spring2life take2

Never leave the house without the camera – and never hurry. I was sent on a mission to capture some pastries for sunday afternoon and did hide the camera well to avoid admonishments re. loitering et. al. And after business I saw this board, which I have probably passed hundreds of times, always in the car, bound for something important. Stop I did this time, got the 25+ years old minolta tele zoom lens (the famous beercan), which allowed me to stand in safety and cover the distance over the street and get just the right crop. Sunday saved.

Hard to believe, but this year’s weather for the photowalk was even more wet than last year’s. The palm trees (planted in pots and brought into the streets by the spa administration, only to pretend a mediterranean climate) were dripping with rain. At least I was lucky having brought my own model (to the right). Other than that a fine time was having had by all, and plans were made for next year, maybe sporting a wet suit and fins then. So I will save my money for an underwater housing for the camera.

Can’t resist to answer Tyler Monson’s duplicities in “American View”, which gave me such a lasting smile today.

That late summer look was achieved by some curves magic in bibble5.

With temperatures up to 37°C the brass band really had a hard job: Marching and playing was severely aggravated by the traditional costumes. Where the man have to suffer under hats with eagle dawns, the women are sweating under long black skirts.

The traditional wishes for the newly wedded couple were given in form of a poem, recited by a five years old relative in autochthonous idiom. A pleasure both to hear and see.

After having returned from church, again marching behind the brass band, and before entering the inn for the meal, a traditional “Burschenrennen” – a race of the unmarried young men – was held. The price for the winner was a dance with the bride.

As I was kind of backup-photographer at this wedding, I had time and freedom enough to get the “different” frames. It was interesting to see how far I could get without flash. Of course in the church I had the advantage of an overall bright situation, allowing to use a long tele zoom to pick out details without interfering, yet the limitations in form of shadow noise became clearly visible in the darker parts of the church.

Interrupting the merely started series from the Country Wedding, I want to announce the two additions in the galleries section: “Wrapped Trailers”, a find from this year on the island of Krk, Croatia, and “Salzburg From Above”, the result of excursions on the Kapuzinerberg in Salzburg, Austria.

The Wedding Series will continue tomorrow.

A country wedding here in Bavaria was and is a day-long event. Family and guests meet well before church for a drink and maybe a soup, the brass band starts playing, and after a while the festive procession of 150+ people walks together towards the decorated church.

The only activity I was able to perform to day was a bit of resting in the shadow, reading a book. So this is a hat shot, summarizing this hot summer day.

And this is one of the rare occasions I use shoot/shot in context with photography – for me it’s a much too belligerent term to be used in the context of photography, especially the ‘head shot’. Only this time I didn’t want to pass on the pun. Of course having been socialised in a continent that bans all kind of arms from private property (sport and hunting being the only exemptions) has formed my mindset. That a google search for +”head shot” +photo results in more than 500.000 hits shows however that my position in this regard is clearly the one of a minority.

The third Worldwide Photowalk takes place on July 24^th, 2010. Following up last year’s event, I will again lead a photowalk in my hometown, Bad Reichenhall – come rain or come shine. 2009 we had plenty of fun in plenty of rain, so I am optimistic that the first part of the term will be the same, regardless of the weather.

If you are interested in joining us, just subscribe here: http://worldwidephotowalk.com/walk/bad-reichenhall-by-deutschland-2/.

Mikroszkóp Színpad is a theater in Budapest. While my wideangle zoom gets only rarely exercise, sometimes it proves to be a real asset. But the drawback of using it only rarely is, that I sometimes forget the basics, like in this case: The fastest f-stop was definitely an inconsiderate (non-)choice and introduced a lot of avoidable blurriness into the image. This is a major problem, as the lens is de-centered and the left side of the image is considerably softer than the right side. Still – point of view/perspective and dynamics make this image a keeper for me.

In her comment to the last post, Martina pointed at the attempts of the people to make their environment more homely. This was probably the motivation, too, to set up this bird’s house in the front yard just 50m away from the scenery with the flower pots.

But in times of ubiquitous home improvement stores, this intended idyll can also be realised in the form of cast concrete lambs under geranium plants.

Strolling through one of the new housing estates here, I came across this scenery. It looks like the flowers in the pot will need a lot of manure and water to cope with these large floor and wall spaces.

Taking up the postings of Carl Weese and Tyler Monson earlier that day.

Having run errands for/with the family the last days forces me to resort to another image of the Wimbach Canyon, already subject of two postings in the last week. As Thomas had stated correctly: “One of those ever-greens”. And as long as it works, I don’t feel guilty, even if the Wimbach cascades are not of world class renown.

Images with two centers of interests have have to fight the problem of diverting the attention of the viewers focus. I hope the staging here is sufficient to give enought attraction to the nearer cascade before the gaze wanders to the bright spot in the background – and hopefully comes back. It’s a risk, but then it probably also is Robert Frost’s “road less traveled”.

