1200? Nice number, huh? Sorry for the delay, I would have written this post in the morning, but instead I have upgraded a WordPress plugin, and that caused my portfolio pages to fail. No big problem though, after a comment on the author’s site, he provided another upgrade that fixed the problem. In fact it took him less than five hours to find the problem, fix it and roll out a new version. This is quite remarkable, try to get that from Microsoft, Oracle or any other big company. I love Free Software. No useless management, instead competent people who care

This image is one more proof for the concept of never being without a camera. The kiosk is at a tramway stop, at a crossing just opposite from where I work. There are people all the time. In this place it would even be uncommon to see a bicycle on the sidewalk, and I sure have never seen a scooter there. It’s one of those shots taken almost unconsciously

The other image, the Image of the Day, well, in a way it connects to Ted Byrne’s comment to “1198 – Under The Bridge” and to my answer. Ted wrote that

Monochrome has an inherent melancholy bias. Yes it can be overcome, but it’s as if the artist starts up a hill with a bag filled with lead.

Yes, but there can be quite some melancholy in color as well, and in some cases, color may even express it stronger. I guess this is such a case. It needs the colors and it needs them faded, in order to express such yearning for a summer past.

The Song of the Day is “Summer Kisses, Winter Tears” by The Blackeyed Susans, a group from Australia. It’s on their 2001 album of cover versions, “Dedicated to the Ones We Love”.

I have found no video of the song in their version, thus I must direct you to the original by Elvis Presley.

Today I had a whole lot of usable images, daylight images from the morning, night images from my way home from work, I really can’t process all of them, I’m tired and it is already midnight. Here are at least two of them.

The bicycle is our old friend who featured in “1089 – He’s The Keeper” and “1034 – That Look You Give That Guy“. He inspires me whenever I see him. Well, this may be connected to the particular sign post that he is tied to, because it’s near a street corner, a a place where no cars park, and thus the background is always relatively clean.

It may also be connected to the brand of bicycles that I’ve never seen before. It’s from the Netherlands, I suppose Emma will know it. Or is it the head light? This slightly sad drooping?

I don’t know, but it always appeals to me.

The Image of the Day is, well, all interaction. The guy is obviously courting, the girl does not seem that impressed. Or did I get that all wrong?

You know how it is, I use song titles as image titles, and frequently the song and the image have no real connection. This is one of those cases though, when song and image match nicely.

The Song of the Day is the Jerome Kern / Dorothy Fields standard “A Fine Romance“. I have versions from Sammy Davis Jr, Billie Holiday and Mel Tormé, but I can’t help it, I really like Ella’s version best. It’s from the “Jerome Kern Song Book”, and I have it in this wonderful box with “The Complete Ella Fitzgerald Song Books”. Hear it on YouTube.

Oh, by the way, I’ve enjoyed perfectly smooth focusing for the whole day

Oh well, here we are. Back to Vienna, let’s embrace darkness, for we have no other choice

I’m a little bit in a hurry. It’s morning, I have just finished yesterday’s image before I’m off to work – and outside snow is falling. It’s early this years, this is already the second time, I hope it’s just an interlude like two weeks ago.

The Song of the Day is of course “For Behold, Darkness Shall Cover The Earth” from George Frideric Handel’s “Messiah”, and as (almost) always I recommend Trevor Pinnock. Hear it on YouTube.

Here’s another bunch of images made last week in Vienna. The bicycle with the poisonous red is from Tuesday morning, I just couldn’t pass it, the others are from Thursday. It is Saturday night now, it’s raining outside, I am uploading 340 images, six sizes each, to my website and have done so for nine hours. ADSL is a bitch

Uploading again? Why that? Oh, in the morning, after I had processed these four images, I found some images missing from some posts, sometimes thumbnails, sometimes the main image. With the current layout this seems to be a problem in certain cases. I don’t use “width” attributes on my images (which I should, I know) and on certain posts the browser simply hung indefinitely, seemingly refusing to carry on without an actual image and its width. That’s obviously pretty bad

I made a check: from an export file of my blog I extracted the image “SRC” attributes pointing to “manessinger.com”. The result was a file with 1887 URLs, one URL per line.

