spring2life take2

Krk, Croatia

Among the campers you find all kinds of preferences, sometimes also for the not so obvious things like this big wall clock. The image seem simple, however it took me to attempts to get enough evening sky and details in the lighted areas, and in the end I had to resort to a layer to intensify and darken a great part of the sky – plus partial noise reduction, as all this tweaking resulted in color noise coming up out of the blue.

Krk, Croatia

Not that the LX3 would be *the* camera I chose for low-light work, but it is possible. I truly despise public relation monsters like the MEGA O.I.S. name that Panasonic gave the image stabilisation mechanism, but I have to state that it works: a quarter of a second handheld yielding in sufficient sharpness for sure is fine.

Krk, Croatia

Omišalj, Croatia

Krk, Croatia

Krk, Croatia

Krk, Croatia

I know it’s a bad thing to spy at people through a long lens – Tyler, you know, this girlwatcher type – and I won’t repeat it in the next time. But when framing this image I mainly saw the size proportions of person and tires and that round/square contrast. Only afterwards on the screen I discovered the tired or annoyed expression of the man.

Krk, Croatia

On my last day in Krk there was an occasion to photograph reflections in the harbour, as the winds had pushed all dirt into a remote corner of the basin. The image above stood out during the first culling, the others remain to be inspected more thoroughly. The colourful dots are the reflection of a Croation flag (red, blue, white) attached to of the stays on a sailing boat.

This reflection series was made with long focal lengths, something I do very rarely meanwhile, even though a tele zoom was the first acquisition after the purchase of the DSLR – maybe a remnant of pubertary reflexes.

Krk, Croatia

After a long trip back home and a good night’s sleep I finally managed to update the blog: Here are the September wallpapers for your kind perusal. Maybe they can keep the feeling and smell of summer alive into Autumn.

Krk, Croatia

Just in time I managed to finish and upload my SoFoBoMo 2011 photobook, aptly titled Conditioned Krk for the countless air condition units it features. Those creepers have been subjects of a number of pictures I posted from Krk, and this year I’ve used the opportunity of SoFoBoMo’s fuzzy month and my summer holidays to build a book of these visual contaminants.

Oh well, I shouldn’t complain that much, living in a moderate climate most of times. Maybe some people of Krk take my visual notes and draw their own conclusion about how to devise their environment.

My special thanks go to Eric Jeschke for providing the LaTex sources of his own 2009 photo book under a Gnu Public License, which allowed me to achieve a compact web pdf in a very fast way, and at the same time creating a blurbable high-res pdf as well.

Update: The pdf is now available from the books section of this website as well.

Punat, Krk

Krk, Croatia

This week, one of Germany’s greatest humorists has died. The man on the beach is reading the most disreputable German boulevard newspaper ‘Bild’ (my keyboard cringed when I typed the word ‘newspaper’ in this connotation), which is famous for its large-letter black and red titlepage, with the sad news shouted at the reader.

Krk, Croatia

Krk, Croatia

For an old seafarer tribe as the people from the island of Krk, the boat certainly was as dear as cars are now. So it’s not astonishing to see normal boats, not the leasure type, next to many houses.

Krk, Croatia

Krk, Croatia

Omišalj, Krk

I am more than happy that Police Chief Jim McDonnell (via conscientious) is not on duty in Omišalj. I am certainly not sure about the artistic value of the image above, but getting detained for it certainly would be a draconic measure. But with long hair and moustache, I might well qualify for a potential terrorist.

Oh America, how have you come down! Once it was an earmark of dictatoric regimes to go after people photographing clearly defined subjects of assumed strategic value – Yugoslavia, from which my current residence in Croatia stems off, was known for such rules. But making an assumed non-artistic value the criterion deciding over the harassment of a photographer is certainly a new quality in the erosion of those very Civil Rights for which the United States of America were rightly admired.

Krk, Croatia

The Kamplin is the main place next to the Bishop’s church in the town of Krk, and in the summer evenings visited by big numbers of tourists. In the mornings usually it’s quiet (and clean), good to visit when the shadows are still long.

