Archive for January, 2010
Sunday, January 31st, 2010
The lake we are heading for in the summer is now a cold, almost lifeless place (besides that one bald coot trying to destroy the reflection). But for a walk it is attractive now, even more so when light snowfall dampens the noise of the cars. Having the tripod with me instead of the fashy walking sticks meant that ground speed was lower than expected by my wife, but she managed to bear with me without suffering too noticable.
Update: Please find the wallpapers for February 2010 are online. You find them in the usual screen resolutions underhttp://markus-spring.info/wp/wallpapers/
Tags:Bad Reichenhall, reflection, snow, thumsee, tree
Posted in dahoam (at home), winter | 1 Comment »
Friday, January 29th, 2010
Now that burkas are so widely discussed in old Europe, you can’t see any veiled figure without the association machinery in the head running wild. It’s a significant discussion, and especially shameful for the self-acclaimed home of liberté, égalité and fraternité. Thinking aloud about a ban of a certain clothing for nothing but populistic reasons is so outright stupid and serves nothing but the lowest-level xenophobic instincts that it is really hard to believe that politicians, even a prime minister, can sink so low.
Other than that, a veil can look magic, sometimes beautiful. I wish there would be a time where I could think more about artistic value than about political/intellectual implications. Oh yes, the image to the right shows the original situation, found in a shop window decorated for winter sale.
Tags:burka, politics, veil, xenophobia
Posted in unknown | 6 Comments »
Wednesday, January 27th, 2010
Lucky enough not having to drive my car over wintery roads, I got rewarded by the railway system with a perfect winter scenery. They really made my day.
Tags:munich, Railway, snow
Posted in winter | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, January 26th, 2010
As winter cold works its way towards spring time, the old leaves that survived autumn hanging on the twigs no loose more and more of their structure. The normal brown-black changes again and with the vanishing of parts of the cells brighter layers become visible for a short time. Rain and snow will wash them away again, and the next fierce gusts of wind may well blow the remnants to the earth. Winter is the time for this.
Tags:circle of life
Posted in nature, winter | 1 Comment »
Monday, January 25th, 2010
Last weekend was sort of a landmark in the change of the seasons: for the first time we had direct sunlight again in our kitchen since beginning of december last year, as now the sun higher on the horizon again. But the during the week work usually finishes only when it’s already dark again. Learning to see differently, there is so much to discover even at night, and in the city it’s not a problem to hand hold most of the shots, cranking up the ISO to 800 or sometimes 1600.
These different trees were again treated in bibble5, applying a bleach bypass preset after masking out the (already sun-bleached) public transport signs and emphasizing the structure of the naked sycamore tree.
Tags:bibble5, city, night, public transport, sign, tree
Posted in urban, winter | 2 Comments »
Sunday, January 24th, 2010
Going through some meagre days regarding the opportunity to photograph, I take what comes along the way. This one is from the music school concerto I was attending to hear my eldest daughter play piano. Well worth the time spent as she and her colleagues, some of them contestants for a state level competition, performed really well.
Again processed with bibble5, but the image needed only lowering the vibrance a bit to get a more neutral tonality. This image for sure would work in black & white, but I like that tad of color in it.
Tags:hands, music, piano
Posted in dahoam (at home) | 4 Comments »
Friday, January 22nd, 2010
As Europe does not know the overly strict ‘No Trespassing’ signs, sometimes you can sneak a peek behind the things without too much risk. This is basically the backside of the hallway leading to the cinema in this post.
Tags:backyard, columns, snow
Posted in dahoam (at home) | 7 Comments »
Tuesday, January 19th, 2010
Winter in Bavaria was traditionally the time for ‘Stubnmusi’, where farmers and farm hands and maybe the teacher of a village came together to play music – in summer everybody was busy, so there was less occasion for a get-together or (bavarian) ‘Hoagascht’. Blessed with daughters who volunteered to learn instruments, I am a lucky man, having my own ‘Musi’. Ok, not to make someone jealous: Learning instruments can be a burden for the learners and for the listeners, sometimes…
Tags:daughters, family, instrument, twin
Posted in dahoam (at home) | 13 Comments »
Monday, January 18th, 2010
Bad Reichenhall, Old Spa Center with concert hall. 42mme and f2.2 are sufficient to blur the background.
