Oh dear! This habit of using song titles, it’s killing me! I’ve just whiled four hours away because of all that associations that connect me with this song.
But first things first: Here’s another image from the gardens of castle Miramare. I simply forgot to use it two days ago.
Of all lenses that you could have on, while you encounter a seagull, sitting on a wall, of all those lenses, a wide-angle, even if moderate, is one of the most awkward. Imagine me with the Nikon 24/2.8, trying to silently approach this bird, and just as I get too near, just as it takes of, I manage to release the shutter. Well, it could have been worse: only minutes later I changed back to the Tokina 11-16 
Actually I like the image. The tips of the wings already show some motion blur, but the moment is just right. With the Nikon 70-300 this could have been a really great image. But then, if I had tried to change lense, I most probably would have ended up with no image at all.
The Image of the Day shows part of the window of a long-since closed shop. The yellow frame and the blue paper attracted me, and it was only during post-processing, that I recognized the text. “Revolution”, “Love”, the guitars, that immediately triggered memories, and while my first impulse was “Revolution #9″ by John Lennon, I finally settled with Marc Bolan and “Children Of The Revolution“.
And then it happened. I searched for a video, found the classic performance with Elton John on piano and Ringo Starr on drums, another video with the album version, and then I began to follow links.
I couldn’t stop for almost four hours, and the trip took me all that impossible way from Marc Bolan via British glam rock band Sweet (my most favorite band when I was 10), to Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Tom Waits.
Really, I love YouTube and the influence that this website has on our culture. It’s really a great place to find things, that with traditional distribution models would be impossible to come by. I’d say, from time to time, just do yourself the favor and listen to some music from your childhood. You deserve it.
It’s Sunday evening, I’m on the train to Vienna, and here are the images from our second day in Italy.
After breakfast I went swimming, and at 10am we left the hotel for castle Miramare. Maximilian had a strong interest in botany, and the castle gardens are lush evidence of his passion.
The castle itself has an interesting ground plan. These two images actually show the same building. In one it looks like a sturdy tower, almost like a cube, while in the other you see the long front that faces the harbor.
Originally all ways in the park seem to have been paved in this typical Italian way with small stones, but today most ways are bituminized.
There are loads of tourists, but the area is so big, that they blend in, and you have hardly a problem getting images without them. Apart from that, the whole park is a paradise for cats, thus you better have some cat cookies with you. Of course we had 
The last image looks back from the park, over the harbor of Grignano, to the shore where just right from the middle, you can see the tower in front of our hotel, the tower with the lift down to the beach, the tower from where I took yesterday’s images.
It was extremely hot (well, at least that was my view) and after our visit to the park of Miramare, we simply drove home. In Carinthia I went swimming one more time, and we finally concluded the day on our balcony, sipping delightfully cool Prosecco
The Song of the Day is “In The Garden” from Bob Dylan’s 1980 album “Saved”. Hear it on YouTube.
EDIT: After much consideration, I have just replaced the Image of the Day with a slightly warmer version.
This trip to Italy was a test. The idea was, to find out if it’s viable to drive down to the sea, spend a day swimming, stay a night at a hotel, and return the next day, just in time for me to probably catch the train to Vienna. Thus, although we did it on a long weekend this time, we wanted to find out if it can be done on a normal weekend. The result is a resounding YES!
We stayed at the Hotel Riviera & Maximilian’s in Grignano, just north of castle Miramare, the sea residence of the ill-fated later Emperor Maximilian I of Mexico. See the hotel on the map.
The road along the coast runs high above the sea. From street level you see no more than the top of a medium sized early 20th century building, but below there are gardens, parking areas and, built into the steeply falling terrain, the actual hotel wings.
There are two ways to get down to the beach, maybe 50 meters below. The first is a tower with a lift, standing freely, connected with the hotel by a bridge.
The other one is a long flight of stairs, winding down to the base of the tower. The Image of the Day and the next image, as well as the sundown, were taken at the bridge and from the tower, the others on the stairs and down at the bottom.
I mostly used the Tokina 11-16 on this trip, and really, this is where it works very well. Of course it has quite substantial barrel distortion at 11mm, but PTLens got rid of that easily.You’ll see more of it tomorrow, when I’ll try to wrap it up with some images taken at Miramare.
The Song of the Day is “Un’altra vita” by the great Italian composer and songwriter Franco Battiato. I first heard it in the version on Alice’s 1985 album “Gioielli Rubati”, but here it is from the master himself. Hear it on YouTube.
