It’s Friday night by now. No, I haven’t fallen into a hole and I didn’t vanish from the face of the planet. I was just a little busy.

Remember that I came back to Carinthia on Wednesday? Well, this is an image from Wednesday afternoon. When I arrived in Villach, it was a wonderfully clear, sunny day, and I just checked what the most likely cause of the computer problems would be, decided to buy a new system disk and a copy of Windows 7 Home 64bit, and then spent two hours drivinng around and photographing. What you see here is another HDR, the image was processed today, already on the new system.

The Song of the Day is “When Sunny Gets Blue“. Among other versions I have it as part two of a medley on Sheena Easton’s 1993 album “No Strings”. Of course it’s not available on YouTube, but maybe Anita O’Day’s version can console you. I don’t have it, but it’s, well, Anita

On the other hand, I wouldn’t easily dismiss Sheena Easton. She is not usually associated with Jazz standards, but this album is different. Very different. And not bad at all.

OK, here’s the second post of today’s series. After the plain modesty of the last post, here’s some pompous HDR for a change.

In fact, this image is not without some serious imperfections. I had made the seven bracketed images in high-speed continuous mode, meaning in only a fraction more than a second, but if you look at 100% (which I won’t let you), you see that Photomatix Pro can’t eliminate the subtle displacements of the twigs’ reflections in the water. The program has a box that you can check, and it’s supposed to be able to cope with water, but in fact it can’t. It’s easy to understand why, because the problem is insolvable in general. There may be cases where it works, but in general it does not.

Anyway, I’d say for web presentation it’s good enough, in fact it is good enough when viewed on screen at 50%, so I prefer to ignore the fact. Still, it’s important to know that you still can’t really depend on such algorithms. They invariably let you down at times.

The Song of the Day is “River” from Natalie Merchant’s 1995 album “Tigerlily”. Funny, I always thought that gal sounded like the singer of the 10000 Maniacs

Hear the song on YouTube.

Here is another HDR image from this afternoon. It’s again been tone-mapped with Essential HDR. I like the snappy look that this program produces.

I have labeled this post to be part of my review of the Tamron SP AF 17-50mm 2.8 XR Di II VC LD Asp IF, the lens that I have bought three weeks ago and that I use exclusively at the moment. I have no interesting sample images, but I thought I should relate another problem of this lens, a problem that I ran into just yesterday and that could influence your buying decision.

Lens flares, ghosts, all sorts of fancy colored things will haunt you when you point this lens towards the sun. It is as if light bounces around and gets reflected back to the sensor by every single element in this lens. In fact, I think that’s just what’s happening

This is no lens to shoot into the sun. Never. It’s not bad, it’s disastrous. Don’t do it.

I will look into this deeper, and I will give you samples. This will most likely not happen before next weekend. I need bright sun and some time for this. On the other hand, whatever my attempts at a more exact method may unearth, it won’t change the result substantially.

How does this change my verdict? Hmm … not really. I have bought this lens for two purposes, as a travel zoom and as a low light lens. I have not yet used it on any trip, especially not in bright sunlight, but from the sunny days so far I can say that it performs very well as long as you don’t have the sun in your frame. I guess I can live with that. And the low light part is just perfect.

Let me put it this way: Each lens is a compromise. The cheaper the lens, the bigger the compromises. By and large you tend to get what you pay for. If you look at it this way, and if you account for the fantastic low-light capability, the excellent sharpness and the stabilization, then this lens is certainly a fine purchase. It is a good overall performer, it is a low light wonder, the occasional autofocus hiccups are too rare to make much effect, distortions are so-so, and finally flares are a problem. OK, my advice is very simple: just use this lens for what it is best at. Use it, don’t abuse it. Avoid shooting into the sun and you’re OK. There are other lenses better suited for that. It’s a compromise.

The Song of the Day is “Sun Goes Down” from the 2003 Deep Purple album “Bananas”. Hear it on YouTube.

That’s a pretty funny number, when you think of it

Today’s picture was taken, well, today!!! I’m back in the game. I already feel pretty well, and I have decided to take off for the rest of the week, to stay in Carinthia, relax, and be able to photograph again. Wow, that feels much better now!

