spring2life take2

Salzburg, Austria

Munich, Bavaria

Thanks to the winter and the so-called daylight saving time – more honestly to be called expenditure enticing time – it is still night when I arrive in the office, and sometimes the moon shows up over the vis-à-vis blocks. Nota bene: The sky was that incredibly blue in spite of my lowering the saturation value.

Piding, Bavaria

Piding, Bavaria

Among the 5000+ inhabitants of the village of Piding there must be at least one avid smoker. Maybe not the worst way to gain equilibrium in grey, cold winter hours.

Once again I was taking advantage of my daughter’s musical education: Acting as a driver for her rehearsal purposes, I walked my camera and used the blue evening light to train vision and lens.

Sidi Bou Saïd, Tunisia

This is the last installment of my images from Sidi Bou Saïd. That cold and windy afternoon offered some wonderful sceneries. This was certainly not the typical tourist season weather, but I had a much more private and quiet time than if I’d have to share the streets with the summer’s legions of tourists. I enjoyed it, but I doubt that I would come back there in summer.

Sidi Bou Saïd, Tunisia

After a lot of deliberation, it seems that both backup and restore measures were successful. There are some issues left with the galleries, but these are consequences of a gallery software update and I have to resolve these manually.

It turned out that my old strategy of distributing services was successful again: As the domain name was not with the hoster, I could easily contract a new hosting company and had not to wait if and when the old hosting provider decided to allow a transfer to the domain name. And a double-checked backup process, which kept all ressources on my sides and removed the dependency from the provider. But nobody is interested if you can backup, it’s only the restore that counts.

Problems like this of course you don’t have, when you stick with google, and there are good reasons for this. I had to pay the price for my independence.

Sidi Bou Saïd, Tunisia

Sidi Bou Saïd, Tunisia

Walking up the main road of Sidi Bou Saïd, a former religious and then artist’s village, leads invariably to the Café des Nattes (here in the background), the place where August Macke had created one of his most renowned aquarels. The image here is from the blog Art and Architecture, which also makes an interesting remark of the genesis of the now abundant blue color in Sidi Bou Saïd, obviously not present during Macke’s stay.

Sidi Bou Said, Tunisia

As blue as it can probably get for a door – and the image was made in the blue hour, under not the typical pretty pictures circumstances, having to resort to ISO 800 to fight the incoming darkness. Yet it’s perfect blue, without having lost too much of the low and soft light’s qualities.

Munich, Bavaria

Karlstein, Bavaria

The first cold autumn day with temperatures not much over 6° C makes looking at summer pictures a somewhat melancholic activity. But this one I like for its supernatural impression.

The colors of the mediterranean countries in the summer are blue and white, and most famous for this combination are the greek islands. Here in Krk you have to actively look for these iconic colors, I found it in an unusual place, high on the upper deck of a large fish trawler. The setting evening sun has muted the intensity already, humid air had softened the blue of the sky, but a bit of rust provides enough complementary color to give the blues their intensity back.

This is one of my preferred photographing styles: looking for form and color combinations and isolating them by a long focal length and a tight framing.

over at his blog andreas manessinger showcases his one-image-a-day post number one-thousand! my heartfelt congratulations for the many excellent images he showed, his extraordinary perseverance, and not least his communicative skills.

andreas’ blog was the first blog i followed regularly when i started blogging myself. and in the beginning it were largely his encouraging and challenging comments that made me intensify my work and speed up my posting frequency. i didn’t forget his comment “can we have more of that please? three images in november? c’mooon ” – andreas, thank you very much for this!

family holidays in krk mean spending quite some time on the beach, often without the camera. but when i finally took it with me and dug out my 11-18 lens, it was quite nice to make a wide beach scenery out of a nice small spot. guess it should qualify for the mindful eye’s assignment of complimentary colors.

again bibble5′s region feature helped to emphasize the sky in addition to the polarizing filter. if you are not already determined on “your” raw converter, bibble5 is definitely worth more than a try. it is now even faster then the old version was and scales well with multicore cpus.

