spring2life take2

i am not the person for rain pictures, so in spite of carrying the camera around today, no shots that deserve better then the ‘immediate delete’ section. resorting to monday’s picture taken during heavy snowfall in the spa garden, i was pondering my options and finally went for the detail: snow and snowfall is more present here, no concurrence with the shape of the tree, valid in itself and therefore distracting from the snow.

of course the concept of dense photography, discussed a short while back on the landscapist and nobodys pictures would recommend a less simple approach, including more information, verbatim background information, but at the moment i am favouring more straightforward compositions, more removing additional elements then adding them.

what i try to find and portray through isolation are the simple, clear things – in spite of knowing that our world is neither clear nor simple. but let me put it that way: if i can recognize the simple things of value, then i can open up my understanding to the complex ones. if i would start with the complex ones, i would get nowhere because of too much distraction. instead i would stop with this subject and turn to the next.

spring does not send any messengers here, instead we had heavy snowfall, frost and rain in the last days. and the snow provided a nice backdrop for this background for this group of wooden sculptures. the one to the right is from this year’s new years post. i had tried several times to photograph this group, but during the summer the background is so distracting that all of my shots ended in the null device. and whilst this shot is far from being perfect, it’s the first time that the group really becomes visible.

back to my beloved blue tones. what is humming with tourists during the summer is a lonely path in winter, covered with 30cm now wet and heavy snow. the positive side: you get much better exercise out of a short distance, however holding a 300mm lens in middle of that exercise makes you praise that in-body anti-shake – in camera body, that is.

first time since many years that i went for the carnival parade here – the curious daughters, wanting to collect sweets, being the main motivation. and many of the fanciful costumes where a joy to look at.

but really alarming was the amount of alkohol beeing consumed also by minors (12 years upwards) – especially as the police was leading the parade. don’t misunderstand me as party pooper, but certain limitations are out of discussion. and nobody should deplore any more underage victims of binge drinking if it gets tolerated at such events in bright daylight. all this is only cheap lipservice.

even the snowstorm was no hindrance: on the way home from a restaurant, celebrating the successful first half of the school year, the eldest daughter couldn’t stop clowneries with her umbrella in the snow. grateful i am for those iso 6400 i can dial in now. and whilst the objective image quality may be poor, the image gives an excellent impression of that night lighting, snow drifting, kid jumping.

in spite of the rain that now soaks the large snow heaps here in the valley, higher up in the mountains winter is still unbroken. a sunday morning, only some 100 m away from the main trail you feel completely alone when the mist swallows all sounds. that always helps me to get the right sense of scale after a busy week, partly in the city, surrounded by all high tech and acting out my high expectations and trying to meet those of others. here in the mountains is the place where i can re-connect and come down to my roots.

late afternoon light had already left st. pankraz church in the shade. due to the cold air and light wind there were almost no distortions by the heatings from the houses of bad reichenhall under this scenery, only the object contrast turned out to be really low – a bit more then 3 f-stops is really not much. i had exposed to the right, so i hoped there was enough differentiation in there for a detail-rich image. playing with lightzone allowed to increase the local contrast and with the result i am quite happy.

just one thing keeps nagging me: even from the tripod all my shots are tilted to right – it seems almost impossible for me to adjust the camera horizontally. so the next thing to get is a rrs lever clamp with a spirit level. not that i would not like to tilt some shots on purpose, but never getting it level even if i want to is more than annoying.

oh yes, st. pankraz was already the subject of this post. it seems to attract me especially during winter time.

having been on the brink already last year and in the end procrastinated for too long, i had already decided to participate in 2009 sofobomo when there were the first rumors on paul butzi’s blog and now i have registered online.

the book’s topic is not yet decided as the fuzzy month from may 1st to june 30th is crisscrossed by several events: a business trip to sri lanka connected with a number of obligations but also possible photographic opportunities, school holidays myy ladies want to spend at the seaside…

whilst the topic needs some decision making (always good to have plan a and b, that keeps you flexible to follow plan f if necessary), the publishing tool is clear: scribus is available on my linux platform. i have used it already for 2 photobooks, and now on the ubuntu platform with color management available and lightzone and/or bibble 5 as high class raw converters/image editors, the basic kit is clear.

on the printing/publishing side i am still undecided: issu is optically very nice – i still do admire andreas manessingers tscheppaschlucht – where it runs, but last year it did not run on too many computers i tried. scribd looked promising, but on linux i was not able to enlarge a presented document up to legibility, blurb i have not tried. so there is still some research to do.

for me, there is however no doubt that it will be a positive experience to accept the challenge and make an intensive month out of it: designing, photographing, editing and finalising should be a real reward in themselves.