The Wimbach (-bach is the german word for creek) brings the waters down from Mt. Watzmann, which has the most prominent shape of the mountains here in the Berchtesgadener Land. The creek itself runs through a short canyon, offering cascades of all sorts and in all lighting situations. Now in spring time they are abundant, and around every corner you find a new situation – good for my search for symbolic pictures of moving waters.

Forcedly spending some time at the fairground (too noisy, too many too young kids and too much alcohol around), I exercised my 85mm lens, trying to find out the right compression for that cacophonia of light and movement and sound. It was only when editing the images that I found that face included in all the screaming bulbs, words and signs. It seems I was prepared for the luck.

I have certainly a faible for forests. Of course you don’t find many natural forests over her outside of the national parks. What I do find interesting in those normal forests, owned by either farmers or the government, are those markings and boards, warnings or direction signs, which, once applied, are left decaying when they are not needed any more

Only some steps and minutes away from the last image I found this scenery. A subtle change in light directionality the selection of silhouetting branches makes quite a differance. I guess those images will make up for a nice diptych.

Evening light helped a lot to increase the magic of “The Paradise”, and my trusty tripod was absolutely necessary, as the light level dropped really fast due to the overcast sky. Even in-camera-stabilisation did find its limits there. Focusing was a bit difficult as I didn’t want to include too much background detail, but shallow depth-of-field rendered parts of the foreground unsharp. Well, there is no tilt-shift lens in my bag, so I had to take what was available.

A smalll evening photo walk with the local photographers group (not to confound with the duck’s camera club) gave some nice results despite of the grey weather and early dusk. Unexpectedly the air was almost quiet, greatly helping with the slow shutter speeds. The place is a local backwater, commonly denominated “The Paradise”. As the state road runs nearby, it is a noisy paradise however. But you don’t hear it in the photographs anyway.

I know I am late, but here are May Wallpapers.

Approaching the venue of the traditional maypole erection ceremony, I passed this hat on a pole. But I did not greet it…

A Westend street scenery. I probably can count myself lucky for not having been accused being a stalker, re-using that red parka as a welcome color element.

Trying to find a balance between beauty and banality, furtheron trying to fight against deadly repetition, I fear I have lost and have to face defeat: I admit having used the saturation slider as nature’s colors were not satisfying my need for overwhelming warmth and tenderness.
And to add to this crime, I have succumbed to the sin of posting several images of the same subject, as I did not succeed in creating a single ‘right’ one that would include all aspects I wanted to capture.

But I am a repentless sinner, keeping to the great Martin Luther, who advised his followers: “sin courageously and believe even more courageously” (pecca fortiter, crede fortior). And who knows, maybe he would plant a Magnolia tree today.

The village of Anger is said to be the most beautiful on in Bavaria. Taking into account that this statement was made by King Ludwig I of Bavaria (Ludwig II was the slightly unhinged one, playing with fairy tale castles) and that the number of villages in Bavaria is quite big, this really means some excellency. Of course the king didn’t see the subvillage now spreading out over the northern slopes of Anger (and up to now I feared for the sanity of my lens and therefore avoided to photograph it), but landscape and situation can be still beautiful. Ok, still in its denotation as an adjective is incorrect again as the highway passes the village just some 100m away. Oh well, have a look at the church of Anger maybe here in this post. Worth a visit, in spite of all.

The weather is as it has to be expected in April: Rapidly changing from really hot in the sun to rainfall, and in the morning the rain can even be mixed with snowflakes. The early blossoms have to face all this, and the beautiful Forsythia will probably wither soon and change their proud yellow against a dying brown.

Wordless Thursday today. Excuse and Enjoy.

The weather was undecided, and so is the season just 100 altitude meters above our hometown: The grass is definitely taking up colors, the buds of the trees  are developing, yet not bursting and the sun was warmer, but not yet strong. All in all very pleasant, seducing to play with subtle forms and colors.

Bibble5′s Provia film curve supported the impression I wanted to transport here.

Easter Sunday was almost as wet as expected, and so eggs and kids had to be kept in the flat. To be honest, I didn’t mind, because after mass at 05:00 my inclination for activties was pretty low.

Taken during today’s Good Friday stroll. We all have deserved the holidays, a kind of exhaustion is visible even in the kids. But sun and warm weather should be good recovery media.

The rain today even got interspersed with snowflakes, and so it was everything else but springtime feeling. The coffee tables outside took a break, and so I will do.

A sufficiently high Cetirizin-level made me somewhat airy, and so I approached the enemy armed to the teeth with my 28/1.8 lens. And even the enemy has it’s beautiful sides, inviting golden colors, soft texture and so on. BUT it will remain the enemy as hazel and friends start to torture me sometimes as early as January, and force me to gulp down Cetirizin, making me loose sense of taste and smell, making me depressive or agressive or both.

Today was confirmation celebration, and of course all confirmands had to pose on the stairs of our church for the obligatory group photo done by the local photographer. Not beeing pressed for high quality or official results, I had my fun with all those family members that crowded and pointed and shot like mad.

