Yesterday afternoon we’ve been to Slovenia again. The idea was to take the “Triglavski cesta”, the small road from Mojstrana, a village between Kranjska Gora and Jesenice, south-west into the Triglav National Park.
I didn’t have the time to take a long walk or even climb up Slovenia’s highest mountain (2,864 meters), thus for us the road ended rather anticlimactic on a parking area in a forest, but actually that didn’t bother us at all.
The valley and the river along the road are incredibly beautiful, the water is icy cold and crystal clear, and as a bonus, I got to see one of the more impressive waterfalls.
The first image shows it from down by the road. The image was taken at an equivalent focal length of 24mm, which is quite wide-angle, and all the water in this fuming creek originates in the fall alone.
The Image of the Day was taken from the side, behind the fall, and it was pretty impossible to keep the polarizer dry for only just a second.
I suppose the fall is about 20 meters high. The enormous amount of water hits a deep pool where it constantly vaporizes and drenches the photographer more than 10 meters away. The pool then overflows and runs down the hill in form of the creek that we’ve seen in the first image. It’s utterly impressive to stand there within the roaring thunder. Wet, but impressive 
The Song of the Day is “Waterfall” from James’ 2008 album “Hey Ma”. See a video on YouTube.
It’s Monday noon, this is an image of yesterday’s short trip to Slovenia. Well, at least it was meant to be short, but one should never underestimate Slovenia’s small mountain roads. At least this time we were not bucked off 
It took me so long to post that image, because in the meantime I have made a book. No, it is not “Urban Dreams II“, my SoFoBoMo book, but it is the promised “Urban Dreams I”, made of most images of last years exhibition, along with some other images that I thought would fit.
I used the Adobe InDesign template, that I have created for this year’s SoFoBoMo. The book was made in about six hours. Of course the images were all ready to be taken, and most of the time went into finding a sequence with a certain flow, writing the introduction and, most tedious, writing the captions. Clicking on the thumbnail will bring you to Issuu.com, where I have uploaded the book.
As there is much concern about file sizes on the SoFoBoMo blogs, I can tell you that at least with InDesign you should have no problem. This book contains 46 images, two of them twice, I have not resized the images, I have just dragged the final JPEGs into InDesign graphics frames. Upon export, I have used the “High Quality Print” preset and only changed the image quality settings from the default of “Maximum” to “High”. The resulting PDF is still no bigger than 13MB and the image quality is absolutely satisfying.
The Song of the Day is “Mountain Greenery“, this time not by Mel Tormé, this time it’s the great Ella Fitzgerald. I have it in a box of her complete songbook recordings (which is very recommendable), but of course the Rodgers & Hart Songbook is also available separately. YouTube has a very nice 1979 live video.
It’s been slightly delayed, but here is the post for May, 1st. Remember my SoFoBoMo project? It’s going to be called “Urban Dreams“. Well, this day marks the begin of the earliest possible “fuzzy month”.
I’m still in Carinthia and making trips to the surroundings. On Saturday I thought I’d start right away, and I would do it on a trip to Ljubljana, Slovenia’s capital, a city with a population of about 270.000, and thus certainly qualified for the term “urban”.
Boy, did I fail! We started by visiting the castle on top of the hill in Ljubljana’s center, there in the park I made the Image of the Day. When we finally got down into the city, we had only a very short time, as a thunderstorm was approaching.
When we returned to Villach, we did not take the direct route through the tunnel, but instead left the highway at Jesenice, from there followed the river Sava up to Kranjska Gora, and via Podkoren we crossed over to Carinthia at Wurzenpass. 
The river image is from river Sava, again you see the typical color of the water in the region.
The view of the mountains is from the ascend to Wurzenpass, looking back to Kranjska Gora, and the final image, the road with the fence, was already taken in Carinthia.
Where does this leave me relative to SoFoBoMo?
I like all four of today’s images, the mountain image is quite a bit conventional, but I like the other three a lot. On the other hand, clearly none of them qualifies as an “Urban Dream”. My original idea was, to use mostly images of Vienna, and thus to start on Monday, when I’m back again. In any case, one thing is clear: I have not started SoFoBoMo on Saturday
The Song of the Day is “It Shouldn’t Happen To A Dream” from the 1962 Anita O’Day / Cal Tjader album “Time for Two”. Deezer has the album.
As I said in the last post, I am in Carinthia for a week. No traveling, no “real” vacations, just relaxing. It’s Sunday evening by now. It did take me some time to digest yesterday’s short trip to Slovenia.
But before we get to Slovenia’s beautiful landscape, let’s first push one thing out of our way: So far we had no dandelion shot this year, the dandelion season is short, here is this year’s attempt
This is the meadow in front of our house in Villach. We’ll get back to that in a week or two, when it will be a sea of white, feathery balls.