#!/bin/sh
XMLFILE=$1
if [ "x$XMLFILE" = x ] ; then
   echo "usage: $0 <xmlfile>"
   exit 1
fi
cat $XMLFILE | sed -e 's/ /\n/g' | \
    egrep 'src="http://www.manessinger.com/images/' | cut -d'"' -f2

I’m printing the code here without explanation, those for whom it may be useful, will understand it anyway.

The next step was to check if all of these URLs are present and which are not. The result was a file with the file names (tail of the URL) of the files that were missing. Again here’s the code, a Perl script expecting an input file with one URL per line, producing an output file with one filename per missing image.

#!/usr/bin/perl                                             

use strict;
use warnings;
use LWP::UserAgent;
use HTTP::Request;
use File::Basename;
use Time::HiRes qw(usleep);

# arguments checking
if (($#ARGV != 0) || (! -f $ARGV[0])) {
    print "usage: $0 <url-per-line-file>\n";
    exit(1);
}

# construct a user agent
my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new();
$ua->agent("");
$ua->timeout(10);

open(URLS, "<".$ARGV[0]);
while (<URLS>) {
    chomp;
    my $url = $_;
    my $new_url = grab_image($ua, $url);
}
exit(0);

sub grab_image {
    my $ua  = shift;
    my $url = shift;

    my $request = HTTP::Request->new(HEAD=>$url);
    my $response = $ua->request($request);

    my $base = basename($url);
    if ($response->is_success) {
        print STDERR ("$base\n");
    } else {
        print "ERROR\@$url\n\t".$response->status_line."\n\n";
        print STDERR ("$base MISSING\n");
        open(MISSING, ">>missing.txt");
        print MISSING "$base\n";
        close(MISSING);
    }
    usleep(100);
}

Yes, I could have given the file reference as a parameter Anyway. This is slightly more convenient than checking 1887 URLs manually, isn’t it? The result were a whopping 340 URLs of missing images. Oops!

Then it dawned on me: I had simply uploaded all images from my image database that were tagged “smugmug”. I have mostly given up tagging images. It’s convenient to know exactly where you’ve taken a certain images, find all images with a sundown taken in Italy, find all images showing a certain person, etc, but when I tag images that thoroughly, it takes me 15 minutes per day. Well, maybe I should do it again, mostly ignoring the backlog.

Anyway. While I had believed that the tag “smugmug” was the one that I had always given, I must have been much more lazy than I had thought. Indeed, some checks in IMatch, my image database, revealed that the missing images were not tagged and thus had not been uploaded.

Now what? Manually finding 340 images, tagging them and copying them to my conversion directory? Possible but tedious. Thankfully IMatch can be programmed. I had to learn it, but learning it and writing a program was still faster than doing it manually.

Sub Main
	' We need an active database to run this script
	Dim db As Database
	Set db = Application.ActiveDatabase
	If db Is Nothing Then
		MsgBox "Please open a database first"
		Exit Sub
	ElseIf db.ReadOnly Then
		MsgBox "The database is read-only!"
		Exit Sub
	End If

	' Check if the result category exists
	Dim rescat As Category
	Set rescat = db.Categories("UNTAGGED")
	If rescat Is Nothing Then
		MsgBox "Please create a category 'UNTAGGED'"
		Exit Sub
	End If

	If Not rescat.Images.Count = 0 Then
		If MsgBox("Clear the category?",vbYesNo) = vbYes Then
			' Avoid flicker when updating the category!
			db.Redraw = False
			Dim rci As Image
			For Each rci In rescat.Images
				rescat.RemoveImage rci
			Next rci
			db.Redraw = True
		End If
	End If

	Dim names(339) As String
        names(0) = "20061017_161745.jpg"
        names(1) = "20061020_173954.jpg"
        ' ... and so on until
        names(338) = "20090919_173043_ps.jpg"
        names(339) = "20090925_154035.jpg"