Only when reviewing the image I discovered that the official collar bands of the lutheran priests made it easy to spot them even when thoroughly blurred.

Running errands the whole day, occasions for photography were rare, but sufficient for one spring image: at least in the shop displays we are offered a colorful spring. In the wild circumstances are different with night temperatures down to 2°C and tulips still hiding in the earth. Snowdrops are abundant, as are Corydalis (I didn’t find a translation for ‘Lerchensporn’) and, in some places, daffodils. The intensive pink at the moment still has a price tag in Euros, but nature will provide it, too, in some days from now.

I was following my old passion for selective sharpness again. Focused very near, even at 16mm focal length and f3.5, a blurred background is no technical problem on an APS-C sensor. Besides the normal bibble raw conversion I applied local contrast enhancement in gimp and some selective sharpening just on the flower in the foreground.

At noon it already got really warm, but the angle of the sun is still shallow and well before sunset the intensity of light and warmth decreases fast. The forests on the mountains – here the south slope of Mt. Staufen – are still in almost the same state as in autumn, no fresh green is visible. Maybe 10 days we have until the vegetation will explode (and I will hide in the basement).

Rehearsing an instrument is not always a joyful time for a kid, and therefore the moments where the music grabs the mind and inspires the phantasy are even more precious. When this happened and she grabbed music paper and a pencil, I was happy to have the camera at hand, and even more happy to have that phantastic old 1.4/85mm lens.

I found no rational explanation why someone would care to paint a box in blue color, if this box is meant to be left on the roadside next to the forest. With more phantasy of the author of detective stories, one could probably make up a mysterious story beginning with such a blue box. For me it remains a somewhat illogical and therefore attractive combination.

Beginning of spring was grey around here, which I didn’t mind as it kept my allergy at bay. I had my own kind of fun (a weird kind as my daughters would say) with the nets covering the facade of an old building of the Saline, which is currently renovated. Those subdued colors and the fine structure grabbed my eyes, and so I found beauty in the ordinary.

Once upon a time there was a benevolent state government, distributing all the fresh money that inundated the country as a consequence of the boom years and the transition from a poor agrarian to a well-of post-industrial state, and many the towns in this stated decided to build natatoria, ice stadiums and tennis halls. It was a high time for the architects, and as the alpine region is proud of the mountains and the traditions, in our small town decor shapes of the ice stadium and the indoor pool ingested the form of the surrounding mountains and repeated them in a modern, rhythmic gesture, combining traditional wooden elements with modern metallic styling.

Alas, the costs for maintenance grew unbearable high and the modern architecture was nowhere as adapted to the climate challenges or as failure friendly as the traditional forms where (the construction of the platform roof relied on humans to clear off the snow off when a certain critical height/weight was reached). Checks on the statics were probably done incompletely, and maybe nobody wanted to tell the administration that they had to shell out millions again to keep the building safe and weather proof.

On a sad, cold, grey January day in 2006 the amount of snow on the invisibly damaged structure was too much, and only hours before the scheduled clearing could start, the roof of the ice stadium collapsed, killing 17.  Years later the artist Karl-Martin Hartmann created the cenotaph, one column for each victim. The tops of the stelae take up the shapes of the mountains – as well as of the architectural elements of the collapsed ice stadium.

I admit that I got distracted during today evening’s music school concierto. But it’s not my fault: most of the time the faces of the artists were hidden behind their music stands, so the vision-oriented parts of the brain concentrated on what was left (and fitting in the viewfinder). That’s the reason.

Winter seems to be coming through an end, but last week there was more than enough snow. What make me dig out that shot were the two trees in the front yard, so perfectly framing the entrance. The same stunning orb shape I found in the trees outside Freilassing train station (my weekly commuting hub). The red of the building’s paint here gets intensified by the low early morning sun, and whilst I usually try to keep my shadow out of the image, here I had to use it as a main element.

Although the weather indicates the end of ice and snow here – at least of the semi-permanent stuff – I want to share a last image of frozen Thumsee with you. This image create a kind of conflict in me: Usually I restrict myself to very limited operations in postprocessing, kind of the wet darkroom stuff like burning/dodging, contrast operations etc. But here the linear shape of that fallen tree was disturbed by a branch sticking out in the foreground. Without it I like the image much better, so I removed it. But this of course is a critical operation: without limits I might transplant items in the next image, or between images, and I don’t know where this would end. I guess I will stick with my old rule: If I could have removed it by hand, I can clone it out. Just sometimes a little bending of the rules…

Thumsee is the home of many grass snakes (or ring snakes, natrix natrix), which find enough protected areas to hunt for prey and raise their breed. But now of course they all rest, usually in dry caves or piles of rotten leaves. But their “gestalt” stays vivid in the shape of some old, half drowned wood.

