This image was made on the same afternoon walk as “1995 – Green“. I wanted to post it yesterday, but then Tonto’s death changed my plans.
Although I made some images yesterday, today I didn’t. We had rain most of the day and it’s supposed to go on like that for two more days.
The Song of the Day is “Come Up And See Me Sometimes” by the great Ethel Waters. Hear it on YouTube.
“Non-Places” — I think the difference between a place and a non-place is pretty arbitrary and the term is a contradiction in itself. After all, even non-places are places, they only fail to get that recognition. When I do recognize it photographically, I try to convert a non-place into a place.
Hmm … it’s all very complicated 
As I said yesterday, non-places are fantastically useful artistic devices, exactly because they “do not hold enough significance to be regarded as places“. They do not come with pre-attached meaning, they are vessels open and willing to accept any meaning I fancy to pour in. They are perfect raw material.
The Song of the Day is “Shoplifters Of The World Unite” by The Smiths. Hear it on YouTube.
Oh, by the way, I took the liberty to remove a pair of price tags from the picture above 
I could have sworn I’ve never used that title before, but alas, Google revealed it, “235 – Hammer Horror” was the first time. Still, it’s been quite a while since
This is a scene from the window of a comic shop in Kaiserstraße, the street where I live. The shop is called “Runch!“, and that’s also where I shot “335 – The Red Spider“.
The Song of the Day is “Hammer Horror” from Kate Bush’ 1978 album “Lionheart”. Hear it on YouTube.
It’s Thursday afternoon, it’s beautiful outside and I’m on my way to Carinthia. The next two weeks I’ll be busy moving, but I hope I’ll find at an hour a day to go swimming, at least as long as it’s sunny and warm.
I did take some images today, but mostly I was in a hurry, thus making them typical examples of non-contemplative photography
Here’s someting from Italy instead.
The Song of the Day is “The Precious Jewel” from the 1997 Charlie Haden / Pat Metheny collaboration “Beyond The Missouri Sky”. Hear it on YouTube.
Here’s an image taken yesterday night. At first I wanted to post something else, and that’s what occupied me last evening.
You know those moments: you take an image, you think it’s excellent, and while you process it, you find out it’s not, and no amount of processing can save it.
Well, this is an image I initially did NOT deem worthy of a blog post, but now, after having processed it, I do. Initial judgement can be pretty unreliable
The Song of the Day is “Hell’s Ditch“, title song of the 1990 Pogues album produced by Joe Strummer of Clash fame. Hear it on YouTube.
Enough diagonals, Ken?
It was pretty warm today, the air feeling liquid like hot sweat. According to the weather forecast the tropical weather will be over tomorrow though. Let’s hope summer does not end like last year, when after two hot weeks rain set in in late July, and never really stopped until the end of September. Scary how time is fleeting, huh?
The Song of the Day is “You’re Pretty Good Looking (For A Girl)” from the 2000 White Stripes album “De Stijl”. Hear it on YouTube.
In a comment to the last post, Colin noted that
It’s interesting that you notice a problem with green. With my LX5 and GF1 I often have a problem with blue skies that seem to have too much cyan in them. I often wonder if I am adjusting to what my own eyes see and whether that produces as pleasing a result for others that might look at my work. In other words, how do we accommodate for / identify whether we have any deficiencies in our colour vision?
Yeah, really, how do we? This question is related to the ages old dilemma of how to decide whether the world is only an illusion in our mind, or if there is something like objective reality.
In reality it’s impossible to decide. Maybe it’s in my mind (but what am I then?), maybe there is an objective reality, but I think it’s a waste of time to even care. Whatever there is, I can only experience it through my senses, and if I can’t be sure that anything outside of my mind even exists, how could I be sure that you and I, that we both experience the same sensations? And even if the “raw data” in form of electrical impulses on nerves were identical, how could we be sure that the processing in our brains led to the same result?
I talk about grass and green and yellow, and we certainly have a shared concept of grass. I can take an image of “it” and there are so many references, both inclusive and exclusive, that, given we accept the idea of our own existence and each other’s existence, I can be fairly sure that something exists that we collectively call “grass”, and that my understanding of that word overlaps to a high degree with each other’s understanding.
Colors are a tiny bit different. We can agree to call the color of grass “green” or maybe “yellow”. We can also assign color names to certain ranges of wavelengths, but we have no way to communicate our experience of seeing those colors. It could well be, that the existence of different “tastes” is really rooted in different experiences, but then maybe not. In a way all communication is based upon a hope for being understood.
We get feedback though, and if the feedback matches our expectations, we get an indication that some shared understanding has happened.