	Dim i As Long
	For i = LBound(names) To UBound(names)
		' Find the file in the database
        Set img = Nothing
        Set iset = db.GetImages(names(i))
        If Not iset Is Nothing Then
            If iset.Count > 0 Then
                Set img = iset(1)
            End If
        End If
        If Not img Is Nothing Then
			rescat.AddImage(img)
		End If
	Next
End Sub

Believe it or not, this was my first Basic program. Hmm … well, not really. Now that I think of it, 12 years ago I have written a code generator that allowed Visual Basic programmers on PCs to call C and Cobol subroutines on UNIX and VMS servers via RPC. The tool had generated client- and server-side stubs, thus I already have written Basic, at least indirectly via a program

Now I had all missing images tagged “UNTAGGED” and could export them to my conversion directory, ready for the resize-and-upload script to process them. And that’s what this script still does. It’s not the resizing, it’s the uploading. On the other hand, I don’t care. It runs in the background and I’m free to do whatever I want.

In the afternoon, after I had started the uploader, I drove to the lake. Weather was fine, and really, the water was still … well … tolerable. It’s quite cool now, but it was in no way uncomfortable.

Here we are. I will post more code examples during the next week. If you don’t care about code, just ignore it. One or the other fragment may be valuable for someone though.

The Song of the Day is “Missing You” from the 1995 Mavericks album “Music for All Occasions”. When I first heard the Mavericks, I was not sure if this is a joke or if they really mean it. It sounded so fifties retro-style, so much like “Kottan’s Kapelle” (a satirical Autrian TV series about Vienna’s police), that I was not sure what to make of it. I liked it though and have bought one more Mavericks CD. See a video on YouTube.

OK, grudgingly even I admit that this summer is over.

It was rainy today, rainy and cool. These images are from Vienna. Carinthia, that’s where the train just takes me, seems to have slightly better weather, maybe I can even go swimming one last time. Well, it’s not that it will be so hot as to necessitate it, I seriously doubt that, but swimming for the last time in October has become something like a ritual to me

As to my website project, I really need to hurry now. There are still two things that I need: The link translator for the blog (this will be a Perl script, I already have parts of it) and an image resize and upload utility.

On SmugMug I simply uploaded a JPEG and SmugMug took care of the rest. On my own site this will be different. I will have a program that takes the original JPEG and locally creates smaller versions in the six sizes that I’ll provide. Then that program will automatically upload the images and sort them into the proper directories on my website. Additionally it may output the URLs for the different sizes.

Initially this may be a Linux shell script that I run in an Ubuntu Virtual Box, and if that proves convenient enough, I’ll keep it at that. If not, I may create an Eclipse RCP Java program or maybe even some C# .NET program. Whatever the user interface will be, the actual resizing will be done by calling an external program, ImageMagick’s “convert” command.

Hmm … I suppose with unintelligible gibberish like that I’m just losing my last readers, so let’s just say there’s still some work to do

The Song of the Day is “The Rain” from the album “Roadsinger” by Yusuf Islam, aka Cat Stevens. Hear the song on YouTube.

What can you do when you have no image? You can always make one. Well, in this case I probably would have had a couple of other images, none particularly strong, thus I decided to try this one, an image I would otherwise have thrown away.

It’s an approaching tramway train, seen half through the windshield of a Vespa scooter. The focus is on the edge of the windshield.

The original image was pale, suffered from high contrast between the sky and everything else, and basically there was no composition at all. That’s always a good reason to go for a square, because it’s pretty hard to NOT find a good square in any given image. Here it was even the biggest size possible, in other words, I only needed to crop from the sides.

I would have had a standard composition with a perspective along the street, the vanishing point slightly off-center, thus conforming to the rule of thirds and … BORING!!

Why? Because it resembled the original in its accent on the perspective. It was not as bad, but due to the extremely shallow DOF, there was simply nothing interesting enough.

My solution was to go abstract by using the left part of the image, cutting through the vanishing point, using the upper right triangle of the sky to balance the red triangle in the lower left corner.

