I’m still at home – and I can’t even begin to tell you how fed up I am. I have made no single image since when? Sunday?? But anyway, I’ll stay home tomorrow, and on Friday I’m back to work and then in the evening back to Carinthia.

Speaking of Carinthia, this is an image that I took more than a month ago on Mount Dobratsch. I didn’t use it, because I had more than enough images for “1210 – Solid Rock“, but today I am thankful for it. It’s also fitting in a way, because while the sun shines in Vienna, there was snowfall in Carinthia during the whole day, and it is predicted to go on until tomorrow. The weekend may see some sunshine as well. We’ll see. Let’s hope I’m fit for photography

This wooden sign is by the side of the road, almost at its end, at a height of about 1700 meters. I really liked the texture in the snow. What you see here is the result of a series of experiments, directed at conserving the highlight detail and the general feeling of depth, and at the same time showing a kind of blinding brightness. Thus I had to be careful: too much local contrast would have pushed the whole image into a medium gray, and that’s far from what I experienced while I was there. All in all I think the result is OK.

The Song of the Day is “Alone” from the 1996 Beautiful South album “Blue Is The Colour”. Hear it on YouTube. Not exactly related to the image, but a great song like almost all of Paul Heaton’s

Here’s one more of yesterday’s images. I was too lazy to go out today. Sorry

This is an abandoned house not far from Klagenfurt, located in a wonderful spot, obviously belonging to an estate not far away, a solitary house, abandoned and closed, with an “Entrance forbidden” sign on the door, of use for no one.

The Song of the Day is the Beatles song “For No One“, sung by Anne Sofie von Otter on her collabration with Elvis Costello, the 2001 release “For the Stars”. Hear it on YouTube.

This is not really an image, is it? But then, you know what this means? DONE!!!!

Mostly. There are some utilities that I still need to install, like WinRAR, Notepad++ and … well, probably not much more. Photoshop with all plugins is installed, licenses are activated, the 64 bit Nvidia driver is installed, the game Morrowind is installed and runs like a charm, my image database is there, the virtual machine with Linux, mobile networking is installed and tested, so are my browsers, bookmarks, wallpapers, etc. Gosh, I’m really tired now!

Image-wise I had some numbers 32 ready as well, just in case I would have to go back to Windows 7 32 bit, but fortunately this was not necessary.

The Song of the Day? “When I’m Sixty-Four” from Sgt. Pepper, what else

See the original clip from “Yellow Submarine” on YouTube.

Just like most Sundays, this was a slow day. I left home shortly before 2pm, at a time when you already have to worry about the sun.

My first way was towards the center of Villach, searching for some rectangular, modern architecture, something big and grid-like, something that I could use as a target for calibration images for PTLens, but I’m afraid that is not as easy as I had thought.

What I need is a pretty big building, one that fills the frame when photographed at 17mm from at least 20 feet away. I need it to have regular vertical and horizontal features, and they must be narrowly spaced, such that the image contains enough of them, even at 50mm.

I found nothing. When I gave up, I took this image of the bored cat (“fad” means “boring” in Austrian dialect), drove a little around in the countryside, made some uninspired images, and finally concluded the day with the other image, the temporary container, that is our local McDonalds while they rebuild the restaurant, catching the last rays of sunlight. Why this choice when the McDonalds image is clearly the better image? Well, I just happen to like cats more than burgers, that’s the reason

The Song of the Day is “Honky Cat” from Elton John’s 1972 album “Honky Chateau”. See him live in Ephesus in 2001.

It’s Sunday night, I am on the train to Vienna. Just like in the last post, these are images taken yesterday, Saturday. Yesterday’s images, the “Silver & Gold” and the baptistery in a local church, were taken while I waited for one tire on our car to be changed.

So were the first two images of this post. Much contrary to today, yesterday was a beautiful day. You know this slightly milky light, this November light that does not warm you, but that nevertheless warms your soul. That’s how it was.

I had to wait for an hour, walked around in the neighborhood, entered a local church (that’s yesterday’s baptistery), took photos of some more industrial aspects, of street corners, a former sawmill and much more, in other words, I had a jolly good time.

Waiting for something, that’s normally nothing that I easily bear. I am not a patient man, but being forced to wait on a day like that, holding a camera in my hands, that’s pure pleasure.

I tried to find out what it is with that autofocus problem that I reported in the last post, but I did not come any further. It sometimes happens, I believe it happens mostly after I have turned the camera on, but – honestly – I am not even sure of that. It just does not happen often enough and I can’t provoke it.