Krk, Krk

Having fallen in love with the square format – the LX3 helped a lot as it offers it as a native format – I continue using it under much more difficult circumstances with the DSLR. There are two marks for the square in the viewfinder, visible but not really helpful when it comes to aligning lines with the frame borders or corners. Currently I lean towards slack framing, offering enough leeway to position a rectangular frame during postprocessing, but this is
a not really satisfying as it is quite imprecise. And I loose a bit the feeling for the image when not beeing able to use the SLR viewfinder as the tool it was meant for. Given that my DSLR in many other aspects allows to achieve fine results, an adjustable and configurable viewfinder (together with a much better rendering of shallow DoF) is at the top of an imaginary wish list.

Krk, Croatia

Omišalj, Krk

What happened in Norway simply leaves me speechless. As Juha I have daughters in the age where they go to summer camps, so I can’t simply push aside that terror. And reminiscences of 9.11. come back, when our foster son was so lucky to be stuck in a traffic jam instead of visiting as planned the twin towers on that day.

What a denial of all values of humanity, what an insane perversion of religion believing that mass murder could be a necessary action. It is frightening to see how close the most adverse ideologies are again in the choice of their means. My heart is with all humans having to mourn the loss of a beloved.

Today’s image was made in Omišalj, in the north of the island of Krk. It is the leading image of a small gallery of black and white images that you can find here. And it’s also the last of this batch of Krk images.

Krk, Croatia

Krk, Croatia

Omisalj, Krk

Lukobran, Krk

Krk, Croatia

Krk, Croatia

Jezevac, Krk

Silo, Krk

Silo, Krk

Krk, Croatia

Jezevac, Krk

Jezevac, Krk

In spite of the danger of getting this image labeled as just another “marine painting”, I do enjoy the shades of grey and subtle colors. The bibble5 raw converter is a wonderful tool for me when it comes to carefully nuancing and enhancing without overdoing such color scales. Also the camera, a beaten Sony A700, seems to be good in delivering this kind of tonalities, whereas in the realm of saturated colors at least I am not overly happy with it. But it could be that my non-preference for very vivid images influences my evaluation here.

Omisalj, Croatia

Jezevac, Krk

Harbour, Krk

Post Office, Krk

Bus Terminal, Krk

Krk, Croatia

Krk, Croatia

Krk, Croatia

Krk, Croatia

Krk, Croatia

Krk, Croatia

Update: “It was a challenging situation for all involved”– Home by George Saunders.
Thanks, Martina!

Dedicated to Martina of blackandwhitecolors. She’d definitely come up with a completely unexpected quote from the book she is reading.

Krk, Croatia

Krk Harbour

Here are the Wallpapers for July 2011, downloadable as usual from the wallpapers page. I had experimented with those harbour water reflections already last year, but found a different brightness distribution this year, as the boats “park” now in a different order.

Krk, Croatia

Krk, Croatia

It certainly looks somewhat sterile, and I don’t remember having seen any signs of inhabitants here.

Krk, Croatia

Krk, Croatia

Krk, Croatia

I really have doubts if the fish would buy this…

Krk, Croatia

Having returned from my holidays, there are still some Krk images I’d like to share with you.

Krk, Croatia

Omisalj, Kroatia

Omisalj, Croatia

Krk, Croatia

Krk, Croatia

Krk, Croatia

Krk, Croatia

Bay of Krk, Croatia

Bay of Krk, Croatia

Krk, Croatia

Krk, Croatia

Silo, Krk

Silo, Croatia

Silo, Croatia

Silo, Croatia

Jezevac, Krk

Krk, Croatia

Konzum parking, Krk

Waiting for the shoppers to return, I tried some framings including the mirror, when suddenly the view changed and the lady’s silhouette added some “drama”. Basically Carl Weese’s recipe: Having an image 90% ready and wait for something that comes and completes the composition.