The rest is familiar: a combination of two versions from the same RAW, one for the bright part with sky and sunlit houses, one for everything else, over-the-top saturation with my standard combination of Hue/Saturation layers in different blending modes (see 683 – Welcome To The Republic), and then Alien Skin Snap Art.

This is a soft pastel effect with long, thin strokes, chosen to turn the strong blur into a whirling swarm of colored light. Actually it is a group of two copies of this layer, one at 30% opacity and “Soft Light” blending mode, the other at full opacity in “Normal” mode, and then the whole group at 70%.

The Song of the Day is the Duke Ellington composition “Take the A Train“, interpreted by Ella Fitzgerald. Hear it on YouTube.

It’s late Saturday morning, I was not able to post Thursday’s images yesterday. Let’s try it now

Wednesday night I had plenty of images for my SoFoBoMo book, but now that I don’t have the need for numbers, I’m beginning to get picky

The problem is, that there are many ways to interpret my topic “Urban Dreams“. So far I have the following groups:

First there are architectural images about roofs, balconies, about where the city meets the sky, about the place where we all want to live, although that’s technically impossible. I think it qualifies as a dream, and among dreams it is a dream generally dreamed by urban people.

I have plenty of these images, definitely more than I need, but here are two more, the first of them with our humble Austrian version of patriotism

The second group contains images dealing with the hope for wealth and with the lack thereof. These are about lottery games, social outcasts, and posters and stickers with political agitation.

I could use more of those, and some days ago I have recognized that I have not taken a single image of right-wing, nationalist agitation. Don’t get me wrong: there’s plenty of that as well in Austria, it is only so disgusting to me, that I shy away from using it.

The problem is, there is a very positive dream in communism, and in fact what the world really needs at this moment, is exactly a piece of that dream. It’s only that communism tends to fail due to the competitive nature of man, it’s not that the dream at the core would not be a positive utopia.

Right-wing nationalist propaganda of the loosely disguised neo-fascist kind, the type that is prevalent under Europe’s right-populist parties, completely lacks that pure core. It is not good intention failing, it is only speculation on the worst sentiments of mankind: avarice, resentment, envy, prejudice, and it works because it appeals to the stupid.

Recently asked about my estimation of the potential for those right-wing populists, I answered “about 30-35%”. Think of Hitler: He was elected and he got 30%. I don’t think he would have got more in any valid, democratic election. Haider never got more. And of those who voted for them, only a small core of maybe 5% really shared their whole spectrum of political opinions. The rest is a wildly fluctuating mix of people who feel underrepresented by the traditional parties, by those parties that at least sometimes try to really solve problems instead of creating them.

Anyway. Now you know my reason for not including right-nationalist-populist propaganda: there is no dream at the core.

The next group is that of images in landscape format that are vertically split in two halves. I added three of them in the last post, today we get three more. I will definitely use most of them in my book, they represent a compositional and personal dream of mine, hard to tell why, but I like them. I may have a chance to add some of them in the last two days, i.e. on Tuesday and Wednesday. I began on Monday, May 4, thus Wednesday, June 3 is the end of my 31 days fuzzy month.

A fairly large group are bicycles, some motorcycles and scooters (for instance the Image of the Day), a traffic jam, a tramway and a railway station. What’s that? Is that a dream? Transport? I am not fully convinced, I may or may not use them. If at all, I’d need some more cars.

There is a small group of non-height-related architecture, but most of these images have some dream-like aspect, thus they are usable.

And then there is the fairly large group of odd things, mannequins on the street, toys, today’s monkey, many others. Dealing with them is easy. They are so much stripped of context, they can as well go for dreams.

Here we are. I’d believe I am on fairly safe ground. It should be possible to make a book with 35 images of that material, and it may even be possible to put some cohesion and logic into it

The Song of the Day is “Red Is The Color” from the 2007 Steve Earle album “Washington Square Serenade”, one of the albums that I bought following Bill’s recommendation. I didn’t find a video, but Deezer has the album.

