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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

1066: Battle of Hastings. Uhhh … damn those associations

This is an image of Sunday. I took it in the early evening, just minutes before we arrived in Villach after 9.5 hours of driving. Most of the way from Kraków to the Slovak border it just did not rain, most of the way through Slovakia we had sunshine, but then in Austria we came into some of the worst rains that I’ve ever had to endure on a highway. Still, everything went well.

The Song of the Day is “No Place Like Home” from the 1992 4 Non Blondes album “Bigger, Better, Faster, More!”. They had one or two hits then, made this album and were never heard of. It’s not their best song, YouTube has it, but I suggest you hear into the biggest hit “What’s Up?” as well. Much better for my retarded taste

You may or may not object to it, but resistance is futile. Today an image is what you make of the raw data that the sensor captured.

These are two images of Saturday, our last day in Poland. We had been visiting Ko?ciuszko Mound in the morning (the image of the spiral stairs is from there), later the salt mines of Wieliczka, and finally, late on that overcast and gloomy afternoon, we drove a little bit around, and that’s where I made the other image.

As to the Image of the Day, I could not really decide what I like better, the B&W version, concentrating on tonal density and contrast, or the color version, concentrating more on the Yin-Yang aspect. I like both. You decide.

The other image is presented in two versions, to the left straight out of the camera, and to the right what I made of the RAW file. This is not a particularly good image, it’s more that I tried what I can do with it and myself was surprised about the result. I post it as a reminder to all those JPEG shooters. You miss something

The Song of the Day is “Your Own Choice” from the 1970 Procol Harum album “Home”. Hear it on YouTube.

By the way, I had a hard time with yesterday’s image of the town hall in Tarnów. I finally decided to give it an overhaul and have cropped it from below. The result finally has the balance that I was looking for. See for yourself. You may have to reload the page to see the new image.

It’s not very long since the last post. I had risen extraordinarily early, spent hours writing my post and hearing the Leningrad Cowboys. All the while the sky grew lighter.

I changed back to the Sigma 28/1.8 to capture the sky gradient. It’s not a particularly good composition or such, it’s just a sky at the time when clear skies are most beautiful.

Later, when I went to work, I used the Nikon 70-300 again. This bicycle is a good old fried, the last time we had it, was in “831 – Just One Of Those Things“, and that was already the second time, but a good actor can be employed more than once

The Song of the Day is “Blues Before Sunrise” from the 1997 John Lee Hooker album “Don’t Look Back”. Hear it on YouTube.

Sorry for the delay. Yesterday I had one of those rare meetings with my friend Christian. Actually I had forgotten the date, and when he met me at work, I was pretty surprised and embarrassed, because I was supposed to be the host.

Thankfully the shops were still open and I could go the the next supermarket to fetch some edibles and some wine. It left me damn short time for photographing though. In fact this image was taken while I walked back home. Note to self: Never go out without a camera, even if it’s only to the supermarket

The Song of the Day is “The Golden Age” from Beck’s 2002 album “Sea Change”. See the video on YouTube.