Kvarner Bay, Croatia

Wonderfully overcast sky – something I had feared in earlier days, associating it with dull pictures (which I made inevitably, even if only to fulfill prejudice) – presented me that graceful transition of sea into sky. I hope I didn’t miss too many dust spots. Back at home I will try to get it printed. As I have a lab that doesn’t “improve” the files you send, it might come out pretty well.

Krk, Croatia

Alas, no female silhouette available here. Robert Adams image of that brick house Denver 412. I tried to find the image on the internet, but was not lucky.

Shipyard, Krk

Andreas certainly is right: once you learn the square, it comes natural. This again was made with the SLR.

Krk, Croatia

Until I had bought the LX3, I had felt quite handicapped when trying to compose square images without any guidelines in the viewfinder. As I feel a certain affinity for that aspect ratio, most images with the LX3 I created in that mode. In the bright mediterranean light, the LX3 without EVF is no joy to use, so without any resentments the DSLR again became my tool of choice. And, unexpectedly, now I am much better in composing the image into the square. I admit, precision is sometimes still lacking, but framing a tiny bit looser and precisely cropping on the computer screen helps a lot. Anyhow, the viewfinder is not 100% precise, so making use of sometimes unexpected slack is nothing new for me.

Krk, Croatia

Krk, Croatia

I just had spotted the flower pots on the AC units placed on those balcony remnants, when…

Krk, Croatia

Using the SLR for street photography is always somewhat frightening, as the shutter sound is *loud* when heared from near. I hope that my subjects know that noise diminuishes with the square of the distance.

Krk, Croatia

The main ingredients for successful holidays are: mainly blue sky and reasonably high temperatures, bars and coffee shops, and not to many tourists (myself excluded, of course). Krk at pentecost offers all this, adding pre-roman, roman and venetian walls and houses plus excellent seafood. Content? Well, almost. My eyes are a bit restless, trying to look beyond the known.

The title for this image came up as a sudden association, but when searching for it, it turned out that I must have heard of or seen the masterpiece and originator of that title: Hokusai’s woodblock print of the series “Thirty-Six Views of Mt. Fuji”, and the later adaption by Jeff Wall. Just see them here on the website of Tate Modern.

So the title is not original, but it’s matching well the image, which I enjoy very much because of its impromptu character, where small details like the carpet corners support that feeling of a sudden and irrevocable departure. And I chose this image to close the Krk series for this year. Expect to find now images from European sceneries of late summer and autumn here in this blog.

Oh yes, and the blog got a new feature: In the menu below the title you’ll now find a link to the “Image Mosaic”: Spread over 12+ pages there is just a compendium of most of the images published on spring2life. The singular images can be enlarged – as all images here – and the new Highslide-Javascript not only adapts to the screen size but also allows to play a slideshow. Enjoy.

Same harbour, different day, different direction of view. What is a nice and harmless (and not so enthusiasting) scenery nonetheless permanently photographed on other days, gets a nice twist when the weather threatens with a storm front.

I am still not sure if this is part of the official vocabulary or just an individual extension.

This is in a certain way a sentimental post: The Renault 4, or R4 as it was commonly called, was our first car, back in 1983. A robust vehicle with plenty of room for frequently moving students, a moderate appetite for the always expensive gasoline, and plenty of old fashioned technique that allowed (and needed) do-it-yourself repairs. The R4 was a successful vehicle with almost 10 millions sold, and production was stopped only after more than 30 years, with the last factories in Europe destroyed in the war on the Balkans. But in the former Yugoslavian states there are still a number of this cars earning their daily gas, appreciated for pretty much the same virtues that German students sought after, 30 years ago.

That this is a HDR image, converted under Linux with a lot of black magic, scripts, command line and all that, is certainly not visible. But I do like it exactly for this reason.

Another wrapped car on the camping site in Krk.

The corrosive qualities of the permanent and salty winds is reason for a number of car owners to wrap their most precious asset in protective foils. Of course the brand – reason for the pride of ownership – should remain visible

<p>Low morning sun and a narrow alley constitute pretty good ingredients for interesting sights. Sometimes all I need is a bit of leasure time and (after a morning cappuccino) just an alert eye.</p>

I just wanted to give you some more time to guess what it is .