Yesterday we left Villach relatively late, at 4pm, but on the highway and through a long tunnel of more than 6km, the trip to Slovenia takes no more than 15 minutes.
Our target was the nearest town, Jesenice, a particularly ugly town that formerly was a center of Austrian k&k weapon industry. I guess it stayed on that track through Slovenia’s time in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, then the Socialist People’s Republic of Yugoslavia, but at the time of Slovenia’s independence, the high days of heavy industry were past. Today Jesenice is a town that visibly struggles to keep with the pace of the rest of the country.
The idea was, to leave the highway at Hrušica, drive all the way through Jesenice, then at Slovenski Javornik to take a small road left and up the mountains, all the way up to Javorniški Rovt, and then to take an even smaller road high up, to the west, to Planina pod Golico, and from there down to Jesenice. Google Maps does not show this connecting road, our street map does, but we finally found out that although the road seems to exist, it is to be used “at one’s own risk”, and that is not to be taken lightly in Slovenia, as we had to find out in March.
Even the road up to that intimidating sign had been extremely steep and narrow, thus we decided to let it be. The images so far were all made on the way up or on the highest point, just before we turned around. Pretty nice panorama, huh?
The only problem is, that winter is long and hard there, and that even the nearest town is half an hour of steep mountain roads away, and even then, it’s not a beautiful modern city, it’s shabby, old Jesenice
Well, that’s not fair. Sure, this is not a marvel of modern architecture (or any architecture), but it is a place where people live, a place that enabled people to live decent lives, so, sorry, I shouldn’t make jokes about it.Apart from its remains of heavy industry, the area is surprisingly rural and in fact very beautiful. This idyllic spring scene was shot somewhere between Koroška Bela and Moste, while we drove down to the small town of Radovljica.
We ended up with only a short look on that walled old town, deciding that it deserves more than a fleeting look. We’ll be back to it maybe this week if weather permits, but in any case soon.The last image is across the plain from Radovljica north. I pretty liked the clouds and the light.
All of these image were shot with three lenses: the Nikon 70-300 VR, the Nikon DX 35/1.8, and finally the wide angles with the Nikon DX 10.5/2.8 fisheye, the latter post-processed with the “Fisheye-Hemi™” plugin.
Well, I don’t really know what I thought, when I packed a bag of primes for this week, even omitting the 24/2.8, leaving the 35/1.8 the widest lens apart from the fish, but at least the fish does a very decent job.
The Song of the Day, “The Water Song“, is from the 1968 Incredible String Band album “The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter”. This was the first ISB album that I ever bought, then on vinyl, and since then I have acquired about all of their albums. Still, “The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter” will always be something special.
For a long time, ISB songs were not to be found on YouTube, but recently even this album has become available. Hear “The Water Song” on YouTube.
OK, OK, “911 – Spring Is Here” was probably really a tad … hmmm … lacking in the color department. Art is no democracy, but the wise artist heeds the voice of the public, even more so, when it’s really ONE voice. “Post-apocalyptic“! Guys, you really know how to motivate me. Hope you don’t mind when I choose to still pursue that way
Slovenia advertises with the slogan “The Sunny Side of the Alps”, and they are quite right. From Carinthia it’s only once over a mountain range (actually through a tunnel nowadays), and from Villach it takes me no more than about 15 minutes to reach the country, but at least in Spring and Summer, the climate is slightly warmer, the vegetation at least a week ahead.
On Sunday afternoon we took a short trip down to Slovenia, and to be precise, along the river Sava from Slovenia’s capital Ljubljana east to the small town of Litja.
There are roads on both sides of the Sava. We took the smaller ones, those that are so small and have so little traffic, that we once saw people playing Badminton in the middle of the road.
I used two lenses on this trip, the Nikon 18-200 VR and the Nikon 10.5/2.8 fisheye, but all images shown here were made with the fish and “Fisheye-Hemi™“. It’s simply more fun.
All of today’s images began as color images, then I have applied my now already familiar B&W process, and finally used a mask to reveal most but not all of the original color. It is very similar to yesterday’s process that did not tickle your fancy, only more subtle 
The Song of the Day, “Down By The River”, is once again from “The Hudson Branch EP” by The Hudson Branch, a music group based in Crystal Lake, Illinois. Three of their six members are Bienerts, and although I came to know Corey Bienert as a photographer, he and his band make very good music as well. Head over to their site and download some of their music. So far it’s for free. See the video on YouTube.
