One more week, one more sunrise in Vienna. This was Friday morning. I didn’t shoot much more that day, it was a travel day as usual, although I saw a breathtaking sunset when arriving in Carinthia, confined to the train and helpless as usual

Regarding “Urban Dreams”, I think this is definitely a SoFoBoMo candidate. I may use this or last week’s image, probably even both.

The Song of the Day is “The Sun” by the young Austrian singer Anja Plaschg, aka Soap & Skin, to be heard on her March 2009 debut album “Lovetune for Vacuum”. Hear it on YouTube.

It’s Thursday night, this is the entry for Monday. Private occupations and an inescapable, deep longing for sleep have caused this bad delay

Let’s see what we have. Monday was a sunny day. I could carry on where I stopped last week.

Of course dreams come in very different flavors. Some people dream of being rich, being on top, and for some, the dreams are much more basic.

For instance there is the dream of a bed. Do you know that those new, ugly benches in Vienna were especially designed to make it impossible for people to sleep on? How pervert is that? A society spends money on public furniture, and then cripples that furniture to a point where it hardly does its job, only to keep “social problems” out of sight?

Sure, we have a problem with beggars coming from eastern countries, but they come from the same countries where they had paid jobs under communist rule (with low incomes and still not much to buy, yes, indeed), and now those countries had the most radical economic transformation ever, and they had it, financed by our banks, directed by our consultants, forced by convergence criteria dictated by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund.

How surprising is it that some of those people end up here, washed to our shores, begging on our streets, violating our sense of beauty and order?

Both images were shot in the morning, and here is the next nuisance. I wish I could spare Ted the sight, but here’s again some of that other aesthetic evil of our times. Urgh! Graffiti!! Well, I just couldn’t resist the side light combined with the compression of the Nikon 70-300 VR.

All the other images, including the Image of the Day, are again about rooftops, balconies and the dream of being near the sky.

It’s interesting: I make a lot of these images, always made them, drew them in my youth, long, long before there ever were digital cameras, but I publish them rarely. It’s probably just because they are so frequent in my work. Still, there must be a reason why the recur.

Janine recently asked for more of my “Electric Ladyland” series. I didn’t want to use it as Image of the Day, but here it is: “Electric Ladyland IX”

The electric wiring of our cityscapes and landscapes is a much underrepresented subject, especially when you put it in proportion with how much we photographers are normally annoyed by it. The solution is: don’t fight it, use it

So far, including these Monday images, I have processed 45 images out of 86 candidates for my SoFoBoMo project “Urban Dreams“. Some of them may not make it into the book, but the majority could and I would have no problem finding 35 images. I really could stop now, but of course I won’t.

I plan to produce a book template this weekend though. Basically an empty layout that I can use to try different sequences of images.

I won’t do anything fancy. The layout will be similar to last year’s, only this time I may even end up using blank left pages with an image title and very little if any text, and then on the right page the image. That’s about what Mark Hobson proposed in his series about POD photo books. Greatly recommended reading for everybody dabbling in SoFoBoMo.

Well, in fact everything on Mark’s site is great. At the moment I neglect reading other people’s blogs badly (sorry everybody), and Mark’s is always rewarding, not only for his imagery that I admire, but also for his witty and intelligent writing that never even tries to avoid controversy

The Song of the Day, “Top Of The City“, is from Kate Bush’s 1993 album “The Red Shoes”, a much underrated album, but for me her best work to date. YouTube has the video. And while you are at it, have a look at another masterwork and my favorite piece from this album:

Welcome to the third part of my review of the Nikon AF-S DX 35/1.8G. The first part was about sharpness, the second part about bokeh, and today we will look into chromatic aberrations, an optical phenomenon often referred to under the abbreviation CA.

I really don’t want to explain over and again what has been explained so often. For more detailed explanations of chromatic aberrations see articles by Paul van Walree, Ken Rockwell or Cliff Smith, to only name a few.

Fact is, they come in four flavors, the combinations of the pairs primary/secondary, and longitudinal/lateral. Primary CA (red/blue fringes) is corrected in modern lenses, all that remains is secondary CA (green/magenta fringes). Longitudinal means that different wavelengths focus on different planes. That cannot be corrected in software. Lateral can, because with lateral chromatic aberrations all wavelengths focus on the same plane, but they produce differently sized images. The software trick is, to scale the red, green and blue channel until the images have the exact same sizes. That’s what you do in software when you correct secondary lateral CA.

