spring2life take2

The title of course is an hommage to Otto Steinert and his famous “Einfussgänger”, here on artnet.

I did not much postprocessing in bibble5, just a careful enhancement of the red color of the shoes. In retrospect it seems like a wonder to me that I managed to frame this so perfectly that any further cropping was unnecessary.

Update: The wallpapers for April are here. Enjoy.

Today I spent some time in the corridor of an administrative building, waiting in vain for a meeting.  Such an environment in literature usually is described in words that try to express absolute and ultimate bleakness, and I admit that this is really not the best way to spend one’s time. But in wise providence I had brought the camera with the 11-18mm lens, and that not so dreary place rewarded me with some images I like.

A sufficiently high Cetirizin-level made me somewhat airy, and so I approached the enemy armed to the teeth with my 28/1.8 lens. And even the enemy has it’s beautiful sides, inviting golden colors, soft texture and so on. BUT it will remain the enemy as hazel and friends start to torture me sometimes as early as January, and force me to gulp down Cetirizin, making me loose sense of taste and smell, making me depressive or agressive or both.

Today was confirmation celebration, and of course all confirmands had to pose on the stairs of our church for the obligatory group photo done by the local photographer. Not beeing pressed for high quality or official results, I had my fun with all those family members that crowded and pointed and shot like mad.

Only when reviewing the image I discovered that the official collar bands of the lutheran priests made it easy to spot them even when thoroughly blurred.

Running errands the whole day, occasions for photography were rare, but sufficient for one spring image: at least in the shop displays we are offered a colorful spring. In the wild circumstances are different with night temperatures down to 2°C and tulips still hiding in the earth. Snowdrops are abundant, as are Corydalis (I didn’t find a translation for ‘Lerchensporn’) and, in some places, daffodils. The intensive pink at the moment still has a price tag in Euros, but nature will provide it, too, in some days from now.

I was following my old passion for selective sharpness again. Focused very near, even at 16mm focal length and f3.5, a blurred background is no technical problem on an APS-C sensor. Besides the normal bibble raw conversion I applied local contrast enhancement in gimp and some selective sharpening just on the flower in the foreground.

The morning sun is already golden, promising warm days to come. Life sometimes shows its swell sides. A happy weekend to all!

At noon it already got really warm, but the angle of the sun is still shallow and well before sunset the intensity of light and warmth decreases fast. The forests on the mountains – here the south slope of Mt. Staufen – are still in almost the same state as in autumn, no fresh green is visible. Maybe 10 days we have until the vegetation will explode (and I will hide in the basement).

Being 5 minutes early for the morning bus gave me a small time slice to see and play. Interesting enough the result corresponds quite a bit with Carl Weese’s post “Thumbs up”, which I don’t remember to have actively seen before taking this photograph of mine.

Rehearsing an instrument is not always a joyful time for a kid, and therefore the moments where the music grabs the mind and inspires the phantasy are even more precious. When this happened and she grabbed music paper and a pencil, I was happy to have the camera at hand, and even more happy to have that phantastic old 1.4/85mm lens.

I found no rational explanation why someone would care to paint a box in blue color, if this box is meant to be left on the roadside next to the forest. With more phantasy of the author of detective stories, one could probably make up a mysterious story beginning with such a blue box. For me it remains a somewhat illogical and therefore attractive combination.

Beginning of spring was grey around here, which I didn’t mind as it kept my allergy at bay. I had my own kind of fun (a weird kind as my daughters would say) with the nets covering the facade of an old building of the Saline, which is currently renovated. Those subdued colors and the fine structure grabbed my eyes, and so I found beauty in the ordinary.

Once upon a time there was a benevolent state government, distributing all the fresh money that inundated the country as a consequence of the boom years and the transition from a poor agrarian to a well-of post-industrial state, and many the towns in this stated decided to build natatoria, ice stadiums and tennis halls. It was a high time for the architects, and as the alpine region is proud of the mountains and the traditions, in our small town decor shapes of the ice stadium and the indoor pool ingested the form of the surrounding mountains and repeated them in a modern, rhythmic gesture, combining traditional wooden elements with modern metallic styling.

