The days becomes shorter, the sun rises later, and the distinctive golden glow of the light is definitely a sign of ending summer. The good thing is that I don’t have to get up that early to stalk the first light, and the golden gleam paints everything in the most favorable colors. In that way, parting with summer is easy, and the misty, cold, grey daysare are still far away.
Of course the kids made me go to the fairground – in the province, loud music, sales booths in the street and a merry-go-round are rare and therefore attractive. While I regarded the whole thing as less interesting than noisy, at least the old chairoplane provided attractive food for the lens. Stopping down to f22 produced the nice star effect, which was however invisible until I used bibble5′s highlight recovery. To be honest, this produced some artifacts which I had to clean up in a last step with gimp (which was faster done than written).
The post-fairground part of the stroll for sure was a bit boring for the kids, but I did enjoy the in comparison even deeper silence of an off season tourist resort at the lake. Unterach at the ‘Attersee’ in Austria can be a wonderful place – the painter Gustav Klimt stayed here for quite a number of summer visits, and the light for sure has influenced his painting.
Both my images needed postprocessing, the fence door a good portion of burning to bring out the gestalt of the iron work, and the flower facade a bit of perspective correction. Interesting enough, several in houses in Unterach are inclined towards the lake, sign of a not completely stable ground.
Early morning has a quality of its own. The mind is not loaded already with all the associations and patterns of the day, and the thoughts can run freely. This new built house seemed to be guarded by the cypress soldiers, whilst an officer in yellow is in charge of the guardsmen.
In maybe two or three years these Thuja bushes will have grown to a veritable wall, completing the repelling expression of this house.
At those times, when Bad Reichenhall was famous and rich and through it’s salt manufactures contributing one third to the state of Bavaria’s budget…
Can you imagine – a small place of only several thousand inhabitants contributing that much to a state’s budget? (Now it is a small place of just a bit more then average prominence, still struggling to find it’s link to presence and future)
At those times this place was so important that Ludwig I, King of Bavaria, sent his star architekt Friedrich von Gärtner to erect an administration building in the style of the capital’s (the City of Munich) most important boulevard.
Well, that was then. Now it’s still beautiful, especially early in the morning, when the low sun lets the sycamore trees cast their shadows on the facade.
Open for interpretations, maybe even inviting to it – I found this empty phone booth on a very late walk back home when the bus hadn’t come, rain was setting, I was tired and all that. No “saturation to the max”, I swear it. The magenta of the handset is like that (this is the brand color of German Telekom), and what is ok in this context can hurt your eyes when you see it on larger installations in historical places.
In case you haven’t found and followed it on Joerg Colberg’s Conscientious, writer/photographer Matt Mendelsohn’s piece The Lessons of Lindsay is highly recommended ‘though tough. And if you are at it, do read a Q & A with Matt about this story here: http://www.sportsshooter.com/news/2267. That this story was published in sportsshooter is a revelating thing in itself – more fitting papers had declined to bring it. Highly recommended.
Whilst the kids were fascinated by the wonderful missals in Krk’s church and exhibition room, my eyes were attracted by the remainders of the wooden statue of an angel, up to 1973 situated on top of the cathedral’s clocktower.
This clocktower is visible in many of the small alleys of Krk, and with it’s green statue on top a nice counterpoint to the mostly warm colors on the ground
It seems as I can’t escape the heat, so this beach photo is more then adequate. Today was an office day here in Munich, and temperatures in the street are up in the high thirties again. In a southbound office room this does mean quite a bit.
Fortunately enough Munich tap water is at least as good as Croatian bottled water, so my liquid level does not suffer – add a bit of coffeine to the (hot) water and I can be happy!
The holidays ended yesterday with a night drive back to Bavaria, and the first day working of course meant searching through a pile of emails and sorting and organising… Still the memories of Krk are vivid, and a number of raw files wait to be evaluated and developed. This self-confident tomcat was one of the rare Krk locals that did not avoid meeting hundreds of tourists that went by his window – the people usally do, and I can fully understand this: in the summer the population in Krk just triples, meaning that there is not too much left the way it is over the quiet off-season.
