Postmen in Austria use such yellow trolleys. You’ve already seen one of them in “655 – On A Lonely Avenue“. It’s one of the images that I put on Fine Art Photoblog.

Ahh, Fine Art Photoblog! I probably don’t advertise it often enough (in fact I almost never do), but in its almost two years it has developed into a nice reservoir of interesting photography. It’s become more quite lately, we all have our own blogs, jobs, lives, but I promise I’ll again contribute more often. In fact I did just yesterday. Why not head over and browse a little? You can even buy prints there

Uhh … yes, sorry for that What else? Nikon Rumors told it for weeks, in only some hours it will be official: the Nikon D3s is coming. What that is? Well, just a D3 with sensor cleaning, video (only 720p) and ISO 12800.

Wait a minute, didn’t the D3 already have ISO 25600??? Uhhh … yes, it did, but it’s highest nominal ISO was 6400. 25600 was Hi3, the highest “boost” value. Now with the D3s, ISO 12800 is nominal and the highest “boost” ISO value is … 102,400!!! Holy smoke

On the other hand, it’s not that much more. It’s just four stops better than my D300. On the other hand, four stops, wow! That’s pretty much! Imagine the difference between photographing at 1/4s and 1/30s! That’s normally the difference between to hold and not to hold. Or take 1/30s and 1/500s: that’s the difference between motion blur and freezing the action. Quite impressive.

Of course I won’t buy one. Can’t afford it. You would have to buy a damn lot of images over at Fine Art Photoblog to make that possible

I’ll tell you a secret: I’ll have a camera with that sensitivity, and I’ll tell you more: you will as well. We only won’t have it right now. We’ll have to wait maybe two years, maybe three, then we will have it in affordable cameras. It’s only that we will not value it, because at that time we will drool about a D4’s or D5’s ISO 409,600

The Song of the Day is “The Letter” from Joe Cocker’s unforgettable 1970 live album “Mad Dogs & Englishmen”. See a video on YouTube.

Some very interesting cameras have appeared recently, and due to all that web site fuzz I have not yet commented on that.

It’s interesting, digital photography seems to get to a point where it’s more than good enough. When i bought my Nikon D200, I knew that, short of the high-end pro models, I had probably the best camera one could buy, with only one exception: the sensor was a little bit too noisy at high ISOs. It was still at least as good as film, but the Canons were better.

With the D300 that all changed. Suddenly Nikon had a first league sensor, and the camera itself had become ergonomically and feature-wise more or less perfect.

Sure, the D700 brought even less noise and full-frame, but in the end I decided to save the money. Full-frame would have sky-rocketed my lens costs, I would have lost the 100% viewfinder that I loved so much from the first moment, and the D300’s high ISO image quality is just good enough.

Additionally I would have lost the long reach without gaining anything on the short end. The point is this: the wide-angle problem for APS-C sensors is solved, there are plenty fine ultra-wide lenses. They may be not as good as the Nikon 14-24/2.8, but they take filters, cost half of it and ultimately they are again good enough. On the long end though, switching to full-frame would have had enormous impact. On the D300, my Nikon 70-300 VR has enormous reach. It’s equivalent to a 450mm lens. Ok, Nikon’s 400 and 500mm lenses are faster and of higher quality, but apart from the fact that they cost between 10 and 20 times as much, you can’t even carry them. Oh, and need I say that for my application, mostly street photography, the 70-300 is good enough?

With the new D300s (that’s a suffix, not a plural, thanks Nikon), the decision was even easier. I don’t need or even desire video, and apart from that, the D300s has nothing relevant to offer.

How about other brands? Not that I have any desire to change, but we have seen some interesting cameras in the last month. With the 7D, Canon finally have their answer to the Nikon D300. It has a much improved autofocus module (in this respect toppling the more expensive 5DMkII), has higher resolution, at least on paper it seems to offer excellent high-ISO noise, it has 18 megapixels, thus a whole lot more than the D300, they have even given it the 100% viewfinder. There are no reviews yet, but when they have not fumbled badly, this camera is bound to sell and give Nikon a headache. If I would begin today, I’d strongly consider the Canon 7D. As things are, it is just another excellent camera that’s more than good enough.

