spring2life take2

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…

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

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.

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.

It’s easy to guess from the headline that I am not smoking. Not smoking any more, that is.

But here I was more fascinated by the replicating leaning forms that manifested themselves in the viewfinder. To emphasize this a little bit I used bibble5’s layers for burning and a bit desaturating the borders. The more I play with this software, the more interesting it becomes despite its overly long beta status and still unresolved bugs. It is just the right tool for my way of handling the raw files, quite straightforward, no fancy effects, just carefully helping to show what’s already in the raw file. As a linux user, all that lightroom and photoshop is a non-option, so I am even more glad that bibble5 now fulfills such a great part of my processing wishes.

And despite all criticism in the forums about bibble’s slow development process, this definitely is not a case of ‘hopes to ashes’.

many of the howto-photobooks i have read recommend repeating patterns as a recipe for better pictures. so i couldn’t resist this setup (in the science center of salzburg’s “house of the nature”). the first pictures with only yours truly as subject were a bit dull, but soon one of the daughters came to look. this was already better, but really good it became when she was joined by her twin sister. aah – and don’t think that clothing them equal is a quirk or a deliberate decision of the parents: it is purely a strategy to avoid unnecessary fights for this or that special t-shirt (replace t-shirt with pants, sweater and so on, ad nauseam).

with the colors i am still not completely content, but the color cast from the green walls was so strong that i couldn’t find a better correction without loosing that green, which in itself is a strong component of the picture.

when i started photography roughly 30 years back, lenses with a focal length of more than 300mm were regarded as professional tools only and priced like this. today aps-c digital slrs with their crop factor of 1.5 plus the development in the area of long telezooms offer the possibilities to use a 450mm-e lens (the mm-e were introduced by mike johnston here and i regard it as a sound concept, especially as it can take care of the different crop factors we have in the wild now: 1.3, 1.5, 1.6, 2…). count in optical stabilisation, and you have the ingredients for succesfull long-lens shots any pro would have licked her or his fingers up to the elbow only 20 years ago.

the really densely populated downtown of salzburg of course creates demand for some, and be it even the smallest, recreational space. down from mönchsberg, the hill where the castle is located, you have a magnificient view into a landscape of roofs, now and then interrupted by a small private spa. even a single sunlounger can qualify for this

a colorful island in all the matt roofs was this small garden with the forsythia in full blossom. spending a morning or evening hour up here for sure is exhilarating when you have to live and work the whole day confined in a building.

happy easter to all of you, and colorful months like those tulips i found in the market.

the light in salzburg was great this morning and the vision almost unreal. walking too long over mönchsberg for sure caused sore feet….

going to the zoo still is fun for the younger kids, but leaves me more unhappy than ever.

his gaze, going past those bars, has got so misted
with tiredness, it can take in nothing more.
he feels as though a thousand bars existed,
and no more world beyond them than before.

the full text of rainer maria rilke’s poem “the panther” you can find here.

back to salzburg after a long time, and for the first time on the mönchsberg. the weather was fine for a short time and the sun already low at 3:00 pm which caused fine shadows and a great plasticity in the structures below. my favourite is this jumble of roofs and chimneys, lined up along a curved street with market stalls deep down in the shadow.

the cupolas and towers of the churches of salzburg of course form a nice scenery for themselves, and especially from this high vantage point of the so called “stadtalm” they are arranged almost in layers. aah, and if i only could blog the taste of the beer up there…