This gets really painful now. My last real post was for Friday and today it’s already Tuesday evening. On the other hand, Ted Byrne just congratulated me for the delay. He says it makes me human. Oh well
It took me so long, because I am a tad short of time, that’s one thing, and the other is, that I wanted to tell a story.
Have you ever been bucked off by a mountain? Well, I have on Saturday, but let me tell the whole thing chronologically.
Just as I left the house, I saw two contrails crossing. I took some quick snaps and at a lesser day I would have been satisfied. Not on Saturday though. We had wonderful sunny weather in Carinthia, I wanted to make a longer trip, and we decided to go down to Slovenia.
When we arrived there, it turned out to be more hazy than at home, but the signs of Spring approaching were everywhere, and most of all it was warm with almost no snow. It must have had something about 15 centigrades, I guess. I even saw the first flowers of this year.
The contrail image was taken with the Nikon 24/2.8, but I soon turned to the zooms. It’s much more convenient and sometimes you really need more reach. An example is this image of a rural church standing in a field. I liked the juxtaposition with the power lines, and 300mm at f13 was just right.
The plan was to leave the highway at Kranj, head for Škofja Loka and then cross over to Italy at Nova Gorica. I have drawn a map in Google Maps of what became the final route. I hope you appreciate it, because it took me an insane amount of time to make it
Actually, drawing routes on maps in Google Maps is not hard at all if you know how to do it. First of all, you have to be logged in with your Google Account. I know that some people are very sensitive to Google’s omnipresence, so I’d like to mention that you may want to log out after the map is finished. If you don’t do so, all your subsequent Google searches will be done on behalf of your account.
On the other hand, if you don’t trust Google, you have to use some anonymizing proxy anyway, because your IP address is as good as an account for the purpose of tracking your activities. I am a GMail and Google Reader user, and although I don’t necessarily trust Google more than any other company, I am always logged in.
When you are logged in, you see a link “My Maps”, and there you can edit your own maps, add markers and draw lines, just as I did.
Now, the trick in drawing routes is, to always begin with a straight line between start and finish. Click once for the start, double-click for the finish. This line will have a handle at each end and one exactly in the middle. Next you drag the middle handle to a point on the map where you want to have it, preferably in the middle. Oops, two new handles have appeared, one in each half of the line, each of them in the middle of the straight segment. You can repeat that as often as you need: grab the middle handle and pull it to its proper place. Each time two new handles appear, one to each side of the point that you have just moved. It’s really easy, actually much easier to do than to describe. Just give it a try.
The image with the bridges and the image of the castle were made in Škofja Loka, a beautiful little town north-west of Slovenia’s capital Ljubljana. This is a wonderfully picturesque place and I am sure to return sometime this year for a more thorough visit.
Did I promise an adventure story? Ooops, yes, I did. Well, here’s the adventure. If you look at the map, you see a marker in the south, labeled “Here we gave up“. When you zoom in, you see that we tried to take a shortcut between Dolenja Trebuša and ?epovan, and that we gave up.
Well, what you don’t see is, that this small and winding road crosses a mountain ridge, that it is a narrow dirt road without guard rails, hardly wide enough that two cars can pass each other, and most importantly, you don’t see that for long stretches this road is literally hewn into a sheer cliff, steeply rising to the right and falling 50, 100 or 200 meters to the left.
The road is closed in winter, but, hey, this is no winter any more, is it? In truly adventurous spirit we tried it. After all, what can happen? Now, when after some time the first snow and ice appeared, and when I had to zig-zag to avoid the fallen rocks on the road, I began to change my mind.
I finally gave up when I reached a place where I could turn the car. I happily admit that I was maybe not exactly in panic, but very far from feeling even remotely safe. The problem was, that I had no idea how far from the ridge we were. From what we saw, it could have been only another 50 meters up, but 200 or more were equally likely. Today, from the satellite map, I know that we had almost made it, but from where we stood, there was no chance to tell.
In a situation like this, all kinds of thoughts come up: What if there is snow across the road? What if there are so many and so big rocks on the road that I can’t drive through or around? What if I have to drive hundreds of meters backwards? Is it stupid to turn around or is it folly to not to, as long as you can?
It was a little ironic that just a minute or two after we had turned around, another car came up the road. It was someone from the region, thus the road was obviously safe. I felt a little stupid, but didn’t turn around again to follow him. Even if I had wanted to, I would not have been able to for at least a kilometer. Somehow grudgingly, but not really unhappy, I drove back down to Dolenja Trebuša. I will try the road one more time in summer, but this time I simply had enough.
Actually I am not really sure where I took this image. In any case it was before our little adventure. I suppose it must have been in the vicinity of Cerkno, one of Slovenia’s winter sports centers.
