Archive for April 2008
Wednesday, April 30th, 2008
what a wonderful world: convinced my wife and the kids to walk along the whole weissbach canyon. ok, there was a wholesome goal, mauthäusl inn, with a terasse overlooking part of the canyon, and the prospect of an icecream worked more than accelerative. and we had a break in the canyon, which offered the opportunity for this shot – the other parts of the path we had to attentively guide the kids in order to avoid an unintended bath. conclusion: walking with kids is fun as long as you take it as what it is, not as an opportunity to make all the pictures you’d probably like to.
the oscillation of the strong sunlight in parts of the canyon is what i visualized here, enforced by the fidgety pattern of the rock.
Tags:salix, sony a700, willow
Posted in Weißbach | Comments Closed
Monday, April 28th, 2008
one of the rare occasions i did more to a picture than dodgin/burning/sharpening aka. their equivalents in lightzone. the red light on top of the antenna mast was there, but not as prominent as it is now. in the the evening light and so much out-of-focus, it is a mere glow in the raw file. lightzone’s regionized saturation and blur tools helped me to make it better visible and in this way to create the visual descant i regarded necessary in this picture.
in retrospective, last week’s 13min. wait for the bus were a really creative time slice. 4 images that i regarded worth showing taken in a really short timeframe…
and i am lucky, too, that i still have them: having no cardreader at hand, late in the night i moved them from the cf card to my fathers computer’s /tmp directory in order to transfer them over the network to my laptop. too tired to think i shut down his computer immediately after moving, and linux clears the /tmp space at that occasion. bummer! but: search engines to the rescue, in this case Aurélien’s room – it is no problem to recover deleted files from a vfat file system. so i did not loose a single raw file.
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Tags:antenna, blue sky, munich, red light, sky, sony a700
Posted in urban | 1 Comment »
Saturday, April 26th, 2008
the first time i made really use of the blue hour and the my old zoom. focused to close distance, wide open, the bokeh really becomes great. which is no wonder at the other hand as there are no diaphragm blades involved. again, anti-shake saved my day as handholding 320mm effective focal length at 1/20s shutter speed is next to impossible, even when leaning to a lamp post. iso 1600 as a usable sensor speed is a value in itself (as is auto-iso, when you are in a hurry), though i have to admit that with other subjects the grain is below the optimum.
it took some time, but it seems that i grow more and more accustomed to my camera and can detach myself from technique and concentrate more and more on seeing. and in the end, *this* is it what really matters.
Tags:handheld
Posted in blue, bokeh, red, urban | 1 Comment »
Saturday, April 26th, 2008
ok, so what do you expect from april. but this weather definitely has its photographic merits, too.
technically i feel a bit suspended in mid-air at the moment. my favourite raw editor, lightzone is available for linux only as a time limited public beta at the moment. only 5 days left and still no official announcement from the company. i do enjoy the smoothness of this application so much that i am without hesitation willing to pay the full price for a license, in spite of the availability of other good raw converters. lightzone has such a tremendous ease of use and blatant similarity to wet darkroom techniques, that it became my favorite ‘developer’ in almost no time. so please, lightcrafts inc., go ahead with a linux version, either fully company supported-full price licensed or for (almost) free as a community support version.
Tags:grill
Posted in dahoam (at home), weather | 2 Comments »
Thursday, April 24th, 2008
yesterday was commuting day. spring in the city is so different and, at least for me, partially depressing when the songs of the birds mingle with the traffic noise. but optically it has it’s merits, translating trees into patterns, creating trompe l’oeil like bird silhouettes, bending straight lines, mixing coating colors of the glass with the most wonderful blue of the sky (bavaria, you may know, is very proud of its skies)
and ‘stary, stary night’ is seen differently here in the city too. not inspiring in the romantic sense, but more so in the business, prestige, non-sustainability sense.
unfortunately. especially for my kids.
Tags:noise, rant, silhouettes
Posted in reflection, sky | 3 Comments »
Monday, April 21st, 2008
i confess, i confess, i confess: i too am guilty of the inevitable spring flower macros, encroaching the photographic websites from all directions now. ok, flickr has always high times for flower shots, and a lot of people turn up their nose on this. but even andreas manessinger already found himself seduced by flowers again… mea culpa, mea culpa, mea culpa.
—
so what: only rarely i have found such pure colors, such unity of form and color, and such photogenic qualities helping my vision and craftsmanship to overcome pure reproduction and turn into feeling, sensing.
so i confess being guilty. but i don’t mind.
Tags:beauty, macro, tulip
Posted in bokeh, red | 3 Comments »
Thursday, April 17th, 2008
as it is brighter now when i leave the office, more photogenic sceneries show up. waiting for the bus, large numbers of bikers, ringing their bells, chased the waiting passengers from the bike lane. across the street, the scenery was different – the biker graffiti seemed to get chased by the cars.
spring in the city has its own photogenic qualities. what i love most is the opposition of nature against man made structures. and, again, i have discovered my love for shallow depth of field. usually a bit difficult to aquire with an aps-c format dslr, the more than 20 year old minolta 3.5-4.5/70-210 zoom makes this possible at least at the long end.
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Tags:biker, blossom, buds, building, car, chase, graffiti, house, sony a700
Posted in urban | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, April 15th, 2008
recently i had discussions with colleagues of the local photo group about moving water in photography. there are obviously two fractions: flow haters aka. freeze lovers and soft flow lovers. whilst the latter enjoy the extension to the human eye in form of the camera’s ability to show the movement of the water, the first party bluntly rejects such pictures. for me, both forms of rendering are valid but I do enjoy very much the flow, expressing a distinct feeling of time passing, energy coming and dissipating and offering the eyes and the soul a place to dive in, melt in and re-unite with nature.
the little Weißbach canyon becomes more and more a place of rest and regeneration for me, and capturing the stimulation of all senses in a photography is an everlasting challenge.
the image to the right is a crisp rendering of a spot nearby, strong more in the colors and in the v-shaped direction of the falling waters.
Tags:canyon, creek, flow, waterfall, Weißbach
Posted in dahoam (at home), water | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, April 9th, 2008
a lesson in ‘learning to see’. i had a bland image on my monitor, taken when i was quite tired at the end of an excursion with the family. i remembered that i had taken it because of the beautiful curve of the fence posts and the shadow curves of the fence’s wire, but there was too much optical garbage clobbering the real subject. so out of a 12.7 MB file i cropped 1.5 MB, the resolution of a 2 year old mobile phone camera…
Tags:Fagerer Alm, fence, Salzburger Land, sony a700
Posted in Austria, shadow | 4 Comments »
Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008
easter monday i got some free time and went to an alpine meadow near the ‘queralpenstrasse’ (alpine transversal road) just 20min far from home. under the north face of Reiteralm there was still a lot of snow, and from time to time avalanches broke free high above our heads. the woods here have suffered a lot from the storms, weakened as they are by the air pollution they toppled over hectar wise. but on the north side there is still hope that a natural mixed forest will grow up again as the density of deer and roe is not as high as in the opposing south faces, where they feed every spring on the buds of the young trees to devastating effects. the young protection forest does not grow up but ends as extremely expensive mash for future trophies on the chimney wall of a hunter.
the second picture is an alpine hut there on the meadows. the cows used to graze right in the woods – with obvious consequences for the young trees – but the administration tries to buy out now those old rights.
Tags:Schwarzbach, spruce
Posted in woods | 1 Comment »
