Found in a staircase ’round here. Speaks to me as my own wanderlust is on the back burner and lives on GEO articles – the sustainable variant, albeit not a fulfilling one.
Update: The wallpapers for March 2010 are now online. Check here
In early spring the forest shows convincingly its linear structures. The verticals are self evident, consisting of the stems, but what I discovered was the complementation of those verticals by arcs, horizontal lines and diagonals. Have a look yourself at today’s small gallery here.
Contemporary architecture in Vienna seems to mix effortlessly with all the well restaurated buildings from the k.u.k. times, and even the extreme examples like the Museum of Modern Art above convince (me) with their intransigence and their presence. This certainly is a field, in which my 2nd hometown, Munich, is falling behind substantially. The Automobility Temple of BMW (here) is the only recent example and far away from the center of the city, only the Academy of the Fine Arts by the same architects as the BMW World, coop himmelblau.
Having discovered that my images of the Academy never got published in any way, I have set up a small gallery here.
The doors of Vienna provide sufficient subject matter probably for many days of photography, and even in the small number of hours that allowed me to visit a really little part of this city, I found more than suitable for series of postings. So I will probably make a small gallery, which also meets my growing interest for images in a series. Diptychs and Triptychs are a bit special in this sense as they are designed to be viewed together (and therefore I find it more complicated to come up with good ones), whereas small series allow for greater variance while still following a common basic idea. And, the latter are easier to show on web and the restricted screen area available for most viewers.
A business trip to vienna gave me the opportunity to stroll through this beautiful city for some hours. My old obsession for doors found sufficient visual food here, but additionally the entrance halls behind the doors provided some wonderful sceneries. And luckily enough I turned around to enjoy the opposite vista as well.
More doors to come tomorrow.
Ok, that was a narrow escape: handling a camera in the hospital’s waiting room while the best wife of all sits there with a luxated thumb, waiting to get x-rayed, *can* lead to a serious conflict. Lucky man that I am, it didn’t… But this dragon tree (dracaena draco), barely surving the lack of light (and maybe all the sighs in this room) had just an irresistible shape. Not leaving the house without the camera paid out once again, and having mounted that bulky 1.8/28mm lens was just the right choice.
Found in my hometown, where usually naked bottoms don’t get wiped in open public…
Photographed in raw, converted in bibble5 with the Andrea plugin set to Tri-X, fine-tuned in gimp as bibble5 currently doesn’t support the perspective correction plugin. Other than that, it’s just having the camera at hand and reasonably pre-set.
"Days End" ¢ leeming + paterson
Morag Paterson and Ted Leeming recently published an article on Luminous Landscape, titled The Light Fantastic – Capturing the Inner Sense of the Scottish Landscape. The image above is from their website leeming + paterson. This certainly is a special approach to landscape photography, away from what you might now from Charlie Waite or Ian Cameron, to name just two British landscape photographers.
Leeming + Paterson’s images do resonate with an inner landscape and express it in a way for which William Turner had found a way to do it with brushes and oil-based paint about 200 years ago. And whilst photography has brought us the ability to record and reproduce the finest detail, the most gorgeous light and given us great works of art going the f64-way, as a counterweight this precise rendering and careful emphasizing of the physical world needs and deserves a balance in form of an impressionistic path connecting the landscape within to the physical world.
The discussion on Luminous Landscape following the article brought up some negative comments. I am just wondering (but then, I am not) about the lack of tolerance and maybe generosity when it comes to classifying contemporary art. The universum of art for sure has place for many ways of expression, and I see my path more in the learning of the different methods of seeing and expressing and finding my own way. What remains to be seen as art only history can tell.
For myself I only can say that Morag Paterson’s and Ted Leeming’s work has opened my eyes to a new and convincing style of seeing, perceiving and recording the landscape and the light.
I beg your pardon for that abrupt change of topics, let me assure that it’s not done on purpose. It’s just the fate of a family father and hobby photographer, who tries to see and photograph the special things wherever he goes, but cannot always follow his preferences – let’s say for quiet, mystic landscapes. So today’s image was taken when I returned from running errands before leaving with the family for half a day of skiing. For training purposes I had only my camera with the 11-18mm zoom with me. Sometimes this kind of self-restriction works out well, because I just create with the tool I have instead of spending too much time thinking which tool would be even better. At least the lady on the bike would definitely have left by then.