spring time all around, today with matching weather. probably this season makes many of us sensitive for fresh and intensive colors. at least it did with me, and the family excursion to the small town of laufen remunerated me with this symphony in blue.

the dull light of todays afternoon could not motivate me to go out shooting, instead i spent some time with scribus, familiarizing myself with the sofobomo requirements to layout my pictures in a harmonic way.

the image shows pictograms on a train window, taken at this weeks commute to munich. i always carry my camera on these trips, but rarely use it that early in the morning, as usually my photographic brains are even more asleep then the rest of the body. but this time it had worked for me.

the blue hour at the moment is quite pronounced, of course the thick clouds make the transit of the light a bit longer. lucky enough i managed to combine the weekly shopping super-task with an hour of walking the tripod. not far from the spot where i took cold winter and the sleeping witch in a winter night the trail i was following suddenly had only one thin layer of branches between me and the village of grossgmain and the untersberg behind it. and especially the branches high above me captured my attention, one of the rare opportunities where i used my 11-18 wideangle zoom.

this lens is quite special: whilst i use it only for a small fraction of my shots, a disproportionate high fraction of those i regard above average. and i had quite a steep learning curve and still do not master it in the way i would like to: making those pictures with a grand subject whilst including a lot of environment information in the background. but my feeling for it grows, and overall it seems to have been a good investment.

back to cold reality. here in my hometown winter is going strong. the scenery above could well be from astrid lindgren’s the tomten, here on youtube.

i don’t want to chime into the ‘waiting for springtime/i love winter’ posts. winter is not my favourite time of the year, but it is the season we will see change all too soon due to the warming of the atmosphere. so i’ll catch it while i can.

today i want to pick up ilan breslers idea to feature a blog which i think is worth to be read: a blog from russia, http://photo.alick.ru/. i can’t read any letter of the posts, but some of the photographs are fascinating. so feel free to follow the link under the thumbnail to the right. and of course, check ilans blog here.

post-dated publishing is nice-to-have. when you get to see this icicle from frozen bavaria, i am supposed to be in abu dhabi, bound for sri lanka.

there should be internet connection in the hotel, so there hopefully will be no break in posting.

it was today. -12°c make you very grateful for your gloves and very ungrateful towards camera ‘engineers’ creating itsy-bitsy-teenie-weenie rubber knobs on the remote control of your camera, which refuse to be operated with gloves.

i had found a small streambed just below a seamill, which sported besides the usual icicles also this wonderful transparent ice sheets between the rocks. well worth freezing off my fingers for one hour…

flying on a project monitoring mission to sri lanka again, woke up at probably 4:00 am local time over the indian ocean and saw this wonderful light.

even after 30 or more long flights from germany to sri lanka i still am fascinated by the quality of light at sunrise, seen from a plane. i still love flying…

the first time i made really use of the blue hour and the my old zoom. focused to close distance, wide open, the bokeh really becomes great. which is no wonder at the other hand as there are no diaphragm blades involved. again, anti-shake saved my day as handholding 320mm effective focal length at 1/20s shutter speed is next to impossible, even when leaning to a lamp post. iso 1600 as a usable sensor speed is a value in itself (as is auto-iso, when you are in a hurry), though i have to admit that with other subjects the grain is below the optimum.

it took some time, but it seems that i grow more and more accustomed to my camera and can detach myself from technique and concentrate more and more on seeing. and in the end, *this* is it what really matters.

this is the story of a flop, almost.

my camera made this picture… the olde Minolta 7D has a really slow low light autofocus performance? Anyhow, i pressed the shutter and nothing happened because the outoffocus-system didn’t see the subject as sharp. when it did, the girl had turned around her head – and the picture was good!

sometimes a flop can be a success.

one of the rare sceneries if have found that express a nothing-more-nothing-less than utterly relaxing mood.

usually i develop my raw files, but this jpeg was already so good that i did only really minor tweaking in digikam before uploading it.

this photo on .