I’m on the train to Carinthia right now and we’re just crossing the first ridge of mountains. There’s snow outside. Not as yesterday, not a mere idea of snow, nope, this is a white, wet blanket of coldness.

I took this image on my way to the train. It’s the cart of someone who posts advertising posters. The interesting thing is only, that there was nobody around.

I’m back to a lens that I have not used in a long time: the Sigma 30/1.4. Well, probably it’s not really necessary to have a 28/1.8, a 30/1.4 and a 35/1.8. Of these three lenses the Sigma 28/1.8 is probably the most versatile. It is not the cheapest, that’s the Nikon 35/1.8, but it is sharp (OK, that’s true for all of them), can be used on FX, and most important, it focuses almost down to the front lens. Anyway. All three lenses are quite fine and now I use the 30 again. It’s the fastest, and that not only means the maximum aperture, no, it has also the fastest autofocus.

Oh, and, by the way, I missed it, but two days ago this blog had its third birthday. Three years. Wow! It was never planned as a 365 days project, I always wanted to make this an institution, but of course you never know. Well, I’m not tired yet. I don’t feel what I do as repetitious, it did neither become an obligation nor a job, no chore, no routine. It is still an adventure and I hope you keep following me

The Song of the Day is “Glamorous Glue” from Morrissey’s 1992 album “Your Arsenal”. See a video on YouKu.

That’s the best I’ve got for Monday.

In the afternoon, while walking home, I saw a crane lift a heavy weight of concrete. I waited for the moment when the container would be exactly between building and sky, and that’s what I’ve got.

Nothing special, but it gives me a reason to recommend the Song of the Day: “Lifted” from the 1999 Eurythmics reunion album “Peace”. Nice song. Hear it on YouTube.

Don’t fear, this is the last post for today, a short one, showing two bicycle images that I shot in the morning, and two afternoon images from my way to the train.

I really love these small children’s bikes. I took the images in front of the same school/kindergarten in Vienna’s Josefstädter Straße where I made “727 – The Gang“

I like both of these bicycle images. The love theme in the Image of the Day was obvious, but I don’t know exactly what to make of the other one. Neglect? A father leaving his child? Or nothing at all like that? Maybe the small bike only fakes being tied to the railing? What if this bike is spying upon the man? Could this bike be a detective? There’s certainly something in his pose, that reminds me of a young hero …

The other two images happened on my way to the train, the “Karma” image just before I went down into the Underground, the other one just after I had re-emerged. “Karma” is basically the same kind of composition as the Image of the Day or so many of the half / half images in my SoFoBoMo ‘09 book “Urban Dreams II“, only not horizontal but vertical.

The second image, the one with the tramway tracks and the giant advertising in the background, somehow appealed to me, wanted to be taken. It’s something about the keen lines and the surreal effect of the giant legs. I don’t know, I can’t really tell why I took the image. I saw it and the urge was there. I’m pleased with the result though.

The Song of the Day is “Love Or Something” by Bob Geldof & The Boomtown Rats. I have it on the collection “Loudmouth: The Best Of Bob Geldof & The Boomtown Rats”. See a nice video on YouTube.

Quick! Two images of yesterday, and then I’m off to work

I like street corners, and yesterday I found out, that I like them even more, when I take the image from the other corner across. This could be a series. I had contemplated such a series once, but then I wanted to use the ultra-wide or even the fisheye. Interesting as well, but here I like the calm view of the 28.

As regards the Image of the Day, this is a crossing that has been closed for car traffic for weeks, and now they have closed it in this direction for the tramway as well. In the other direction there is no fence, but by car you can’t drive across either. Still, regardless of all the stop signs, beginning from the crossing before, you won’t believe how many drivers ignore that and try to get through, only to have to turn around

The Song of the Day is “No Way Pedro” from Van Morrison’s 2000 album “You Win Again”. No way to find the original, but YouTube has a cover version that’s quite to the spirit.

OK, here’s the missing images of Monday, and then I’ll only have to make one for today and post it

Sorry for the inconsistent posting, but yesterday I was still sick, tired and completely unmotivated. We would have had tickets for another concert in Graz, but due to my condition, we skipped that.

The image with the tractor was taken from out of the window of my study, in the morning, when I saw that the wonderful flowers were brutally murdered.

The second image is from the same window, late in the afternoon. I liked what the shadows and the clouds did.

Actually I really love these images from my study. It’s always the same landscape, but light, clouds and perspective change enough to make it interesting over and again. Who knows, I may end up with a book of those

The Image of the Day was taken later. The sun had gone down, I tried to sleep a little on a camping bed on the balcony, and suddenly I felt the urge to get the camera and try to make some images from my perspective. Over the years I’ve learned to always follow such impulses, and so I did. Thus: never go to sleep without your camera

The Song of the Day is “Sick ‘n’ Tired” from the 2002 Ms. Dynamite album “A Little Deeper”. Hear it on YouTube.

