Didn’t I tell you there’s a pawnbroker in Josefstädter Straße, just for all those photographers in need? Well, yesterday I looked there again, and as always I found something. Lush and oriental. It’s not Easter yet, but the eggs are on the table

While I yesterday wondered if I should link to CDs or to digital downloads, today it is terrifyingly simple: I must take what I can get. In 1999 XTC, one of the best English bands of all times, returned with the album “Apple Venus Volume 1″, to be followed a year later by “Wasp Star (Apple Venus Volume 2)”, two extraordinarily good albums. When you look at Amazon today, you can get both via the marketplace, but both albums have been discontinued by the manufacturer, none can be had as digital downloads.

Believe me, I’m not at all communist, I am not against private property, I am not even completely against intellectual property, but what we desperately need, what the world, what our culture needs, what society, what our species needs to further advance, is a return to the premises: Intellectual property is not property at all. You can’t own songs once they’ve been sung.

You can have a right to get paid for the publication or even the performance of these songs, that’s all well, but we need a system where you waive your rights by refusing to publish. I remember all those years when it was not possible to buy David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks”. Someone kept it in his safe and waited for a time when he would make the most money by publishing it. That’s simply not acceptable. We can’t tolerate paintings by Van Gogh and movies by David Lynch to be locked away in safes.

Not publishing music was excusable in the age of vinyl, in the age of plastic, but now, with digital downloads, there is no excuse. Publish or give it up. You stifle our culture.

“Easter Theatre” is the song, YouTube has it.

Nothing ages faster than science fiction, and when I saw this image, when I tried variants and ended up with this toned B&W, it immediately reminded me of 1950s science fiction movies.

Speaking of sci-fi, I’m still reading Orson Scott Card, and while “Ender’s Game” did not overly impress me, “Speaker For The Dead” brought up some real clever questions, and now I am in the middle of “Xenocide”. Seems like I will read the next one as well.

The Song of the Day is “A Better Future” from David Bowie’s 2002 album “Heathen”. Hear it on YouTube.

I’m falling behind for no reason but being tired. It’s Thursday morning and this is the image for Tuesday. I made it while my friend Christian and I returned from dinner, and before we heard music until 2am. After that I was not exactly in the mood for image processing. Yesterday I came home late, processed it, chose a title, and then decided to lay down for only a short nap. And here we are: two days behind

Esther Emma and Flo asked me how I did the post-processing in “1158 – Sophisticated Lady“. Well, here we go:

It’s two versions from RAW, a dark one for the background, a lighter one for the foreground, and then in Photoshop I used some plugins: Noise Ninja, Topaz Detail and Topaz Clean. I used Noise Ninja on both versions, and by painting on the mask I used the light version for the face. With Topaz Detail I added some local contrast to the face, giving it more definition, but of course that raised noise again. I countered that with a skin beautifier effect in Topaz Clean, added some neutral blur (described towards the end of “571 – Them There Eyes II“). Somewhere in the mix there is also a push in saturation, done with my usual combo of Hue/Saturation layers in different blending modes, described in “683 – Welcome To The Republic“. Throw in a light vignetting layer and you’re done.

You see, there is not so much variation in my processing technique these days, and the reasoning is simple: When I change light in part of the image, I must change local contrast as well, otherwise it would look unnatural. When I do these things, I have to counter noise. Using the skin beautifier from Topaz Clean is a bit radical, but for a mannequin it is OK. On real people you have to be very careful with it, at least when you want to keep them recognizable. Topaz Clean tends to make them years younger, and that’s not always what you want, or better, that’s what you don’t want most of the time. But again, on this mannequin it was a very effective way to eliminate noise, the blur mostly adding glamor. As Flo recognized, the lights of the shop’s decoration in the background look like a pearl necklace, and that adds to the glamor as well.

That’s it. As for this post’s image, well, that’s a face stenciled upon a shop window, and behind the window is an add for a clearing out service. You see parts of the words “Entrümpelung”, “Dachböden” and some more, plus some phone numbers. I saw it while Christian and I walked to my place. I had some other images, but this natural overlay of graffiti and text struck me as an interesting detail. I love it how you can focus near with the Tamron 17-50/2.8.

The Song of the Day is “I Can’t See Your Face In My Mind” from the 1967 Doors album “Strange Days”. We didn’t have The Doors in quite some time. That’s bad, but it can be remedied

YouTube has the song.

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.

Gloomy, rainy days in Vienna, what would I do without this pawnshop in Josefstädter Straße?

It’s a place I pass by late on my way to work, and when I am not sure that I have another good candidate, I always have a look into this shop’s window.

