spring2life take2

Munich, Bavaria

Munich, Bavaria

Munich Train Station

Commuting by train offers time for reading or programming, but unlike traveling by car, only limited occasions for photography. Nevertheless, approaching the station means not only packing book and/or laptop, but also unpacking the camera for the 5 minutes walk to the office. When asked beforehand I would have negated that this could mean any quality time for photography, but experience has taught me different – quite a number of keepers resulted from these short walks on always the same path.

Freilassing, Bavaria

Freilassing is a small town on the German-Austrian border, having grown fast between the World Wars as a significant crossing of railway lines along and cross the border. I sometimes go there for shopping, but more often than not my stay is compulsory due to some hickups in the railway system (percentually small, but often annoying none the less). One hour delay gives a good timeframe to explore at least the surroundings of the station. When the results are good, the annoyance subsides somewhat…

Freilassing, Bavaria

Freilassing, Bavaria

I made my camera sweeten the annoyance of a one-hour delay. Not that I am inflexible, but after almost 10h of working, a train delay is among the least welcome events.

Hammerau, Bavaria

Update: Following a conversation with Carl Weese, I created a new version of the first image, removing partially the color cast in the first image. To the right is the version posted originally, for comparison.

Only one day later, commuting home, the scenery had changed completely, when rain had washed away all romantic assets.

Piding, Bavaria

Munich, Germany

Freilassing, Bavaria

Commuting this morning I saw a companion piece for Tyler Monson’s “Coach”.

Train Station, Munich

Department of Health and Environment, Munich

Train Station, Munich

Commuting delights, visual.

Meets in a certain sense what Joel Meyerowitz states in his foreword interview to ‘Cape Light’ here, which I found through the ‘Landscapist’.

After that switch back from the Business Boosting Time aka. DST, during the week a lot of my photography has to happen in the dark hours. It took me a long time to become content with the amount of noise in high iso images (this one was taken with ISO 1600), and it seems that now the manufactures have greatly improved the sensors also of the APS-C cameras. But the available improvements of the new models don’t trigger any purchase reflexes any more. What might be interesting would be a better high-eyepoint viewfinder and a more discerning focusing screen – both of it are not part of the feature set of any of the new models. Good for me, as there’s no reason for in-depth considerations or even purchase decisions.

Instead I continue to always carry my camera and try to submerse into a state where seeing doesn’t get interrupted by gear.

New chances can be triggered by railway construction works, too: As “my” train is canceled for some weeks, I had to get up earlier, only to find a familiar place in new light. I don’t know what makes the Deutsche Bahn (German Railways) do rent their emptied, service-deprived stations preferably to gambling saloons (my guess: money, what else), but this seems business seems to be booming in a way that the time slot for cleaning is somewhere around 5 in the morning. So the Casino’s door was open and their primary tool was there on display. For everybody to learn, but then, the ability to learn is maybe not the strong point of their customers.

The walk home after a long day commuting to the office brought and unexpected picture: Progressing autumn had coloured the Gingko tree’s leaves yellow, the spotlight from below enhanced it and the night sky had just the right brightness as a contrast.

However it did not meet me unexpected: I had already seen other trees in different states of foliage, with different lights and different states of the evening sky, but in spite of carrying the camera I did not bother with making an image – in the viewfinder, the scenery did not form an image.

This process of deciding when to try an image, of estimating the pictoral power of the elements is still a mysterium to me. And while I am intently following the Landscapist’s series of posts On Seeing, I have still not found even a thread that would allow to untangle that mysterium. Instead I have decided to practise, not letting the theoretical discussion completely fall below the horizon, instead hoping for something like a critical mass that would suddenly bring a great leap in the process of understanding.

I do know this procedure from my day job as GIS analyst/programmer, where I sometimes spent days on a single problem, then got diverted, read and gained knowledge and practice by doing, and suddenly the first problem got resolved – not by determined analysis, but by a broad gain of knowlege and skill.

So I keep my fingers crossed that this works in photography in a similar way.

For platform furnishing only the most robust plants are suitable. Here a Pine tree, a Box bush and Olibanum (?) have to suffer for the assumed desideratum of the passengers to see some green.

Found this just stepping out of the tramway, before entering the office. It seems there are certain predispositions where I just see. Now if I could only find the switch or trigger for it…

Commuting again, while the summer weather takes a break to make place for rain showers and cold temperatures around 13°C in the morning (that’s 55°F for you folks outside the metric system). My self chosen lens diet – only the wideangle – is not a diet in the sense of restriction, instead reveals constantly new images to me. And meanwhile I even manage to create shallow DoF frames – it’s all a question of moving near enough.

The view of a cello, especially in such a somewhat surreal situation, always reminds me of the Swiss author and cabaret performer Franz Hohler, who used to accompagny his performances with his cello. The English wikipedia article unfortunately is not more than a stub, and even Amazon doesn’t list any books available in English. At least one translated story title I found, “The Little Scottish Ghost”, and if you could find this, it would make up for a wonderful introduction into his whimsical humour.

The weather here on the northern slope of the Alps reminds me a bit of what Paul Maxim wrote not long ago about the weather in the Rochester area. What we have at the moment is more like a late winter with night temperatures below 10°C and 15°C during the day – only the intensive green of the flora is a proof for the early summer.

Taking the train for commuting at least means a relaxed situation without confrontation with testosterone-loaded freedom-on-the-highway seekers, given the waggon’s airspace doesn’t get completely pervaded by the busy chit-chat of students on a school trip. The extended living room, that is so often projected into a car, *can* be a major motivation. That it’s not a sustainable one can easily be blocked out.

On the way back into 19th century, the central railway system of Germany now gets de-centralized and in the regions the railway public transport is handled by smaller, sometimes county based companies. This can have a positive side-effect like those brand new suburban cars, but also results in some weird occurences: Completely to the surprise of this local railway company, the “Berchtesgadener Land Bahn”, the alps were erected quasi overnight, and for monthes those new cars had to remain unused until a special permit to use them on mountain tracks could be obtained. Of course neither the railway company nor the central administration for railway security was responsible… But now the new system is working, the staff is friendly and competent, and whilst de-centralization and competetion didn’t result yet in lower prices (they should, isn’t it? That’s why de-centralisation and competition are introduced.), at least service didn’t downgrade

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

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.