What else? Of course, the new Leica M9. This beast is totally and utterly out of reach, but I suppose if I had enough money to burn, I would buy one. Finally and after a long odyssey, Leica has arrived in the digital age. I am impressed.

And then? What about the Leicas for the poor man? What about those big sensor / non DSLR cameras that have appeared recently? It’s strange, they all have their strengths, but none of them is really interesting yet. The Sigma DP2 has improved upon the DP1, nevertheless it’s still much too slow. The Olympus Pen E-P1 is a nice camera, good looking, charming even, but its autofocus is much inferior to any DSLR and even to Panasonic’s Micro Four Thirds offerings. On the other hand, Panasonic has brought a too big, too DSLR-ish first offering with the G1, followed by a much nicer GF1, a camera of about the same type as the Olympus, but why on earth have they decided to set on stabilized lenses instead of a stabilized sensor?? That’s stupid! About the only argument in favor of lens stabilization is, that it stabilizes the image in an optical viewfinder. Apart from that it is only more expensive and adds complex elements that can fail. On a camera that does not even have an optical viewfinder, lens stabilization is pure folly.

Leaves the new Leica X1. Oh well, no need to salivate about this. Leica’s appeal are the M lenses. A fixed-lens Leica X1 is just another overprized camera soon to be obsolete.

All in all it seems that the category is not yet there. The cameras are either not good enough, or if they are, they are irrelevantly expensive.

Let’s look into the other direction, let’s look at medium format and the new Leica S2 system. This is even more out of reach than the M9, but again, if I had the money to burn, I would probably lust for a Leica S2. It’s not bigger than a pro DSLR (which most people would already consider too big to carry around at all times), but it should give us much better image quality. Indeed, the 100% crop shown on The Luminous Landscape hints at probably the best image quality ever seen in a digital camera. Impressive again.

In a way even the big medium format backs from Phase One and Hasselblad impress me, although those cameras are completely unusable for my type of photography. And then there is it again: my 12 megapixels are just good enough for me. They suffice even in those cases where I don’t invent half of my pixels with tools like Alien Skin Snap Art. And there is more to it: with 12 megapixels and the corresponding file sizes, my storage problem is solved. Hard drive space increases faster than I can make images, even though I save all my multi-layer Photoshop files, with some of the bigger of them being around half a gigabyte. I can still keep all my images so far on one single inexpensive drive, and I will be able to do so forever. Going medium format would set me back not only financially. Find a laptop that can edit a 60 megapixel image with ease. Well, you may find some extremely expensive MacBook Pro to come near, but then show me one of them that weighs 1.5 kg. No chance.

So do I care? Heaven, no! Times have changed. This is not the early digital age. Cameras keep their value now. Mind it, I don’t mean monetary value, that one goes down as it used to, but they keep their inherent usage value. I have no idea when I will change cameras. Should the D300 fail or get destroyed, I would of course buy a newer camera, but other than that I see no reason to change one good enough camera with all features that I could ever need, against another good enough camera with the same or similar features. Fact is, the D300 is already more than I need.

These images are from yesterday morning, thus the title. The Song of the Day is “Morningshow” from fellow Austrian Fuzzman’s self-titled first album. See a video on YouTube.

There are some image titles that I use once a year. “Summertime” is one of them (I kinda missed it this year) and another one is of course “Summer’s Almost Gone”.

I took this images yesterday on my way to the lake. The water level is unusually high for this season, but it is still warm enough to enjoy ten minutes of swimming. This is late sun falling between the trees of a rural orchard.

The Song of the Day is again “Summer’s Almost Gone” from the 1968 Doors album “Waiting for the Sun”. We had it last year and the year before. Actually it was interesting for me to compare the pictures, but in a way they all seem to carry the concept over.

Hear the song on YouTube.

A big, fat rain cloud squats over Italy, Slovenia and Austria. All of Austria? No, today there was a spot in Austria’s utter east, Burgenland, where the sun still shone, and that’s where we sought shelter from the storm. It’s a bit crazy and completely irresponsible from an ecological point of view, but it sure felt good to sit in the car and drive 2.5 hours for a little sunshine.

We went to Güssing in the south of Burgenland. It’s a small town best known for its mineral water, featuring a castle atop of a hill and a Franciscan monastery. This image has been taken in the Franciscan church.

