spring2life take2

in case you have difficulties to find the bluebells: better click on the image and see it large! trying to find the best compromise between sharp water droplets and the impression of fast moving water i did a small series with different exposure times, and 1/100s gave the best result. this was a bit astonishing for me as i had expected the best effect at slower speeds of maybe 1/30s, i guess this is due to the the big amount of water coming down the mountains after the rainfalls.

the raw file was converted with the bibble5 preview 2 version, and despite some flaws, the region tool and selective color tool can give already great results. without it, the bluebells would be almost invisible in the small image size.

having re-vitalized the rubber boots was the first step for enjoying the rain, and having learned to trust the weather sealing of the camera is the second and even more important one. usually i am quite concerned about my gear and don’t want to take a risk, but taking no photos at all because of the rain is not an option. the moss on the trees in the weissbach canyon really seemed to ask to be photographed.

and so did the ‘waldgeissbart’ (aruncus dioicus). unfortunately the compositions showing white out-of-focus dots of the white blossoms in the background of a sharp one didn’t work as expected. but according to the weather forecast i will have the opportunity to re-do this subject.

the amount of rainwater we received in the last two weeks changed also the appearance of the small cascades that are tributaries of the ‘weissbach’, a creek in a canyon not far from home. a canyon walk in the summer is nice as you experience temperature and brightness differences, but at that time of the year the water is low and those cascades are more or less trickling down. now the water is really vivid, and this is what i tried to capture here and afterwards to emphasize in postprocessing.

and not only the waters are vivid, the colors of the leaves are as well. and it was a beautiful different experience from summer’s heat and glaring light. even the kids sometimes stood and looked, which doesn’t happen too often with 8-years old ones. but the white-throated dipper of course was more interesting for them, only i was too slow to photograph it.

the wet weather here in bavaria was not only in the headlines of the yellow press. even serious newspapers ask meteorologists for scientific explanations and/or longer-term forecasts – which are impossible to give for our geographic situation. the only reliable trends are for higher average temperatures, but this is not so surprising. and for local weather in the next 2 weeks it doesn’t determine anything. and umbrellas keep being accessoire du jour.

but the bad weather makes it easier to set aside some time to read sofobomo books. i started to read the books of photographers whom i already knew from their blogs but quite soon got hooked and peeped into other books – only to the effect that i have a reading list now and am quite determined to read all of them. i hope i can finish before next sofobomo starts…

the rainy weather continues, but, having adapted to it at least photographically (and anyway sitting in the office during the day) i do not mind that much any more.

even here, from the train window, the rain has it’s merits. and i would definitely not like to swap seat with those drivers that are speeding through the rain.

the prospect is wet: meteorologists predict heavy rainfall for my hometown, up to 100mm within 24 hours, which means flooding of many secondary roads and potential damage to the railways, too.

in the long term, i guess it’s better to get used to weather extremes as this might be the future: the climate change will come not as a steady increase of temperatures but as more unstable weather conditions that challenge the vital infrastructure. but probably in a week or so the cat will dance on a hot tin roof again.

real life kicking in can mean: coordinate reprojection utility has to be done before yesterday, printint utility does not work, car has to go to the workshop, kid 1 has to rehearse violin, kid 2 harp, kid 3 is unhappy with the maths test, wife away for a parent-teacher conference, the most urgent letter has to be written today, and a good friend shows up in the evening…

this is when i love the trainspotting quote “choose life”

what an amount of books sofobomo yielded this year! i did go through only a small part up to now and already found quite a number of really precious, extraordinary ones. so on top of the personal success of having really created my book, analyzed in part what it meant to me and what it taught me, there is so much food for reading, seeing, reflecting that i am truly overwhelmed. a lot of my free time the next days i will spend going through those books.

the image above, taken in the newly built house of a tsunami victim in batticaloa, left me somewhat speechless in its tight vicinity of the lord of mercy and a war instrument. strange, in many aspects.

nice synonym for the catch i sometimes find on my flash cards. but sometimes those emblematic empty bottles just hide their merits (or less sugarcoated: they have to wait for a more clear-sighted moment). carl weese hinted in a comment he made yesterday on the value of an archive and the necessity of a 2nd look, and of course he is right. especially the rejected images deserve this re-evaluation, and in this way i found my empty bottles.

postscriptum: i have uploaded the book to issuu, too, and am astonished how hassle-free this was. so if you want to see it more book-style in a nifty flash version, klick here: Batticaloa Fishermen on issuu.

