The inside of a sunlit plastic tube hanging on a fence. Sometimes I have weird ideas 
The Song of the Day is “Inside” from the 1994 Stiltskin album “The Mind’s Eye”. Hear it on YouTube.
May 132010
You know this habit of mine, taking a song title, making it the title of the Image of the Day, making the song Song of the Day. Well, today is different and this is, because I got stuck in the middle.
I have a file with all my song titles. First I search this file for keywords that I feel match my image. When I have found something, I look if I can find a video, preferably on YouTube. I also check in my Index of the Songs of the Day if I have already used the song. If so, I may use it again or look further.
Today I had a very short time of about 40 minutes for photography. But still, I got into the mood quickly, and taking photos was an intense experience, almost meditative, out in nature, first on a small country road, then in a forest by the river. It was an experience of silence and joy.
Well, “silence” was one of the words that I looked for in my list of song titles, and when I found Shara Nelson’s album “What Silence Knows”, I immediately loved the idea. The problem is, that the title track was not available on YouTube. In fact, the only song from that album that’s on YouTube, is “One Goodbye In Ten”, and when I heard that, I knew I wanted it to be Song of the Day. It’s such an incredibly beautiful song, and if you don’t know the album, I can only recommend it heartily. Here’s the video.
Oh dear, see my mistake? The rules say you must keep your shadow out of the image, and what did I? A minute I let my attention slip and somehow it must have sneaked into the image 
Wow, how I love this early summer weather that has come over us, just a week after the last snow fell in Villach!
Vienna is always about two weeks ahead of Carinthia, at least in spring, and here the trees are already budding, people go in summer clothes, the days are long again and color has come back into the world.
Today my color is yellow. A warm yellow, and that’s just how I feel. I have used the Nikon 24/2.8 today, I wanted it a little “wider”
I really like to use it, although it is not a good lens by today’s standards. Sure, it’s sharp, no problem with that, CA is there but not a problem either, bokeh is nothing to write home about, but it is not worse than with the average zoom, no, the problem are the reflections.
Boy, if you even remotely have the sun in your frame (or at night any strong light), you get a strong reflection from the sensor to the inside of the lens, and then as a strong emerald ghost back to the sensor. Eeek! Well, it’s not really a problem on DX format, because you can easily shade it off with your hand without causing vignetting, but I guess on FX format it must be painful.
This is something that typically occurs with old lens designs stemming from film days. Film was much less reflective than those silver sensors, and therefore the problem did not exist. Today’s lenses use a special anti-reflective coating on the inside, but my Nikon 24/2.8 was made sometime in the early 1990s. Oh well, no real problem, just a reason to be careful, and I just stop complaining. Who would, on a day like this
The Song of the Day is “I See My Great Mistake” by Memphis Slim. I have it on that wonderful 169 CD collection “The Ultimate Jazz Archive”. Sorry, no video, but Deezer has the song.
Three posts in a day? Promised: I’ll keep this very short and apolitical, OK? I’m back in Vienna, I have all my images with me again but still no Photoshop installed. Oh my!
This is an image from today. I went into the garden and took some images of the Cherry tree that just now has wonderful colors. I’m afraid it will have lost its leaves by next weekend.
The Song of the Day is “The Garden” from the 1999 Faithless album “Sunday 8pm“. Hear it on YouTube. There are no lyrics, it’s instrumental
Sep 232008
I don’t change lenses all the time. I like to keep my lenses for some days, like to get into their way of seeing. I am in no way a fanatic. If it’s a zoom, I use it as a zoom, if it’s a prime, I zoom with my feet. I do have a slight preference for fast primes though. At the moment it’s the Sigma 20/1.8, just because I had it still mounted from yesterday’s gloomy, rainy afternoon.
The first image for today is a composition that I kinda like, although I liked it even more with two people, a man and a woman, crossing in the background. I had waited for the perfect moment, all positions were exactly how they needed to be, the image was balanced and … focus was all wrong. I wanted it on the bicycle but got it on the background. Oh well.
The Image of the Day was shot some minutes earlier on a street corner with a flower shop. They sell tiny pumpkins for decoration, but of course when you get in very near, everything becomes big.
The Song of the Day is “Autumn’s Here” from Hawksley Workman’s 2003 album “Lover / Fighter“. See him perform live on YouTube.
Sep 212008
Yesterday afternoon it was sunny and there was a hint of summer, at least in the light. I had only some minutes, and the one thing that immediately caught my attention, was a group of these yellow flowers that we now have all around.
They are a kind of sunflower, grow in brushes of up to two meters high, and the flowers are much smaller than those of the archetypical sunflowers.
I don’t know when these flowers turned up in Austria, but I am quite sure that we did not have them here in my youth. I suppose they came as garden flowers and now grow in the wild, or maybe they were mixed with seeds. Everything is commercial now, and of course no farmer seeds from last year’s crop today. Whatever the reason is, they seem to feel well here. Can anybody enlighten me as to their origin?