For the afternoon, clouds were predicted to come from the west, thus we decided to make a trip to Carinthia’s eastern end, the region around Lavamünd / Dravograd,where river Drau / Drava leaves Carinthia and enters Slovenia. The wayside shrine is somewhere on this way.

Ask me why of all these images, I made an image of some shrubs beside a river my Image of the Day. I can’t tell. It’s something in this image, some silence, some peace, that mightily appeals to me.

It is some quality of summer lost, some quality of sweet bitterness, some sting of death, some melancholy, some essence of fall. I can’t properly explain it but I feel it when I see this image, when I remember being there, and I hope you can feel it as well.

“Roll River Roll” from Richard Hawley’s 2007 album “Lady’s Bridge” is probably not a bad match, but judge for yourself.

This is the second in a series of entries about my newest lens, the Tamron SP AF 17-50mm 2.8 XR Di II VC LD Asp IF. Just like in the last post, these images are from Saturday. I haven’t gone out today, weather was rainy throughout, and the only images that I have made, were some reproductions of old photographies.

The first image is of a yellow sign that I found on a garden fence. It asks for caution when digging, because of a power cable. I liked color, texture and the crumpled look. The image has been treated with a healthy dose of Topaz Detail, strongly emphasizing local contrast. This is f5.6 at 50mm.

The next image is from the same place as the Image of the Day. It’s a former restaurant/café at the foot of a tower where once pellets were cast. It is on the northern shore of Wörthersee, the most prominent of Carinthia’s many lakes.

On the left side you have the image just as it came out of the camera, on the right side is my version from RAW, where I have tried to extract as much detail as possible, and to present the late autumn afternoon colors as radiating as they were. Additionally I have tried to correct the strong barrel distortion at 17mm with PTLens. I am not completely sure what the problem is, I strongly suppose PTLens mistakes this lens for its predecessor, the version without stabilization. In any case the correction is obviously wrong. It is quite OK at 17mm, there really is barrel distortion, but at 50mm PTLens tries to correct a pincushion distortion that is clearly not there. Maybe I should take my time and provide the necessary input for Tom to make the correction profile

The image was taken at f8. Other tests say that this lens’ sweet spot is at f5.6, this conforms to my own impression, but f8 is pretty good as well. Both thumbnails link to the full-size images. The JPEG right out of the camera is very sharp, my version builds upon that. I have corrected distortion, added saturation and sharpened the image, but otherwise I have left it pretty much as it was. Just see for yourself. I’d say I see some sharpness falloff in the farthest corners, not bad at all, but noticeable, even when not photographing charts.

The Image of the Day is a detail from the front building. Here is again the original from the camera, both this thumbnail and the Image of the Day link to full-size versions.

This is again f8, this time at 50mm. In this case I have added local contrast with Topaz Detail, added some saturation and again sharpened the image. I have not applied any distortion correction. PTLens would have so, albeit grossly wrong. Actually this looks pretty good to me.

As regards sharpness, this image is razor sharp across the frame, and if you look at the big version of the Image of the Day, I’d be surprised if it were possible to get any more detail out of a 12 megapixel sensor, regardless of camera brand, regardless of lens. This is as good as it gets.

Well, here we are. So far we have looked at nominal conditions, i.e. sharpness at f8, an aperture that we are likely to use in typical landscape images. The result is good at 17mm and outright excellent at 50mm. This is also as expected. Zooms frequently show some weakness at their shortest focal length. In this case there is strong barrel distortion and a tiny bit of sharpness falloff in the far corners. The former can be corrected after the fact, the latter is not bad at all and unlikely to be a problem in real-world situations. We’ll have to make a further look into performance at f2.8 though. This will be the topic of another post.

The Song of the Day is “Razor Love” from Neil Young’s 2000 album “Silver & Gold”. Hear a live performance on YouTube.

Don’t fear, this is the last post for today, a short one, showing two bicycle images that I shot in the morning, and two afternoon images from my way to the train.

I really love these small children’s bikes. I took the images in front of the same school/kindergarten in Vienna’s Josefstädter Straße where I made “727 – The Gang“

I like both of these bicycle images. The love theme in the Image of the Day was obvious, but I don’t know exactly what to make of the other one. Neglect? A father leaving his child? Or nothing at all like that? Maybe the small bike only fakes being tied to the railing? What if this bike is spying upon the man? Could this bike be a detective? There’s certainly something in his pose, that reminds me of a young hero …

The other two images happened on my way to the train, the “Karma” image just before I went down into the Underground, the other one just after I had re-emerged. “Karma” is basically the same kind of composition as the Image of the Day or so many of the half / half images in my SoFoBoMo ‘09 book “Urban Dreams II“, only not horizontal but vertical.