The Image of the Day has been taken a little bit back down south, most likely not much north of Kobarid. I have used the Sigma 10-20mm. The contrast between the dark forest and the mountains reflecting the last rays of the sun was extreme. You can’t really see it in the image, but I was standing in front of an abyss that dropped down maybe about 100 meters. The river in the valley is called So?a, and for readers of Hemingway’s “A Farewell To Arms” it may be better known under its italian name Isonzo.
The novel plays further downriver, but this valley was the stage for some of the most fierce battles of WWI.
You may find the color of the water slightly exaggerated, but it’s actually quite correct. This river’s color is such an impossible cyan, it’s hard to believe even when you are there. I don’t know the exact reason for this extreme color, but it must be connected to some minerals in the water.
Hey, that’s it. The Song of the Day is again “River Deep, Mountain High“, but this time it’s the original by Tina Turner. Hmm … when last time I called the Deep Purple version the absolutely best version ever, I must admit that I had not heard Tina Turner in a long time. In fact, I did not have a single Tina Turner record in my collection. I have somewhat remedied that since, by at least putting her “Platinum Collection” into my Amazon shopping basket.
It’s hard to recommend a single version of this song, thus I may point you to an early version, most likely the classic Phil Spector production, to a recent version with orchestra from French television, and finally to a version that she performed with an all-star band recorded live in 1989 at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. You may spot Little Richard, Stevie Wonder and Paul Simon. The image quality is so bad, I could not recognize anybody else, but the performance is top notch. Or maybe 1996 live in Amsterdam? There are countless fantastic performances on YouTube, you could really get lost. Fact is, I did, and that’s another reason why you had to wait so long
This is the result of another day off of SoFoBoMo. We were in Slovenia, about 90 minutes from home, and we came to see a fascinating phenomenon, a lake that’s only there in winter and spring. In summer it completely dries up, only to re-appear half a year later.
Phenomena like this are not uncommon in Slovenia. Geologically this is a karst landscape, porous limestone full of caves and underground rivers, rivers that come out of a cave, only to vanish in a canyon some miles down, coming back to the light of day somewhere else.
We plan to come back some time in August for the other side of the story. It must be interesting to see the boats lying on the ground when there is no lake at all.
Or maybe that’s not completely true. Some parts of the lake seemingly don’t vanish completely, or if they do, they do it so late, that no grass grows where the water leaves. These parts are covered by a thick layer of dead reeds, an ideal place for small spiders. Wherever you tread, there are hundreds of them.
We finished the day with a trip to the peak of a nearby mountain. There, at 1114 meters above sea level, is a restaurant with a fantastic view on the lake below. This last image was taken from the forest road up the mountain.
The Song of the Day is “Vanishing Act” from the 2003 Lou Reed album “The Raven“.
On Saturday we wanted to visit Bistra, a former Carthusian monastery, that is now the Technical Museum of Slovenia. Bistra is located in a very rural environment along the marshes south-west of Slovenia’s capital Ljubljana, only about 90 minutes by car from home. We had bad luck though, the museum is closed until March.
Being already there, we decided to drive a little further along the road towards Borovnica, and from there a forest road up a mountain and to a church that we saw on the map.
And I’m glad we did! In that forest I have seen more Christmas Roses than before in my whole life altogether (Hey Flo, I found out all by myself!). The mountain is sprinkled with flowers. The Image of the Day and this image were both shot there, both with the Sigma 70/2.8 at f2.8. It was an extremely warm weekend with temperatures up to 20 degrees Celsius, and for the Image of the Day I actually lay on the ground, wearing Jeans and T-Shirt.
On top of the mountain there was actually a village and sure enough this church. Churches on Mountains and hills, that’s a very common thing in Slovenia, and much more apparent than in every other European region that I’ve seen so far. This is the only image taken with the Nikon 18-200 VR at 18mm. The foreground tempted me 
Borovnica is hardly more than a big village with some old industry. I don’t know what they produce, but at least I took this image of some industrial architecture. It does not look totally deserted in Borovnica, but also not very lively either.
We took our way back along a completely straight, narrow street through the marshes, parallel to the river Ljubljanica. Every once in a while a way goes right or left, many of them like this one with beautiful trees.
Shortly before you reach Ljubljana, the road leads through the long stretched village ?rna vas (Black Village, after the black earth in the marshes) with its famous church of St. Michael, built by the most important architect of Slovenia, Jože Ple?nik. We were not inside because it was already late, but we will certainly come back.
It was a warm day, but not clear at all. The air was full of haze, and this hazy sundown concludes our little trip to Slovenia.
The Song of the Day is “Where The Wild Roses Grow” by Nick Cave and Kylie Minogue, from the 1996 album “Murder Ballads“. See the video on YouTube.