Tags:Bad Reichenhall
Posted in bokeh, dahoam (at home), winter | 3 Comments »
Sunday, January 17th, 2010
While it is not always convenient to take photographs during winter time, leastwise it is a challenge: familiar subjects change completely, some vanish, others appear, many of them in a quite volatile way, especially when related to snow. Seeing better the more images I take, the orange-yellow color of the snow catched my eye. Together with the black lines of the tramway tracks and the irregular patterns of the pedestrian’s tracks it formed an image where the conversion of matter by light and framing becomes a subject in its own sense. And yes, I am onPaul Butzi’s side, when he emphasizes the importance of subject. If there’s no connection between my mind and the subject, no image will start to exist, just a wasted file.
Tags:Abstract, form, light, night, shape, snow, sodium light, subject, yellow
Posted in urban, winter | 1 Comment »
Friday, January 15th, 2010
© Carl Weese
Carl Weese is probably known to you through his blogs Working Pictures and WPII: Pictures in Public. Those who have visited his website for sure have seen his series about the derelict and decaying drive-in movie theaters. From a European point of view, drive-in movie theaters seem to an inseparable part of American culture and cult. To see them falling prey to a more and more individualistic lifestyle and getting “eaten up” by corrosion and decay evokes melancholic feelings. Having captured singular moments of beauty in this disintegration or sometimes re-integration certainly is commendable
This series today is featured in the New York Times “Lens Blog”. I hope it finds a wide readership. Congratulations, Carl!
Tags:carl weese, decay, drive-in, movie, new york times, the lens, theater
Posted in blog | 1 Comment »
Thursday, January 14th, 2010
Again from the “park with the bridge”. Currently I have not much time for photography, I hope this will change for the better when the weekend comes.
Tags:maple, snow, tree
Posted in dahoam (at home), winter | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, January 13th, 2010
Most of you will have heard of or seen images of the terrible earthquake that hit Haiti. This country was one of the poorest on earth before, and now many of those whose life already was hardship have lost their relatives, their health, their meagre posessions.
All of the big humanitarian organisations are collecting donations now to support the victims. Maybe you can add your share.
Posted in humanitas | 1 Comment »
Sunday, January 10th, 2010
The newspapers and broadcasts on friday had one favorite headline: Depression ‘Daisy’ will bring blizzards with vast amounts of snow and will probably stop public life for quite some time. The German administration even advised to buy a stock of food, drinking water, flashlight batteries and so on.
Nothing happened so far, and now speculation is up why this depression was so over-estimated. Mind you, I’m not disappointed at all, as such catastrophic weather means danger and sometimes even death to the poorest or weakest, even in our rich country. But I take the grey winter weather with equanimity – no desire for images from warmer seasons like Paul Maxim – and see it as the right timeframe for “grey”, not-overly-vivid images.
Tags:Bad Reichenhall, flute player, grey, statue
Posted in dahoam (at home) | 7 Comments »
Friday, January 8th, 2010
Those shades of blue in the open sky and reflected in the snow have their own fascination. And there is no need to play with the saturation slider, simple underexposure by only a half of a f-stop got me the most wonderful blue I could imagine.
Tags:blue, Grossgmain, Plainburg, silhouette, snow, tree
Posted in nature, winter | 1 Comment »
Thursday, January 7th, 2010
click (as always) on the image to enlarge
There is a bavarian folk singer group that sings with kids for kids, and one of their songs starts with a conversation:
“What’s your favourite season?”
”springtime, summer, … fall … winter”
“But that’s all seasons!”
”Yes – what’s wrong with this?”
For a photographer’s eyes this seems to be the right attitude: In every season there is something to find, not always big spectacular things, but very often tiny gems. With snow however, it’s a bit special now: My mother-in-law was an active skier, and she still tells about downhill routes that are barely visible now: Trees have taken there place, as for decades now the winters have become shorter here and snow has become less.