This is a composite of two exposures, one at f2.8 and one at f5. Additionally I have accentuated the sharp foreground with a healthy dose of Topaz Detail. Speaking of which, they have recently released Version 1.1 of this plugin. It it is advertised as substantially faster, well, maybe, but it’s still slow. Other than that, they have added a new high-contrast, high-detail, near-monochrome preset. If you own a license, you should have been notified by mail. The upgrade is free.

The Song of the Day is “Bird’s Nest” by Charlie Parker. I have it on my 168 CD collection called “The Ultimate Jazz Archive”. 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.

One more image for today. Yesterday I felt slightly restricted by the Sigma 150/2.8 Macro. There were several moments when I missed images because I was always far too near and going so far back was not an option.

The problem with going back, even when there is space, is that the longer your lens, the more obstacles fit between you and your subject. In any case, I wanted something shorter for today. The morning was rather gloomy (it did get better though during the day), thus 1/200s, as I use with the Sigma 150mm lens, did not feel promising anyway. I really hate getting into high ISOs at daylight and even at f2.8.

Following that impulse, I decided to use the Sigma 50/1.4, one lens that I have not used in a long time. With it I took this image of a small copy of a greek sculpture. I found it in the window of a greek restaurant.

The Song of the Day is “Big Boy Blue” by Ella Fitzgerald. I have it on a 10 CD collection that I’ve got for 10€, but as that is not available elsewhere, I link to “The Platinum Collection”. Hear it on YouTube.

This is an image from last week. No circus image, sorry. What more can you do than ask? At the beginning of the show though, they announced that taking photographs is forbidden “for copyright reasons”.

What do they expect me to do? Copying their acrobatic tricks? Acting like the clowns they are?

I was furious at first, but then … I simply enjoyed the show. No focus, no exposure, no camera settings, no hunting for pictures. Just plain fun, and that was not bad either

The Song of the Day is “Money Changes Everything” from Cyndi Lauper’s 2005 album “The Body Acoustic”. See the video on YouTube.

Oh dear, so much has happened since the last post! Where shall I begin? OK, I’ll begin with answering some of the comments to that rant about style.

Ted, I guess we disagree much less than you think we do

I looked up Reed Dixon, and I very much appreciate what he does. If for any reasons he will still do the same kind of images in 30 years (or if he did it that way all through the last 30 years), I most probably wouldn’t.

What I did in my post, was to define the word “style” (for me!!!). I am aware of the fact that style is frequently used to denote outward attributes of an image that can best be characterized as mechanical. I mean things that could be cast into a Photoshop action. Other people call that “effects”. To call something like that a “style”, does not make sense to me at all. The only meaningful definition of style that comes to my mind is connected to a way of seeing. If anything, for me, just like for Paul Maxim and Ove, style is an attribute of personality.

We have a photo book in Carinthia, a very expensive and very beautiful book with portraits done by Henri Cartier Bresson. On Sunday I took the opportunity to have an intense look at these images, and what I did was looking for the signs of a distinct style.

Frankly, I didn’t find anything that would allow me to pick out an HCB from the mass of photographs. There are some hints though, for example that he didn’t seem to care much about the “Rule of Thirds”, and if he did, he frequently placed the head of his subject in the lower third, including a seemingly undue amount of background. In other words, he didn’t follow rules, he broke them.

Unfortunately he didn’t break them in any consistent manner, thus taking away the fun that we could draw from instantly recognizing him.

It goes on like that. It’s easy to recognize the Erwitts as long as there are dogs in the image, but if not? I doubt it.

But this is not specific to photography, it’s just by accident that we discuss it in that context. In my eyes style, when that word makes sense at all, is a certain way of seeing the world, of judging one’s own work, ever evolving until we die. Style is a statistical entity that can be seen as an inconsistent and evolving, but still recognizable pattern in the background of a large body of work. If it is not evolving, well, then the artist probably has found something that sells.

The market does abominable things to artists. Capitalism is not everything, and from a perspective of art it fails miserably. Why? Because it tells artists to stick to their recipe, to basically repeat themselves, or better, to repeat whatever they found that sells. THAT’s the reason why some Artists continue to produce the same things, over and again, for 30 years and more.

Hopefully this has cleared things up a bit. Enough of that.

As I said, so many things have happened, and although I’m late to the party, I should at least send you over to Cedric’s blog, as he has written a very clever post about artistic ambivalence and ambivalence in general, all circling around the question what photographs tell about the photographer.

As to these pictures, well, they were all taken with my new (and cheap!) Sigma 28/1.8, and they demonstrate perfectly why I like this lens: With its ability to focus down to the front element, it opens up a completely different world. Nice bokeh, huh?

The Song of the Day is “Living In A Different World” by “Honeydripper” Roosevelt Sykes. I have it on disc 57 of “The Ultimate Jazz Archive”, and if you aim for something cheaper, you can get it as well on his “Complete Recorded Works, Vol. 8″.Hear the song on Deezer.