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.

I like those Topaz plugins. For this image I have used the original ISO 3200 image without noise reduction applied.

These old walls have so much texture, noise reduction would have made more harm than the noise itself. Instead I have emphasized the texture with “Interior Strong Detail”, a Topaz Detail preset, and thrown in some of Topaz Adjust’s “Spicify”. It does not look entirely natural anymore, but I suppose it gives quite a good feeling for the place.

The Song of the Day is “Steps Steps Down” by Barney Bigard. I have it on disc 32 of the “Ultimate Jazz Archive”, my trusty treasure chest of 168 CDs full of Jazz history. Hear it on YouTube.

Friday was another meager day. It only rained a little, not nearly as bad as Thursday, but it still forced me to use an umbrella.

Other than that, Friday marks the end of the first half of my SoFoBoMo effort.

I had two working weeks of shooting in Vienna, ten days, 63 processed images so far, almost twice as much as I need, some candidates are left to choose from, in case that I need a certain color or subject, and of course I won’t suddenly stop now, but I may ramp shooting down to the usual blogging level. This will save me a lot of time that would otherwise go into processing.

The Image of the Day shows a window hook in my stairwell in Vienna, thus the Song of the Day is “Leave It Open” from Kate Bush’s 1982 album “The Dreaming”. Hear it on YouTube.

As promised: after 24 images with the Nikon 24/2.8, I needed something new, and I really went with the fish.

One of the three blog posts of yesterday was made in the morning and, being pretty much in a hurry, I took the Underground for work. I saw this image in the morning, took two versions, but none was usable. One even included my feet and the paper bag with my breakfast

That’s the hardest part when using the fisheye: keeping out what you don’t want in the frame. I returned after work, and I was very thankful for the image, because in mid-afternoon it had begun to pour down, making outdoor photography a little inconvenient.

That in post-processing I went for toned B&W again was not planned from the beginning, but when I tried it, it worked so well to play down colorful peripheral elements like a red emergency telephone at the upper end of the elevator, that I stuck to it.

All these last images had a B&W conversion layer, usually with a filter like “Maximum Black”, a gradient map with the same tri-tone gradient, all had a layer with a strong 50px gaussian blur applied liberally along the edges, all had 10% monochrome gaussian noise added at 70% opacity, and in all cases I have applied levels and contrasts in normal blending mode after the gradient map, thereby intensifying colors where I have accentuated contrast.

This has become more or less a recipe and it works exceedingly well. In yesterday’s image I have mixed it with distorted edges, today I have increased local contrast, but the basic recipe is always the same. I should really turn this into an action

The Song of the Day is “Something New” from Tanita Tikaram’s 2005 album “Sentimental”. I’ve just heard the whole album while working on this post, and I think it’s really a shame that I seemingly did not sell so well. It is temporarily out of stock at Amazon, but some Amazon market place dealers have it for reasonable prices around $10, from at least one, Caiman (in Florida, where else), I have bought in the past.

Enjoy the song on YouTube. You won’t regret it.

24mm, on a Nikon D300 that’s an effective focal length of 36mm, which is about 35mm, and that’s one of the classic focal lengths for a moderate wide-angle. Everybody and their parents have used that from the beginning of time, but so far I had it only on the 18-200 zoom.

Sure, I must have used it a thousand times and I’ll check that, but you only really learn to see in a focal length when you use it with a prime.

So, how does it work? I have no big number of images to show, but that’s more because I had neither time for shooting nor later for processing.

This lens fits like the proverbial glove. I don’t know, there’s something about it that makes it incredibly versatile. It’s wider than normal, but definitely not wide enough to produce much distortion. It feels … natural. I like that. And it’s small. I like that too.

To answer Thomas‘ question: it’s actually two bags of lenses, one for Vienna, mostly with primes, one for Carinthia with the three zooms and the current “prime of choice”. Additionally, the Sigma 150/2.8 and the Nikon 50/1.8 are permanently in Carinthia now.

So, how was it for you when you used your 24mm (or most likely 35mm on film) for the first time? Do you still like it? Do you still use it? Is it boring?

The Song of the Day is “How Was It For You?” from James’ 1990 album “Gold Mother”. See a video of them as young boys on YouTube.

Juha Haataja has recently complained about lack of inspiration due to this dull, gray winter light. I can feel with him, we had no sun for more than two weeks now, and up in Finland the days are even shorter.

In a comment on his blog I had said that “when I have the problem, I normally search for colors in shop windows, street lights, advertising and so on, and I use that, frequently with very shallow depth of field, often only as a background. In many cases I go macro (but on the street) or use a longer lens.” Well, here we are

It’s not that I don’t like the Sigma 20/1.8 any more, but sometimes change is a nice thing, and so I changed to one of my less favored lenses, the Nikon 85/1.8.

Let’s be honest, this lens is a pig, regardless of its generally good reviews. Wide open it is extremely soft (it’s no focus problem, it’s only softness), shows excessive purple fringing (not CA, that would easily be fixable in software), and its minimum focus distance of about 85 cm makes it unusable for any macro work.

Still, at times it is quite funny to use, and it made a nice contrast to the Sigma 20/1.8. I’m only sure that it won’t live on my camera for much longer. Its restrictions and flaws make it a tough choice as a walk-around lens. In fact, I’m a day late, these are Monday images, I’m writing this on Tuesday afternoon, have used it today as well, and I definitely know that I won’t shoot with it tomorrow.