Since some days the temperatures are slowly rising, the snow mixes with rain and the ice on the lakes and ponds changes sound and color: the sound gets powerless, foul and the color undecided, the reflectivitiy is lost. Definitely signs for the end of the winter, even if the snowdrops are still invisible in most of the places. Thumsee again is  a place for recreation, to re-gain power, to recharge and find peace.

Having packed up work, it’s almost dark again, especially when thick clouds dim the little daylight even more. This matches the winter’s cold, and it makes the warm light out of the windows even more attractive. The best time to see and capture this is twilight, just before the street lights get switched on and shift the light’s colour to a, well, less attractive one.

The building in the background to the right is the old royal spa center (featured here, here, here, last image) and here), which has the most beautiful hall here in Bad Reichenhall, used for concerts and receptions.

Photography is not in highest esteem by everybody, but the people in my surroundings are accustomed to my switching to a cyclopean life-form from time to time. And the kids, so I thought up to yesterday, should see it as perfectly normal as they know about my hobby/obsession/… But my daughter was cringing when she saw me walking behind that lady with the orange coat: she felt my behaviour was completely indecent. It seems that next time I’ll have to go alone to buy bread if I dare to take a camera with me.

This morning I had 15 minutes after having dropped wife and kids at their respective schools. Without gloves and cap, I was glad that the time was limited as my hands were numb afterwards. But I enjoyed the play of the snowflakes and the intensified effect of aerial perspective, so these 15 minutes were really prolific. Having only the “wrong” lens, the 127mme tele, was not a problem at all. The compression effect also enhanced the snowfall, and all images got kind of a similar signature look.

Today morning’s snowfall managed again to cast a spell on our garden. And besides the optical merits, it made me happy on a different level: All those hazel and alder pollen that had started to pollute (see that unison?) the air and made me announce my arrival wherever by loud and unstoppable pollinosis-induced sneezing: Now they are crushed on the ground, wetted to innoxiousness and frozen to death. Sometimes I am gleeful for a reason. It’s only that I now I just have a small grace period.

Too tired after a long working day I just want to share this image with you, found in the shut-down peat factory of Ainring.

Found in a staircase ’round here. Speaks to me as my own wanderlust is on the back burner and lives on GEO articles – the sustainable variant, albeit not a fulfilling one.

Update: The wallpapers for March 2010 are now online. Check here

In early spring the forest shows convincingly its linear structures. The verticals are self evident, consisting of the stems, but what I discovered was the complementation of those verticals by arcs, horizontal lines and diagonals. Have a look yourself at today’s small gallery here.

I beg your pardon for that abrupt change of topics, let me assure that it’s not done on purpose. It’s just the fate of a family father and hobby photographer, who tries to see and photograph the special things wherever he goes, but cannot always follow his preferences – let’s say for quiet, mystic landscapes. So today’s image was taken when I returned from running errands before leaving with the family for half a day of skiing. For training purposes I had only my camera with the 11-18mm zoom with me. Sometimes this kind of self-restriction works out well, because I just create with the tool I have instead of spending too much time thinking which tool would be even better. At least the lady on the bike would definitely have left by then.

Not that the skiing was bad (only photographically unproductive), but that scenery from the town had its charm for me.

Again from Thumsee, the magic place. The water of this lake is cold and very clear even in the summer, and now in the winter time the reflections on the jet black surface are just magical.

Just to show you what it is like in the summer. And no, I don’t really suffer from winter’s cold and snow up to now. The less so as pollen season is about to start, so I do know what I am trading in for the warmer times of spring and early summer.

Whilst downtown masquerade  is the trend of the moment, only 5km out of town you can find incredibly quiet and almost achingly pure moments, like this ice on Thumsee. I created some more images today, but in my eyes nothing could match this quiet pattern of ice, hoarfrost and water.

With this image I send special regards to Martha in Vienna, who has a special appreciation for that place.

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.

For me the necessary balance for carnival’s blithesomeness. 30 minutes out at the shore of a pond, looking up into the grey clouds and sometimes getting a glimpse of the mountains above is real recreation, alas not a very companionable one. But there is time for every event under heaven, an appointed time…

Talk about secondary benefits: the kids had their fun catching sweets thrown from the windows and the balconies into the crowd, but I was much more interested in some snaps of the disguised figures. So I did, a welcome diversion from the cold landscapes that my photographical interest usually centers on in these days.

Can’t help it: those fishermen on the ice of the Hintersee (a rare scenery in the Bavarian alps) made me immediately think of Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon in their famous movie.

The dreamy effect in the image above results from the lens wide open at f2.2. To get enough interesting detail I used the detail slider of lightzone – bibble5 currently offers no such tool. There was no toning necessary as the evening (non-)light with shutter speeds of 10 to 30s provided a natural blue toning.

This was one of the rare occasions where I dug out my summer lens, the venerable 16-80mm zoom. It renders very sharp images, but the slow f-stops from 3.5 to 4.5 make it quite unsuitable during our current short and dark winter days, especially when the sky is overcast. But here I could stop down to f8, resulting in sharp grasses and florescences but still blurred background.

