR programs, you ask? Well, they are quite cheap, at least Photomatix Pro and Essential HDR have distinct strengths and one time I like the output of the one, and for the next image I prefer the other. It’s about choices.

Anyway. I have a license now, I can already say that the current version has a bug, it always wants to run as administrator on Vista (and according to the forums on Windows 7 as well). Other than that I have just tried tone-mapping a single RAW file and the output was – garish

The Song of the Day is “So Many Ways” from the 1986 James debut album “Stutter”. See the video on YouTube.

That’s a pretty funny number, when you think of it

Today’s picture was taken, well, today!!! I’m back in the game. I already feel pretty well, and I have decided to take off for the rest of the week, to stay in Carinthia, relax, and be able to photograph again. Wow, that feels much better now!

As you can see from the file name, this image is an HDR, combined and tone mapped in Photomatix Pro, and then taken over to Photoshop. There I’ve used some combination of Topaz Detail, my neutral blur, my saturation layers, a cooling filter, levels and contrast adjustments, some of them localized via masks, much of that modified by blend-if sliders to work mostly on the highlights or on the shadows, in other words, this image was quite some work.

Does it look like it looked while I was there? Nope. It looks better

The Song of the Day is “I’m So Free” from Lou Reed’s 1972 album “Transformer”, one of the best albums ever made.

Uhhm … this is not lightly said. I mean it. Let’s put it like this: When asked for the 20 best albums of all times, I may produce different lists on different days, no question, but I can hardly imagine a day when “Transformer” would not be on my list. And that’s pretty remarkable.

Hear the song in very good quality on YouTube.

Funny that I have never used “September Song” as a title. It was an obvious title for this image, in fact so obvious, that I thought it must have been taken two years ago.

Of all versions that I know of this song, none is better than what Lou Reed recorded for the 1985 all-star collection “Lost in the Stars: The Music of Kurt Weill”. I know, this record is not available any more, but if you happen to find a copy: get it. It’s so good. Hear for yourself on YouTube.

As for the image, I took it when I went swimming this afternoon. Maybe for the last time this year. Who knows?

1066: Battle of Hastings. Uhhh … damn those associations

This is an image of Sunday. I took it in the early evening, just minutes before we arrived in Villach after 9.5 hours of driving. Most of the way from Kraków to the Slovak border it just did not rain, most of the way through Slovakia we had sunshine, but then in Austria we came into some of the worst rains that I’ve ever had to endure on a highway. Still, everything went well.

The Song of the Day is “No Place Like Home” from the 1992 4 Non Blondes album “Bigger, Better, Faster, More!”. They had one or two hits then, made this album and were never heard of. It’s not their best song, YouTube has it, but I suggest you hear into the biggest hit “What’s Up?” as well. Much better for my retarded taste

A very conventional photo with Nikon 18-200 VR and Lee ND grad filter for today. I took it on my way to the lake. I wanted to go swimming one more time. No idea what the weather in a week will be.

Btw, due to yesterday’s 20 hours downpour, the water level in the lake has risen by between 20 and 30cm to an all-year high. Pretty impressive. This has also cooled down the water to maybe 22 centigrades, which is very comfortable.

The rest of the day was shopping, packing for tomorrow’s trip to Kraków, Poland, and dining out with Michael, who visited us today.

I guess the next blog entry will be from Poland, at least if the hotel has WiFi as promised. If not, if you don’t hear from me for a week, then I am not dead, then I have a connection problem

The Song of the Day is “Dog Days Are Over” by Florence + the Machine. The album “Lungs”, that I have linked to, won’t be out in the US before October 20. You can either wait or get the download. YouTube has a video, and here is the link to Amazon’s download version: Lungs

Forest roads in bright daylight, that’s a worst case scenario when we talk about extreme contrast. Everything dark is very dark and everything light is extremely bright. The Topaz plugins Topaz Adjust and Topaz Detail can really help you here to model contrast and to re-distribute the tones more evenly.

And still, this is a 19 layer job, no single plugin in the world can do it in one click. You have to have a vision of where you want to go with your image, what it is that you want to accentuate, and then you have to do it. Those Topaz plugins or Alien Skin’s Snap Art are only tools. I’ve used all of them in this image, and then some tricks of my own. In the end I got an image that satisfied me.

Is this image true to what I saw? Hell, no! Not at all, but it resembles the image that I originally set out to make. Nature could not provide me with what I was looking for.

Over the last months you have seen many images that utilized a certain tool set, and although some of these images look as if they had been made in the same way, there is really no canned effect. I use the tools that I have, at times I add a new one, some get used less often, but with every new image I am again on the road to find out. That’s why it’s art, not engineering

The Song of the Day is “On The Road To Find Out” from Cat Stevens’ classic 1970 album “Tea for the Tillerman”. See him perform live on YouTube.

I haven’t been too well these last two days. I had a little bit of fever and my digestive system was … out of order.

I can’t know for sure, but I blame it to the steak tartare that I had for a starter Saturday evening. It was a pretty respectable restaurant, but it’s summer, and … well, as I said, I can’t say for sure, thus I won’t drop any names, but on the other hand, I won’t give them a second chance either

Most of Sunday I spent copying image data from the old 1 TB hard disk to the new 2 TB one. The computer here in Carinthia must still run Windows XP, because we need a certain accounting program to run on it.

