spring2life take2

less words this time. punctum – i have decided to get barthes’ book to understand better what he tries to express.

above you have the black and white version of the batticaloa lighthouse picture. in my eyes it has a more detached quality than the color version here which is just so …natural and vivid. maybe it’s my mood that i savour more in the black and white version.

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some days ago i discovered the landscapist blog. what an amount of food for thought, in a way almost intimidating. man & nature # 19 ~ reading a photograph grabbed my attention, and even my illiteracy regarding barthes’ punctum thesis did not stop me from at least trying to follow.

later on, going through my pictures again, i was pondering this idea of the punctum again, trying to find a connection to my own body of work. the picture above maybe comes close – do you discover the punctum?

maybe i should read the original of this theorem. the landscapists interpretation at least seems to be flawed in the sense of ignoring the cultural roots of all our interpretational skills, and my image of the vesak lanterns is an example for this. from perceiving the subject, the odd combination of barbed wire and colorful lanterns, you don’t get the point of the picture even if you know where it was taken and what vesak is – one of the most important buddhist holidays in sri lanka – and this point cannot be photographed or included by omission, but it has to do with some further knowledge.

the picture was taken on the east coast of sri lanka, in a region where tamil villages mix with muslim ones. without influence of racist politicians, all these ethnics and religions coexist with the buddhists, and those are the absolute minority in this region, almost non-existent outside of army and police. an army, which is at war since 30 years with the tamils who form the majority on the east coast. hence the barbed wire. punctum.

but maybe i got this whole idea wrong…

the regular “der thumsee brennt” (burning lake thumsee) open air concert of the philharmonic orchestra met mixed weather yesterday. the concert itself had to be interrupted several times due to drizzling rain, but the fireworks went off into almost clear sky.

i had a vantage position a bit outside of the festival itself and so i could capture some foreground with the fireworks. shooting raw + jpeg this time, i was astonished about the a700′s jpeg quality straight out-of-camera, but ended up again with hand-tweaked (or should i say lightzone-tweaked) pictures from the raw.

the workflow with lightzone is just so convincing: dodging, burning, masking, intensifying – these are all old darkroom techniques, achievable through a very logical interface. not that lightzone doesn’t have its quirks – printing is a bit better than broken, it’s a memory and processor hog (for that reason alone i wouldn’t want a 24mpix camera) and the worst thing is the invisible support on the website together with the incomprehensive documentation. but it still has the for me most logical approach in developing raw files, and the results speak for themselves.

nice pat on the back yesterday: in my flickr account i found a mail from a journalist of tamilweek.com, notifying that they had – in accordance with the creative commons license i put on my pictures and blog – taken my blog entries and compiled them to a news feature named portraits from kalmunai. What I found appealing and a positive experience is the fact that they did not clandestinely copy and paste, which is something that so many authors experience nowadays, but behaved like high-standard journalists from the good old days in the midst of the snake pit internet.

content-wise i made my rants about the political situation there heard, now i just wait for the miracle that this has some effect.

batticaloa beach again – a real bonanza of photographic opportunities this has turned out to be. my first pictures dates back to 2004, still before the tsunami. at that time i had only 1.5 days there and was surprised about the peaceful place batticaloa was then. to my utmost luck my friends idea of going there with the families for christmas holidays did not materialize. 2nd day of christmas 2004 the tsunami struck.

the raw files from the last sri lanka mission are still a treasure chest. today i found this one. some adjustments in lightzone created a picture that appeals a lot to me – definitely not a “picture that sucks” as it was the topic of paul lester’s post yesterday.

the recipe given there ‘practice, practice, practice’ is a good one, but in my experience somtimes a pat on the back from an experienced, open-eyed fellow can help a lot to bring one’s vision forward. that’s the reason why i am deliberating about visiting a workshop.

sometimes 30 minutes can be sufficient: a walk alone in grey, wet weather at the borders of a lake, a short view in the woods and the silhouette of an old strong tree. Of course it was dark in there and so i was glad for my tripod. the polarizer had to help avoid too bright reflections from the leaves. the final imaged showed an intense green, but not in as many variations as i had hoped for a strong picture, so i took my chance in the conversion to b&w and some toning.

what a boost for my ego: last monday the ‘sueddeutsche zeitung’ (1.35 mio readers) has printed the picture above together with a report about the results of munich’s activities in eastern sri lanka.

[edit:]regarding the ego: of course the whole project is a gratification per se: being able to dedicate your energy to the improvement of the life circumstances of victims of such a large scale disaster is a value by itself. it’s only that i am not always an ideal selfless person-

therefore you will understand my disappointment about the fact that my authorship wasn’t mentioned… well, joy and sorrow always take turns.

giving the pictures on the todo-list more attention – for lack of new convincing shots, that is – i found this one again and after in-depth inspection i am astonished again about the fine rendering of colors and details at iso 1600. This is really a great achievement and well worth last years investment in a new camera body. and in this context the new nikon d700 with its suspected low noise at high iso is really attractive. poor me who has invested quite some money in sony mount lenses… sony unfortunately seems to go the ‘more megapixel’ way which will definitely not make me buy a new camera body, and if it’s only for the reason that all my postprocessing can just handle the present 12 million pixels per picture and will slow down to unusability with the 24 million pixels the new sony will offer.

acknowledging the fact that 99% of the views on my images come through the internet at resolutions of ~ 1 million pixels, and for the rare prints and exhibitions the resolution of my camera’s sensor is sufficient, just more megapixels is simply not attractive at all. ’nuff said.

now for something completely different. i found this cobweb in schönram bog on one of my random visits. early morning, full of dew, a beauty of architecture and form follows function philosophy. creating an image was a bit tedious, of course the angle finder was at home, of course there was just a light breeze that invalidated all the support the tripod could give, so this image is the best out of many attempts.

the postprocessing turned out to be difficult: lots of options, but no immediately convincing one. i tried black and white but had the feeling that i lost to many nuances in the cobweb itself. so i ended with this, desaturated and contrast increased and – maybe the most important manipulation – a cropped out sky. that sky offered a nice warm color but in my eyes was too distracting. but i am still not fully content, as there seems to be too much foreground not adding to the picture. on the other hand i’d prefer to stick with the 2:3 ratio. so this is probably not the final version.

the beauty of sunrise again. the kitsch-or-not-kitsch debate i have decided for myself to be not-existing anymore: beauty is a superior principle, taste is something indivdual and nobody has to like or dislike what i happen to like. for me this beauty (and my activity of capturing it) has a high value of its own, otherwise i would not bother to overcome jet lag, face tmvp militias in the form of 16yr old boys wearing kalashnikovs (oh no, not terrorists, on the “good” side!) and walk to a beach lugging around 2 kg of glass and electronics. so much for motivation.

even the klichee-like sunrise with palms: i don’t want to resist. those early morning moments, between night and day, are mysterious, powerful, promising, loaded with energy, still quiet but already carrying the noise of the day – they are just great.