speaking about time constraints, just imagine the following situation: you leave the house to catch the bus (2 days a week i work away from home in munich), the bus is early and leaves you waiting 10 min at -8°c, which is 18°f and not really comfortable. to make the best out of it you start shooting, notice the moon, notice the lamp post and try to figure out something reasonable, cropping loose, cropping tight and so on. finally you see the next bus approaching, pack away your gear when suddenly the streetlights switch off and the scenery changes. get the camera again, frame the shot hastily now as the bus is almost there, press the shutter and run for the bus, glad to get into the warm interior….

now that really was tight…

it seems that this is my blue period. fortunately enough this concentrates on photography and is not a general description of my mood.

however the self-assignment of ‘learning to see’ seems quite a bit harder here in the wintery bavaria than it is in sri lanka. it’s not the time restrictions – on business trips they are even tighter – but the familiarity with the visual impressions around, i think. so opening the eyes, seeing without categorizing, absorbing optical stimuli and becoming aware of beauty in the well-known is what i learn.

beauty is a keyword in yesterday’s post of ‘the landscapist’ mark hobson. whilst i do agree with large parts of his argumentation thread, i am not sure if this ‘chasing the light’ is something to condemn: what many of those landscape photographers do accomplish is to portray a perfection in nature that is unknown to the majority of mankind. in my eyes this can be way beyond mere pretty-ness, this can be beauty. and this beauty can be the bridge to love, and this love is the first step to acknowledgement of value, of worthiness.

if this feeling for value could only a little bit balance the race for hypothesized shareholder value, i think a great many of mark’s concerns would be alleviated.

at the moment those late afternoon hours seem to be really rewarding for me. i had tried to portray gruttenstein castle, only 10 min away from our house, on quite some occasions, but all i got were mere reproductions. today’s image is different: the old trees (another found-again partiality) do not reveal much of the castle, but create a mood maybe a bit out of a fairy tale. that’s what i enjoy in here, and it still is quite ‘straight’ photography, not much massaging the raw file.

the blue hour at the moment is quite pronounced, of course the thick clouds make the transit of the light a bit longer. lucky enough i managed to combine the weekly shopping super-task with an hour of walking the tripod. not far from the spot where i took cold winter and the sleeping witch in a winter night the trail i was following suddenly had only one thin layer of branches between me and the village of grossgmain and the untersberg behind it. and especially the branches high above me captured my attention, one of the rare opportunities where i used my 11-18 wideangle zoom.

this lens is quite special: whilst i use it only for a small fraction of my shots, a disproportionate high fraction of those i regard above average. and i had quite a steep learning curve and still do not master it in the way i would like to: making those pictures with a grand subject whilst including a lot of environment information in the background. but my feeling for it grows, and overall it seems to have been a good investment.

with the right gloves, even photographing in snowfall looses its scaring quality. yesterday evening i had some spare time between appointments, and due to the weather just sneaked into a place where i had been on quite a number of walks.

snowfall transforms all the vistas, softens contours, hides details (no dense photography any more…) but the mood i did enjoy very much – that approaching night, absence of light, dampening of the sounds due to the snow. those 15 minutes really managed to recharge my batteries.

back to cold reality. here in my hometown winter is going strong. the scenery above could well be from astrid lindgren’s the tomten, here on youtube.

i don’t want to chime into the ‘waiting for springtime/i love winter’ posts. winter is not my favourite time of the year, but it is the season we will see change all too soon due to the warming of the atmosphere. so i’ll catch it while i can.

today i want to pick up ilan breslers idea to feature a blog which i think is worth to be read: a blog from russia, http://photo.alick.ru/. i can’t read any letter of the posts, but some of the photographs are fascinating. so feel free to follow the link under the thumbnail to the right. and of course, check ilans blog here.

let the beauty of the flags speak for itself. the flag doesn’t bother who is raising it and why.

even this much abused national symbols keep their relevance, the more so when all those malpractioners are gone.

some of our youngest beneficiaries: their families received rainwater harvesting tanks or toilets through our project. we are targeting especially the poor families, among them so many woman headed families, having lost the husband/father in the tsunami or the war.

the stories you get to hear there are sad, sometimes hard to bear: one woman had lost her husband in the tsunami and 18 months later her son under unknown circumstances due to the war. the death toll of that conflict is now well over 70.000, and besides an end of the fighting on the battlefield no reconciliation is in sight, instead acts of violence and vengeance may deepen the trench between the ethnics. politics has messed up completely here, the reasons you can easily find on both sides.

since my first official visit to batticaloa and kalmunai, fishermen were the subject of numerous shots, from beach overviews up to portraits, details of their catch and their tools. this time i brought two small albums as tokens of my gratitude for their acceptance of my photography.