I was pretty much in a hurry in the morning. When I left work late in the afternoon, we had traces of sunshine mixed with some raindrops, and halfway that turned into a constant drizzle. Oh well, it IS worse north of the alps.

The first image is from the morning. I had just left the Underground station. So … you think your camera’s got a big, heavy battery, huh? Loser! That’s a big battery

I suppose electricity in the Underground station had failed and they came with the big truck to our rescue: 400 kVA!! That’s a battery.

The next image is from the afternoon, near my workplace. This is a garbage container of some construction company, and the sign on it reads “Please don’t fill in refrigerators and PC monitors“. I wonder if they take TV sets or sofas

I used the Nikon 24/2.8 for all images. Post-processing is similar to what I did the last days, Topaz Adjust and Snap Art. The exact settings, which Snap Art effect I use, how much I modify it, which Topaz effect I use, whether I add lines made with Snap Art “Stylize” or not, what kind of masks I use, the opacity values, all that varies from image to image, thus it wouldn’t make much sense to create an action. It’s more of a pattern than an algorithm.

The Song of the Day is “Oh Yes, Take Another Guess” by Ella Fitzgerald. I have it on a 10 CD box of her early recordings, that is most probably not available outside of Austria, Germany and probably Switzerland, but you find the song on many compilations, e.g. “Ella And Her Fellas”. Deezer has the album, YouTube has a video.

It is Sunday afternoon, I am still processing images of Thursday.

Yesterday I was shopping most of the day, then I was swimming for the first time this year. The lake may have about 17 degrees Celsius, the water feels definitely warmer than it was when I was there at the end of September.

In the evening I was held up, because the populist madness of censoring the Internet (allegedly for fighting child pornography only) has swapped over from Germany to Austria. I have spent more than two hours writing a long mail to one politician, Gottfried Hirz of Upper Austria’s Green party, whom I absolutely would not have expected to vote for that craze. I took great lengths to explain the situation, we’ll see what answer I get.

But anyway, let this be not about censorship, let it be about SoFoBoMo.

I’m pretty sick of playing catch up and always being three days behind. You know, when I am photographing, I always think a lot. I think about things that I could write, I have inner monologues about what I see, what I shoot, why I shoot it, why I shoot it this way, what I want to tell you, and when I get home, I forget all that, because what I find and what I need to write about, are the images of three days back. This is frustrating.

Thus, the new method is, that I won’t try to keep up the illusion that text and images were from the same day. If I need to talk about something that happened at the day that I write the post, I’ll simply do so.

Back to the images. I could really have gone on processing images of Thursday, there are at least four contenders left, but for now it’s enough.

All these images were shot with another favorite lens of mine, the Sigma 50/1.4. The Image of the Day is not exactly what I’d call a snapshot, but it was the only way to react to a certain situation. The machine moved, the train moved, seeing, composing, shooting, that was all within one second – and now I greatly like this cruel instrument.

The Bicycles? Well, maybe more my dream than anyone else’s, although Ove has similar obsessions

The graffiti images maybe need some explanation. The second one would have been the Image of the Day, but unfortunately I do not own the Elton John album “Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only the Piano Player”. If I did, I would have named this image (and the whole post) “Crocodile Rock”.

The third graffiti image is definitely an “Urban Dream”, although it presents the old problem of language. How do you cope with an image that contains text, written in a language that 90% of your audience won’t understand?

I have no ready solution but to explain it, and that may well lose the point. Anyway, the text means “Less work, higher wages, self-determination of workers”, a revolutionary, leftist parole, that looks so incredibly out-fashioned on this wall. It is not by accident that this is the wall of a house that belongs (or belonged) to our communist party. Communist romantics, in a way

The next image is more a puzzle than a dream. It contains a typical element of my photography, the bicycle, and then some signs seen from behind, and a poster spelling “Gesucht” or “Wanted”. I like this image. It is dense. It is opaque. It tries to keep you out. It breaks rules. I love it.

The last image is the only one that I didn’t process at all. It’s the JPEG right out of the camera. It’s colors are true to what I remember, but now that I see it, I might as well have pushed saturation a tad.

This also brings up the question if (or if not) these images are the final renditions that will go into the book. Honestly, like so much these days, I don’t know. Last year’s “Tscheppaschlucht” was really easy. Just shoot a bunch of images in a given sequence within a short time, all in one place, all under very similar lighting conditions, all within a small range of subjects, and then process it to a common look. Tedious but simple.

This time it can be everything. I may find a meaningful sequence of subjects and styles, I may have to re-work many of the images into a “look”, or maybe I can bind it with text. I have no idea, or rather, I do have ideas, many of them, but I don’t know yet which of them may apply.

The Song of the Day is “Sweet The Sting” from the 2005 Tori Amos album “The Beekeeper”. Hear it live on YouTube.

Back again. This is the second entry for today, these are today’s images.

