spring2life take2

it seems that i start to enjoy turning down saturation more and more. the weather was grey, daytime was busy, no fresh shots but still some old ones deserving to be evaluated and worked upon. in my eyes it’s not a disadvantage of shooting raw that i have to re-judge my images again when deciding which one to convert and edit, it’s a bit like old-fashioned black and white darkroom work: it made and makes no sense to mechanically convert/develop because the results were and are average at best.

additionally to toning down saturation i found that adding a bit of vignetting is good for some images. even if it’s only a small, barely visible amount, it seems to center the view quite a bit. it is a bit a contradiction to my own infuriation about the vignetting my standard lens adds now and then, but the latter is beyond my control and not predictable for me, and probably that is what annoys me so much.

the sludge in our driveway became the material for some experimenting with the saturation level: how much of color saturation can you remove and it still remains a color picture, giving a different expression than a real conversion to black and white. it was astonishing how far i could go.

but winter does not want to go. in spite fo the kids’ easter decoration, the garden is still covered under 2″ of wet snow. at least the stamina of the hazels are, too, according to the bavarian saying: there is rarely a damage without some kind of profit going along…

rainlight saving time started today. ‘dis is a well thought out marketing idea of some leasure outfits lobbyists, nothing else. as bavaria is really strong in traditions, we had our easter egg fountain this year again, with more than 4000 hand-painted eggs. closer inspection leaded to the conclusion, that guinness beer now got incorporated into our cultural heritages, along with more halloween style eggs.

anyhow, nobody will ever be able to suggest that we are anti-modernist.

the original items sold at that occasion are those catkin-and-box bouquets, directly connected to the fertileness-roots of all easter traditions. these usually got blessed in church at palm sunday and later on found their place next to the crucifix in the living room of the houses.

but i also found a nice runner-up for my personal ‘ugliest thing in hometown’ collection, 2nd row at least.

taking up carl weese‘s question and implicit suggestion to present in color what gets it’s ugliness through color.
and note to self: stick with either portrait or landscape if you want to make it a series. a lesson i should have already learned from my krk images…

trees are a for me a symbol for beeing deeply rooted, constant, connected with this planet. always sad to see them fallen, the more so when snow reveals details that could be assumed as remnants of their struggle.

i am constantly learning to make use of even small slices of time for photographing. the price for this is the weight of a not so small camera bag i am dragging around. but with my preferences for raw files and long or short focal lengths, it would not make sense to go with a point’n-shoot or only one lens when i don’t know what will turn up.

going to the zoo still is fun for the younger kids, but leaves me more unhappy than ever.

his gaze, going past those bars, has got so misted
with tiredness, it can take in nothing more.
he feels as though a thousand bars existed,
and no more world beyond them than before.

the full text of rainer maria rilke’s poem “the panther” you can find here.

slowly slowly it seems to come. the air is still cold most of the time, but the sun already powerful. still the salvia plants have to remain in the house, but this way they make a nice, promising pattern.

today’s second shot is the church of maria plain, next to salzburg. and while i like this powerful place very much, the shot itself is not satisfying, it leans to much to the illustrative side and i miss a bit of expression in it. well, the tripod i use did not deliver what i was expecting. time to change tripod?

ok, april is the month for fast changing weather conditions. not yet april? don’t mind, let’s just enjoy the sun.

our spa gardens exhibit quite a number of contemporary art pieces, mostly sculptures. normal, not accentuating lighting situations don’t help to bring attention to those, and for some the place chosen is simply uninspired.

yesterday’s snow however made the scissor-type portrait of a violinist (guess it’s mozart, he is (ab-)used everywhere here for public relation purposes – I stand corrected here: it’s anna-sophie mutter, a german star violinist) really interesting.

but even those rusty penguins did not show enthusiasm about the cold weather anymore. but the snow cap brings a nice accent on them.

spring again got defeated when after a cold night snow set in. whilst i am no fan of grey sludge on the streets, the graphical effect of the thin snow layer on the still leafless tree had its merits.

so i took what was there as long as it was there. not much postprocessing, some minor local contrast enhancement and a tiny bit of sharpening was all. the magic for me is in the patterns.

time to start the sofobomo preparation in the evening. last year’s china photo have to make up for training material. scribus has a lot of bells and whistles including adjustable kerning, so you can tweak your book to your heart’s content. starting with a completely empty page however is challenging, so the first thing i did was checking and re-checking with existing examples to find out a recipe for an attractive book.

grateful i am for the fact that my job leads me out of the countryside into the big city (munich) every week. in spite of the ww2 destructions, many places are still or again intact, and a lot of substance has survived the centuries. the councillors follow a quite strict no-scyscrapers policy, on the one hand leaving munich a bit in a small-town state, on the other hand avoiding the not so small risc of 2nd, non-war destruction.

