There are some image titles that I use once a year. “Summertime” is one of them (I kinda missed it this year) and another one is of course “Summer’s Almost Gone”.
I took this images yesterday on my way to the lake. The water level is unusually high for this season, but it is still warm enough to enjoy ten minutes of swimming. This is late sun falling between the trees of a rural orchard.
The Song of the Day is again “Summer’s Almost Gone” from the 1968 Doors album “Waiting for the Sun”. We had it last year and the year before. Actually it was interesting for me to compare the pictures, but in a way they all seem to carry the concept over.
Hear the song on YouTube.
A very conventional photo with Nikon 18-200 VR and Lee ND grad filter for today. I took it on my way to the lake. I wanted to go swimming one more time. No idea what the weather in a week will be.
Btw, due to yesterday’s 20 hours downpour, the water level in the lake has risen by between 20 and 30cm to an all-year high. Pretty impressive. This has also cooled down the water to maybe 22 centigrades, which is very comfortable.
The rest of the day was shopping, packing for tomorrow’s trip to Kraków, Poland, and dining out with Michael, who visited us today.
I guess the next blog entry will be from Poland, at least if the hotel has WiFi as promised. If not, if you don’t hear from me for a week, then I am not dead, then I have a connection problem 
The Song of the Day is “Dog Days Are Over” by Florence + the Machine. The album “Lungs”, that I have linked to, won’t be out in the US before October 20. You can either wait or get the download. YouTube has a video, and here is the link to Amazon’s download version: Lungs
At first I was not sure about these images, but the longer I see them, the more I like them. Today was just this: a beautiful and hot summer day. Hopefully there are more to come, but even if not, it will have been a great summer.
Searching for a Song of the Day I began with my newest CDs, and the title “Those Were The Days” stuck.
Recently, when I wrote “1019 – Both Sides Now” and searched for a video, I found out that this Joni Mitchell tune had been interpreted by countless people, among them Dolly Parton and Doris Day. This caused me to buy CDs of both of them, and today’s Song of the Day is the title track of Dolly Parton’s 2005 album of cover versions.
I also found a video on YouTube, and there disaster struck: Have you ever heard “Those Were The Days” by the Leningrad Cowboys and the Russian Red Army Choir? Live in Helsinki 1993?? The Total Balalaika Show???
Oh my, speak of definite versions 
It caused me to immediately order the CD (get the double CD from Amazon.de!!) and the DVD. The DVD contains only half of the concert, but the problem is, you really have to see them. Unfortunately “Those Were The Days” is not on the DVD, but of course YouTube has it
And while you’re there, don’t forget to see some of the other songs from this concert. Basically you find the whole concert among the “Related Videos”.
Forest roads in bright daylight, that’s a worst case scenario when we talk about extreme contrast. Everything dark is very dark and everything light is extremely bright. The Topaz plugins Topaz Adjust and Topaz Detail can really help you here to model contrast and to re-distribute the tones more evenly.
And still, this is a 19 layer job, no single plugin in the world can do it in one click. You have to have a vision of where you want to go with your image, what it is that you want to accentuate, and then you have to do it. Those Topaz plugins or Alien Skin’s Snap Art are only tools. I’ve used all of them in this image, and then some tricks of my own. In the end I got an image that satisfied me.
Is this image true to what I saw? Hell, no! Not at all, but it resembles the image that I originally set out to make. Nature could not provide me with what I was looking for.
Over the last months you have seen many images that utilized a certain tool set, and although some of these images look as if they had been made in the same way, there is really no canned effect. I use the tools that I have, at times I add a new one, some get used less often, but with every new image I am again on the road to find out. That’s why it’s art, not engineering
The Song of the Day is “On The Road To Find Out” from Cat Stevens’ classic 1970 album “Tea for the Tillerman”. See him perform live on YouTube.
Sunday again. I’m on the train, and this time the image is already up on SmugMug, with only the writing left to do.