trying to find the essence of the pictures, i am reviewing the raw files several times, judging back and forth which picture to pick and which to reject, also modifying details here and there.yesterdays posting included the scenery with the two men walking, which i had already posted here. the new version crops out the sky, and i like it much better now as for one thing the sky was a bit too rosy, but also because the lack of sky now gives a stronger impression of a vast and powerful ocean.

catching the small fish, and only small numbers, is hard work, tearing on muscles and gear. the sharp corals brought by the waves to the shore constantly tear holes into the net. a good part of the morning this fisherman spent repairing the net.

he had a helper, and after having tried one spot and repaired the net, off they went along the beach to another spot where the net was thrown again. half a kilo of small fishes after one hour is definitely not sufficient to feed even a single person, so at this time of the year most of the men go to work as labourers.

no dessert for me after a working dinner, instead 10 min. break and a very short walk on the beach. the colors here were wonderful, the beach certainly attractive for tourists. however i was told that people here in kalmunai would not feel at ease with tourists as conflicts with muslim traditions and teachings would be preprogrammed.

the kids, and the boys especially, meanwhile do enjoy their life, and a stranger on the beach is definitely a reason to say hello and try one’s language skills.

late in the day the light was soft and the green regained its power after the blazing sunlight. the combination of the red rocks and the plants was very soothing, calming and inviting for a rest.

this is my first try with the beta of the new bibble5. its region feature allowed to keep the shadows in the center away from pure black while the environment was darkened half an f-stop to compensate the effect of ‘exposing to the right’. this way the picture is less noisy an richer in tonalities in comparison to a shot where big parts are in the left half of the histogram.

the old bibble4 id did like because of its speed already, but the lack of region functions meant that selective editing had to be done in gimp afterwards (i am an all-linux guy), and therefore lightzone was the tool of choice for low iso shots – for high iso its denoising algorithms simply are not state of the art.

probably something for andreas manessinger, who is quite often posting bicycle pictures. i started to travel regularly to sri lanka in 2003, and since then a lot has changed regarding bikes. while you still find a lot of bikes like this – they are just means of transport, and when income is lacking, nobody bothers with repairing – recently leisure biking has started: on sunday morning you find young people on the road on modern bikes, seemingly unaffected of sri lanka motorized traffic endangerment: suicide can be painless here, roadrunning is only for the really tough ones.

this is what i am in sri lanka for: bringing locally adapted low cost technology to improve drinking water supply of the people in need, mainly the poor, low caste, incomplete families. the pump you see here consists of material available in the local hardware store, mainly pvc and metal pipes (pvc to avoid corrosion), a glass marble as vent, tire cutouts as gaskets. our partner emas int. has set up a well drilling school to teach this technology. self-employment at least for some is the way to improve their living conditions, others simply profit from the fail-safe and long-lasting technology.

early morning, shortly after sunrise at the beach. half a dozen fishermen are there, but due to the rough sea beach fishery is impossible. one of them tries with a hand net, half an hour of work results in a handful of really small fishes of maybe zero market value. i decided to leave but was gestured to stay, to wait for that single one boat they own that can go deep sea fishing because it has an outboard motor. and then it comes and brings home the catch: a sailfish that makes 8 us$/kg at the market.

after shortly posing for me, the men went off to clean the fish, so i guessed. but no – a motobike was waiting, and 50m away from me – too far for my standard zoom – the fisherman takes the rear seat, and with the fish on his shoulder they head for the market. this would have been *the* shot.

one of the rare occasions i could break out of that usual mission cycle of visiting one rainwater harvesting tank or well or toilet after the other, and just take 7 minutes on the road, for a moment concentrating only on shape, graphics structure. not that i would take this monitoring not seriously, it is just that my attention is suddenly grabbed by some details.

and i had to learn the hard way that procrastinating means loss. i cannot come back there for reasons of time and transport – i do have the position thanks to a small gps logger i always have in my pocket – so i try to snap whatever is interesting immediately and without too much fiddling.

the harvest then only begins after returning home, and fighting the jet lag through staying up until late gives the opportunity to go through the collections. diamonds i rarely find, but even rust can be rewarding.

what you see here are fence blinds, attached to the fence posts to give a little privacy on the 250m² plots, where a big part of the life happens in the garden.

sometimes i am just too shy. the owner of this food stall greeted me, as do most of the people you meet on the early morning streets in batticaloa, but for one reason or the other i refrained from asking if i could make a picture and went into a side street. only after 50m i changed my mind and went back, asked and of course was allowed to photograph (the term shooting is not appropriate in batticaloa as there is too much real shooting happening). and so i got my etude in rusty colors.