The first image, debris at a construction site, caught my attention for one thing only: an S-curve. S-curves are hard to come by, thus I take them whenever I can

The other one is one more bicycle. Its headlight again has this typical form that’s so common with older bikes in Austria. It’s beautiful and I can rarely resist. All the other circles come as an added bonus, and there is even some optimistic light in the right upper corner. What more can I want?

The Song of the Day, Howlin’ Wolf’s “Look-A-Here, Baby”, is on disc 63 of “The Ultimate Jazz Archive”. It’s a bit pointless to recommend this collection these days. I got the whole 168 CD box for €99, and in Germany and Austria you can still get it for that price, whereas in the US you currently pay $270 used and $340 new. Quite a difference, huh? Still no bad price for 168 CDs though.

Fortunately you can get the song on “Memphis Days: Definitive Edition, Vol. 1″ as well.

Amazon has no sound sample, but I found a new music service called “The Filter“, and they have the song. At the moment it is still available from Austria, but I guess they will close for non-Americans soon, just like most others. Ah, what a pleasure globalization is, at least for the corporations

I said junk and I mean junk. I’ve had slightly better images on Friday, but I finally decided for this one, not for its aesthetic qualities (on a scale from 0 to 100 it would firmly score in the negative range), no, not for aesthetics, but because it reveals something. How so, you ask? By hiding, I say.

Vienna’s southern train station, Südbahnhof, is is (and will be for years) a big construction site. I remember four images (“448 – Down In The Hole)”, “525 – Too Much Of Nothing“, “588 – SoFoBoMo – Progressing Pretty Well” and one earlier, that I’m too lazy to search for now, that have been shot at that place. I did it always on Fridays, as Friday is my traveling day from Vienna to Carinthia. I always shot them through this wire fence … and now they have hidden the site.

Suddenly.

Unexpectedly.

Oh, I know why. It’s because in two weeks Austria will be host to “Euro 2008″, the European soccer championship. It always amazes me, how well organized this crime is. All newspapers are staunchly pro, as are all television stations. This is propaganda with an efficiency every authoritarian régime of the past, Nazis included, could only have dreamed of. Sure, the Nazis had similar results, and so had the Soviets, but they had to use force. Today the propaganda system is fueled by money only.

Ask someone on Austria’s streets. People are at best indifferent, most are outright fed up with this “event of the year”. Public and publicized opinion contradict each other strongly. Why? Money.

Euro 2008 is sold as a big event that will be beneficial to the public. The saying is, that restaurants and bars will profit hugely, and that it will have a lasting effect on tourism.

Maybe. So far I see that in the so-called “Fan Zones” everything will be controlled by the biggest European brewery Carlsberg (nobody will be allowed to sell a local beer), Coca Cola and McDonalds. The usual suspects, one might say.

And now they’ve hidden the construction site on Südbahnhof. Ok, ok, I stop my rant. Things are as they are, the world won’t change because I find it disgusting, thus I could as well arrange myself with it. Uhh … yes … thank you, City of Vienna, that you spare me the view of holes in the ground and machinery, from now on I’ll happily photograph white fences. But probably you’ll spare me even that. You’ll hopefully rent the white fences to advertisers. That’s it. The only thing that’s still missing. Advertising. And if at all possible, please do it for “Euro 2008″. This city needs it. Advertising will make it a better place.

But now for something completely different.

SoFoBoMo.

Yesterday morning I was ready to give up. Not so now. I certainly won’t finish before midnight, but I have reinterpreted the rules. As long as it is May, 31 somewhere on this planet, it will be SoFoBoMo. This gives me 11 hours more time. My deadline now is tomorrow, 11 am. At that time there will be no May any more. Hmm … one could cheat and deny daylight saving time for probably another hour

Anyway, I’ve got to be back to editing now. See you tomorrow, hopefully with a book. Good Night.

The Song of the Day is “Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except Me And My Monkey” from the White Album. Hear it on YouTube.

Funnily enough, having stress and no typical photo opportunity at all, that’s always a catalyst for me. In the morning, after having written yesterday’s entry, I had no time to take images, and in fact I arrived at work literally at the last minute.

I had already decided to skip image taking for today, when on my way to the train I looked through this fence.

Vienna’s southern railway station is one big construction site for the next years. You have already seen some images from there, and today, looking through this fence, I saw the signs reading “VIENNA SIGHTSEEING”.

Is that bizarre? In all this disorder, in all this chaos, in the middle of a place that’s as unattractive for tourists as it can get, there is a lost piece of touristic infrastructure. And in front of that … flowers. Well … that’s pretty, I thought.

There was not much processing needed for the Image of the Day. It was the first thing that I did on the train, and then I began to process more SoFoBoMo images. I managed to do five of them while on the train, and this brings the score up to 22. On the other hand, it’s a week now since I shot them, and there is only one more week to go. Still no idea how to make a book.



The Song of the Day is “Pretty” from the 2003 Beautiful South album “Gaze“. See a live version on YouTube.