The Song of the Day is “Indian Summer” from the 1970 Doors album “Morrison Hotel“. I had the vinyl album and have just ordered the CD. See a video on YouTube.
Sep 142008
After a busy weekend in Carinthia I now sit on the train back to Vienna. It’s extremely uncomfortable, impossible to sleep, so, what better could I do but blogging
The announced end of summer really hit on Saturday, temperatures fell by 15 centigrades in one day, but I still went swimming – in the rain. It was nice, the water was still warm, and it was much needed after a day of sweat-inducing work (have you ever packed some three or four thousand books and transported them?), and I’ll try it again next weekend, that’s for sure. No way I could give up so early
This image was shot from out of the car using the Nikon 85/1.8 at f1.8 with a polarizer. You can’t see the rain, because the focal plane is so far away, but it was enough to keep me from getting out.
The Song of the Day is “Early Autumn“. I have it on Ella Fitzgerald’s “Johnny Mercer Songbook“, but the only vocal version that I’ve found on YouTube is by Jo Stafford. Slightly different stuff.
Jun 202008
Funny image, huhh?? Well, I like the effect. This involved some weird tricks like overlaying a layer that was generated by “Filter / Stylize / Find Edges”, major pushes in the color department and a lot more. I was inspired to do this for two reasons: the reflection patterns in the tiles looked interesting and, more important, the highlights looked completely burnt out. I just had a discussion with Paul Lester about RAW vs JPEG, and if ever an image was a good example for why I shoot RAW, this is it.
Well, I’ve done all sorts of violent things to this image, don’t get distracted by the graphic syle. The point is, when you look at the lower right corner, there is nothing but white. Everything is clipped and gone. In RAW it took me just an exposure correction of -2.5EV, the details were back and the image was back in the game. But of course, Paul and I do completely different things to our images, and with the kind of shooting he does and his gentle style of post-processing, he won’t ever stress an image like I do here. In the end it’s quite simple: do what you need and what’s enough to reach your goals.
The Song of the Day is “The Light” from the Stranglers album “Coup de Grace“. Hear it on YouTube. Judging from the reviews on Amazon, “real” fans seem to dislike this album passionately. Well, I don’t
Sometimes you’ve got only one chance. This is the single image that I shot on Friday. I took it on my way to the train, just as I went up the escalator from the Underground. After the gloomy darkness below, I suddenly saw a blue sky and a flash of strong yellow. I did not think about it, I just raised the camera and, without any conscious effort, got this, just in the right split-second.
I combined three versions from one RAW file to cope with the enormous contrast, but otherwise I could have taken the original composition as shot. That I still cropped it, well, I saw the chance to get some lines int corners, and I simply couldn’t resist. The original was not bad, but this one is even stronger.
The Song of the Day is “The Day That Jackie Jumped The Jail” from the 1991 Deacon Blue album “Fellow Hoodlums“. See them live on YouTube. The song is in the second part of the video.
May 012008
Some time ago I’ve written that the world is fractal, which Ted Byrne found amusing, but essentially that’s what it is: Even if you believe you know a region (like I certainly do in case of my home Carinthia), you only have to look around the next corner to see something completely new. And even if you don’t, even if you look at the same things again and again, you can always see them from different angles, different distances, giving you new perspectives, and even if all this is constant, then there is the ever changing light.
This post is about dandelions. It’s all about the same subject, but we constantly change our perspective, going from a distanced view on a spring meadow all the way down into the wonderful world of macro photography.
See these two images? I didn’t recognize it until I saw them side by side in the thumbnail view in my SmugMug galleries. In reality they were shot basically at the same place, hills to the south of Klagenfurt, but they were certainly not side by side. We got there when, just for the sake of it, we followed a small country road that we had never used before. It began rather unpromising and grew interesting later, making me completely forget the light rain. The two images were shot with the Sigma 30/1.4.
When was this? Oh yes, Saturday. It’s now Thursday, the first of May, public holiday in Austria, the weather outside is just as it was on Saturday, and I write about images that I have processed yesterday on the train.
Last weekend was ideal for photographing dandelions. Now, only some days later, the first of them have already had their metamorphosis into white balls of feather, but then it was sprinkled yellow all over the place. Vienna, as you have seen in “559 – Obeisance” is already a week or two beyond, but that’s normal, as Carinthia is higher and encircled by mountains.
Later in the afternoon long after the rain had stopped, the sun came out, and I mounted the Sigma 20/1.8, a marvelous wide-angle macro lens, grabbed a towel and went out into the garden, trying to capture the flowers from a very low perspective. 
We also see a progression here from normal to very shallow depth of field, and this all culminates in the Image of the Day, shot from extremely near and wide open at f1.8. For this last image, shown at the top of this post, the front lens must almost have touched the flower. The world is fractal. If you think you’ve seen everything there is, just get nearer and dive into the wonder of a world that you can’t see but through a camera.
The Song of the Day is “How Many Worlds” from Brian Eno’s great 2005 album “Another Day on Earth“. Check it out, it may not be everybody’s taste, but it’s well worth it. Also hear the song on YouTube.
