spring2life take2

Sorry, but this kind of Santa Claus creates stomach churning feelings – it’s more a threat than a friendly reminder of christmas-to-be. I think it qualifies for a gallery of the “most ugly chrismas decorations” that Bernd over at babaoskar shoots back was intending. I do like the less agressively painted “Nikolaus” figures, the ones that don’t look like a comic creature brought to life (and nightmare). But this one… Alas, I am quite alone.

Addendum: There’s a new set of wallpapers for december. As there was still no wintery weather, I resorted to an image from the archive: the deeply frozen pond in Schönram. The scenery is maybe a bit depressing with all the dead trees, but then, it may be just anticipate the Kopenhagen climate talk results. Only that we won’t have that much cold winters any more.

found at the entrance of a private park, open to the public.

More leaves, less words. These pictures seem to become more interesting the more time I spend editing and closely looking at them. And not only on the main subject, the leaves, but also on the way they interact with their environment. Can’t help it – I really like those images.

You see, my obsession with shallow DoF continues. Even so, the images are very different: An almost abstract rendering of the red fruit on a background that dissolves into unidentifiable shapes and the spadix in the second image, that shows up in front of structures that, whilst blurred, still carry some information about the environment of this plant.

The “great landscape” image of that place is still work in progress. The art is to increase the tones in a very subtle way without jazzing it up, and to find a more interesting crop than the the original frame is. It will take a bit more time for thinking and trying

Despite of the frost the bramble leaves have kept a marvellous deep red, so deep that indeed I decided to turn down the saturation a bit in order to avoid an artificial ‘vivid’ look that was significantly enhanced by the warm sunrise light. The birch leaves did not need such treatment, their thick and meanwhile dry material does not glow to the same extent as the bramble’s do.

The various groups of birches, just at the border of the tarn and interspersed into the pines in the elevated areas form excellent graphical elements with their white bark. The morning hours were not really cold, especially not for november, but this year we have the warmest november since 35 years.

Oh, but don’t care – our elected and not so elected leaders won’t bother when meeting in Kopenhagen (at least most of them). The most important thing is this generation’s prosperity – which is only relative when 1/6th of the world’s most affluent state had to live in ‘food uncertainty’ in 2007.

Song of the day? ‘Oh what a wonderful world’. What else.

Update: try to see the pictures at least in 1024px height by clicking on them – the downscaling to the posted size lets vanish quite some details.

Today I spent some morning hours with a friend in Schönram bog. I have been at this place several times now, in different weather and light situations – like here in deep winter. Today it was warm, unexpected so in November, and besides some reflections in the tarn I found grasses and leaves to be most interesting. The rising of the sun over the horizon gave a wonderful backlight to bring out the fall colors.

In some places the Christmas decoration encroachment is really subtle, like in this window of the Spieldiener coffee house here in Bad Reichenhall. This is really cool! Ok, I admit it: I had to tune the white balance to get that effect, but so blue it meets much more my vision of a quiet and empty coffee house at night.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born in Salzburg, lived there and died in absolute poverty. Nowadays he’s one of the most important economic factors not only for Salzburg itself but also for Bad Reichenhall. Here we have one of the big producers of the ‘Mozartkugel’, a ball with different kind of chocolates inside. For a full background on this sweet stuff and also it’s not so sweet aspects, namely lawsuits, seethis wikipedia article.

To fire the business with the tourists, of course the Cafe Reber has a statue of W.A. Mozart as well as his sister Nannerl in their inner courtyard. Mozart himself is placed under a giant Mozartkugel, which in this way looks more as a menace than a temptation.

Not only the windtalkers were specialists in unbreakable code, in a certain way all generations have developed their own codex, much to the annoyance of the elders, who did not understand a single word of this language. So this day marks a birthday: I stood before this sticker and no clue at all what it could mean. At least I did not remain stupid, thanks to my mighty friends, the search engines. And to reveal the secret: the “rude girls” is a local series of drum/bass events, featuring djanes and promoting female artists in that scene. Now you know. Me, I prefer that photography to the real music, probably.