First sun in the garden, and the kids love to play there. Calling them for lunch does not always result in immediate success, meaning sufficient time to take the camera for some playing with the already intensive sunlight. Different focusing distances are among the photographic means I do enjoy at the moment, together with combining images.

The lake we are heading for in the summer is now a cold, almost lifeless place (besides that one bald coot trying to destroy the reflection). But for a walk it is attractive now, even more so when light snowfall dampens the noise of the cars. Having the tripod with me instead of the fashy walking sticks meant that ground speed was lower than expected by my wife, but she managed to bear with me without suffering too noticable.

Update: Please find the wallpapers for February 2010 are online. You find them in the usual screen resolutions underhttp://markus-spring.info/wp/wallpapers/

Going through some meagre days regarding the opportunity to photograph, I take what comes along the way. This one is from the music school concerto I was attending to hear my eldest daughter play piano. Well worth the time spent as she and her colleagues, some of them contestants for a state level competition, performed really well.

Again processed with bibble5, but the image needed only lowering the vibrance a bit to get a more neutral tonality. This image for sure would work in black & white, but I like that tad of color in it.

As Europe does not know the overly strict ‘No Trespassing’ signs, sometimes you can sneak a peek behind the things without too much risk. This is basically the backside of the hallway leading to the cinema in this post.

Winter in Bavaria was traditionally the time for ‘Stubnmusi’, where farmers and farm hands and maybe the teacher of a village came together to play music – in summer everybody was busy, so there was less occasion for a get-together or (bavarian) ‘Hoagascht’. Blessed with daughters who volunteered to learn instruments, I am a lucky man, having my own ‘Musi’. Ok, not to make someone jealous: Learning instruments can be a burden for the learners and for the listeners, sometimes…

Bad Reichenhall, Old Spa Center with concert hall. 42mme and f2.2 are sufficient to blur the background.

Again from the “park with the bridge”. Currently I have not much time for photography, I hope this will change for the better when the weekend comes.

This bridge is in a park nearby. The reflections I showed you some days back. During yesterday’s grey weather with slight snowfall I needed a break, so I grabbed my camera with two primes (42 mme and 127 mme) and walked round the pond to the bridge. All postprocessing was done with the new bibble5. The more I use this just released stable version, the more convinced I am. For my quite straightforward style and sober, more reduced colors it is an excellent tool, zeroing the need for further processing in a full scale photo editor.

The newspapers and broadcasts on friday had one favorite headline: Depression ‘Daisy’ will bring blizzards with vast amounts of snow and will probably stop public life for quite some time. The German administration even advised to buy a stock of food, drinking water, flashlight batteries and so on.

Nothing happened so far, and now speculation is up why this depression was so over-estimated. Mind you, I’m not disappointed at all, as such catastrophic weather means danger and sometimes even death to the poorest or weakest, even in our rich country. But I take the grey winter weather with equanimity – no desire for images from warmer seasons like Paul Maxim – and see it as the right timeframe for “grey”, not-overly-vivid images.

click (as always) on the image to enlarge

There is a bavarian folk singer group that sings with kids for kids, and one of their songs starts with a conversation:

“What’s your favourite season?”
      ”springtime, summer, … fall … winter”
“But that’s all seasons!”
      ”Yes – what’s wrong with this?”

For a photographer’s eyes this seems to be the right attitude: In every season there is something to find, not always big spectacular things, but very often tiny gems. With snow however, it’s a bit special now: My mother-in-law was an active skier, and she still tells about downhill routes that are barely visible now: Trees have taken there place, as for decades now the winters have become shorter here and snow has become less.

I admit being a “warmist”, and so I try to savour the snow even more, knowing that those fairy-tale like winters I had as a child are past and gone. But that is only the least disagreable consequence of global warming.

Monochrome light like this I’ve met only rarely: Besides a little bluish cast, the subject matter is almost completely without color. Only when viewing the original file at pixel size I found yellowish spots in the rocks, but the rest are just shades of white and grey. Even the fir trees had lost their green over the distance. But even more intriguing for me was that curved slope that is like a curtain, opening just a partial view on the mountains in the background.

After some days without noteworthy photographic activities, I made use of the necessary shopping today to deviate my path through a nearby park. But it seems that I am either rusty or can’t yet develop the right feeling for my raw files. So I will let them stay in the folder and revisit later.

A happy new year to you all!

When wandering through darkness, with a torch in hand that only illuminates the immediate surroundings, I hope there is a scout ahead with profound knowledge, not merely driven by instincts. This is my wish for 2010.

A Merry Christmas to you all!

I know I am late, but as a father of three (one seems to have got lost) Christmas day is full of activities, carrying a harp to the church and back, decorating the tree, rehearsing Christmas carols and the nativity play ranking much higher than photography. But we had a  wonderful Christmas Evening and a very peaceful holiday today, and so every effort was worth it.