and what a harmony you can enjoy there, and what a difference this is to my hometown, where the fountain sculptures shown to the right shall enjoy the guests. sometimes i have the feeling that well-meant will never reach well-done. am i just oversensible?

carl weese made me rethink my decision to convert my hometown monstrosities to black and white. yep – the german saying that someone has tomatoes on his/her eyes seems fit here: i was so concentrated on that wideangle effect and the dynamic lines that i just did not pay attention to the subject: overdone color to the perdition of our kids optical systems. so i will re-work my raw files and possibly re-shoot the subject.

in the meantime one of the reasons to carry my camera everywhere: the commuting train to munich is not so banal when shot in the morning light where the blue of the sky nicely complements the striking red of the waggons. and i confirm on oath that i did not touch the saturation slider.

and the morning light was so beautiful that it even caused me to drop the newspaper (anyhow bad news everywhere, thomas is so right). the world does not change if we look out of the window to pay attention to every day’s beauty, but it might give us some power to fight the big and small evils everwhere.

a treasure not only for the photgraphically inclined, but probably also for art business happened to be hidden in an innsbruck basement: the original pictures of magnum’s first exhibition, 1955, fittingly titled ‘magnum’s first’.

cartier bresson’s images of his session with mahatma gandhi, only hours before his assassination, are there, followed by the immensely powerful picture of mourning relatives and friends in his sleeping room. the images are still as found glued to the wooden plates, roughly cut from the panel on which they were shown in the sixties of last century and then forgotten in 2 large boxes.

so if you happen to come through munich until may 8th, 2009, this is certainly an exhibition not to be missed.

this i wanted to do for a long time already: portray the pollution of my hometown’s pedestrian zone with plastic surrogates of the old roundabout, blatantly constructed to empty the pockets of parents not able to fight the whining and grouching of their progeny, offering 87 sec of brrrrm or high pitched voices together with some movement.

the newest generation of those one-armed bandits has proximity sensors, puking ring-tone like sounds to attract unblamable kids, assuming that the are degenerated already by having listened to too many strip cartoons.

ok, i admit being ill-tempered today, maybe full-scale pollinosis adding to my fretfulness, but, believe me, those awfully colored plastic monsters encroaching daily life have been a nuisance since quite a while, optically as well as concerning the behaviour of the kids, spoilt by too lenient adults.

back to my roots – back to b&w. paul lester&squot;s post never have a favourite weapon made me think about the influence of my preferences and the development of my photography.

black and white were my photographic origins as a student, and some of those pictures i still do regard very high. now b&w is much easier, sean mcpucket&squot;s bibble plugin andy even allows to choose film/developer/paper combinations for that old-time grainy look – i don&squot;t know how realistic those settings are, but frankly i don&squot;t care if my digital tri-x matches the real one, i prefer that contrast distribution over dark and light parts of the histogram is pleasing, and so be it.

my hometowns spa garden with the pump room produced the subjects where i tried to re-vive my b&w skills. here everybody waits for the guests and patients to arrive, the effects of the economic decline will be obvious in the next weeks even here in the gardens.

the dull light of todays afternoon could not motivate me to go out shooting, instead i spent some time with scribus, familiarizing myself with the sofobomo requirements to layout my pictures in a harmonic way.

the image shows pictograms on a train window, taken at this weeks commute to munich. i always carry my camera on these trips, but rarely use it that early in the morning, as usually my photographic brains are even more asleep then the rest of the body. but this time it had worked for me.

my first disappointment about the shots from the new synagogue in munich proved to be premature. scrutinizing the raws, in found the above one combining the massive, block-like quality of the building not only with the light emanating from the entrance door in the foreground, but also with the movement of the lady just in front of the wall. the latter made my ‘punctum’.

lesson learnt: dont judge precipitate (and don’t throw away raw files too early).

most of us, yours truly included, live in countries where freedom, including freedom of religion and freedom of speech are a everyday commodity. we enjoy it without thinking and honestly couldn’t even imagine that it could be different.

my friendship with colleagues in sri lanka has opened my eyes in this context: it is not commonplace that you can speak freely, and not everywhere physical integrity is warranted by constitution and state. instead speaking openly can make vanish you in a white van (that’s the common mechanism in sri lanka), and not so many of those victims of abductions are found even as corpses.

tibet yesterday celebrated the sad 50th anniversary of its uprising against the chinese invaders and the following suppression. we all should at least take notice of this (reading the dalai lama’s statement here gives some background information) and maybe take even small action against injustice and suppression, not only in tibet. injustice, illegal actions by the state unfortunately happen all over the world. but if everyone of us remembers, if we do act, that will accumulate and help change the world. i am convinced of this.

