1403 - It's A Fire

Sigma 28/1.8 4 Responses »
Aug 172010

Oh dear, a sunrise! How could I?

But then, why not? Sure, it’s a cliché, with probably only sundowns being worse, but it has happened, it did impress me, and I have the feeling that the image is quite a good representation of what I saw.

If sunrises totally disgust you, I can offer you a look though one of the etched windows in our stairwell here in Vienna. It’s likely the better image, but, damn, that sunrise was really great :)

The Song of the Day is “It’s A Fire” from the 1994 Portishead album “Dummy”. Nice song. Head over to YouTube for it.

Posted by andreas at 9:46 pm Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,

1394 - Blue Again

Sigma 8-16 No Responses »
Aug 092010

I haven’t done much photography this weekend. On the one side there were the consultations about the apartment, on the other side I was very busy programming. This is an image taken today in the afternoon on my way to the lake. The sky was blue again, swimming was fine, it’s only that my head was buzzing with ideas. It’s pretty hard to empty your mind and to get creative, when you constantly worry about programming concepts :)

This is a place where I like to drive by. It’s not the direct way to the lake, it’s a detour that costs me at least half an hour, but I know the environment very well and there’s always an image to be had. I would have liked some more flowers to work with, but hey, I was already determined to use an image from Italy, so this one came for free :D

The Song of the Day is “Blue Sky” from Joan Baez’ 1975 album “Diamonds & Rust”. Hear it on YouTube.

Posted by andreas at 2:36 am Tagged with: , , , , , , ,

1393 - Stormy Weather II

Sigma 8-16 No Responses »
Aug 082010

Funny, I had thought these images were from Saturday. Now it turns out I shot them on Friday afternoon. Oh well, I did a lot of work over the weekend, seems I got a little confused.

It’s not that great an image, I just had to take it, because this was the overture to one of the most violent rainfalls that I’ve ever seen. When finally the rain began, I used the time for a pause and a nap. There’s nothing better than sleeping when the rain drums :)

I have not countless, but quite a lot of versions of Harold Arlen’s “Stormy Weather”. Contrary to my normal habit I present a version here, that I don’t own, but it’s a version that I dearly love: Elisabeth Welch’s performance in Derek Jarman’s interpretation of “The Tempest”. Honestly, it’s too long that I saw the film, I can’t remember how it was, but I do remember that scene towards the end (or was it the end?) when Mrs Welch came in and began to sing. Incredible! YouTube has a good version, but of course the effect of the sudden transition is lost. Still, you may like it :)

Posted by andreas at 10:15 pm Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,

1359 - Wicked Game

Tamron 17-50/2.8 VC No Responses »
Jul 062010

Allow me please to make an indecent proposal.

As we all know, fame and fortune are a direct and automatic consequence of merit, right? Just work hard, be good, and it will be recognized, yes? No?

Well, probably it is not just that automatic, probably at times we need to help Fortuna along, take her by the hand, lead her in the right direction. I suppose this is such a time :)

Yesterday night (yeah, yeah, this is supposed to be the blog post for Saturday, and now it’s already Tuesday morning again, I’m late, I know), after only about three months, I have finished my Eclipse / GlassFish / Java EE 6 Cookbook, a blog post on my Programming blog. Being here for photography, most of you won’t be interested in it. Still, it’s a damn fine tutorial about a topic that is not broadly covered. It’s comprehensive, well researched and would print to about 80 pages. That’s not shabby. It needs exposure though.

May I make an indecent proposal?

Could we perhaps play a game together? The wicked game of creating public interest? Even when Java programming is probably the thing that interests you the least, may I beg you to go to my tutorial, scroll down to the very bottom and use one of those icons, to share my tutorial on Facebook, to digg it, to stumble it, set bookmarks on Google, Yahoo or Delicious, whatever you use, whatever you happen to have logins for. It would drive users from those social bookmarking sites to my tutorial, some may return later, and that would greatly help in building an audience for this fledgling blog of mine.

Of course this is a little bit dishonest, this is tricking the game, but on the other hand, this is just what advertising does to us all the time, and I don’t even sell something, to the contrary, I’m giving away a compendium of my experience … for free. Thanks a lot for considering.

The Image of the Day is from June 20 and was taken in Lavagna, Liguria, Italy, just the next town north of where we stayed. I didn’t take any images on Saturday. The Song of the Day is of course “Wicked Game” by Chris Isaak. Hear it on YouTube.

Posted by andreas at 4:35 am Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,

1185 - White Winter

Tamron 17-50/2.8 VC 4 Responses »
Jan 102010

OK, that’s what I talked about in the last entry, the view from my study this morning. This was another day spent at home, relaxing, playing games, finishing Orson Scott Card’s sci-fi novel “Ender’s Game”, winner of both Hugo and Nebula awards,

The book didn’t impress me all that much. When it came out in 1985, it was criticized for the way it excused violence, but in the end it is not much more than a mix of Potter in space and Full Metal Jacket. In a way.

It’s not a bad book. It’s only not great. Still, I liked it well enough that I give the author another chance: I’ll continue with the sequel, “Speaker for the Dead”. Maybe the whole is more than the first part :)

The Song of the Day is “White Winter Hymnal” from the 2008 self titled Fleet Foxes debut album. Great song, see the video on YouTube.