I admit being a “warmist”, and so I try to savour the snow even more, knowing that those fairy-tale like winters I had as a child are past and gone. But that is only the least disagreable consequence of global warming.
Tags:blue, climate change, global warming, ice, snow, white
Posted in dahoam (at home), winter | 5 Comments »
Wednesday, January 6th, 2010
Processed with the new bibble5 again. The sophisticated regions functionality and the color functions helped to carefully dodge and burn until the fence itself got the necessary bit of emphasis.
Tags:bibble5, fence
Posted in winter | 5 Comments »
Wednesday, January 6th, 2010
Leaving the hill where the kids were sleigh riding once more, today’s hike led into the shadowy areas of the Hochschwarzeck mountains. Not that I found spectacular things there, but the scenery seduced me to play a bit with photographic possibilities.
And finally I got around to re-write my scripts for downloading and geo-tagging all my raw files.Phil Harvey’s exiftool is the core of this functionality, the rest is some shell scripts and perl programs to queryws.geonames.org for the name of the place that image was taken. The end result is an xmp sidecar file that contains the coordinates plus sub-location, location/city and state in a format that gets read and prolifered by my favourite raw converter, bibble5. Oh yes, bibble5 got released just a week ago, and it really is a fine piece of software. When the plugin developers have released their addons for the new version, there is almost no necessity (for my style of photography) to use gimp et.al. on an image any more.
Tags:bibble5, blue, Hochschwarzeck, shadow, snow
Posted in winter | 1 Comment »
Monday, January 4th, 2010
Being out with the kids on a slope for sleigh riding (with all due diligence, it’s just a year that I postedthis), I retreated a bit from the crowd and spent some time at the edge of the woods. The shapes of the logs I always find interesting, but then: this is a subject matter that’s probably photographed to death already. The combination with the people on the hill fascinated me, even more so when using unsharpness as a means of generalisation.
From Peter Stewart's blog
But now for something completely different: Danish photographer Peter Stewart is on my reading list since a long time. He has a collection of (mainly) very quiet, even meditative seascapes. After a period of irregular posting he seems to have found his sources of power again. So if you have a faible for landscapes of the silent, definitely not hue-and-saturation-to-the-max type, then you should mine his blog for real gems and stay tuned for his new work.
Tags:log, sleigh-riding, snow, winter
Posted in winter | 1 Comment »
Sunday, January 3rd, 2010
Monochrome light like this I’ve met only rarely: Besides a little bluish cast, the subject matter is almost completely without color. Only when viewing the original file at pixel size I found yellowish spots in the rocks, but the rest are just shades of white and grey. Even the fir trees had lost their green over the distance. But even more intriguing for me was that curved slope that is like a curtain, opening just a partial view on the mountains in the background.
Tags:mountains, Ramsau, Schwarzeck, snow, winter
Posted in dahoam (at home), monochrome | 4 Comments »
Sunday, January 3rd, 2010
After some days without noteworthy photographic activities, I made use of the necessary shopping today to deviate my path through a nearby park. But it seems that I am either rusty or can’t yet develop the right feeling for my raw files. So I will let them stay in the folder and revisit later.
Tags:bridge, path, pond, snow
Posted in dahoam (at home) | 3 Comments »
Friday, January 1st, 2010
A happy new year to you all!
When wandering through darkness, with a torch in hand that only illuminates the immediate surroundings, I hope there is a scout ahead with profound knowledge, not merely driven by instincts. This is my wish for 2010.
Tags:darkness, Höglwörth, lake, torch, walk
Posted in dahoam (at home) | 3 Comments »
The lake we are heading for in the summer is now a cold, almost lifeless place (besides that one bald coot trying to destroy the reflection). But for a walk it is attractive now, even more so when light snowfall dampens the noise of the cars. Having the tripod with me instead of the fashy walking sticks meant that ground speed was lower than expected by my wife, but she managed to bear with me without suffering too noticable.