reviewing my selection process for the images to be included into the book, i made an interesting observation, for which today’s lead shot can serve as an example. during the first review of the pictures within days after their creation, i had a very different attitude towards their qualities. the image above came out only 2nd, the lower image, already posted on 2009/05/20, won.

now creating a set for the sofobomo book, the criteria changed. the silhouette of the man in the lead image won over the more interesting structure of the water. and suddenly i realized that for too long a time i had tried to carefully avoid people in my images of situations and sceneries. for a reason unknown to myself even now i did not want humans in the photographs. only now i felt the added value that men/women and their interaction bring even into such scenes.

and here lies for me the added benefit of sofobomo: i had to re-evaluate my images, thoroughly weighing there merits plus their function in a sequence, something i wouldn’t have done without this project. and i think this improved my vision.

finished. after some intensive hours my sofobomo 09 book is ready. it is available from the sofobomo website here: batticaloa fishermen. scribus proofed to be a reliable tool for this work, it can only be recommended. the resulting pdf is 7 mb for more than 40 images with 150dpi, so compression works reasonably well. plans are to get it printed by blurb, the layout was carefully crafted for the small square book that blurb offers.

and having completed it gives a good feeling, i can tell you!

another find from a stroll with the kids: a wonderful round tree shadow. the only difficulty was the photographer himself. i didn’t want to take a self portrait with tree, so after some difficulty i merged my shadow with that of the tree’s stem. oh yes, and the rarely used tamron 11-18 again performed well in this shot.

the already familiar alleys of krk showed different aspects in the late afternoon soon, walking them together with the kids. the earlier visits i had paid to them early in the morning, when light and air were cooler and daily life was just starting.

together with the family, working a scene was not possible – there is a certain incompatibility of family holidays and the slow, deliberate act of creating a picture out of the subject matter. but that’s no reason to complain, just a reason to adapt: seeing, spotting and making a bit-worthy selection of the framed subject is the matching style for these walks. and in this way i enjoyed it.

with only 3000 permanent inhabitants, the city of krk on the island of krk in croatia is really a small place. but wandering with open eyes again and again reveals beautiful details, those door handles among them, found on the church of sv. kvirin, the patron of krk.

and i never before found such a convincing example of form following function as this one.

family holidays in krk mean spending quite some time on the beach, often without the camera. but when i finally took it with me and dug out my 11-18 lens, it was quite nice to make a wide beach scenery out of a nice small spot. guess it should qualify for the mindful eye’s assignment of complimentary colors.

again bibble5′s region feature helped to emphasize the sky in addition to the polarizing filter. if you are not already determined on “your” raw converter, bibble5 is definitely worth more than a try. it is now even faster then the old version was and scales well with multicore cpus.

using the evening hours for sofobomo work, i learn to master scribus more and more. it turns out that the first framework i had prepared did not make proper use of the templating functionalities, so modifying fonts and text colors turned out to be more tedious then necessary. as i prefer the systematic approach, i first did the necessary refactoring and then only started to fill the frames with pictures, cherishing very much the drag-and-drop possibilities of the digikam asset management software and scribus under ubuntu linux.

what works amazingly well with scribus is the creation of pdfs. i now have 13 images in the book, and limiting the output resolution to 150dpi, scribus makes a 1.7mb pdf file out of this. sounds and looks reasonable, but i still want to check the quality on a better monitor than my laptop’s.

oh, and the girl: she’s happily using a pump provided by our project and locally built with available material and techniques.

to describe traffic in sri lanka along european criteria, there is just one word: insane. even for a seasoned driver, not shy of left-hand driving, it is so much better to have a careful sri lanka driver and a working seat belt.

and when you have the lorry so close in front of you, it is definitely a reassurance that it is “fully insured”

sometimes colors and forms just grab me and for moments i stop thinking about the stories behind. those occasions i do cherish, even more as they don’t happen too often to me. in these rare moments i can see beyond simple shapes. but they are rare.

travelling to sri lanka, i had david duchemin’s new book ‘within the frame’ with me (thanks to paul lester for his review), and there is a lot of substance to think about in it. not all was new for me, but even the well known things i found extremely well said and explained. for all those who like to read and speak freely also about spiritual things, this book should be highly recommended.

a matching door for the fence blinds shown yesterday, this door is one of the rare cases where the recycling/upgrading path left the original structure well visible and self-contingent, not mixing in or adding other components.

the fence, too, is a case of recycling: the net was beyond repair and unsuitable to catch fishes any more. it still is, however, fit to keep the hen in the garden. together with the pine twigs and the cones optically it makes up for a fine structure.