The only remaining cinema of Bad Reichenhall – when I came there first, there were three of them.

The weekend was weather-wise pretty much grey in grey, so this picture from last week might be a good representation. It is the time between the bright colors of fall and the beginning non-colors of early winter, where the drizzle is still stronger than the snow. But it is the first year where I can photographically enjoy this time, too. Only partially it has to do with good gloves and a good tripod, the bigger part is a fresher, free view that identifies beauty in more of its incarnations.

November is in Germany also called ‘month of the dead’. The grey, cold weather, lack of daylight, falling of the leaves, all this is usually associated with death. And yes, during spring or midsummer, I would probably not have had the idea to capture the special mood of a cemetery, but now in November I did. The urn graves section of our cemetary was extended recently, and in a matching and harmonic way, as I think. Today’s images are from this part of the cemetary. Again I think, the wide open f-stop adds to the mood, to the vibrations of the image.

The Stihl sound is quite different from the steel guitar sound, despite of similar sounds of the words. The first one is giving these days an almoust continous concerto. It’s end is not yet foreseeable as the trees still have good stock of leaves to distribute.

Oh, and if you wont to see wonderful portrait of a single leaf, hurry to head over to the Capture this blog of Laurie Jackson. Definitely worth a look!

I still can’t get enough of my 85mm lens – after years with zooms in the f3.5 upwards speed class, beeing able to sharply differentiate by focus and to include informative background without letting it get too prominent is a welcome experience. And it leaves me wondering why lenses like this have become so rare and consequently expensive, if available at all. In the good old film days, when the Mamas and Papas sang “All the leaves are brown”, those f1,8, f1.4 50mm lenses became popular – and cheap. They were the bread and butter lenses, and some of them were of outstanding optical quality. For the DSLRs building a f1.4 50mm lens should not have become more difficult, on the contrary: the smaller image area for an APS-C sensor should have made it possible to produce smaller and cheaper lenses with the same quality. But instead the zoom fever set in, and part of the high-iso discussion we see now, is fired by the low speed of the lenses.

And fast primes, if we can get them, sell for mid- to really high prices. Only for those brands that did not see major changes in the lens mount, the 2nd hand market offers alternatives.

An evening hike, a bit away from the wanderers’ tracks, invited me into the brushwood. It was dark, cold, humid, and a nice smell of funghi (mostly decaying already) in the air, but not until turning around and searching my way back I found something suitable for an image: a flame like beech, gleaming in red and yellow, and impressive against the blue evening light and the dark-greenish fir twigs.

Today’s flat light didn’t bring much inspiration. So I went out only when daylight was fading already and I could expect the street lights to be switched on soon. Their bokeh gave the twist I was looking for to these old, dried efflorescences.

In her comment to Warm yellow, Martina asked: “what is it with bokeh that is so nice?”. My gut-felt preference for those airy disks and blur would not make up for a good answer. But considering the special techniques photography has, and their difference our human vision perceives a field of view, I think both items, airy disks and blur, make a big difference. When the eyes scan a scenery, focusing to the different planes happens very quick and usually without a decision, so these artifacts will be eliminated usually before they reach conscious recognition. The only situations where they might get recognized by the eye are stress or overload situations: reflections of lights on a rainy windscreen at night, glistening sunlight on a rippled water surface: Then for a moment those artifacts will stay as the eye simply does not find focused and therefore prioritized items to replace them with.

But for my photography, the gut feeling of course remains the decisive factor.

Image: http://blog.babaoskar.info/wp/

Let me direct your attention to a new blog: babaoskar shoots back.

Bernd is a friend and avid photographer since many years, running the film-only flag until recently and now enjoying his treasured optics on a new DSLR body. The 2nd image in his blog, posted today, matches this November 9th very well. I am already looking forward to his images. Stay tuned.

Not related to today’s historical date, these maple leaves grabbed my attention because of their graphical complementarity.

Wandering along some paths not that frequented any more I came along that bench which seems to be quite advanced on its way back into a primordial level in nature’s circuit. The more frequent guests here are probably chipmunks and birds for whom the capacity of the wooden boards should still be sufficient.