Have a good start into the new week!

The subdued colors attracted me here, and the contrast of the old walls and the new Daimler. The barred windows belong to the Franziskan Monastery in Krk.

A second take on the shore plants in Krk. For both images I used the Sony 70-300G lens, the first one was taken with the maximum focal length and widest open f-stop of 5.6. The soft rendering of the out-of-focus areas combined with the perfect maximum sharpness I love very much in this lens.

Other than that my relationship with it is somewhat plurivalent: Since my first steps in photography I am in love with the compressed perspective of tele lenses, and the first lens I always got with every SLR was a tele or tele zoom. But since going digital I find myself to use it less and less, having discovered the possibilities (and challenges) of wideangles at or below 24 mme. So I carry the 70-300 less often, therefore use it less often. But when I do, I am very often astonished about the fine image that it allows me to capture.

I tried this subject with different light situations until I was happy with morning striplight that left the rocks in the shadows and deepened the black of the cracks.

The September wallpapers are available for downlad from here.

Just couldn’t resist the quote… as well as this wonderful combination of colors, pose and expression. I loathe those usual beach snaps, so you rarely will find me with a camera there (if at all, that is). But there are often some small details to record and remember, especially when the light gets softer and warmer late in the afternoon.

This post goes with special regards to Earl, who featured his morning coffee spot here! The coffee shop you see above is the eldest in the town of Krk, already mentioned in documents of 1763, thus the name. It has recently been revamped and for sure sports a fine place for an early morning cappuccino, especially when the crowd is still sleeping: They open at 07:00 and in the tourist season close only well past midnight. The coffee is as good as it can get, and leaning on a 500+ years old wall can give a special feeling.

The tourists are catered in shops everywhere, in shops with souvenirs of all kinds. But sometimes they have strange things in their displays!

Found in the alleys of Krk: The ingredients of this image come from a long stretch of time. The oldest for sure are the cobblestones, next comes the fountain, now deprived of the red communist star (visible here or here), and the youngest is probably the ATB. And me? I do enjoy the moment and the light.

Today was my last morning in Krk, and after my morning cappuccino in the harbour I found those two buoys absorbed in their tête-à-tête, but closely guarded by the port entrance light house.

The drive home was not so much fun then (Carl: my inner trucker seems to be miles away), but coming home was a joy. Relaxed (and somewhat deprived from, say, a fast internet connection) it is of course easy to indulge in things that were just commonplace before the holidays. Tomorrow I will have a look at the backlog of too many unread posts.

Krk suffers as all tourist locations under the extreme oscillation of population. Permanent jobs are quite rare, and a lot of commuting traffic (or emigration) the inevitable consequence. But a small number of local companies tries to make use of the location, combining quarry stone houses on roman foundations and venetian sprinkles with newest technologies. And, as I found out just now, the center of Krk with its numerous caffés is a free WiFi zone.

Steep shadows under the wires and ACs provide a nic(h)e playground for the viewer. Not that I am particularly fond of this decoration of a medieval town, but then: this is life, and optically interesting.

Many of the houses in Krk are 500 years or even older. The arc in the first floor in this example can well be from Venetian times – the electrical wiring is definitely more recent, and indispensable for the energy hunger that is constantly growing. But as you can see to the right, this will be only an intermediary solution: preparations for underground cables are well under way in the old cobblestone alleys. But up to then, the open wires will provide interesting patterns in the sky.

The ubiquitous growing of AC units on the facades as well as the – connected – plein air electric wiring became the main fields of interest during my wanderings through the Krk alleys. The images need some editing and selecting, so I have postponed the creation of some galleries until I am back home.

But then, I will also order as many stocks as possible of mediterranean energy companies and public utilities: this seems to be an enormously growing market, and if we all have to suffer under a climate change, I do at least want to have my share (sic!) of it.