One more image today and we are in sync again. I took it this morning in the tramway. Nuff of words, the train is almost in Villach, I have to hurry 
The Song of the Day is “Stuck In The Middle” from the 1992 Inner Circle album “Bad to the Bone”. Hear it on YouTube.
Thursday. We had snow, for a change. This image was taken in Josefstädter Straße, I was in a rush and seemingly everything else as well
I expect to put up one more post today, in the afternoon, when I’m on the train.
It’s interesting, by the way. This is post #84 made with the Tamron 17-50/2.8 VC. Quite some proof that this lens works for me
The Song of the Day is “Winter Was Hard”, an Aulis Sallinen composition from the Kronos Quartet’s 1990 album of the same name. Take it as an acoustic counterpoint to the sense of speed in the image and hear it on YouTube.
I can’t believe it, I really managed to catch up. Now guess where I took this image
The image has been taken with a bit of flash again. You really have to be careful, too much flash makes the snow flakes the brightest part of the image, and that looks very unnatural. In this case I’m quite satisfied with the balance.
The Song of the Day is “I’m Waitin’ At The Station“, an early hit by Aaron Neville. I have it on a collection that’s not available any more, but you can get it on the 2001 “Ultimate Collection”. Hear it on YouTube.
Well, I don’t seem to have caught up 
It’s Friday morning now, I am in a hurry, and this is only the image of Tuesday. Maybe in the afternoon when I am on the train to Carinthia.
“440 – Round The Bend” was one of my better images in the past, made with another fabulous lens, the then new Sigma 70/2.8. This time, while on the tramway, I greatly profited from the Tamron’s stabilization. There’s not much in focus in today’s image, but the little that is, is perfectly so.
The Song of the Day is again “Round The Bend” from Beck’s 2002 album “Sea Change”. See the video on YouTube.
I’m on the train to Carinthia and that’s an image taken this morning.
The Song of the Day is “Doin’ The New Low Down“. I have it on a CD called “Harlem Story”. Amazon does not have it, but Google gave me a hit on iTunes. But that’s not what you should hear anyway, because searching on YouTube, I found what must be the definitive version: The Mills Brothers with Cab Calloway. Enjoy!
This is not an image of today, this is another image of Friday, still from Vienna, taken from the rear of the tramway as I approached the railway station. Today I was lazy, played computer games, slept in the afternoon, and in the evening I attended Andreas Frei’s annual Christmas party.
I mentioned Andreas several times, he is the guy who just made the post-production for the movie “Mount St. Elias” (where he contributed two songs), recently produced singer Jean Nolan’s album “Born Ready“, is a great musician himself – and just a good friend. It was a great evening, except for photography
On the other hand, in a way this image is also an image of today, because only today I remembered that I had taken it at all. It was still on the camera, because at the time that I took it, I had already decided to make yesterday’s “1155 – Born To Be Wild“.
The Song of the Day is “Leaving The City” from Róisín Murphy’s 2005 album “Ruby Blue”. Hear it on YouTube.
It’s Friday, I’m on the train to Carinthia and here is another post, this time a morning image.
In the morning I take the tramway line #5 when I am in a hurry, when it rains, or when I want to be at work extra early. Today it was the latter, and whenever I am on the train, I try to take some images, either out of the window or in the train. I really like the colors here, and when I look at it, the bokeh of this new Tamron 17-50/2.8 VC is not bad either.
The Song of the Day is once again Duke Ellington’s “Take the A Train“, but this time it is Anita O’Day on her 1963 album “Anita O’Day Sings the Winners”. Hear it on YouTube.
Sometimes the titles won’t come. Train, rain, … I’ve had too many of them. It is late now, very late. This is an image taken early this morning from the rear window of the tramway train, line #5.
Yes, there are still some with real windows, windows that you can open. I love those trains and I always open the windows, take images while the train rumbles on. Not many of them find their way into this blog, but they are countless.
The Song of the Day is “No One Knows I’m Gone” from Tom Waits’ 2002 album Alice. Hear it on YouTube.
PS: Wanna see some good pictures? Head over to Emma’s blog. That’s some good pictures
It’s Friday morning. It’s stormy outside, just as it was yesterday, just as it was the day before. Meteorologists were right, we had snow yesterday morning. Only mixed into the rain, more the idea of snow than real, physical snow and nothing remained, but I’ve heard of parts of Austria where it piled up to 20cm. Isn’t that strange, given that we had 25 degrees Celsius about a week ago? More strange, given the fact that I was swimming on Saturday?
Well, that’s how it goes. I have no good image for yesterday, but I won’t shy away from showing you a bad one
I was in a hurry yesterday morning, I took the tramway line #5, and this image was taken through the rear window just before the last station, just before I left. When the train accelerates, water spills down from the roof and runs down the window.
The Song of the Day is “A little Rain” from Tom Waits’ 1992 album “Bone Machine”. Wow, is it really that long? Excellent as always. Hear a 1999 live version on YouTube.
What can you do when you have no image? You can always make one. Well, in this case I probably would have had a couple of other images, none particularly strong, thus I decided to try this one, an image I would otherwise have thrown away.
It’s an approaching tramway train, seen half through the windshield of a Vespa scooter. The focus is on the edge of the windshield.
The original image was pale, suffered from high contrast between the sky and everything else, and basically there was no composition at all. That’s always a good reason to go for a square, because it’s pretty hard to NOT find a good square in any given image. Here it was even the biggest size possible, in other words, I only needed to crop from the sides.
I would have had a standard composition with a perspective along the street, the vanishing point slightly off-center, thus conforming to the rule of thirds and … BORING!!
Why? Because it resembled the original in its accent on the perspective. It was not as bad, but due to the extremely shallow DOF, there was simply nothing interesting enough.
My solution was to go abstract by using the left part of the image, cutting through the vanishing point, using the upper right triangle of the sky to balance the red triangle in the lower left corner.
The rest is familiar: a combination of two versions from the same RAW, one for the bright part with sky and sunlit houses, one for everything else, over-the-top saturation with my standard combination of Hue/Saturation layers in different blending modes (see 683 – Welcome To The Republic), and then Alien Skin Snap Art.
This is a soft pastel effect with long, thin strokes, chosen to turn the strong blur into a whirling swarm of colored light. Actually it is a group of two copies of this layer, one at 30% opacity and “Soft Light” blending mode, the other at full opacity in “Normal” mode, and then the whole group at 70%.
The Song of the Day is the Duke Ellington composition “Take the A Train“, interpreted by Ella Fitzgerald. Hear it on YouTube.