As you can see from the file name, this image is an HDR, combined and tone mapped in Photomatix Pro, and then taken over to Photoshop. There I’ve used some combination of Topaz Detail, my neutral blur, my saturation layers, a cooling filter, levels and contrast adjustments, some of them localized via masks, much of that modified by blend-if sliders to work mostly on the highlights or on the shadows, in other words, this image was quite some work.

Does it look like it looked while I was there? Nope. It looks better

The Song of the Day is “I’m So Free” from Lou Reed’s 1972 album “Transformer”, one of the best albums ever made.

Uhhm … this is not lightly said. I mean it. Let’s put it like this: When asked for the 20 best albums of all times, I may produce different lists on different days, no question, but I can hardly imagine a day when “Transformer” would not be on my list. And that’s pretty remarkable.

Hear the song in very good quality on YouTube.

This morning I made some images that could probably have been usable, but then, in the afternoon, on my way back home, in the middle of a slight drizzle, I got pleasantly surprised by an enormous sunset.

It didn’t last longer than maybe 5 minutes, and all the while I made image after image, constantly hampered by the traffic. Finally I decided on this one, embracing the traffic instead of trying to avoid it.

Btw, you may have found my blog to be unreachable today and part of yesterday, and that’s because it was every once in a while. JustHost, my hosting company, had some trouble with my machine. It must have affected quite a lot of people, at least that’s what my stats say. I’m sorry for that, I hope it’s a singular event. If not, well, I’m really not inclined to pay more for something that I’ve bought anyway and that should simply work. But let’s see how it goes on.

It’s far from being the fourth of July, but the Song of the Day still is “Night Ride Home” from Joni Mitchell’s 1991 album of the same name. Great album, great song, hear 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.

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

Sorry for the long silence. I’m not dead and I can’t blame my internet connection either. Must have something to do with being on vacation. In any case I have a real processing problem. Well, some images may turn up another day, when I lack anything usable.

What can you write about a place like Auschwitz? Can you take photos there? People do, and many of them make just the usual images, with their beloved or their friends posing, just not in front of a fountain, but in front of the remains of an electrical fence. That’s just how people are, just as places are what places are.

There is nothing like an evil place. It’s all about the people, and what can you say about a place that was a rural village for centuries, and then, all of a sudden, strangers came, performed their incredibly cruel deeds, turned the place into hell, stayed for five years and vanished again.

It is pretty impossible to conserve the horror. Yes, Auschwitz I, the original base camp, still has something sinister in it. It’s the contrast between neatness of architecture and the horror of the double electrical fences. If at all there is something left of pure horror then it’s there.

Auschwitz II, Birkenau, is different. It’s a vast area, mostly ruins, and it’s there that the masses were killed. It is much less graphic, but in its largeness there is an abstract monstrosity that suddenly makes all those big numbers of millions of killed people comprehensible. This is a place that obviously was built for that purpose, a place that had the capacity.

Still, the question remains: what can you photograph at such a place? Can you show anything meaningful beside the cliché? I don’t know. What you get today is a detail from a fence in Auschwitz II, a view from the monastery Tyniec on top of a hill overlooking the river Wis?a, and the Image of the Day is a birch tree shortly after sundown.

The Song of the Day is “Going Places” from Paul Weller’s 2003 album “Illumination”. See him perform live on YouTube.

This is an old image. One from my archives, one from mid May last year. We had pouring rain today and I have not made a single image.

Sometimes when I already have an image of the Day and when I am tired, lazy or when I have no time, I put promising images that I can’t process on a TODO list.

This is one of these images, and I guess that I got a better result today than I could have got last year. One of the reasons is a micro-contrast adjustment made with Topaz Detail, and then I may have gained some experience since then. I ended up with an 18 layer job and an image that I am quite satisfied with.

The Song of the Day is “Remember The Time” from Michael Jackson’s 1991 album “Dangerous”. Hear it on YouTube.

It’s still summer, so let’s celebrate it while it lasts.

This image was taken yesterday when I left the baths. It’s almost two months past summer solstice and it shows, but it’s hot again in Vienna and it seems to last for some more days, hopefully even weeks.

Do you ever take pictures directly into the sun? I’ve read that it may blind you, it may destroy your sensor and all sorts of things. Well, I still can see, my camera still takes pictures and I love it

The Song of the Day is “Blinding” from Florence + The Machine’s 2009 debut album “Lungs”. Hear the album version and a live version on YouTube.