I have linked to an obscenely priced three CD “Platinum Collection”, because the collection that I have seems to be unavailable.
Well, these two weeks in Carinthia were quite a roller coaster ride. Up the mountains, down to the sea, deep snow, no snow at all, and this time it’s the sea again.
These are images of Monday. For various reasons it took me a while to get them processed, but now it’s done. It’s almost 3:30am though, tomorrow (well, technically today, but I’d still like to get a cap of sleep) I’ll have to work again, thus we’ll keep this short and sweet 
Lots of new highways have been built in the last years. I remember, when I was a child, it took us 8 hours to get down to the Croatian isles, while Monday it were no more than 2:40 hours from Villach to the island of Krk.
Of all the Croatian islands, Krk is the most accessible, because it can be reached via a bridge from near Rijeka, and it is the most northern island in the Kvarner archipelago.
Incidentally this was my first “real” visit to Krk, though I had crossed it in July 2007 on my way home from Mali Losinj. The island is rather flat. I can’t find any exact information right now, but I honestly doubt that the highest point, the village Vrh (which means summit) is even 100 meters above sea level.
The first two images were taken in Punat, one of the biggest yacht harbors in the Adriatic, but otherwise not overly exciting. Opposite of Punat, in the middle of an almost circular bay, lies the small island of Košljun with its Franciscan monastery. As far as I know, it can be visited, but for lack of time I have not even tried.
The main town on Krk is called Krk as well. It has been a bishop’s see from at least the 6th century, it’s still partially walled, and the bishop’s palace is one of the biggest buildings. The image to the right is part of the town wall.
The town of Krk is really cat territory. Just sit down anywhere, and slowly but steadily one cat after the other will come and inspect you, beg for food or simply some affection. I can’t remember having seen so many of them in one place.
This image is particularly dear to me, because it needed a lot of affection as well, and after a good dose of post-processing, I guess it is quite OK. It was my first candidate for the Image of the Day, but finally the scooter won for its warm colors that so perfectly capture the feeling that I had, when I escaped from Carinthian frost to a sunny land by the sea, where it’s winter as well, but where the winter is 15 centigrades warmer 
Of course warmth is relative. When the sun went down, I took some last images and then left. I could have stayed longer, but due to its orientation, Krk is not a very good place for a sundown. In fact, not even the “summit” Vrh is, because even there the sun vanishes in the mountains of the western island of Cres. The sky did some pretty things though.
When I crossed the border between Croatia and Slovenia, the temperature had fallen below freezing, and there was again snow.
The Song of the Day is “Southbound Again” from the 1978 self-titled Dire Straits album. Hear it on YouTube.
That’s it for today. Did I say something of “short and sweet”? Oh well! As for the images of today, I’ll try to catch up tomorrow. Have a good night.
It’s 17 months now since the last time that I’ve been to Savudrija, a fabulously picturesque fishing harbor in Croatia. Honestly, I have no idea why I keep my visits so sparse.
From Villach, it takes about 2.5 hours to get there. It would even make sense to enter the car in the morning, spend most of the day swimming, and return in the evening. After dinner, of course, and probably at another time of the year
Yesterday, with all holiday business past, the lure of the sea was strong, and it was a good feeling to get out of the snow, into a mediterranean landscape that even in winter keeps its southern charm. This time it was not nearly as warm as last time (see “142 – A Trip to the Sea” and “164 – I Remember Croatia“), but that did not take away from the experience.
The Image of the Day was shot with the Sigma 10-20 and put through quite some Photoshop treatment, the other image is from the Sigma 50/1.4 at f2.8 and straight from the camera. I came back with 170 images and should probably process some more, but I really want something posted now, and those two may well give you a feeling.
The Song of the Day, “The Lure Of The Sea“, is once again by The Beautiful South, a band that commentary on Amazon.com describes as
“… a band whose obstinate Englishness earned them enormous popularity in the U.K. and a decade’s worth of total obscurity in the U.S.”
The song is from their 1999 album “Quench”. Unfortunately I have found no video, but at least Amazon has a sound sample.
This is not an image of yesterday. Yesterday was a drab, rainy day here in Carinthia, and the northern part of Austria had a bad storm that is supposed to return today. Not a tornado or hurricane, but with speeds up to 100 mph nevertheless. Four people in Austria were reported dead, three of them hit by falling trees. I decided to stay in bed and slept for most of the day.