One of those occasions, where everything falls into place: The bus is late for some minutes and the person appears in the window. Now: The right lens is on the camera, the right iso already dialed in, I can just take this one shot, the bus comes and off we go. Was it pure luck? A well-meaning muse? Probable fortune is, when chance meets preparedness.

It doesn’t happen too often.

Today the kids had their Christmas concert, organised by the harp teacher in the old saline chapel of Bad Reichenhall. The outside of the building,here, does not show what an architectural gem is inside.
As I wasn’t there for photography, here only two quick glances. But I will go back there, probably at a better time of the day to get more light through the stained glass.

Whilst yesterday’s image shows a slight lack of sharpness due to the flexibly boggy soil, which moved under the tripod a tiny bit, the pine tree today is almost painfully sharp. And while I do not regret that softness in the complex dreamscape, in today’s image the sharpness I think is crucial – here that tree is almost cut out against the landscape, in my eyes emphasizing that feeling of solitude epitomized by this landscape.

While working on yesterday’s images, blue in their tint as it was what the Landscapist would label as “entre chien et loup”, I am listening to internet radio. Only recently I got addicted to this vice, after having discovered the wonderful www.wwoz.org, a blues and jazz radio station from New Orleans. Original, traditional blues is played only very rarely here on Germany’s radio stations, so I am more than grateful for this gain.

But I would also like to take up Juhaa’s comment on yesterday’s post regarding literal vs. non-literal photography. For quite a while a would have labeled the majority of my images as purely descriptive, what I would see as literal in the sense of the quote. Unfortunately neither the blog post nor the comments discuss this topic any deeper. But non-literal I would see as having a different, more fundamental statement than the subject matter would describe. And sometimes this is what I want to transport in my images. This is probably a field suitable for an “artistic statement”, but if I could describe it with words I might have become a writer, not a photographer.

Similar situation as the one that had led to that post: A birthday party, that time at MacDo’s in Freilassing. It is definitely not my cup of tea, but I try to let my kids find out themselves, and at least this gave me the opportunity to go for 90 minutes to Schönram bog again. Twilight was setting in, and one of the last images I took is this one: scarce, almost zen-like, and a stark contrast to the kind of “life” I was confronted with when returning to that burger frying place.

The human, understandable reaction answer to the fading colors of our natural surroundings are, what else, more colors. The Christmas bauble and the reflection of the raindrops play nicely with the artificial light, only the blue LED’s, replacing the small Edison-type bulbs on many trees, can get enervating because of their overly bright and cold characteristics. And while we do not suffer from the really short days Juhaa is reporting here, on overcast and rainy days there is a substantial lack of brightness. *That* makes me long for snow – it becomes brighter then – and the sudden quietness, when the freshly fallen snow dampens all the sounds.

It’s still way too warm for the season. Last week it was like an experiment of snowfall, but it ended after three hours with barely noticable sludge on the streets. But the light is grey and tints the remaining leaves and fruits during the day.

Only at night, when the Christmas decoration starts to scintillate, some more warm tones mix into the de-energizing grey and pale blue. But there still remains beauty to be discovered, and new details get revealed to be savoured. Sometimes feeling chilly I enjoy the days.

The past years have seen a constant revival of “traditional” in every context. This led to some odd results, especially ugly and hard to escape in “folksy” music. So please notice that in fashion speak men don’t really need a head – a facility for fixing the hat would suffice.

In the alpine region there are still remnants from pagan or, more friendly, pre-christian times alive. The Krampus, in some traditions escorts of Bishop Nikolaus, are connected to the rite of the 12 days or Rauhnächte, where the expulsion of ghosts was tried with dances of wild, disguised figures. December 5/6 is taken into this old tradition, and the Krampus are now played by young men, who take the chance to wear threatening masks and – behave badly, horrify bystanders etc. Maybe 10 years ago this was really bad, resulting in as many innocent victims with injuries and traumas, now it has calmed down a bit. And while the group of Krampus now is accompagnied by their own security, trying to avoid assaults, the masks of the Krampus seem to be more and more influenced by horror movies. Now that is real horror.

In these not so bright days and with strictly limited daylight time budget for photography, the nearby parks and gardens are a natural choice. Using my primes at wide open f-stops, I always have to translate the image during framing as the viewfinder does not at all show the abstract patterns that get recorded by the sensor. What was first astonishing and then annoying me, has now become a nice exercise in visualizing beyond the image in the viefinder.

And sometimes the pattern of the plant repeats in the flow of the background lines. No, I did not see this before, but I was even happier when discovering it.

A year ago we have had some really cold days even before december started, but this year it’s been a wam fall and up to now a warm winter. The situation above I do remember as a freezing cold scenery where I added just a tiny bit colder color temperature to better visualize what I had felt. But this year – it’s more a summer evening scenery than anything else.