Today I set out for swimming, but leaving at 4:30pm was too late. I drove around a little for an image, and this is what I ended up with. It’s the Sigma 28/1.8 again, with rather straight processing.
The Song of the Day is once more “Sitting On A Fence” from the 1986 Housmartins album “London 0 Hull 4″. See a video on MySpace.
It was extremely hot yesterday. We had intended to go to Salzburg to visit Michael, but thankfully I remembered that at this time school holidays in southern Germany start, and that means hours of delay due to traffic jams in front of the two big tunnels on the highway that crosses the Alps.
We used the time for shopping and then for a short trip down top Italy, just across the border, near Tarvisio, where we wanted to drive up to Santuario Monte Lussari.
There is a church on a mountain with a spectacular view. According to our street map, a road goes up there, coming from the Saisera valley. Fact is, there may be a road, but neither did we find it, nor (if it exists at all) is it open to the public. The first image was taken near the end of the valley.
The other image, the Image of the Day, was taken much later. We had returned from Italy and driven straight to our lake for swimming. After we left, the sun was not yet down, but beginning to vanish in clouds and haze in the west. I stopped at a meadow full of flowers and took a series of images, trying to capture that feeling of a summer evening. While I had used the Tokina 11-16 in Italy, this image was made with the new Sigma 28/1.8.
The Song of the Day is “In Summer” from Jon Hendricks’ 1990 album “Freddie Freeloader”. See him perform it live in 1986 on YouTube.
It’s already Sunday and I’m so much behind. Sorry for that, I ran pretty out of time. That’s for quiet weekends
This image was taken Friday morning on my way to work. I actually thought all the time I would take another image, one of the current mirror series, but when it turned out worse than expected, I instead found that I really like this one for a certain quietude in it and for its composition in general.
The Song of the Day is “Morning Glory” from the 1967 Blood, Sweat & Tears debut album “Child Is Father to the Man”. Hear it on Deezer.
It’s really true, Vienna is on the wrong side of the Alps. On my first day back, we had two extended periods of rain, the first between 2pm and 3pm with massive downpours. After that it calmed down, only to begin again when I walked home
I made some images in the morning, but what really made my day, was this image of people waiting in the rain, with an advertising of our mayor, Michael Häupl, in a kind of stay-in-minds-between-elections poster, stating “Always a hit: summer in the city”
The old Lovin’ Spoonful hit “Summer In The City” is also the Song of the Day. I have it as a cover version on the much underrated 1997 Stranglers album “Written in Red”. Deezer does not have the album, Amazon has no samples, I didn’t find a video, thus I can only offer you the Lovin’ Spoonful version.
OK, this is the last post for today, promised
Yesterday I went to bed very early, exhausted from editing all those Vajont pictures, with only the first post written and no end in sight.
This morning I woke up early, in fact it was still night, but I was awake, and so I sat down in my study, and while I worked on the images for “995 – Dies iræ!“, I had the camera on the tripod, the Nikon 70-300 VR mounted, mirror lock-up dialed in and a cable release attached, and in that way I casually took photos every once in a while. This is one of them, again with liberal amounts of processing applied
The Song of the Day is “One Of These Mornings” from the 2002 Moby album “18″. Hear the song on YouTube.
Yesterday was not my most productive day. When I got out in the afternoon, it was not much more than driving to the lake for some swimming, and to a restaurant because I was hungry.
Anyway. I still had a bracketed image of the sunrise, thus I was not too worried. The view is, as so often, from my study, and processing-wise this image was rather complicated. I used two differently mapped images from Photomatix, lots of adjustments in Photoshop, some Snap Art and a little blur to top. Oh well, I like it
The Song of the Day is still Gershwin. I didn’t want to use the title “Summertime”, maybe we get a little more high summer this year, but the lines are of course from “Summertime“. The version, that we hear today, is not even sung, and it’s one of the more unusual recordings of this song. It’s from the 1968 Ten Years After live album “Undead”. There is even a video, albeit of very bad quality, on YouTube, but in fact it’s so bad, I’d really urge you to go to Deezer for the album.