Posted by andreas at 9:54 pm Tagged with: , , , , , , ,

1175 - Last Good Day Of The Year

Tamron 17-50/2.8 VC 8 Responses »
Dec 312009

The world changes, and it does not. So we do, and we do not. Time goes by, another year is over, a new one waits for us, and it will be like all the others: it will bring us joy and tears, and when among the tears there is enough joy to remember, then it is a good year.

I’d like to thank all my readers, all of you who take time to comment, all of you who are too busy and still come back, all of you who were actually looking for a song and who found that you like the pictures as well. I wish you all the best. See you on the other side :)

The Song of the Day is “Last Good Day Of The Year” from the UK band Cousteau’s self titled debut album. Enjoy it on YouTube.

Posted by andreas at 10:44 pm Tagged with: , , , , ,

1108 - Sick And Tired

Sigma 28/1.8 7 Responses »
Oct 252009

Looking out of the window of my study, and if the sky or the light are interesting at all, taking some morning photos, this has become a habit.

Today it was an especially excellent idea, because I spent the rest of this wonderful, sunny, warm day in bed. Diarrhea, fever, and generally a feeling of being completely drained of all energy. Hate those days, and even more so, when they are that beautiful!

Tomorrow evening I should be on my way back to Vienna, but I guess I will need another day or two, at least given how I feel at the moment.

The Song of the Day is “Sick And Tired” from Eric Clapton’s 1998 album “Pilgrim”. See a live performance on YouTube.

Posted by andreas at 11:34 pm Tagged with: , , , , ,

1107 - The Harmony Of Industry And Nature II

Tokina 16-50/2.8 8 Responses »
Oct 252009

This is the Infineon microchip plant, the biggest employer in Villach, just 200 meters south of where we live. I’m standing on an artificial hill, maybe all the material dug out when they built the plant.

This image began as an HDR, and somehow it didn’t satisfy me at all. I experimented quite a while, and in the end it became this 26 layer job, groups not counted.

I like these images where I overlay local contrast enhancements with blurs of various kinds. Using masks, I can selectively keep parts of the image more or less free from the effect, allowing me to set accents and emphasize certain parts of the image. Here it is the building diagonally opposite from the sun. You only have to be careful to make it not too obvious.

Just like in “904 – The Harmony Of Industry And Nature“, the Song of the Day is from the Nine Inch Nails album “Ghosts”, and this time it is “12 Ghosts II”. Enjoy it on YouTube.

Posted by andreas at 1:50 am Tagged with: , , , , , ,

1093 - Dream River

Tokina 11-16/2.8 10 Responses »
Oct 112009

I took this image yesterday evening, on my way back from swimming. This is one of the three or four possible roads, one avoiding the highway.

I know this place. This is a sundown place. I don’t use it very often, but yesterday I didn’t have anything compelling, so I tried my luck. The Tokina 11-16 was still mounted and two test images confirmed, that I best would use a sequence of bracketed images, or otherwise I would have to choose between detail in the sky and detail in the landscape.

My soft edge split neutral density filters would not have helped me here. Through this ultra-wide lens, the transition would have been much too soft. They would at most have darkend the top too much, doing almost nothing to the sun. The right traditional tool for the job are Singh-Ray’s reverse graduated ND filters. Maybe I should get one, I suppose it would have worked very well.

With no filter available, I resorted to HDR. This is an image made of four out of a sequence of nine exposures. I tried Essential HDR first, and when it had problems aligning the images, I switched to Photomatix Pro. Both are excellent programs, none is perfect, but normally one of the two works fine. I don’t care that much which it is, I go to Photoshop anyway. Of the two tone mapping modes in Photomatix Pro, this is the more conservative, called “Tone Compressor”.

In fact I can imagine very different ways to process the image, with this one just one possibility. The “Detail Enhancer” tone mapping made the scene much less peaceful, more dramatic, and even in Photoshop there are so many different ways to go. There is no single right way and on another day I probably would have produced a very different result.

The Song of the Day is “Dream River“, again by the Mavericks, but this time from the 1998 album “Trampoline”. Hear it on YouTube.

Posted by andreas at 9:41 am Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

1070 - Under A Stormy Sky

Nikon 70-300 VR, Sigma 28/1.8 2 Responses »
Sep 182009



Sorry for the irregular posting intervals. At the moment I am pondering a major overhaul of this blog, and most of my time goes into reading web reviews of web hosting services, comparing hosting plans, etc.

Anyway. Yesterday was supposed to be a mostly rainy day and it actually turned out to be not. There were high clouds towering on all horizons, but most of the day it was warm and sunny in central Carinthia. I was even swimming.

The Song of the Day is “Under A Stormy Sky” from Daniel Lanois’ first album, the 1989 release “Acadie”.

To my great surprise YouTube has multiple videos, for instance a live performance, another that’s part of a documentary, where Daniel explains what this song is about, and finally another documentary about the Canadian “Mariposa” festival, where he performs the song in a manner very similar to the album version. Pretty nice coverage :)

Posted by andreas at 9:36 pm Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,
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