Some new Nikon DSLRs automatically correct CA in-camera, at least for JPEGs. Nikon introduced the feature with the D3/D300, and as far as I know, all new cameras since, the D700, D90 and D3X have it as well. Correction for CA in Nikon cameras works extremely well and whenever I have cared to look closely at a JPEG, it was flawless. Whenever I have tried to do better in Adobe Camera RAW, I have failed. Up to now, that is.

And here comes a surprising point: Nikon does not base CA removal on anything the camera is told by the lens, not even for their own lenses. CA removal is totally based on image analysis. How do I know? Because I caught them failing miserably.

On the left side you see a JPEG straight from the camera. The bark of the tree has extreme detail, and somehow the correction algorithm seems to struggle. The right side is the same image, converted from RAW in Adobe Camera RAW. I can’t remember the exact settings that I used, but it was quite extreme. The two crops are from the lower left corner, and you can see how much of a difference it makes. You can almost see it in the thumbnails.

Obviously this lens suffers badly from secondary lateral CA. That’s certainly a problem, but none that I’d call too severe. If you’re shooting JPEG only, you could get unlucky and trigger a case where the built-in correction fails (and that is extremely rare) or you may shoot with a camera that has no built-in correction at all. If you shoot RAW, you have to correct it, but you can.

The fact that a single camera, my Nikon D300, with a single lens, my 35/1.8, corrects for CA at one time and not at another, is proof for me that this correction is based upon image analysis only. Most of the time it works flawless, sometimes it fails, and this may be due to certain patterns in the image.

The other interesting thing is, that lateral CA is not independent of focusing distance. The image of the bark was focused very near, and I had to use other correction values than for images focused to infinity. When you remember the illustrations in Paul van Walree’s article, this really makes sense, but for some reason I had not expected it.

I had frequently used “Previous Conversion” settings in Adobe Camera RAW when converting more than one image. This is wrong. Don’t do it, or at least only do it, when you convert images that were focused to approximately the same distance.

Now, couldn’t I be wrong about Nikon’s correction method? Could the correction generally fail at close focus?

Not at all. The Image of the Day was shot from about the same distance, and the JPEG from the camera is perfectly clean of CA, just as the conversion from RAW. QED.

Well, here we are with some lessons learned: This lens has substantial CA, but that’s something you can fix in post-processing. Some cameras do it automatically for JPEG shooters, but they don’t do it all of the time. Lateral CA varies with focusing distance, thus you better do it manually and don’t rely on remembered settings.

The Song of the Day is “True Colors” from Cyndi Lauper’s 2005 album “The Body Acoustic”. YouTube has the video.

In a comment to “723 – The Morning Fog III” Deb jokingly remarked that the image was not tilted. Interestingly enough it was, although only slightly and to fight an optical illusion that would have made a perfectly straight horizon look like running out. You know what I mean, the variant that looks accidental.

Well, the tilt is back and with a vengeance. These are images from Tuesday, the day my computer died. Yesterday I had almost posted them unprocessed, but now that I see them after some Photoshop work, I am glad I didn’t.

At the moment I’m on the train to Carinthia, having processed eight images in the last four hours, and now I’m beginning to catch up on the blog entries. The titles are found, the music clips as well, thus you’ll get two more entries tonight.

What’s the state of affairs? Well, the new computer is up and running, but this morning I’ve taken the new terabyte drive out once more. It is now in my bag to be filled in Carinthia. There is still no Photoshop, IMatch image database or any image related software on the new computer. This will eat up my evenings when I return to Vienna.

The Song of the Day is “Who By Fire“, originally from the 1974 Leonard Cohen album “New Skin for the Old Ceremony“, but the version that I want you to see so badly is from a TV show in the late 1980s. Head over to YouTube and see and hear a once-in-a-lifetime performance.

… time passes …

You know, some days are better than others – and some plainly suck. Trying to get my eight images from the laptop to the desktop computer I found that WiFi failed for whatever reason, my portable hard drive is still in Vienna and my CF card seems to have died as well. Talk about a series

Sorry, it’s 2am now, no more posts today, I am too tired. See you tomorrow with hopefully at least two posts.