The dark colors of the evening light were quite challenging again, and to get that dark mood back into the image I finally resorted to a vignetting-like mask in lightzone. For quite a while I hadn’t used this program any more, but here the application of the relight tool to carefully improve the detail structures in the leaves gave me the results I wanted. And as this image was made with a tripod, the sophisticated noise reduction of bibble was not necessary.

One of those golden autumn days we had today. In the evening I went to one of the creeks, but the best image of today turned out to be this one, taken on the way to the post office – the sun in the spa gardens was warm and inviting. Inviting for this leaf probably, too, to dry up a little bit more and fall down, leaving the twigs bare until next spring.

My hometown accomodates a huge number of guests during the summer, but now things get more and more quiet: the fountains are covered, chairs moved out of the pedestrian area, an icecream parlour is changed into a lebkuchen sales point. Luckily enough christmas decoration is almost non-existing yet, but that’s probably a grace period to be measured in days only.

The locomotive driver probably did not share my adventurous feelings regarding a trip to Rome – and I guess he had to go up to the border to Austria only anyhow. Different perspectives everywhere, and differentiate I did also (again) with a big f-stop, and afterwards in postprocessing by working on that cold-warm contrast as well.

From the number of keepers within that week that I own this lens now it seems that this purchase was a good decision. That (slow zoom lens induced) lack of shallow DoF is the only drawback I see at the moment with my APS-C format camera. But with the right prime it is not an issue any more. That I get high shutter speeds even in the darker times of the day is another benefit, albeit a smaller one when taking that great high-iso performance of the current camera generation into account. Oh – I have to say yesterday’s camera generation, as my model is already 2 years old – an eon in today’s camera makers fast development rhythm.

When Munich is grey, cold and wet, a train to Rome is an alternative definetely worth considering. Well, I guess I am too duteous or too inflexible, and so I chose the well known path to the office.

Originally on the sticker is written “Rettet die Bürger, nicht die Banken”, which translates to the words of the headline. The “socialist german workers youth”, SDAJ does not even play a minor role in the political scenery of today, and only in dispersed parts of the city you can find their stickers or illegally sticked posters. But the headline on the stickers nicely matches the fire like lights in the street.

Beginning with today I have added the opportunity to send e-cards and buy prints or cards from the images on the blog. www.fotomoto.com offers a promising service. As I cannot realistically expect fine art prints from such this lab, I have opted for low prices, always keeping in the back of my mind the words from Tyler Monson: “No work of art should cost more than a fine meal, nor be required to last any longer.”. And in case you did not visit his blogs More Original Refrigerator Art and Here now, gone before long up to now, this might be a good cause.

After a long dry period now autumn rain calls the shots. Here in Bad Reichenhall lmost all fountains are switched off and covered by now, with the ones in the spa gardens as lonely exception. But the water doesn’t spray in the fountain any more, instead cold raindrops make strolling a different experience.

The gold of the maple leaves slowly starts to fade, and sometimes it seems as if this cold and this humidity, that reinforces the felt coldness, also affects the passers-by – head between shoulders, viewing straight ahead now everybody tries to minimize the time she spends outside of buildings. Winter doesn’t seem to be far anymore.

Maybe I am overdoing it with my faible for low DoF, but then I find the autumn leaves in that context really wonderful – beauty not in a grain of sand but in a single leaf, alone or against just the idea of a background, blurred to an extend where the colors only signal the wonders of an autumnal forest.

To avert the impression that my new lens had made me forget how to use a smaller f-stop like 1/5.6 here are three images from a road construction machine. Here I sometimes missed the universality of my zoom, but this restriction of course provoked more flexibility. And I am still asking myself why I didn’t make more use of my 50mm lens, similarly fast. It could be that I am somewhat drawn to the extremes in focal lengths, either really short or much longer than normal. The 50mm I tried for portraits, but this focal length distorts the proportions of the face when you try a tighter framing.

Ok, and an image with wide open f-stop at last – I simply couldn’t help it.