Alas, the costs for maintenance grew unbearable high and the modern architecture was nowhere as adapted to the climate challenges or as failure friendly as the traditional forms where (the construction of the platform roof relied on humans to clear off the snow off when a certain critical height/weight was reached). Checks on the statics were probably done incompletely, and maybe nobody wanted to tell the administration that they had to shell out millions again to keep the building safe and weather proof.

On a sad, cold, grey January day in 2006 the amount of snow on the invisibly damaged structure was too much, and only hours before the scheduled clearing could start, the roof of the ice stadium collapsed, killing 17.  Years later the artist Karl-Martin Hartmann created the cenotaph, one column for each victim. The tops of the stelae take up the shapes of the mountains – as well as of the architectural elements of the collapsed ice stadium.

I admit that I got distracted during today evening’s music school concierto. But it’s not my fault: most of the time the faces of the artists were hidden behind their music stands, so the vision-oriented parts of the brain concentrated on what was left (and fitting in the viewfinder). That’s the reason.

Winter seems to be coming through an end, but last week there was more than enough snow. What make me dig out that shot were the two trees in the front yard, so perfectly framing the entrance. The same stunning orb shape I found in the trees outside Freilassing train station (my weekly commuting hub). The red of the building’s paint here gets intensified by the low early morning sun, and whilst I usually try to keep my shadow out of the image, here I had to use it as a main element.

Although the weather indicates the end of ice and snow here – at least of the semi-permanent stuff – I want to share a last image of frozen Thumsee with you. This image create a kind of conflict in me: Usually I restrict myself to very limited operations in postprocessing, kind of the wet darkroom stuff like burning/dodging, contrast operations etc. But here the linear shape of that fallen tree was disturbed by a branch sticking out in the foreground. Without it I like the image much better, so I removed it. But this of course is a critical operation: without limits I might transplant items in the next image, or between images, and I don’t know where this would end. I guess I will stick with my old rule: If I could have removed it by hand, I can clone it out. Just sometimes a little bending of the rules…

Thumsee is the home of many grass snakes (or ring snakes, natrix natrix), which find enough protected areas to hunt for prey and raise their breed. But now of course they all rest, usually in dry caves or piles of rotten leaves. But their “gestalt” stays vivid in the shape of some old, half drowned wood.

Since some days the temperatures are slowly rising, the snow mixes with rain and the ice on the lakes and ponds changes sound and color: the sound gets powerless, foul and the color undecided, the reflectivitiy is lost. Definitely signs for the end of the winter, even if the snowdrops are still invisible in most of the places. Thumsee again is  a place for recreation, to re-gain power, to recharge and find peace.

Located in a “Durchhaus”, probably best translated as a combination of passageway and courtyard, is the Cafe Schatz in Salzburg. From all the Cafes – and as a coffeine addicted I do know many – this seems to be one of the eldest and most traditional ones in Salzburg. The coffee is great, so is the pastry, and the whole institution including the waitresses has an aura that seems unchanged from maybe 40 years past.

This is even more stunning as many of the streets in Salzburg now are governed by the great international brands, leaving less and less space for local flair. So the “Cafe Schatz”, and “Schatz” means treasure, really is a precious place, moody and relaxing (at least off season).

Update: I had edited the first version of the lead image on a color calibrated, yet not brightness calibrated monitor, and this resulted in an image that was way too dark. Lesson learned: I wil redo the calibration and double check the brightness level instead of using the all-auto setting.

I found these in Salzburg. The center of this town is so attractive for tourists from all parts of the world, that they have a shop selling Christmas decoration throughout the whole year. But to top this, they’ve invented easter eggs with Santa on it. That’s what I’d call real creativity and serving their customers. And if people buy this…

Having packed up work, it’s almost dark again, especially when thick clouds dim the little daylight even more. This matches the winter’s cold, and it makes the warm light out of the windows even more attractive. The best time to see and capture this is twilight, just before the street lights get switched on and shift the light’s colour to a, well, less attractive one.