The second image, the one with the tramway tracks and the giant advertising in the background, somehow appealed to me, wanted to be taken. It’s something about the keen lines and the surreal effect of the giant legs. I don’t know, I can’t really tell why I took the image. I saw it and the urge was there. I’m pleased with the result though.

The Song of the Day is “Love Or Something” by Bob Geldof & The Boomtown Rats. I have it on the collection “Loudmouth: The Best Of Bob Geldof & The Boomtown Rats”. See a nice video on YouTube.

On Wednesday we made a trip to the mountains south-east of Kraków, the region between the Beskides and the Tatra. In a journal from 2001 I have read about the region, that legions of its inhabitants had gone to America, especially to Chicago and Toronto, but that most of them never had given up their houses.

Indeed you see innumerable of the typical wooden houses being uninhabited. In fact it’s pretty easy to see why: Although the region is beautiful, there is not much work available, almost no industry. My impression is though, that in the meantime tourism has become a substantial pillar of the region’s economy, with Zakopane being the #1 winter sports center in Poland.

Personally I was not particularly impressed though. I am afraid I am spoiled by our own mountains.

Other than that, let me bring forth one gripe that I have with Poland: It’s the habit of the Polish to burn things. We have called this trip jokingly an olfactory trip into the past. Let me explain.

Sometime in my youth it became forbidden to burn junk and plant remains on the fields or in your garden. Neither I nor my parents had ever done such a thing, but it was pretty common among farmers, and I can vaguely remember the protest against the law. It worked well though, and here in Poland I can experience what it means to the environment to not have such a law: It’s crazy, you see fires everywhere, everybody seems to burn some hay, leaves or whatever, and the air is constantly – and pretty unnecessarily – filled with smoke that hangs over the landscape like fog. That’s rather unfortunate, because the pollution by the heavy industry seems to be well under control.

By the way, the final image shows the name of a village. Language is another problem here in Poland, if for nobody else, then at least for me. Normally when I read a name in German, English, Italian, Spanish and to a degree French, I know how to pronounce it, and when I see it, I can more or less immediately recognize it. Not so here. Polish spelling is in a certain way elaborate that makes recognition pretty hard for me, and in some cases, like with this village’s name, it takes some pondering before I even have an idea of how to pronounce it

The Song of the Day is “Close To The Borderline” from Billy Joel’s 1980 album “Glass Houses”. Hear it on YouTube.

Not my best day yesterday. On the other hand, it was a wonderful late summer day and I left work early to go swimming, thus I should not complain

Both of these images are from yesterday morning and both were taken with the Sigma 150/2.8 Macro. These are the last images with this lens for at least two weeks. At the moment I am on the train to Carinthia, on Sunday I’ll be on a week-long trip to Kraków, Poland, and then I’ll spend another week in Carinthia.

I have decided to leave the 150 in Vienna. It is too heavy and as a walk-around lens only useful when you have the chance to return to a place. My lenses for the next two week are the three zooms Tokina 11-16/2.8, Nikon 18-200 VR, Nikon 70-300 VR, and the three primes Sigma 28/1.8, Nikon 50/1.8 and Nikon 10.5/2.8 fisheye.

The 28 will be my “normal” lens, the fish may be useful when ultra-wide is not wide enough, and the 50/1.8 is in my Carinthian bag at all times since I bought the superior but heavier and bigger Sigma 50/1.4. Additionally I will have my tripod in the car and the Lee graduated neutral density filters in the bag. I hope the weather plays nice

The Song of the Day is “Power To The Meek” from the 1999 Eurythmics album “Peace”. See a video on YouTube.

Quick! Two images of yesterday, and then I’m off to work

I like street corners, and yesterday I found out, that I like them even more, when I take the image from the other corner across. This could be a series. I had contemplated such a series once, but then I wanted to use the ultra-wide or even the fisheye. Interesting as well, but here I like the calm view of the 28.

As regards the Image of the Day, this is a crossing that has been closed for car traffic for weeks, and now they have closed it in this direction for the tramway as well. In the other direction there is no fence, but by car you can’t drive across either. Still, regardless of all the stop signs, beginning from the crossing before, you won’t believe how many drivers ignore that and try to get through, only to have to turn around

The Song of the Day is “No Way Pedro” from Van Morrison’s 2000 album “You Win Again”. No way to find the original, but YouTube has a cover version that’s quite to the spirit.