It’s the first day of summer. At least that’s what it’s supposed to be.
In reality it pours down like mad, it is relatively cool and the weather forecast mentions snow lines. They are in a very safe distance above us, but at this time of the year even the idea of snow is obscene 
Anyway. It is as it is. The bicycle detail was shot in the morning. Uhhh … “shot” again? Oh well, maybe it’s OK to shoot bicycle details, as long as nobody else gets hurt
The Image of the Day shows the impressive summer situation that I encountered when I left work early. For both images I used the Nikon 24/2.8, a lens that I selected because I knew I would not have to struggle with flares and ghosts anyway. It’s a very relaxing change from the Tokina 11-16/2.8, because again I can focus relatively near (still not as near as I like) and the focal length feels so incredibly natural.
Do you know that feeling, when you do something, that you used to do regularly and with pleasure, but have not done long since? That feeling of returning? Well, that’s how it felt
The Song of the Day is “Summer Turns To High” from the 2001 R.E.M album “Reveal”. Sorry, no video, I can’t offer you more than Amazon’s sound sample.
Time is short at the moment. At least I managed to get one image in the morning.
Snow had gone, for a change we were back to rain, thus you get one more umbrella image. This time it’s even a double umbrella image
The Song of the Day is “Calling Elvis” from the 1991 Dire Straits album “On Every Street”. See them live on YouTube.
Well, if 666 is the Number of the Beast, what may 888 be? Any idea? But whatever it is, 4554 is the Number of the Train, that’s for sure
Yup! From southern sun back to northern cold. Ouch, that hurt! We even had snow in the morning, and actually quite much of it.
Photographically this wasn’t my best day either. In the morning I was in a hurry, in the evening my brain hurt from hunting other people’s bugs in a heap of highly toxic code. Oh well!
The Song of the Day is one more time “Cold & Wet” from Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s 2006 album “The Letting Go”. The last time I used it on an image of our poor little cat
What did I say? Color again! Well, both images of today are from the archives. It was a decently nice day today, but I have not been out photographing. Hmm … that somehow gets routine on Sundays 
The first image is from Friday morning and nothing special, just one of my umbrella images, because it rained like mad. I had composed with the handle of the umbrella going straight through the middle, because straight lines going through the center of a fisheye image stay straight. This is one of a series of five or six images that I made there, waiting for a satisfying constellation of people and/or trains and cars.
The B&W conversion is a mix of “High Contrast Red Filter” and “Maximum Black”, along with the familiar gradient and some dodging and burning. Again I have treated this image with Fisheye-Hemi™, and again the result is extremely satisfying.
In fact, that’s what I did most of the day: trying this new plugin on old fisheye images.
That’s really important. When you use such a beast, you have to get a feeling for what it does to your compositions, after all, you can’t see it through the viewfinder. Thus, to increase my hit rate, I have to get familiar with the mapping, have to acquire the ability to predict the final outcome.
Well, so far there is room for improvement. I can say though, that the mapping seems to be mostly just what I wish for. Kinda magic In any case I’ll go on like that for a few days, at least until I get the new Nikon 35/1.8.
Apropos get: when I was at the local electronics and media store yesterday, I saw a long-expected box tagged “LG Flatron W2452-TX”. This 24″ monitor is the new incarnation of the successful 2452-T, only this one is a wide-gamut monitor.
So far I have only “calibrated” it visually, using the supplied software and a couple of monitor test photos, but I am certainly impressed. Tomorrow or the day after, I’ll try to get the same monitor for Vienna. It has the ability to throw out almost obscene colors, it is evenly lit, has great contrast, and the stability against varying the viewing angle is much better than with the cheap Samsungs. For a price of €260 it is a steal.
Oh, in all that chatter I completely forgot about the Image of the Day! This is an image of yesterday. I stood in the middle of a bridge and tried to capture as much of the sky as possible. Pretty nice clouds, huh?
If you have ever tried to take such an image with a fisheye, you know that the horizon at the lower end is invariably curled. In this case I have composited two versions of the same image, one with Fisheye-Hemi for the land and the clouds immediately above the mountains, one with the original fish for the clouds, because I really liked the curl at the top. I think that’s pretty neat. Best of both worlds. Of course you can’t do that all of the time. Normally you won’t find a smooth transition, but here there was just enough blank blue sky to make it work.
