spring2life take2

The end of the school year regularly sees me at music school concertos. As the daughters decided to learn three different instruments, of course there are three events to visit, and yesterday it was the violin class. It was again a heart warming experience, because from the youngest up to the graduates across all levels of skills the joy of making music was tangible.

And besides the official portraits – which I don’t post as parents are really and reasonably sensitive about privacy – in one image I found that spirit of making music captured. Serendipitiously enough, sometimes I also can experience this when finding images.

I found this scribbling on a mobile phone advertisement poster in the train station in Munich. To be honest, my colleague found it, I just took the picture again with a short focal length and in a different angle.

The slogan of the mobile phone company is “You are not on this world to be silent”. Well, the author of this scribbling really took it literally. But I can’t deduce if he wanted to criticize all that talk about climate change or the absence of such a discussion among many young people. But at least he provoked my thinking.

strange – some small areas turn out to be real photographic bounties whenever you walk through. the ‘westend’ is a quarter, formerly located at the western end of the city, but now quite near to the center, that was traditionally a lower-to-middle class quarter. some decades ago quite a number of immigrants mixed under the inhabitants and it was a quiet region. only the transfer of the trade fair center and the sudden availability of building lots, immediately occupied by big companies, brought a sudden change. now you see chaps in suits and ties everywhere, and the styles of the pubs have changed, too. one of the not so rare cases where gentrification takes place here in munich.

oh yes, and the plate in the picture is probably 40 years old. not too much change in this very place up to now, but no forecast possible either.

these images, created while commuting in the rain, might have also fit martin storz’ always-take-the-weather project on his blog ‘the public eye’, but i decided to show them here as part of my bokeh mini-series. and for martin i will try to create a sunny weather image, given that we get such a thing in the next days.

for me these airy disks are something genuinely photographic, along with shallow dof, which can not be reasonably reproduced in painting or other arts and crafts. maybe this is the reason why i get so fascinated by those two phenomena.

and as always: click on the images to see them large in a javascript lightbox.

since i bought my first dslr in 2005 i am lusting for a 1.4/85mm lens just to indulge in my passion for shallow dof and fine bokeh. for the minolta a-mount, taken over by sony without modifications, this lens is available in zeiss brand for a zeiss price and used in a variety of minolta makes for less then half the price, but still hefty. just recently i’ve got permission from my departement of finances, but since then not a single reasonable priced specimen showed up on *bay. the strange thing now is that am not too shure anymore that i really need it. and i learned to get my airy discs by using the existing lenses, which means that i do not have to carry an additional piece of glass, which is not too bad either.

travelling home last week I was really p***ed: again the fast train from munich was late and the connecting train was gone when we arrived. such is the service of the deutsche bahn. my bad mood prevailed for quite some time, proportional to the non-facilities of the province railway station that freilassing is. it was late, a thunderstorm was coming and i had to carry some things so the hands were not free for the camera.

after a while my better side prevailed and i managed to get some shots of the trains in the upcoming storm as well as the fellow victims in this inhospitable location.

and when that guy on the next platform started his wheelies in the dry zone under the roof, just stopping before he got out into the rain, i was fascinated enough to forget about my anger and switch my camera to those fine iso 6400, not fast enough to stop his motion but sufficient for panning.

if you think ‘what a antagonism, yesterday traditional costumes and today such a urban scenery’ then you are right. but life in bavaria can be like this. my hometown with 18.000 inhabitants is just 2 train hours away from munich with its 1.3 millions, of which 30% have a migration background.

and whilst i do enjoy to live in the middle of such opposing lifestyles, it is also true that i belong neither here nor there: in the city miss the smell of the clean countryside air, but there i feel sometimes oppressed by a certain know-it-all and we-don’t-need-all-this attitude. so teleworking and commuting at the moment gives me the best of both worlds.

in the course of such a long event there are enough occasions to concentrate on the details. the chokers i’ve shown some days ago would be worth a photo essay of their own, and so could be the marchin’ feet together with the lower parts of the costumes.

those half socks, covering only the calfs, are called ‘stutzen’ and are a significant part of the traditional clothes of the men in the alpine region. for festivals and holidays of course they are knitted with decorations, and colour and pattern again show the affiliation to a certain region or nowadays a certain costume group.

the men on these images wear ‘haferlschuhe’, brogues, and these shoes point to the landscape where their wearers live: the thick sole with a good grip predestines these shoes for hills and rough paths.

this is the last installment of the ‘trachten-gaufest’. if you want to see more images of this event, just have a look at the slideshow of these images on flickr.

the ‘gamsbart’, literally chamois beard, is a tuft of chamois hair worn as a hat decoration. needless to say that the size of this thingie closely correlates with the wealth and influence of its owner.

it is definitely *not* made of the hair of a beard as chamois don’t have one, unlike goats, but from the middle hair of the back. that means that earlier only licensed hunters were able to harvest the necessary hair.

hunting was a royal privilege in bavaria (it still carries a bit of this reputation nowadays, along with a unobjective cost-benefit analysis), and the stories of the fights betwean poachers and foresters are an essential basis of literary tradition as well as popular old songs.

