2008 June | spring2life take2

silvery sea

Monday, June 30th, 2008

if there is a single one photographic situation that i do like most, it’s backlight in all its variations. it gives so much opportunity for drama, for hiding distracting things, for abstracting from a world full of diverting colors into the essence of shapes and silhouettes. in the picture above as well as in the prior “kalmunai fishermen” the beauty of form is intensified.

in grey past a.k.a. my film days, backlight was always difficult, specifically when shooting slides. in my experience, dslrs are well suited for backlight especially in situations where you can easily chimp or bracket. and my sony a700 seems to keep a lot of highlight information in its raw files for discovery with a suitable tool, lightzone in my case.

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Tags:boat, fisher, sea, sony a700
Posted in Batticaloa | No Comments »

colorful catch II

Friday, June 27th, 2008

this image is a mystery to me. i regard it very highly (otherwise i wouldn’t show it), but flickr seems to have a differing opinion, or better no opinion at all of it. all the pictures i put on flickr get views, comments even without promoting them, but this one: not a single view in the three days since it has been uploaded.

so i do hope i can blame it on flickr…

Tags:catch
Posted in Batticaloa | 2 Comments »

colorful catch

Tuesday, June 24th, 2008

saturday mornings visit to schönram bog was a success in terms of recreation, but not so much in terms of pictures. the frog concerto was good to hear but impossible to visualize and overall i was too late for the early morning mist that gives that bog such an impressive ghostly atmosphere – sunrise is at 5:15 at the moment and the 30 minutes of driving were enough for the sun to develop sufficient strength to quickly dissolve the remainders of the fog. it seems that i have to encourage my ‘go’ a little more – see paul lesters blog on the joy of waiting.

anyway, from my last mission to sri lanka there are some pictures left that i regard as worthy to be shown. like this one. it was taken with a 20 year old minolta zoom at iso 1600, and i am all over astonished again when i search for traces of image degradation that could be attested to this high sensivity.

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Tags:basket, batticaloa, fin, fish, high iso, sony a700, tail
Posted in Sri lanka | 2 Comments »

church of Anger, dominating the village

Thursday, June 19th, 2008

bavaria still is one of the roman-catholic heartlands. no politician will stand a chance opposing the church – the green party at the moment has to learn this the hard way, it seems. this domination was in former times even a physical one, as you can see in this picture: the church really towering over a village of maybe 10² houses.

This image needed some more postprocessing: removing CA with gimp, adding saturation to the not so blue sky, incrementing local contrast etc. i am still amazed about the performance of this budget/lightweight/small tamron lens.

Tags:Anger, bavaria, fields, morning, sony a700
Posted in dahoam (at home) | 2 Comments »

more barley and poppy flowers

Monday, June 16th, 2008

that excursion last saturday was extremely satisfying in terms of both the process and the outcomes. so here are two more poppy flower vs. barley shots.

never before i had used the macro capabilities of my new tele zoom, but here, for the shallow depth of field, it is really indispensable. in a severe attack of lens buying addiction i had succumbed to the new tamron 70-300mm f/4-5.6 tele-macro ld di, which david kilpatrick of photoclubalpha.com had reviewed very favourably here. It definitely is a steal, and the remaining chromatic abberations – for this price you don’t get an apo lens – can be easily corrected with a gimp plugin, if necessary.

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Posted in dahoam (at home), nature | 5 Comments »

poppy flowers in a barley field

Saturday, June 14th, 2008

getting up early to catch the first light was definitely the right thing to do today, as the sky became overcast before noon and stayed like this until the evening. i finally got over my feeling of inertia which quite often strucks me after my missions to sri lanka: so many contradicting emotions overwhelm me, compassion with the suffering people not the smallest, that it takes time afterwards to get up and go again, searching for harmony, beauty (not daring to use the word art). but when i was there i was just delving into that feeling of seeing, beeing there, experimenting, framing, that i completeley loosened up and this way really relaxed.

so it was really worth getting up early.

Tags:alley, Aufham, barley, field, flower, poppy, sony a700
Posted in dahoam (at home), nature | 1 Comment »

“no damage here after tsunami”

Wednesday, June 11th, 2008

“no damage here after the tsunami”. i was astonished, as this area was flat, not far from the beach, but our companion from the municipal administration repeated it. so i started asking for explanations and after some minutes it turned out: people here had been poor before the tsunami, the loss of their huts didn’t count as damage worth accounting. to make this very clear: our company was not a hard-hearted bureaucrat but quite the contrary, father of two and very emphatic. and he understood my helpless laughter after i had understood his explanation.

and the people living here are still poor – their open pit latrine, barely 10m away from the open well illustrates the whole situation. it was this place together with the reading in the city profile that we decided to dedicate the surplus of the donated money to the building of toilets as a very first and basic item that might help the people to improve the circumstances of living here.

their unbroken sense for beauty, for order in certain places, for harmonic colors sometimes shining through made a great impression on me. my photography there, more documenting, more often than not under pressure of time, was rarely up to these moments so my framing of the top image was poor, much too wide, and cropping turned out to be the only solution to rescue this image.

Tags:broom, brown, poor people, sand, slum
Posted in Batticaloa | No Comments »

tsunami traces III

Sunday, June 8th, 2008

since the tsunami of december 2004 those women live with their families in temporary shelters: that means huts with corrugated tin sheets as roof, maybe one and a half rooms, cooking outside, toilets and washing facilites shared with a big number of other families. while this may look bearable under warm and sunny conditions, in the 4+ months of monsoon it becomes a total mess – a deep swamp everywhere, seasoned with the threats of cyclones.

when foreigners on an official mission become visible, now there are sounds of protests. and it hurts me that we could not offer some more houses to be constructed from our funds, as apparently their own state prefers to spend the money on a war they cannot win: sri lanka spends 2.4% of their gdp (est. 2004, compare with 1.5% in germany) for their army, plus the (unknown to me) amount the need for police and special task forces, let alone their losses of the agonizing economy due to the civil war of more than 25 years.

oh, and did i tell you that this country could be a paradise on earth?

Tags:protests, tsunami
Posted in Kalmunai | 2 Comments »

Tsunami Traces II

Wednesday, June 4th, 2008

the tsunami devastated Sri Lanka more than 3.5 years ago. it’s traces can still be seen in the faces of the people. that man to the right, probably 15 years younger than me, lives and works next to the place he lost his family, barely 50m away from the shoreline. conversation was difficult, so he silently offered me a glass of tea and we stood there closemouthed in a place where i was already short after tsunami, covered in the smell of decaying corpses under collapsed houses.

the west and south of sri lanka got rebuilt pretty fast and well, as this is where the singhalese majority leaves. the east with the muslims and tamils was always neglected and still is. or could you imagine a city of 100.000+ inhabitants not having a single loader and truck? hospitals not sporting a toilet for the men’s ward? and still a number of tsunami affected families live in temporary shelters. as do the sometimes 180.000+ internally displaced persons (an excellent euphemism for war refugees) alone in this region. those war refugees get no compensation, in the camps they wait to be allowed returning to the shattered remainders of their villages after one or the other army was there. and racism shows its ugly face everywhere, making tamils fight muslims, tamils kill tamils, singalese fight tamils without end.