The Song of the Day is “Shelter From The Storm“, originally from the 1974 Bob Dylan classic “Blood on the Tracks”, unequivocally acclaimed as one of his best albums, and a live version is also available on the 1976 release “Hard Rain”.

YouTube has the album version and a 1976 live video. Well, I’m a fan, I love both, but when you press me hard, I’ll take the live version.

Yesterday it was extremely hot in Vienna and I went swimming. It turned out to be an excellent idea, because today weather was rainy and at least in Vienna it’s supposed to stay that way. At the moment I am on the train to Carinthia, there it’s still sunny, with at least some chances for a sunny weekend. If not, we could always make a trip to Italy.

This week I recognized that I had ripped no more than 50% of “The Ultimate Jazz Archive” so far, and so I added another 20 CDs, thus I have 104 of 168 discs done now.

The Song of the Day, “Sunset” by jazz saxophonist Sonny Stitt, is on one of them, it’s from disc 99.

You may probably prefer to buy a single CD instead of 168 (though you miss the bargain of your life). If so, “Sonny Stitt/Bud Powell/J.J. Johnson” is for you. It has exactly the same version of the song and Deezer has the whole album for you to hear.

Ted Byrne is to blame. He made me do it. I swear!

You may have seen Ted’s recent experiments with the Alien Skin plugin Snap Art.

Well, we had some conversation about the merits of said software, and – without having tried it – I uttered my concerns that these were simply some canned effects, that everything made with it would look like Ted’s recent works.

Maybe not. Since then I have installed the plugin (along with “Bokeh” and the whole “Topaz” plugin bundle), have experimented a little, and I can see ways to put at least Snap Art to use. By the way, “Snap Art” is an incredibly stupid name, obviously catering to the non-artist crowd that may at times want to produce “something artsy”.

In reality this plugin is incredibly configurable. You have lots of pre-configured effects, but then you can begin to twist the parameters to your liking. And of course you can combine different effects with layers, blending modes and opacities.

The images shown here were made in reverse order. The Bamboo restaurant is the earliest, maybe still looking a little byrnesque, the street image looks more like where I wanted to go, and the Image of the Day finally has the composition as well.

The Song of the Day is “Come Together“. We had the Beatles version in “171 – Come Together“, this time it must be Ike & Tina Turner. See a video on YouTube.

It’s strange, but after all that SoFoBoMo, I still judge days by the number of “usable” images

Today I have made not so many, because most of the time I was very busy, first buying a new laptop, then installing my software on it.

Well, I had planned to buy it this year, because the old one is heavy, slow, and its display is so bad, that I frequently have to re-edit the images that I make on the train. Still, originally I wanted to make the purchase later in autumn, after Windows 7 has been released. Other than that, I was agonizing for months about what exactly to buy.

I didn’t want to spend too much money. The logic was, that I have walked around with a heavy laptop for years, so obviously this was no problem. You know, size and weight, these are the two factors that determine the price of a laptop.

Or are they? Yesterday I spent half an hour in an electronics supermarket, comparing laptops, and I was pretty shocked. Most of them have very bad displays with low contrast, small viewing angles and small gamut. Most, but not the Macs.

Hmm … one day I’ll buy a Mac or two, but at the moment I am pretty tied to Windows, and of all the Windows laptops, only two had a decent display: a monster with 19″ and weighing more than 4kg, and then the Sony Vaio Z11.

On those B&W images you see me on the train, speeding down to Mödling, one of Vienna’s suburbs. A dealer there had a very good price for the Sony Vaio Z21, the successor to the Z11, and now I have such a beast. Core 2 Duo, 2.4 GHz, 4GB memory, a wonderful non-glare display with high contrast and wide gamut, 1366×768, weighing only 1.5kg. Yup! That’s more like a Photoshop machine

The Song of the Day is “I’m So Free” from Lou Reed’s classic 1972 album Transformer. Hear it on YouTube.

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

Oh dear, see my mistake? The rules say you must keep your shadow out of the image, and what did I? A minute I let my attention slip and somehow it must have sneaked into the image

Wow, how I love this early summer weather that has come over us, just a week after the last snow fell in Villach!