bad weather with rain, temperatures just above 0°c, low light because i could leave office later than planned. but still, after an uncomfortable day some visual excercise deemed necessary to compensate for all the frowning and sweating because of murky software. the planned target for my activities, the (not so) new synagoge of munich (see here, definitely worth a return) turned out to be not so attractive because of the dull light, and so i headed home. taking a shortcut through a building block however got me immediately hobbled.

that silvery sphere, open-worked and reflecting inside and out, was just amazing, and the tiny rest of daylight together with the lamps in the surrounding offices made up for the most wonderful symphony of reflections. so i stood there and watched and shot until the fingers were numb and the protection filter in front of the lens was sprinkled with raindrops.

up to now i could not make out the artist who had created this sculpture (one of the rare cases where google did not come up immediately with a solution), so there’s some work left. and a lesson learnt: don’t rule out bad weather, instead go out shooting.

and now for something completely different…

commuting to the city twice a week certainly helps changing perspectives. and if i can convince myself to get up really early and get to the office a little bit later, then opportunities like this show up, just by strolling 2 stops instead of taking the tramway. and in terms of dynamics of the lines as well as making optically use of what is there, i did learn a lot from this graffito.

i guess it was not the wedding in the church that made the pidgeons flee… the church is beautiful, freshly renovated, which indicates that the roman catholic church in bavaria is still well-heeled in spite of the many difficulties it is facing in these fast changing times.

in the inside the church is decorated in this certain baroque, joyful style that together with traces of incense give a special light feeling, very different to the sobriety you experience in most of the lutheran churches.

trees and windows are some constantly recurring subjects in my photography, so here is a new combination of both topics. shot during a wedding celebration in dachau palace (beeing not photographer-in-charge those deviations were allowed), i tried to make best use of that soft twilight shortly before sunset.

taken some minutes earlier than the lead shot, the shadows of the trees outside formed beautiful patterns on the facade of the old palace. generally i do love those soft, non-vivid and not at all gaudy colors up to monochromacity in color, but here the contrast between that strong, warm yellow and the (bavarian) blue sky is really pleasing to my eye.

dachau, situated approx. 40km away from munich, is a small town with a history: temporary domain of one of the well renowned bavarian writers, ludwig thoma, 1867-1921 (who unfortunately enough had a mostly pushed aside renommee as anti-semite) and site of the first nazi concentration camp in germany. the concentration camp is now a memorial place, and a majority of bavarian pupils have their first real exposure to 3rd-reich cruelty there.

the memories of ludwig thoma are conserved at least for economic reasons, and even 100 years later some houses there seem to have retained a bit of the look-and-feel of those days.

in a sense this is an attempted conservation of an aura that has lost its life and importance since a long time, but reading thoma’s (non-political) books can fire one’s imagination where his characters might come to life in an environment like these old houses.

my stroll round dachau palace also led me to the brewery. the proximity to the palace itself is stunning, especially given the olfactoric annoyance a brewery can create. it seems though that the former rulers were not that sensible regarding smells.

the brewery is now in a quite derelict state, not used any more. here in bavaria the structure of the beer business has completely changed in the last 3 decades, pretty much all the beer is produced by large companies. wherever there is still local beer, people do like it very much, but only some of them are willing to pay a higher price for it. and economies of scale of course work in favour of the big ones, selling “aktienblempel”. the latter is a colloquial term for low quality beer with a high return on interest, “aktie” being the german word for share.

weddings can be a challenge photographically, but most definitely they are a challenge for the stomach. to prepare for the refill at dinner, we had an opportunity to wander through dachau palace. this is a small palace, built 1546 and heavily renovated in the 18th century. the vicinity to the church of dachau is astonishing – at those times secular and ecclesiastic powers were really close – and this is what attracted my attention here.

maybe it’s local patriotism only, but we bavarians are convinced that the sky over bavaria is something special, and so we do have the colors blue and white in our flag. a late winter evening, with the air on the brink of carrying the scent of rich soil, still not able to do so because of the partial snow cover, and with the winds having carried away the smoke and fog, suddenly can add a certain transparency (i lack a better word for this) and the sky develops that rich and warm blue, dotted with some feather like clouds just to make the blue and whites glow even more. and then one can forget for a moment being in a chatting crowd, just savoring these wonderful seconds.

at a wedding, the kids started inspecting the buffet quite early. to their discontent, no french fries were to be found. to try the alternatives a bit of persuasion was needed, but in the end even the little ladies were satisfied.