bavaria generally and the traditional mountain costume associations (what a monster expression, we just say ‘trachtler’) especially are inseparably connected with brass music. only at indoor events, we call it ‘hoagascht’, guitar, zither and hammer dulcimer replace the wind instruments.

clear shapes and reflections of course make those brass units very photogenic. musically the bands at events like the present one are on a real high stage, and in the last decade fortunately a lot of re-discovered really traditional music went into the programs, replacing the innommable beer hall music of lowest possible niveau.

only the sheer level of the sound became a bit problematic in the moments when the procession stopped with the band playing some 2m away from my ear. but the little suffering for art (not with a capital a, nota bene) is neglectable in the greater context of ‘hue and saturation to the max’.

the translation of ‘kropfband’ – the traditional necklace these women are wearing – as choker made me mistrust the various online dictionaries, as in my ears this sounds a bit weird. but as they all agree, who am i to dissent.

focusing on the chokers proofed to be difficult when the groups were marching, so i was more then grateful for several unintended stops that gave me the opportunity for close inspection. as everybody was in high spirits – the bad weather had stopped just for this day – photographing was no problem, just seeking eye content asking for consent and then making pictures.

even the impressive zoom with the long lens hood did not create any camera shyness, but of course it is not the right tool to capture unobserved moments. it was a different kind of street photography, where the chance for good picture was to behave so naturally that the subjects just noticed and forgot.

in the course of the festivities of the 850th anniversary of bad reichenhall as a city (it was a camp already at roman times) today we had the “gaufest” of the traditional mountain costumes association. the started at 6:00 in the morning with silver salute, which was resumed for probably 45 minutes after church had ended and the groups were assembling for the procession through the city.

from the numerous optical attractions today i show you a small selection of ladies with eagle feathers on their hats. in former times those eagle feathers were given as a present by the respective admirers, who collected them from the eagles nest risking their lives in the hope that this act of daringness would help them to win the heart of the adored one.

in the alpine region the traditional costumes associations are still important groups in the villages and small towns where their festivals of ‘fahnenweihe’ (flag blessing ceremony) and the beer festivals form annual highlights

our photowalk was a wet affair, but spirits were high. after 2 hours in all sorts of rain from drizzle to downpour the small group met in a local inn for hot drinks and a first review. in spite of the unfriendly weather we all had lots of fun, photographing or watching.

the saalach river, full with water from the rainfalls of the last days, provided a more dramatic scenery than the quiet grey and green landscape or the not-so-populated alleys.

an improvised slideshow immediately after collecting most of the images was the final part of an excursion that all of the participants want to repeat the nextx year

tomorrow is the second annual world wide photo walk. i do highly regard such events as opportunities to meet and see different styles of photographing, different styles of seeing and getting new ideas. as there was no photowalk organised in or near my hometown, i decided to lead one myself. it will be a small group tomorrow, but given decent weather, maybe clouds mixed with sunshine, we should have sufficient opportunities to see and make good images.

the lead image from today is a door handle from stift nonnreit in salzburg, widely known as one of the sets of the film “the sound of music”.

yesterday i received the printed version of my sofobomo book from print. i had been really curious about the quality, especially the rendering of the difficult, so i thought, darker regions. in this respect there is hardly a fault to find. problems however arise in two other aspects: colors, especially red and blue, come out definitely more vivid than on my calibrated monitor, and fine structures like sand on the beach or a fishing net suffer from the printing resolution. sometimes even in fine nuanced bright areas it seems that compression artifacts become visible. now i stop nitpicking, because i know only too well that i can definitely not expect steidl quality for a print-on-demand book in that price class. we always get what we pay for.

the positive experience of the first self-made book, where i did not resort to the pre-fabricated layouts of photobook making software, is simply unbeatable. and in this sense i have learned a lot in this year’s sofobomo, and i guess i’ll be in next year again. the image above was taken on the beach of batticaloa and is the back title of my book.

this photo i took already in june, but only now, reading hans-michael koetzle’s “photo icons” and the chapter about louis jacques mande daguerre’s image “boulevard du temple” (1838) i noticed the stunning similarity in the poses. you can find a reproduction of this image on the website of timm starl.

indulging my passion for canyons, i arranged the last family excursion to target to of the smaller canyons of salzach tributaries. unfortunately i did not pay attention to the lack directions, and arriving there it turned out that this canyon for the lack of a footpath was only accessible with ladders and climbing gear. and before we arrived at the second one, rain set in…

so here i show you two images of the weekend before’s visit to the the ‘salzachöfen’, öfen as plural from ofen, oven, is the salzburg-austrian word for canyon. and while i do like the image with the human silhouettes, i also love the other one where the visible water gives me a better impression of scale.

taking the camera always with me has become a habit since quite some time. it helps me to get into that feeling where the images come to me and i do not have to fuzz too much about photographing but can merely react and cut out that noteworthy slice of time. but i still cannot toggle this feeling – sometimes it is there and i can see 10 good sceneries in an hour, and sometimes nothing comes. getting distracted by company very often but not always is an adverse factor, so is nervousness, but also the wilful intent to find images.