That “operating system” seemingly has some severe problems copying from a big drive that’s more than 99% full. It’s true: the problem was reading. After copying some 50 GB of data, it suddenly became extremely slow, to the point where it would have taken days to finish the copy job, and the only way to make it fast again, was to reboot the computer. Copy, stop, reboot, repeat. Have a nice day!

Yeah, that’s how I spent my Sunday, and when it was finally done, I went out to make some images. That’s where I recognized that I must have fever. I returned after only half an hour, but at least I discovered a Mexican restaurant, that I had not known about, and that’s only minutes away from home. That’s what became Image of the Day.

The Song of the Day is the “Cantina Theme” from Bob Dylan’s soundtrack to the 1973 Sam Peckinpah classic “Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid”. YouTube has it for you.

I could have gone out today, really, but instead I preferred sleeping on the balcony. Nice Sunday activity, I tell you

Well, you and I have not missed anything. Weather was a mixture of dense, dark clouds, dense dark clouds with rain and not so dark but still dense clouds without rain. Only in the evening I have considered going swimming one more time. I did not, because time is short and I am off to Vienna in the evening. Instead I’m writing this entry.

This is another image from yesterday. Seeing what the weather was, I have already processed it in the morning. It’s a composite of two vertical exposures that both were a bit off of my intended composition. The place is again old grounds, and the processing uses the same tools as yesterday, Topaz Adjust and Snap Art, along with various masks and opacity settings.

The Song of the Day is “One More Time, Chick Corea” by the 1970s German A-Capella band Singers Unlimited. I have a 7 CD boxed set called “Magic Voices”, and you can also get the song on a cheaper 2 CD collection called “Complete A Capella Sessions”, mind though, that these sessions are far from complete

Go to Deezer to hear them. You won’t regret it.

OK, the rain stopped, in mid-afternoon I took the car, drove into the next forest, looked for a way, some nice lines, anything that would possibly work with an ultra-wide, and here is the result.

I have used a polarizer, set the minimum shutter speed for Auto ISO to 1/8s, and then I took a series of images in this place.

I tried to get as low as possible, in order to use the cracks of the asphalt as foreground, I tried to keep any high-contrast sky out of view, and because the resulting image was too much tilted even for my taste, I have warped and twisted it around in Photoshop until it would fit

Today is summer solstice, and as bad as the day was in between, it ended in the most magnificent sundown I have ever seen in my life. Imagine a clear, bright sun coming in very low. Above a dark cloud cover. A sunlit rural church, behind it the most impossible storm clouds, dark violet with mixed in patches of deep orange. Honestly, in Photoshop I would not dare to do that. I would pull the trigger, I would tone it down, because no sky will ever look like that and … Damn, it did and I was on the train!!

Yup. That’s the reason why you get nothing but a forest road. Sorry for that

But there is another thing that I have learned and that I want to share. It’s nothing photographic, more philosophic, but I try it anyway.

Michael visited us today and confronted us with a hypothetical question. He had been to a discussion in Salzburg where the question arose, and the hypothetical situation was the following:

Imagine a trial for rape. The defender argues that the victim had invited the rapist with her provocative clothing. The judge is a muslim woman wearing a hijab. The prosecutor claims the judge to be biased.

Actually the situation is rather stupid and my solution would be, that as long as there is not a law that forbids wearing certain clothes while executing certain offices, there is no merit to the claim at all. The judge may indeed later be found to have been biased, but the same could be true for anyone, and everything beforehand is nothing but prejudice.

Michael argued in a different way. He says that we are a secular society, and that religious symbols, regardless of the actual religion, are incompatible with the function of a judge. Openly wearing a religious symbol is always a public embrace of a certain set of believes, and believes are by definition prejudices.

OK, that’s the setting. The interesting point now is, that Michael and I come from the very same position. Both of us agree that we live in a society that at least claims secularity, that a truly secular society is what we should strive for, and still we go different ways.

Michael’s idea of banning religious symbols in certain contexts where the bearer acts as a representative of the state, is more or less the French way. My own position is liberal, relaxed, probably libertarian, basically it’s “Judge people by their doings, not by what they wear, and you can’t judge them before they act”.

What I find so fascinating, and why I share this stupid scenario, is my sudden realization, that a philosophical position in no way determines your actions. Both ways can be argued and defended on good grounds, and both of us could claim the same reasons. Still we would execute either tolerance or force, trying to defend the same position.

That’s it. No big image, no big insight, only the conclusion that things can get pretty complicated when you begin to look into the details

The Song of the Day is probably a little less song-like than some may expect. It’s “Three Ways to One” from Ornette Coleman’s 1997 album “Colors: Live from Leipzig”. Yes, that’s the guy whose album “Free Jazz” gave name to the whole genre. I personally know some people who strictly refuse to call that music, but on the other hand, I keep getting the same reaction to Schönberg as well

Deezer has the album for you to hear. Give it a try, relax, go with the flow, and you may even find yourself tapping, maybe even itching to move to it