Sorry, but this kind of Santa Claus creates stomach churning feelings – it’s more a threat than a friendly reminder of christmas-to-be. I think it qualifies for a gallery of the “most ugly chrismas decorations” that Bernd over at babaoskar shoots back was intending. I do like the less agressively painted “Nikolaus” figures, the ones that don’t look like a comic creature brought to life (and nightmare). But this one… Alas, I am quite alone.

Addendum: There’s a new set of wallpapers for december. As there was still no wintery weather, I resorted to an image from the archive: the deeply frozen pond in Schönram. The scenery is maybe a bit depressing with all the dead trees, but then, it may be just anticipate the Kopenhagen climate talk results. Only that we won’t have that much cold winters any more.

found at the entrance of a private park, open to the public.

More leaves, less words. These pictures seem to become more interesting the more time I spend editing and closely looking at them. And not only on the main subject, the leaves, but also on the way they interact with their environment. Can’t help it – I really like those images.

Today I spent some morning hours with a friend in Schönram bog. I have been at this place several times now, in different weather and light situations – like here in deep winter. Today it was warm, unexpected so in November, and besides some reflections in the tarn I found grasses and leaves to be most interesting. The rising of the sun over the horizon gave a wonderful backlight to bring out the fall colors.

In some places the Christmas decoration encroachment is really subtle, like in this window of the Spieldiener coffee house here in Bad Reichenhall. This is really cool! Ok, I admit it: I had to tune the white balance to get that effect, but so blue it meets much more my vision of a quiet and empty coffee house at night.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born in Salzburg, lived there and died in absolute poverty. Nowadays he’s one of the most important economic factors not only for Salzburg itself but also for Bad Reichenhall. Here we have one of the big producers of the ‘Mozartkugel’, a ball with different kind of chocolates inside. For a full background on this sweet stuff and also it’s not so sweet aspects, namely lawsuits, seethis wikipedia article.

To fire the business with the tourists, of course the Cafe Reber has a statue of W.A. Mozart as well as his sister Nannerl in their inner courtyard. Mozart himself is placed under a giant Mozartkugel, which in this way looks more as a menace than a temptation.

The only remaining cinema of Bad Reichenhall – when I came there first, there were three of them.

November is in Germany also called ‘month of the dead’. The grey, cold weather, lack of daylight, falling of the leaves, all this is usually associated with death. And yes, during spring or midsummer, I would probably not have had the idea to capture the special mood of a cemetery, but now in November I did. The urn graves section of our cemetary was extended recently, and in a matching and harmonic way, as I think. Today’s images are from this part of the cemetary. Again I think, the wide open f-stop adds to the mood, to the vibrations of the image.

The Stihl sound is quite different from the steel guitar sound, despite of similar sounds of the words. The first one is giving these days an almoust continous concerto. It’s end is not yet foreseeable as the trees still have good stock of leaves to distribute.

Oh, and if you wont to see wonderful portrait of a single leaf, hurry to head over to the Capture this blog of Laurie Jackson. Definitely worth a look!

I still can’t get enough of my 85mm lens – after years with zooms in the f3.5 upwards speed class, beeing able to sharply differentiate by focus and to include informative background without letting it get too prominent is a welcome experience. And it leaves me wondering why lenses like this have become so rare and consequently expensive, if available at all. In the good old film days, when the Mamas and Papas sang “All the leaves are brown”, those f1,8, f1.4 50mm lenses became popular – and cheap. They were the bread and butter lenses, and some of them were of outstanding optical quality. For the DSLRs building a f1.4 50mm lens should not have become more difficult, on the contrary: the smaller image area for an APS-C sensor should have made it possible to produce smaller and cheaper lenses with the same quality. But instead the zoom fever set in, and part of the high-iso discussion we see now, is fired by the low speed of the lenses.

And fast primes, if we can get them, sell for mid- to really high prices. Only for those brands that did not see major changes in the lens mount, the 2nd hand market offers alternatives.

An evening hike, a bit away from the wanderers’ tracks, invited me into the brushwood. It was dark, cold, humid, and a nice smell of funghi (mostly decaying already) in the air, but not until turning around and searching my way back I found something suitable for an image: a flame like beech, gleaming in red and yellow, and impressive against the blue evening light and the dark-greenish fir twigs.

Wandering along some paths not that frequented any more I came along that bench which seems to be quite advanced on its way back into a primordial level in nature’s circuit. The more frequent guests here are probably chipmunks and birds for whom the capacity of the wooden boards should still be sufficient.

The dark colors of the evening light were quite challenging again, and to get that dark mood back into the image I finally resorted to a vignetting-like mask in lightzone. For quite a while I hadn’t used this program any more, but here the application of the relight tool to carefully improve the detail structures in the leaves gave me the results I wanted. And as this image was made with a tripod, the sophisticated noise reduction of bibble was not necessary.

My hometown accomodates a huge number of guests during the summer, but now things get more and more quiet: the fountains are covered, chairs moved out of the pedestrian area, an icecream parlour is changed into a lebkuchen sales point. Luckily enough christmas decoration is almost non-existing yet, but that’s probably a grace period to be measured in days only.