Different islands, similar lanterns: Just have a look at Martin Storz’ public eye blog. On Tenerifa he has found a shadow casting lantern, mounted on a skilfully crafted wrought iron arm. My Krk lantern shows splendid clear lines, but I fear this is not caused by the islanders’ love for straight forms (there ceramics at least speak a different language) but because of the chinese lamp producer’s knowledge about market acceptance.
In Krk you can find other lanterns, too. The one to the rights hangs in front of an architrave of probably venetian times origin.
When the days are too hot, life changes to the night. After a buzzing 37°C day, the Camplin, Krk’s main plaza, was buzzing even at 11:00 in the night. I took out my venerable 1,7/50mm lens, and did I praise the Anti-Shake in the camera already? So that photographing lady’s pose got fixed in 1/8th of a second, quite unthinkable in film times.
Mixed light situations are usually meant as a mix of natural and tungsten light. Not so to the right: the modern, energy saving street lights gave a light that was almost purely yellow and even manual white balance or postprocessing tricks cannot make a normal lighting out of this. But leaving it yellow and balancing it with the tungsten light of a gallery makes it interesting (for me) again
Today is the 3rd day with temperatures high in the 30th (Celsius), and sitting outside is no real joy if the breeze stops. The good thing is that the internet speed in the campground lobby now is aczeptable – in the evening it reminds more of old 2400 Baud modem times.
Picturing heat is not simple at all. I should go out to the places were the asphalt is melting (almost), but honestly – I am not that motivated. Better get another espresso and water and wait till the sun goes down.
In the narrow alleys of Krk the shadows of the houses make shure that it does not get unbearable hot (though unbearable is relative, today we had 37°C). However it gets dark pretty soon in the evening down there, and only the windows of the upper floors still catch some daylight or reflect it when seen in the proper angle.
The warmth of the day still lives in the colors of the picture to the right. In spite of the prevalent shadows, all areas still breathe warmth.
The harbour water is not such an attractive medium – oily, smelly and so on, probably the same in every harbour of the world. Amazing enough locals are fishing there, and I guess even that fish is ending on the table.
But the reflective qualities of the water are still intact, and the way the ripples dissolve the form of the ships was really amazing.
Those images just required some adjustment of the black point and a bit tuning of the curves. It was already late in the day when I took the images and the low light required a high sensitivity resulting in higher noise levels in the shadows. But the Bibble5 beta did a great job here.
It is probably a question of personal affinity that I find the fishing boats on the pier in Krk so rewarding in terms of pictures. In spite of the small number of possible positions to photograph from I always find new things worth to be picked out.
Even the main winch offered new details again. Exposing and later on processing these images is a bit tricky as the red channel is often in danger of clipping, so dial down exposure compensation and do not “expose to the right” what would be my usual technique. Playing with layers in bibble5 then helps to bring out the details sufficiently.
The fine light in the afternoon in the many narrow alleys of Krk brings out shadows of all kind on the walls, which were already subject of a number of posts in the past. Maybe the Solar Electric Mantis was the most prominent example. Here is a more reticent specimen.
The electric lines are always good for a nice intermezzo with the sun rays, and so are the roofs and chimneys that get projected on the sometimes intensely coloured neighbouring walls.
And the obligatory ice cream for the patient daughters (not subject here) is the final reward on top.
Practising really pays out: I just had 20 minutes after a shopping mission, and those I spent sitting on a low window sill in the main square of Krk, watching the people passing by. In holidays situations, nobody seems to care about a guy with a camera, even with an impressive long zoom.
As I was in a playful mood, I started snapping the different feet passing by. Needless to say the ladies’ footwear was aesthetically much more pleasing (and moved way more elegant, too).
Strange enough all my efforts did not result in a single useful picture of the dogs passing by with the ladies, so I will have to take another chance and concentrate on the quadruped partners.
The colors of the mediterranean countries in the summer are blue and white, and most famous for this combination are the greek islands. Here in Krk you have to actively look for these iconic colors, I found it in an unusual place, high on the upper deck of a large fish trawler. The setting evening sun has muted the intensity already, humid air had softened the blue of the sky, but a bit of rust provides enough complementary color to give the blues their intensity back.
This is one of my preferred photographing styles: looking for form and color combinations and isolating them by a long focal length and a tight framing.
Not the blue sky nor the blue sea, just the pyramid shape of the young men grouped on the rocks made me take out the camera.
A second take of the same scenery shows more context, but alas, the “perfection” of the pyramid is already dissolved.