Vienna is always about two weeks ahead of Carinthia, at least in spring, and here the trees are already budding, people go in summer clothes, the days are long again and color has come back into the world.

Today my color is yellow. A warm yellow, and that’s just how I feel. I have used the Nikon 24/2.8 today, I wanted it a little “wider”

I really like to use it, although it is not a good lens by today’s standards. Sure, it’s sharp, no problem with that, CA is there but not a problem either, bokeh is nothing to write home about, but it is not worse than with the average zoom, no, the problem are the reflections.

Boy, if you even remotely have the sun in your frame (or at night any strong light), you get a strong reflection from the sensor to the inside of the lens, and then as a strong emerald ghost back to the sensor. Eeek! Well, it’s not really a problem on DX format, because you can easily shade it off with your hand without causing vignetting, but I guess on FX format it must be painful.

This is something that typically occurs with old lens designs stemming from film days. Film was much less reflective than those silver sensors, and therefore the problem did not exist. Today’s lenses use a special anti-reflective coating on the inside, but my Nikon 24/2.8 was made sometime in the early 1990s. Oh well, no real problem, just a reason to be careful, and I just stop complaining. Who would, on a day like this

The Song of the Day is “I See My Great Mistake” by Memphis Slim. I have it on that wonderful 169 CD collection “The Ultimate Jazz Archive”. Sorry, no video, but Deezer has the song.

It’s interesting: when something finally catches your attention, you begin to see it all over the place. Well, as long as you’re not desperately looking for it, that is

I know there are many more lions on the streets of Vienna. Of some I know where to find them, some will come my way. There will be more of this. It could even make a SoFoBoMo topic: “Lions of Vienna”

Being out of that software project, that troubled me recently, I have no more meetings at 8:15am, but I try to keep going to work early. Even though we have daylight saving time now, the sun is already up at 6am, and between 7am and 8am I really enjoy strolling to work in this beautiful light.

This image is a snapshot if I ever made one. I was busy photographing the columns and their shadows, more from outside than from inside, when this woman passed me by. I quickly reacted, there was no conscious framing, no careful composition at all, I just clicked, got this one shot, and with slight cropping from below and a little more from the right, it turned out to be a real nice image

This is a mixed bag today, huh? The next image is not even from Friday morning, it’s from Tuesday and I forgot to post it. Did you ever put time into making an image and then forget to post it?? Oh dear!

It should have been posted along with “900 – There Ain’t No Cure For Love“, it would even have made a nice Image of the Day, but I really wanted to explain about them bicycles, and so a bicycle image was needed and I finally forgot to post this at all.

Compositionally it is somewhat top-heavy, but it is really about light, about the light shafts from the reflections in the shop windows. I tried it in color first, but B&W makes it so much easier to get away with massive contrast adjustments. This is another case where I really like what my current B&W process does, especially the blur along the edges.

The final image is again shot through the dirty rear window of a tramway, just like in “826 – Goin’ Down Slow“. I had forgot something at home, thus I didn’t take my usual route directly from work to the train station by Underground. Instead I returned home and then took the tram line 18 down to Südbahnhof. The last part of it is under ground as well, but this is at the crossing Gumpendorfer Straße / Gürtel looking north. The building on the left is a station of the Underground line 6, actually an Upperground here

Those stations were built for the old Stadtbahn lines that circled the city, and the architect was Viennese superstar Otto Wagner, Austria’s most famous proponent of Jugendstil, that’s how Art Nouveau is called hereabouts.

The church in the background is called “Maria vom Siege” (“Mary of the Victory”), a rather pompous name for this historicist church built between 1868 and 1875. It was not even built to commemorate a recent victory, but instead is about a victory of imperial catholic troops in the Thirty Years’ War in 1620. At the time when it was built, the Austrian empire was already in decline, politically in the shadow of Germany, economically struggling with the fact that it had no colonies to exploit. Didn’t make no difference though. Politicians always find reasons to use our money for useless projects that in the end are meant to glorify nothing but themselves.

The Song of the Day is “Oh England My Lionheart” from Kate Bush’s second album, the 1978 release “Lionheart”. Hear it on YouTube. Fantastic song, but that goes for pretty everything that she’s ever made