Not that the skiing was bad (only photographically unproductive), but that scenery from the town had its charm for me.
Again from Thumsee, the magic place. The water of this lake is cold and very clear even in the summer, and now in the winter time the reflections on the jet black surface are just magical.
Just to show you what it is like in the summer. And no, I don’t really suffer from winter’s cold and snow up to now. The less so as pollen season is about to start, so I do know what I am trading in for the warmer times of spring and early summer.
Whilst downtown masquerade is the trend of the moment, only 5km out of town you can find incredibly quiet and almost achingly pure moments, like this ice on Thumsee. I created some more images today, but in my eyes nothing could match this quiet pattern of ice, hoarfrost and water.
With this image I send special regards to Martha in Vienna, who has a special appreciation for that place.
With the Schengen treaty, de facto ending border controls for traffic inside the European Union, the advertising at the German-Austrian border for the casinos of Salzburg and other places lost most of its attention factor – no car has to wait here any more. The buildings of the former checkpost as well as this one are now in different states of decay.
For me the necessary balance for carnival’s blithesomeness. 30 minutes out at the shore of a pond, looking up into the grey clouds and sometimes getting a glimpse of the mountains above is real recreation, alas not a very companionable one. But there is time for every event under heaven, an appointed time…
Talk about secondary benefits: the kids had their fun catching sweets thrown from the windows and the balconies into the crowd, but I was much more interested in some snaps of the disguised figures. So I did, a welcome diversion from the cold landscapes that my photographical interest usually centers on in these days.
I had planned to show more diptychs, but with the current means of presentation I am a bit unhappy: Combined as one image, the current blog layout shows them so small that they become quite unattractive. Of course clicking on the image enlarges it, but the first impression is not inviting. I started to experiment with some blending methods, but the day job proved to be more time-consuming than expected.
So today’s image is a snap taken when returning from a meeting via subway: One of the stations, next to the museum quarter in Munich, exhibits some replicas of greek statues, hijacked by a graecophil Bavarian king and since then shown in a local Museum.
The raw image was converted in bibble5, and I used a LAB plugin to emphasize the greenish light. But for the last treatment I had to resort to digikam’s local contrast enhancement function, without it the image was too “flat”.
Update: I added a screenshot of bibble5 in action on this image. In the top row you find the thumbnail of the unmodified raw just right to the highlighted thumbnail. The effect of the LAB modification is the extreme narrowing of the blue and green values. The tint was achieved by moving the grey point of the histogram out of the center towards darker.
My preference for shallow depth of field is well known, but of course it is not suitable for each and every subject. Since some time I am experimenting with means to transport the specific way in which the camera records to the viewer. Shallow depth of field is, as well as bokeh, a concept unknown in human seeing with the naked eye, as we are constantly accomodating and combining the images of the different focal planes in our visual conception. Combining two such images in a kind of diptychon is – for me – a promising way of enhancing the visual experience.
I hope a grey day in Salzburg, with a subject photographed probably a gazillion times, is a suitable example for this approach. Oh yes, and don’t forget to click on the image to view it large.
Can’t help it: those fishermen on the ice of the Hintersee (a rare scenery in the Bavarian alps) made me immediately think of Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon in their famous movie.
The dreamy effect in the image above results from the lens wide open at f2.2. To get enough interesting detail I used the detail slider of lightzone – bibble5 currently offers no such tool. There was no toning necessary as the evening (non-)light with shutter speeds of 10 to 30s provided a natural blue toning.
This was one of the rare occasions where I dug out my summer lens, the venerable 16-80mm zoom. It renders very sharp images, but the slow f-stops from 3.5 to 4.5 make it quite unsuitable during our current short and dark winter days, especially when the sky is overcast. But here I could stop down to f8, resulting in sharp grasses and florescences but still blurred background.
made of a rainstorm and early morning traffic lights during commuting in Munich. And you are right: commuting traffic is more like a horror trip.
First sun in the garden, and the kids love to play there. Calling them for lunch does not always result in immediate success, meaning sufficient time to take the camera for some playing with the already intensive sunlight. Different focusing distances are among the photographic means I do enjoy at the moment, together with combining images.
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