After a thunderstorm night with not much sleep my spirits returned only in the afternoon. Strolling through Krk town (a small town, really small with 5000 inhabitants) brought us in the evening to a small jetty opposite of the harbour. The beginning of the way was lined with cafes and a game hall, which offered a nice view from above on the gamers.
Leaving the touristic center decimated the number of shops and burger restaurants, and it was only the presence of the daughters which commanded me back to the camp ground instead of having a beer out there and a silent and drawn out view of Krk.
Holiday time again, for the daughters there exists only one place eligible for a holiday stay: Krk on Krk. OK – we avoided the traffic jams and travelled on sunday, giving up a precious day for an easy road trip. Still I was tired after 7hrs behind the wheel and threw my hat on the trailer bed – which had its optical merits.
In the back of my mind there was this sentence “A Rose is a Rose is a Rose”, immediately connecting with this image. Still I was not sure where from I knew the words, thoughts targeting Antoine de Saint Exyperie’s Little Prince… Until google and wikipedia corrected me, nominating Gertrude Stein as the author.
But this rose looks withered already in august, which is a bit unusual. The explanation is (again) the long rainfalls which made the water level rise so much that this rose stood in the water for some weeks, ruining the roots and make the leaves and blossoms fade much too early.
Still this rose is a rose is a rose…
A unhappy anniversary is this 6th of August since the year 1945 – in microseconds only the world had achieved a new quality of danger, the danger of total extinction by the press of a button. When I was a teenager, my mother gave me Robert Jungk’s book “Children of the Ashes” as a birthday present, and I do vividly remember a scene of this book where a young man has to watch how a glass fragment, hurled through the air by the blast wave, pierces and kills a young lady in a Hiroshima office.
So this is my ‘punctum’ in today’s image.
Amazon US sells used copies of this book for amazing prices (in Germany used copies sell for small change), but if you want to strengthen eventual pacifist inclinations, it is definitely worth reading.
The image above was *not* taken with a fisheye lens, instead I used the Sean M. Pucket’s “percy” plugin for bibble 4, which offers not only to reproject fisheye images to rectilinear projection, but also the projection to a equisolid model.
Westend again. Some of last weeks images (Westend Strip Light, City Life) originate from there, and the streets are always worth a deviation from the shortest way to work. Today I indulged in my bokeh passion again, this time with the long zoom on the camera. A conscious decision for a certain lens influences my way of seeing, and while I was a fan of very long tele lenses earlier, this passion has somewhat subsided. But in this image I see a good combination of sharp detail and blurred shapes of the street and its inventory, f5.6 seemed to have been just right.
When asked to photograph a friends wedding, I felt a bit unsure if it wouldn’t go beyond my capacities. So I made clear that for professional results they would have to hire an experienced pro. In the end they decided to take what I would deliver and I had quite concentrated 90 minutes taking pictures and 2 hours converting the raw files to jpegs. I still don’t feel comfortable with in-camera jpegs, especially in mixed light or available light situations. And the batch mode of bibble, the possibility to easily copy settings and the powerful noise ninja makes this decision not too hard.
White walls don’t have to look white. I knew this effect from sunset colorings as well as from mixed light situations, where the same material can look so different depending on the source of light that is reflected. The turquoise cast however caught me by surprise…
… until I looked consciously into the water where the ducks played. Still much to learn, and a relaxing afternoon is not the worst environment for this.
A lazy day at the lake and not much to photograph until I saw the wind play with the leaves of that japanese maple tree (acer japonica). Here in Europe they are quite popular in the gardens because of that wonderful red of their leaves even in the midst of summer.
The image alone I found not interesting enough, but that development from the static leaves, suddenly showing their bright underside in a gust of wind and heavily shaking when the wind becomes still stronger, that was it for me.
Strolling through the city last week seemed to get my optical receptors going. Both images were shot on the way to/from work. For an unknown reason it is much easier for me to set aside some 20 minutes from the way to the office, knowing that I have to stay longer, then to get up early on a saturday morning.
After 8 hours staring at a screen most of the time, I have to take a deliberate decision to switch on (photo-)graphic seeing. Preparing the camera, checking battery and available memory is part of a small ritual. And the sometimes the muses kiss, sometimes they don’t.
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