The Song of the Day is “In The Sky” from Mark Knopfler’s 2007 album “Kill to Get Crimson”. Nice song, nice album. Here’s a video.
Oh dear! Sunday night the train had arrived 45 minutes late, thus I missed the last Underground and had to take a taxi. 
When I wrote yesterday’s entry, I already knew that Vienna had had a lot of snowfall over the weekend. What I didn’t know though, was that it had been followed by relatively warm rain. Thus in the middle of the night I was presented with enormous amounts of slush.
In the morning there was still some rain, though most of the slush was gone, probably more due to busy hands than due to the rain. For part of the afternoon we had heavy rain again, but thankfully it stopped, just as I left work.
The Image of the Day is a window of Palais Auersperg, a baroque palace that is now used for all kinds of events, balls and exhibitions, and part of it houses a safe rental service.
In a way the image is a lie like all images are lies. Would you have guessed that this window looks out onto one of the most busy streets in Vienna? Would you have associated traffic noise? Well, lets pretend it were not there. Let’s pretend we stood in a palace garden outside of this window, longing for the warmth of the room behind.
The Song of the Day is “In The Warm Room” from Kate Bush’s 1978 album “Lionheart”. Hear it on YouTube.
Yesterday morning I rose very early and went to work through first drizzling rain and then some snowflakes, almost alone on the streets at the end of the night. After eleven hours of work I took a different way home, again in the dark and again in such fine weather
The results were some quarter-decent images with a potential to raise them to maybe three quarters in Photoshop. I tried some of them and this is one that I like pretty well. The pose of the person could be more dynamic, on the other hand the odd silhouette with seemingly only one leg has something disturbing, so I won’t complain
The Song of the Day? “A Walk In The Dark” is once more from David Byrne’s 1992 album “Uh-Oh”. See a video on YouTube.
In the morning I made some mediocre pictures of bicycles, quite spiritless, but there’s always the afternoon, right?
Well, shortly before noon it began to rain and it stubbornly kept to that all day, even when I went home. In the meantime I had looked at my bicycle images, had decided that they were probably even less than mediocre, and so I felt the need to pull something out of my non-existent hat.
Of all routes possible, I decided to do the umbrella trick again: Basically you use a wide-angle lens and include your umbrella in the frame. In this particular image I used the verticals of two trees, one fountain, the umbrella handle and a woman passing by, and the result, cropped to a square, quite satisfies me.
Hobsonesque? I think so. It may have something of that certain quality that Mark’s compositions always have (and always here means really … well … always), that quality that I admire endlessly and that I can’t possibly describe. I admit I’m neither ashamed to plagiarize, nor to pay homage
The Song of the Day is “Rainy Day Blues” from the 2008 album “Two Men With The Blues” by Willie Nelson and Wynton Marsalis. Hear it on YouTube.
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.
Thursday was rainy. I took some mediocre images in the morning, while it was still dry, and some more interesting in late afternoon in pouring rain. I don’t have the time to process all of them, but this is one of my favorites. Again I use a more or less out of focus background and a sharp foreground, and this time it is a variation on the concept of “601 – Rainy Day in June“. The lens used is the Sigma 30/1.4, and it took me some attempts to find the ideal aperture of f4. Here we have just enough definition in the background to vaguely recognize people and umbrellas, and enough blur to keep the image timeless and general.
The Song of the Day is “Here’s That Rainy Day“. I have it on “Magic Voices“, a seven CD collection of all records made by the Singers Unlimited. Unfortunately I have no sound samples, but of course YouTube has plenty of other versions.
There is a school of thought that reminds us to concentrate on one subject, to not clutter our images, to keep them free of distractions, and I am only too willing to submit, but not all of the time. Sometimes life is clutter, and to feel it, I have to let you dive in. Have you ever tried to photograph from under an umbrella, while walking in the rain? Well, that’s how it feels
The Song of the Day is “Rainy Day in June” from the classic 1966 Kinks album “Face to Face“. If you don’t have it, go for it. Hear the song on YouTube.