in sri lanka, plots are usually at least fenced with barbed wire. only the wealthy ones can afford real walls, often topped with bottle bottom fragments. To protect the owners from the curious views of the bypassers, the street side of the fences is usually equipped with blinds.

traditionally they were made from palmyrah leaves, but these degenerate within some years, and now people use metal sheets, rarely new. even old oil barrels, cut and bent straight, are used for this purpose. these materials now offer a wide variety of textures and colors.

as it generally is of interest for bad reichenhall locals, here bilingually with german as the first version:
Im Rahmen des “2. worldwide photowalk” findet am 18.7.2009 der “Reichenhaller Fotospaziergang” statt. Im Rahmen eines gemeinsamen Stadtrundgangs mit Gleichgesinnten wollen wir Fotos machen und über alles reden, was mit Photographie zusammenhängt. Zur (kostenfreien) Anmeldung gibt es hier ein Formular

. Die Fotos werden anschließend auf die Website des Worldwide Photowalk hochgeladen und zusammen mit den Fotos aller anderen Teilnehmer ausgestellt. Da es eine Obergrenze von 50 Teilnehmern gibt, sollte man mit der Anmeldung nicht zu lange zögern.

the idea of scott kelby’s international photowalk is striking. as last year there was no photowalk in my hometown, i decided to take over the task to organize one: http://worldwidephotowalk.com/bad-reichenhall-by-de/. if you happen to be around, i would be more than glad to meet you at this occasion! Register early as there is a limit of 50 participants.

finally my sofobomo 09 theme has found me: the fishermen of batticaloa. since 2005 i try to spend the early morning hours of my missions to batticaloa on the beach, and over the time i got more and more acquainted with them. since quite some time i planned either a small exhibition or a pod-book on this topic, so using it for sofobomo is just natural.

the next evenings i will spend with bibble5 – the preview 2.1a really rocks – and scribus. my laptop is not too well suited for heavy image editing, this is one more reason to use bibble instead of lightzone. to compile the book should be not too difficult, as the framework is ready: a blurb book is going to be the print target. now it’s high time for doing the final selection.

in his comment on a bitter victory, thomas stated that there is no justification for terrorist attacks like the ones the ltte comitted. of course he is correct, still my answer contained a big ‘however’.

to understand why many of the tamils did not support the ltte any more due to their murderous acts even against their own people, but still mourn their demise as it seemed to be the only force able to face the government and it’s allies, let me tell you the story of the murder of the 8 years old s. thinusika, already subject of my post out of my depth.

thinusika was the daughter of s. santhirarajah, who was abducted for ransom in a white van and probably killed 2 years ago. already at that time it was suspected that this crime was a joint venture of tamil and government (para)military forces. now his daughter was abducted for ransom and killed, her body was found 3 days later in an abandoned well. only days afterwards, her assumed kidnappers were found, bullet-riddled and with bound hands. so no trial, no testimonial, but probably some cover-up of unwanted evidence. lifes, especially tamil lifes don’t count very much in sri lanka. and again this crime and the way it is treated nourishes assumptions that a paramilitary group is involved.

my discussions with many tamil friends circled again and again around the question of justice. before the war there was an average number of murders followed by trials and convictions. the war changed this completely: now there are killings on a weekly basis and no persecution, no trials. spies and denunciators rule, and army, police and paramilitary groups are accused of making people vanish at will, ‘white vans’ are now the current name for this threat. the tamil groups cooperating with their government still wear their arms and use them for their own profit by stealing, robbing, kidnapping. in obligatory briefings, united nations security names those gangs and their organized crimes as biggest threat for safety for locals and foreigners.

so there is no hope for the tamils: the ltte is dead and gone. army, paramilitary and other armed groups operate outside the law, and the government offers nothing but propaganda about patriot and non-patriot sri lankans.

so the grievances of thinusika’s mother will replicate on and on.

trincomalee internally displaced persons again, in front of their shed. one of the boys is sick, born with a hole in the cardiac septum.

basic healthcare in sri lanka is free, and in some aspects of really high quality and excellent quality/circumstances ratio. however an operation in this case has to be paid extra, and the 4000 us$ the family is not (and will not be in the near future) able to afford.

for cases like this there is the sri lanka president’s fund. doesn’t sound like a really democratic solution, more like a holdover from good old monarchy, where the sovereign distributes alms, eh? and, the family is not able to apply. they are not educated, they speak the wrong language, they don’t know where to apply.

why they are smiling on this picture? they got a new toilet, and that is a big improvement.