My style of seeing with this lens is very similar to that with the Sigma 70/2.8, but then again it is not. They have almost equal focal lengths, the Nikon is longer and opens up to f1.8, but the Sigma is a macro and that makes all the difference. See my images from about a year ago, when the Sigma was my favorite lens and I used it more or less exclusively. It is so much more versatile, and although it is slower, it is completely usable from wide open, which the Nikon is only under very controlled conditions.

Anyway, we’ll come back to the Nikon 85/1.8 in the next post, and after that it will go back into the bag for good, to be resurrected for the odd portrait session or maybe on another one of these weird days when I need something different

The Song of the Day, “Bright Lights Big City“, is one more time from the 2008 album “Two Men With The Blues” by Willie Nelson and Wynton Marsalis. YouTube has a promo video that’s actually worth seeing, and this song begins at around 3:10. Enjoy!

I’m back to Vienna, but let me first point you to an update of “778 – My! My! Time Flies!“. I have post-processed another winter image of that series and if you enjoyed the original, you may enjoy the update as well.

Today’s images were shot one in the morning in the staircase of the house where I live, and one at night on the streets. Spare me more words please, I am tired as a log

The Song of the Day is “Fado Curvo” from Mariza’s 2003 album of the same name. See her perform live at a Dutch TV show on YouTube.

Let’s say this is another typical Friday: late at work, in a hurry in the morning, in a hurry while on my way to the train, short on images as usual.

I could have gambled and hoped for a nice night image with snow falling, and although Villach had snowfall since the morning and the chances are not too bad, I decided to play safe. Tomorrow I’ll have to get up early, and here on the train I have enough time to get creative

This is an image that I shot in the morning in the staircase of the house where I live. Don’t ask me what I thought while post-proceessing, honestly, I can’t tell. This is one of those images that “happen” while I explore.

I tried some things, kept some, dismissed others, and overall I like what I’ve got. But even if I can’t tell you what this image means to me, probably you could tell me what it means to you, will you?

The Song of the Day is “Everything Is Broken“, but not in the version originally released on the 1985 Bob Dylan album “Oh Mercy”, no, we’ll take the alternate version on the 2008 official bootleg album “Tell Tale Signs”. Great album, just don’t buy the completely overpriced three CD edition. This is not for fans, it’s for idiots

Hear it on YouTube.

It’s still Thursday, I am still on the train, and here is finally the image of today. I shot it on my way to the train, already inside of the station, standing on the stairs to the platform. I fooled around with focusing on the last step, the Sigma 50/1.4 wide open at f1.4, and when I heard a man coming up behind me, I waited until he was exactly in focus.

Well, that’s it for today. Oh, and, one more thing: Nikon has released a firmware update for the D300. If you have one, this is not to be missed. They have added some features and corrected some bugs. Most spectacular is what they have done to automatic white balance. It was already good, now it is much better. It’s not perfect, and if you want to, it is still easy to fool it, but I have seen some extremely good results under very difficult lighting conditions, mostly mixed light at night or in twilight on the streets. These were situations when the old firmware would definitely have been far off. In other words: Install this!!

The Song of the Day is “Step It Up And Go” from Bob Dylan’s 1992 album “Good as I Been to You”. Sorry, no video, no sample but what Amazon has.

These are images of yesterday, Thursday. As I have nothing for today yet and plenty of time at the moment (I’m currently on the train from Vienna to Carinthia, a four hours ride), I felt the temptation to use one of them for today. Well, I resisted. There is still time and I intend to get lucky

The Image of the Day was taken only seconds after I left my appartment, while still on the same floor. This is something I really believe in: One should never dismiss a subject on the ground that it has been used before. I had quite some Images of the Day made in this very staircase, and while I would not spend an hour shooting images here, a few every few days tend to be fun and the routine is productive as well.

The umbrella has not been arranged by me, it was simply there, someone seems to have forgotten it. As always when I have a new lens, I currently use the Nikon 85/1.8 almost exclusively, and as always with fast primes, I mostly play with shallow depth of field.

This image surprised me quite a lot in post-processing. The original out of the camera was dark and moody, but when I clicked “Auto” in Adobe Camera RAW, I found that I liked this light look much better. A comment on SmugMug, my photo hosting site, described this as “a very lovely shot”, and indeed there is something serene in this shot that I did not anticipate originally. Well, some people may be disturbed when their images begin to acquire unintended sense, but I am a great believer in the process of discovery. I think it’s honest. I believe that much of what we see as coherent in the work of other artists is only what has been arranged that way.

Let me conclude with two more images, the first one being a morning image as well. This is another product of Puch, the Austrian manufacturer of bicycles, motorcycles and cars, that I have already written about or its products shown more than once. Just like the car recently, these scooters were old-fashioned in the Seventies, but I remember having seen a lot of them in my youth, all of them in the posession of old men.

The last image is from the afternoon. This is a park along the street where I work, and there are always flowers. I tried to get a nice distribution of verticals and asense of depth. Nothing special, but I like it.

The Song of the Day, “True Love Tends to Forget“, is from Bob Dylan’s 1978 album “Street Legal“. Funnily enough this was the first Dylan album that I bought. Hear the Song on YouTube.