The building in the background to the right is the old royal spa center (featured here, here, here, last image and here), which has the most beautiful hall here in Bad Reichenhall, used for concerts and receptions.

Estimating how often I had passed by this arrangement of cute robots (water and electricity dispensers) in the train station of Freilassing, where I change trains when commuting to work, lead to a figure in the thousands. Don’t ask me why it took so long until I realised this image. One explanation – the one which I like best – is that photography leads to opening the eyes leads to better photography leads to … You get the picture. It could be that perception can be trained like the biceps.

A quiet, snowy image again, after the last two more lively ones. I love the repeting forms here, not only of the wipers, but also the arcs, beginning from the canopy to the right, repeated in the bushes, over the cleft in the snow to the roofs of the small cars. Definitely not surprising as Paul Maxim demanded and substantiated for good reason here in his blog, but for me in its quiet harmony still fulfilling.

“Sizzling Silhouette” would have been a headline matching the ad for an “Erotic Trade Fair” even better, but Debra from A Passion in Frames had already used it for her post of today. Maybe take it as an encouragement to look in her blog.

One of the results of a lunchtime stroll. No story behind, just delight about that blue-white combination. You can’t always resort to greek islands for this color combination, so I decided to take what I could get.

Photography is not in highest esteem by everybody, but the people in my surroundings are accustomed to my switching to a cyclopean life-form from time to time. And the kids, so I thought up to yesterday, should see it as perfectly normal as they know about my hobby/obsession/… But my daughter was cringing when she saw me walking behind that lady with the orange coat: she felt my behaviour was completely indecent. It seems that next time I’ll have to go alone to buy bread if I dare to take a camera with me.

Thoreau’s Walden for sure is not on everybody’s reading list over here, but the craving for the “genuine” life out there in the woods seems to become stronger with every degree of civilisation’s comfort and amenities.

My snowstorm images of the last days finally got distilled into a new small gallery, here.

This morning I had 15 minutes after having dropped wife and kids at their respective schools. Without gloves and cap, I was glad that the time was limited as my hands were numb afterwards. But I enjoyed the play of the snowflakes and the intensified effect of aerial perspective, so these 15 minutes were really prolific. Having only the “wrong” lens, the 127mme tele, was not a problem at all. The compression effect also enhanced the snowfall, and all images got kind of a similar signature look.

Today morning’s snowfall managed again to cast a spell on our garden. And besides the optical merits, it made me happy on a different level: All those hazel and alder pollen that had started to pollute (see that unison?) the air and made me announce my arrival wherever by loud and unstoppable pollinosis-induced sneezing: Now they are crushed on the ground, wetted to innoxiousness and frozen to death. Sometimes I am gleeful for a reason. It’s only that I now I just have a small grace period.

Found in Vienna’s Westbahnstrasse, this abandoned shop probably waits for renovation. The handwritten sign in the window states the retirement of the shopkeeper. Deducing from the fancy tilework on the floor, this shop probably has been run for many decades without major reconstruction. But probably these tile’s future now is a very limited one.

Sitting in the bus, peering through the front window, I suddenly had this feeling that the scenery of red lights in front of me might unfold into an image worth recording. Some quick fiddling brought out the camera of the backpack, luckily with the 1.8/28mm lens alread mounted, and I took the first shot without thinking, but before the second and third I dialed in exposure compensation. Well, what shall I say: the first shot was “right” in the way that it recorded that ghostly scenery of light sources and reflections, giving not too much clue of the real scenery. The 3rd shot turned out mundane, interesting more as reference for comparison then anything else.

And now it’s high time to tune the formatting of the blog again – the highslide plugin I use for the image popups used up the minimum distance between text and image. This needs to be addressed.

Matching to the return of grey winter weather, not only here but also in the new world, like in Woodbury. Here is an image that was taken outside the Museum of Modern Art in Salzburg, Austria. Even without the works of art inside the museum, this place should be on everyone’s agenda when coming to Salzburg, and if it’s only for this view

Too tired after a long working day I just want to share this image with you, found in the shut-down peat factory of Ainring.