We can also try to match what we see in nature, with what we see in the pictures that we make of nature. In my own vision, as long as I don’t try to answer how others see (which I can’t), there is perfect consistency. I can’t tell how you see my pictures and how you see reality, but I know how I do, and I can strive for greatest overlap, or if I am not interested in that (which is often true), I can try to make the inter-relationships of colors within a certain picture consistent, and if I am not even interested in that, I can at least try to make them conform to an idea or a memory.
The Image of the Day is easy. I am certain that it does not look like what I saw, but in an image of such an artificial space, we severely lack clues to how the image “should” look. The original JPEG from the camera was fine and what I made of it is fine as well. In fact there is not much of a difference. I have increased global saturation a bit, but have pulled back the reds, because otherwise they would have dominated in an unbalanced manner. Thus we have a consistency of inter-relationships within an image, but due to the lack of a reference point, we can’t tell what’s “right” and what’s not.
The other image is a different case. On the left you see the original JPEG from the camera, and on the right is what I did to it in Photoshop.
Here I have tried to solve the problem of dynamic range by trading brightness for saturation. I have put warmth into the colors, but I have done more so in the center, around the sun. Saturation is also higher there. The result may not conform to any physical reality, at least not more so than the JPEG from the camera, likely even less, but it conforms better to my memory of what it was to look into the blinding sun.
The Song of the Day is “One Bright Star” from the 2008 Paul Weller album “22 Dreams”. See him live on YouTube.
I love my Panasonic LX5. I have bought it more than two months ago and I have used the D300 one or two times since. Two, I think. Once because I had to for a portrait, and the other I can’t remember. It’s so small, it’s so light and it makes so perfectly usable images.
There are only a few accessories that you can buy. An electronic viewfinder (I bought it the second day, it’s great), a spare battery (I bought it the first day, it keeps me safe), a conversion lens adapter ring (also needed to mount filters), a polarizer (I already had that), a two-stop split-ND filter (my big Lee were useless with such a small lens, thus I have bought a screw-in B+W), and now I also have the last one that I can think of, the Panasonic DMW-LWA52 wide-angle converter.
It’s big, it’s heavy, it is of extremely high quality, I can’t see any detrimental effect on image quality … and I hate it.
It’s too big. It’s too heavy. In order to have its use recorded in EXIF data, one has to put the camera in converter mode using a menu setting. That’s easily done, only that it disables the zoom. Yes, really, you can’t zoom while you have that heavy chunk of glass attached. Well, you can if you put the camera out of converter mode, after all, it can’t tell if or what is attached to the ring, but then you get wrong data, although I see no difference in image quality, at least in the widest setting.
Obviously there are reasons, for instance that images at maximum zoom are very blurry in the corners. The converter is seemingly optimized for one focal length. This does not worry me, it is understandable, but it makes the converter a very specialized accessory, and given that I need it very rarely, my willingness to accept the weight penalty is limited. And while it’s a burden to carry it around in a bag, it’s worse when you actually have it on the camera. It completely unbalances the LX5, makes it front-heavy as hell. Small wonder, given that the lens has about the same weight as the camera
By the way, when I say no detrimental effect on image quality, I don’t exactly mean “no effect”, rather “no unexpected effect”. This lens distorts wildly (+7.00 in Photoshop!) and it also vignettes as mad, but I’m not going to blame it for that. In film days those traits would have been inexcusable, but today you simply don’t care. No, the real problem for me is how the lens transforms a camera that I like to carry, into a camera that I don’t like to carry. That’s it.
Which doesn’t mean that I’m going to sell it, only that I expect to rarely use it
The Song of the Day is “Wide Boy” from the 1984 Flying Pickets album “Lost Boys”. A great song from a great a-capella album. Hear it on YouTube.
This shop had good times, then it had hard times and now it is gone. Certainly there are stories to be written, stories of a patron and his customers, stories of a street, stories of an era, but that’s not my job and not my ambition and certainly not my gift. I am no Steinbeck, I am a photographer, and when I don’t take photographs, I am a programmer.
Apropos programming: Today I have released version 1.2.1 of my Azzyzt JEE Tools, and with that release I have the impression that we’re past all major problems. If you are a programmer (hmm … most photographers today are ), if you need to implement database-backed web services, if you happen to like Java, and if you haven’t tried it yet, I guess now is a good time. Might save you a lot of work.
And … did I mention it’s free?
“Hard Times” is a Ray Charles classic, today interpreted by Eric Clapton on his 1991 live album “24 Nights”. The version on YouTube is different, but not much, and David Sanborn is a good match. Still, you may prefer Ray Charles and I certainly do. Here is his version.
I really wanted to post another Saturday image, but when I went out around midnight and passed this bike shop, I found the lively scene inside quite inspiring.
I’m not sure if this was the best frame to be had (tough I tried some) nor am I sure if this is the best processing. I may come back
“The Natives Are Restless Tonight” is from Horace Silver’s 1965 album “Song for My Father”. Great Jazz. Hear it on YouTube.