Usually however, attentiveness and a certain ease of mood seems to motivate the muses to come and kiss me.

please don’t think that i am getting cocky because i post two self-portraits in a row – these are 2 out of maybe 5 self-portraits i tried over several years.

when i saw this rare bill of a socialist/marxist group in munich (there aren’t many of them left) i knew i wanted to do something with it. alone it didn’t shine too much, but as it was sticking to the back of a bus stand, there was not much possibility to add something that would make a picture work. the glass material of the bus stand finally made me try out reflections, but there were not so many people around and time was running. so in the end a self-portrait with the che was all i could make out of this. romanticising mode on: that’s not that bad, i think…

many of the howto-photobooks i have read recommend repeating patterns as a recipe for better pictures. so i couldn’t resist this setup (in the science center of salzburg’s “house of the nature”). the first pictures with only yours truly as subject were a bit dull, but soon one of the daughters came to look. this was already better, but really good it became when she was joined by her twin sister. aah – and don’t think that clothing them equal is a quirk or a deliberate decision of the parents: it is purely a strategy to avoid unnecessary fights for this or that special t-shirt (replace t-shirt with pants, sweater and so on, ad nauseam).

with the colors i am still not completely content, but the color cast from the green walls was so strong that i couldn’t find a better correction without loosing that green, which in itself is a strong component of the picture.

over at his blog andreas manessinger showcases his one-image-a-day post number one-thousand! my heartfelt congratulations for the many excellent images he showed, his extraordinary perseverance, and not least his communicative skills.

andreas’ blog was the first blog i followed regularly when i started blogging myself. and in the beginning it were largely his encouraging and challenging comments that made me intensify my work and speed up my posting frequency. i didn’t forget his comment “can we have more of that please? three images in november? c’mooon ” – andreas, thank you very much for this!

the way home from office in munich invariably leads my steps along a hairdresser’s shop on one of the main roads, and the light and reflections as well as the colors are always interesting. this window was already subject matter for this post, but this time i caught the barber in action.

it was time to revive my old acquaintance with black and white again. the spirea in the garden made up for a very patient subject matter, and the setting sun provided me with lovely backlight. removing the color information at first seemed a bit disappointing because the impression of the complementary contrast of pink and green, reinforced by the simultaneous contrast through the backlight, has a strong quality of its own.

but as paul maxim said in his post the seduction of color, sometimes the impressive color quality can cover subtle shapes and patterns. for me those plant forms have this quality, but of course this is a subject that is present in photography since the very beginning. still for me it is a worthy topic to explore.

the axelmannstein hotel, where i found this abandoned showroom, had it’s high times in the 20th of last century. at that time, everybody who was rich and/or famous spent his/her time in this summer health resort, famous for the healing effects of the brine aerosols on the respiratory system. the tailors had their summer business here in bad reichenhall, and in the winter time they went to Merano in south tyrol.

those mannequins made the impression as if the humming life of the catwalk had suddenly stopped like in sleeping beauty’s castle, and time had its effect only in the form of bleaching of the colors and a bit of dust. a really strange scenery.

today was city festival here in bad reichenhall, so a lot of people went around even in areas that are normally not open for the public – a good occasion for a seeing wanderer. on my ways i came to see the outside facilities of one of the oldest and most renowned hotels here, the axelmannstein (which now belongs to the radisson group). on the fence to their tennis court, unused probably for years now as i never heard the typical plop-plop, i found this sign, informing about the siesta hours. stunning for me was the typography: a font that was used around the time of the 2nd world war, but probably not much later. this is the first sign i found with a seemingly eternal life.

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contrary to the common beliefs (read the landscapist for details, especially the nonsense about ‘hue and saturation to the max’) what the ‘beautiful pictures crowd’ does, i was working with the saturation slider in negative direction. the forenoon light, evened out by some clouds, made the spirea glow, so i could reduce the corkscrew hazel to just some decorative silhouettes. probably i should blame it on someone else, maybe (quote again) the creator got it wrong.

as always commuting into the city confronts me with urban sceneries very different from what i would prefer to have as my surroundings. but in contradiction to the gut feeling i know that this tension presumably keeps my senses active and vigilant. but that morning i found the weather as grey as my mood, matching my weariness. and suddenly the bike fragments in the frame seemed to match, too. and just as a note on the margin: these white on black letters on the right side read ‘gegenwind’, head wind, the natural adversary of each bike rider, and a major factor for weariness.

who invented the white-balance automatic? and who told me to leave it switched on? egad, sometimes i feel sympathy for mike johnston’s ‘the leica as a teacher idea. at least no whitebalance-automatic that, as every automatic, does as good as it can, but doesn’t help me thinking. and getting the balance manually, just by optical impression, was impossible for me, at least at first take.

note to self: one more automatic to switch off on certain occasions. oh yes, and i do this when shooting panos, but here i simply forgot.