spring2life take2

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.

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.

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.

The time in the train I spent mostly for the wallpapers today. You can reach them through the top menu. I have created them in a variety of resolutions, so you should find a matching size. If not, use the contact page. If you like them, you could use the contact form as well.

Mornings can be hard; The unread paper in one hand, the camera in the other, eyes still tired, brain slow – the night was just too short. Only 1 minute left until the train leaves. Fumblin’ with numb fingers at the f-stop dial, knowing that some DoF is needed. 06:06 – just getting two shots.

They turned out to be the best of the day, a long working day. In the end well worth having carried the gear on the commuting trip to Munich. Didn’t touch the saturation slider, I swear.

Westend again. Some of last weeks images (Westend Strip Light, City Life) originate from there, and the streets are always worth a deviation from the shortest way to work. Today I indulged in my bokeh passion again, this time with the long zoom on the camera. A conscious decision for a certain lens influences my way of seeing, and while I was a fan of very long tele lenses earlier, this passion has somewhat subsided. But in this image I see a good combination of sharp detail and blurred shapes of the street and its inventory, f5.6 seemed to have been just right.

Strolling through the city last week seemed to get my optical receptors going. Both images were shot on the way to/from work. For an unknown reason it is much easier for me to set aside some 20 minutes from the way to the office, knowing that I have to stay longer, then to get up early on a saturday morning.

After 8 hours staring at a screen most of the time, I have to take a deliberate decision to switch on (photo-)graphic seeing. Preparing the camera, checking battery and available memory is part of a small ritual. And the sometimes the muses kiss, sometimes they don’t.

strange – some small areas turn out to be real photographic bounties whenever you walk through. the ‘westend’ is a quarter, formerly located at the western end of the city, but now quite near to the center, that was traditionally a lower-to-middle class quarter. some decades ago quite a number of immigrants mixed under the inhabitants and it was a quiet region. only the transfer of the trade fair center and the sudden availability of building lots, immediately occupied by big companies, brought a sudden change. now you see chaps in suits and ties everywhere, and the styles of the pubs have changed, too. one of the not so rare cases where gentrification takes place here in munich.

oh yes, and the plate in the picture is probably 40 years old. not too much change in this very place up to now, but no forecast possible either.

these images, created while commuting in the rain, might have also fit martin storz’ always-take-the-weather project on his blog ‘the public eye’, but i decided to show them here as part of my bokeh mini-series. and for martin i will try to create a sunny weather image, given that we get such a thing in the next days.

for me these airy disks are something genuinely photographic, along with shallow dof, which can not be reasonably reproduced in painting or other arts and crafts. maybe this is the reason why i get so fascinated by those two phenomena.

and as always: click on the images to see them large in a javascript lightbox.

since i bought my first dslr in 2005 i am lusting for a 1.4/85mm lens just to indulge in my passion for shallow dof and fine bokeh. for the minolta a-mount, taken over by sony without modifications, this lens is available in zeiss brand for a zeiss price and used in a variety of minolta makes for less then half the price, but still hefty. just recently i’ve got permission from my departement of finances, but since then not a single reasonable priced specimen showed up on *bay. the strange thing now is that am not too shure anymore that i really need it. and i learned to get my airy discs by using the existing lenses, which means that i do not have to carry an additional piece of glass, which is not too bad either.

travelling home last week I was really p***ed: again the fast train from munich was late and the connecting train was gone when we arrived. such is the service of the deutsche bahn. my bad mood prevailed for quite some time, proportional to the non-facilities of the province railway station that freilassing is. it was late, a thunderstorm was coming and i had to carry some things so the hands were not free for the camera.

after a while my better side prevailed and i managed to get some shots of the trains in the upcoming storm as well as the fellow victims in this inhospitable location.

and when that guy on the next platform started his wheelies in the dry zone under the roof, just stopping before he got out into the rain, i was fascinated enough to forget about my anger and switch my camera to those fine iso 6400, not fast enough to stop his motion but sufficient for panning.

if you think ‘what a antagonism, yesterday traditional costumes and today such a urban scenery’ then you are right. but life in bavaria can be like this. my hometown with 18.000 inhabitants is just 2 train hours away from munich with its 1.3 millions, of which 30% have a migration background.

and whilst i do enjoy to live in the middle of such opposing lifestyles, it is also true that i belong neither here nor there: in the city miss the smell of the clean countryside air, but there i feel sometimes oppressed by a certain know-it-all and we-don’t-need-all-this attitude. so teleworking and commuting at the moment gives me the best of both worlds.

this photo i took already in june, but only now, reading hans-michael koetzle’s “photo icons” and the chapter about louis jacques mande daguerre’s image “boulevard du temple” (1838) i noticed the stunning similarity in the poses. you can find a reproduction of this image on the website of timm starl.

carl weese made me rethink my decision to convert my hometown monstrosities to black and white. yep – the german saying that someone has tomatoes on his/her eyes seems fit here: i was so concentrated on that wideangle effect and the dynamic lines that i just did not pay attention to the subject: overdone color to the perdition of our kids optical systems. so i will re-work my raw files and possibly re-shoot the subject.

in the meantime one of the reasons to carry my camera everywhere: the commuting train to munich is not so banal when shot in the morning light where the blue of the sky nicely complements the striking red of the waggons. and i confirm on oath that i did not touch the saturation slider.

and the morning light was so beautiful that it even caused me to drop the newspaper (anyhow bad news everywhere, thomas is so right). the world does not change if we look out of the window to pay attention to every day’s beauty, but it might give us some power to fight the big and small evils everwhere.

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.

commuting once a week to the office by public transport offers photographic opportunities (it is a burden, too – 2 hours in early morning buses/trains, well, some of you will know). carrying the camera with me every week did not really pay out, in spite of all efforts. this week i got this picture when waiting at a crossing, getting the bus driver lightened by the reflection of the headlights in the white train surface, with the dashboard lights adding some surreal glow.

technically it is more than astonishing: 5000 ISO is a sensibility we could only dream of in film days, but also beeing able to use a shutter speed of 0.4 sec (on a 16mme wideangle) without tripod, thanks to in-body-stabilisation is a great achievement. so i have to make even better use of these possibilities.

diverting from my usual techniques i used bibble to convert the raw file. the current 4.1 version lacks the wonderful region tools of lightzone, but has a much better noise reduction on noise ninja basis. and, it is available for linux.