Well, some days are better than others, some are not. I barely found anything usable for rainy Thursday, this is the lone contender and at 24mm the only “wide” SoFoBoMo image so far.

I had made three remarkably bland shots of this blue scooter in front of the equally blue “Honk”, only a slightly rotated square crop could save me a half-decent way out.

The Song of the Day is “Country Honk” from the 1969 Rolling Stones album “Let It Bleed”. This is the country version of the probably more familiar “Honky Tonk Women”. YouTube has a slightly different recording, still country but without the fiddle, and Deezer has the whole thing for you.

This is one of those half a dozen classic Stones albums, I guess you really have to hate them in order to not like it

Wednesday. I write this on Saturday morning, thus I am still substantially behind. Frequently I can use the time on the train to Carinthia to catch up, but this time I managed to process eight images. Just now I did one more, which requires me to fill the spaces between with words. Ouch!

Wednesday brought the expected rain, and that forced me to use shorter focal lengths. I decided to take the Sigma 70/2.8, this outstandingly versatile macro lens that can also perfectly be used for street photography.

Due to the rain I had to use an umbrella, but it really doesn’t bother me any more. It may look strange for passersby, but sometimes, mostly with wide lenses, I even use the umbrella as part of the framing. You have seen some of these images in the past.

As to the subjects, well, I did as I said yesterday: I shot impulsively, without much care about if a particular shot would possibly be a good candidate for the book. Basically that’s one of the big advantages of having no idea of what the final book will really be about. And, honestly, even if bicycles probably won’t play a major role (but who knows now?), there is no reason at all to skip a perfectly good bicycle

Of course the title “Urban Dreams” is still in my mind, and of course this also shapes the impulses, thus I am much more likely to produce something that fits my idea than normally. The scooter in front of the hairdresser’s, the black flag on the theater, dreams of beauty and death.

The black flag is for Fritz Muliar who has died recently at the age of 89, died in the evening after having stood on the stage for the last time that very afternoon. Muliar may not have been widely known outside of Austria, but here he was immensely popular. R.I.P.

Why the other images? Well, the flowers on the window sill represent a dream of nature, the figurine of the boy a dream of family. Both will typically be found among older people from the working class.

But maybe there is more in this figurine. I feel a sense of adventure here. The young boy in a place of wonder and probably even danger.

By the way, this is the same shop that brought us “781 – Piggy And The Frog In Love“. I frequently pass this window, and most of the time I see something that I could photograph. A safe place to go when you are in need of an image. The only thing that you need is a lens with a very wide aperture.

The final two images share the blurry foreground, a style that I have explored greatly last spring.

The first image is shot through the rack in front of a flower shop, using the rack as a frame, and the second is an advertising for a Klimt exhibition, shot through some leaves.

So, obviously my SoFoBoMo efforts come to fruit, I progress nicely, I have processed and published 19 images from three days, that’s slightly above my target average of five images per day.

Thus I may end up with around 65 images by the end of next working week, at least if I manage to keep my pace. I may choose to omit some images, some images of the next days may represent subjects already covered, only better, but all in all I suppose that I won’t need to take a day off, especially because I won’t stop photographing at the end of next week.

The Song of the Day, “Lord, Help The Poor And Needy” obviously inspired by the dream of money in the Image of the Day, is from Cat Power’s second album of cover versions, the 2008 release “Jukebox”. Deezer has the album, YouTube as some live versions, for example this one from Bogotá.

Did you ever need to rotate an image? Badly need it? By a substantial amount maybe? I did.

No problem in Photoshop, the only thing is, that you lose a big amount of your image when you crop it back into the frame. The bigger the angle, the more you lose. Rotating by, say, 15 degrees is absolutely out of the question. Well, this is my solution

The music for today is “Look Into The Sun“, originally from the 1969 Jethro Tull album “Stand Up”, but today’s live version, the special version for the elderly among us, is from the fabulous 1992 album “A Little Light Music”. Enjoy it on YouTube. Well, OK, if you must have it: here is the original as well