At night I tried to take some images of forks. Why forks? Well, Neil Creek, one of my co-artists on Fine Art Photoblog, runs a competition about images of forks on his blog, basically a creativity training, and, having no image yet, I thought I could at least try.
Shiny little bastards, those forks. I found myself without easy success, completely uninspired and at the moment not willing to further explore the essence forks. I gave up and decided to tackle one of those images tagged “TODO” in my image database.
This is it. An image shot last July in the harbor of Mali Lošinj, an image that I did not use as Image of the Day then, an image that I always planned to work upon one time and that I had completely forgotten in the meantime.
The Song of the Day is “Sailing” by Rod Stewart, and I have it on the 1982 release “Absolutely Live“.
Every once in a while I feel a strong desire to drive down to the sea, either to Croatia or to Italy. Yesterday it had to be Italy. The first image, right out of the camera, was shot in the small yacht harbor Grignano, a short way north of Trieste, right after Miramare. I used the Sigma 70/2.8 Macro at f2.8.
The next image was also shot with the Sigma 70/2.8 Macro, this time at f4, and about 10km to the north, in Sistiana, another yacht harbor. On Sundays all of Trieste and Monfalcone are out at the sea, thus it was rather crowded. That’s really the time, when fast telephoto lenses shine. I walked around and shot details, lots of details. and the crowds didn’t bother me at all.
Next comes another image from Sistiana. This place is really only a bunch of piers with boats and some bars 
We finished our trip in Duino, a small village with a large castle, made famous by the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke.
In Duino I changed to the Sigma 10-20. For this image and for the Image of the Day I used f11 and shot from the tripod. This is the harbor of Duino, with the unpretentious but excellent restaurant “Dama Bianca” in the back. Hmm … just the right time for some sweet twilight shots, but then, don’t boats move? They do, and this is one more lesson learned
The Image of the Day is from only minutes after sundown. There were no spectacular clouds, only a nice gradient and the moon. I was lucky, because the girl sat there, completely motionless, and only seconds after this shot, she stood up and walked away.
The Song of the Day is “The Sea Calls” from the fabulous Richard Hawley’s 2007 album “Lady’s Bridge“.
One last thing: there will be an important announcement today, Monday 11. Be sure to check back, it’s an amazing thing. See you this night!
Yesterday weather in Austria was drab and rainy, so we made a trip to Italy. Not Venice or Florence, only the Villaggio del Pescatore between Monfalcone and Trieste, not more than 180km on street from home, but it was enough to give us fine Italian see food, a harbor full of sailing boats, and all that on a warm, decently sunny day.
There was a veil of thin clouds in the sky, so light was mostly flat. Of all the images I made, this is the one I like most. It’s funny, I have made many images that day, many that are very controlled and basically came out as pre-visualized, and this is the complete opposite. It is a found image.
This is a very tight crop, and when I was there, I didn’t even recognize the patterns that you see here. Post-processing was done in Capture-NX and Photoshop.
“Una Giornata Al Mare” (A Day By The Sea) by Paolo Conte is the Song of the Day. I have it on an album that in the US is distributed as “The Best of Paolo Conte” and in Austria only as “Paolo Conte”. Fact is, I never knew that it is a best-of album.
Constantly one day late, but here am I with the image for yesterday, Sunday.
It’s funny. I have seen this all my life, but not before I began photographing, have I consciously experienced how bad the light during the middle of the day is. Unfortunately this is exactly the time when I am on my way during holidays. Therefore we are in the evening again, this time a little before sundown, and it’s the boats in Mali Losinj’s harbor.
Again Bob Dylan? Why not. This is an old song, it’s from his 1964 album “The Times They Are A-Changin’“, it’s called “When The Ship Comes In“, and it is the Song of the Day.
Opatija, Abbazia, the Croatian and the Italian name both mean “abbey”, and an abbey there was, before this became the most glamorous sea bath of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. The structure in the background, the Juraj Šporer pavilion, was originally a café and now serves as an art pavilion.
On Saturday I’ve been there, only three hours from home but indeed for the first time in my life. I can tell you, communism is gone as if it never had been there, and it’s glamorous again.
Opatija is a paradise for photographers. Of course this image was shot with the Sigma 10-20 at 10mm, f11, 1/60s, with a polarizer.
“To Me You Are A Work Of Art” by Morrissey is the Song of the Day. “Ringleader Of The Tormentors” may not be his best solo album, but this song is undeniably great. Hmm … Morrissey … you either love or hate him. Guess on which side I am