After a long dry period now autumn rain calls the shots. Here in Bad Reichenhall lmost all fountains are switched off and covered by now, with the ones in the spa gardens as lonely exception. But the water doesn’t spray in the fountain any more, instead cold raindrops make strolling a different experience.

The gold of the maple leaves slowly starts to fade, and sometimes it seems as if this cold and this humidity, that reinforces the felt coldness, also affects the passers-by – head between shoulders, viewing straight ahead now everybody tries to minimize the time she spends outside of buildings. Winter doesn’t seem to be far anymore.

That wonderglass I unwrapped yesterday of course stayed on the camera for quite some time – to be honest, it still stays. I was longing such a long time for that shallow DoF that I guess it will take some time until that deprivation is compensated for. I was using zoom lenses almost exclusively for the last 4 years, and of course for recording of events they do have their merits. But I was astonished how fast I got accustomed to that ‘framing with the feet’, and the fixed focal length is no hindrance, at least for the photography I am doing at the moment.

Pixel-peeping (of course you do that, as you can do it so easily in digital photography) I found some CA, but to be honest, I couldn’t care less. It is not too difficult to correct, but even uncorrected probably barely visible, and then I won’t do reproductions or architecture photography with emphasis on ultimate sharpness with this lens. It’s for (soft) moods, I think, and these it can capture in nonpareil style.

Just a remark on that image of the red maple: I barely was able to rescue it as the reds were clipped in quite some areas. Bibble5 highlight recovery did a good job, but still I’ll try to capture this again when light and winds permit.

Sometimes an image can beam us decades back, right into the time when we were listening with red eyes to the fairy tales.

After days I spent mainly in the flat, I needed a walk. Today’s dying light gave a wonderful backdrop for the dried flowers and shrubs along a small logging road.

Just opposite my window is a really old hydrangea in, and this is special, tree form. Usually hydrangeas are shrubs, but this old specimen grows its efflorescences on a real stem and branches. And probably 2m over ground they collect all the dew from the cold and humid autumn nights, and in the blue morning light the  remaining pink of the petals glows. I have already lowered saturation a bit, but probably this is still not enough – pushing down exposure by 2 stops to compensate for exposing to the right gets wonderful colors, maybe a tad on the artificial side.

Hunger is the best sauce – and that is definitely true on a hike in the mountains. The doughnuts – Auszogne in local terms – were kept warm in the wood-fired oven and served with powdered sugar. Delicious, I can tell you!

I’ve always been interested in reflections and the corresponding circles of confusion that the backlight brings out so strongly. But photographing for decades, up to now I had never deliberately misfocused – sharpness for a long time was like a holy cow for me, as I see it as one of the genuine characteristics of photography to render the scene sharp and full of details. This small creek I found 2 weeks back during our hike in the Berchtesgaden national park, and the quality of the autumn light I found transported best in this blurred rendering of the scene.

This image is probably more conventional, and it was easy for me to accept. Backlight is the light I cherish the most since decades, however it eluded me often back in the film days. Chimping has improved my skills in dealing with this light form very much, and now I find more time to deal with the colours in this light situation.

Found in the pedestrian area. Due to the (usually) moderate climate, sycamore trees grow to large sizes here in Bad Reichenhall.

A climate change we have for sure, just no local warming, at least not for the moment: 9 days ago sweating in +25°C (which is 77°F) and now the rain is mixed with snowflakes already. But I do accept it, in spite of photography getting different if not more difficult with the receding light. And as today’s image clearly shows, this kid doesn’t mind as well.

I was so busy with that small scenery of grass and lake in almost complete darkness, hiding under a large umbrella held by my tip-toeing daughter, that I did not look up to the mountain and the clouds on the other side of the lake until the kid’s voice told me something about a strange light in the sky. With the clouds moving fast, this mystery soon was resolved: the mountain top hotel of Mt Predigtstuhl, were the world’s oldest large-cabin funicular drops passengers since the year 1928. But in the moving clouds one could have thought that a spaceship was looking for a place to land.

are the leaves for all the house managers and municipal workers – at least it seems so. Only hours after heavy gusts of wind had poured down all the fruits from beeches and chestnuts, together with some leaves, the leaf blowers/suckers started a concerto grosso, underpinned by the diesel growl of the road sweeping vehicle. Autumn music that is.

After a day full of small-small fuzz that left the feeling of having wasted too much time, I just had a short stroll with one of the daughters, the camera on tripod and an umbrella. It was a fine occasion for some father daughter talk, she was asking and I tried to come up with understandable explanations, trying to carefully correct half-understood things. Our path led to the inlet of an almost 120 year old power plant, which now has automatic scrapers. And interrupting the boredom of a walk in a beginning drizzle, those scrapers came to life, wonderfully enough in just the right speed for a 20s exposure that captured the movement of the arms in the perfectly still lake.

Just minutes before it had just looked like this. Seeing the father busy with his camera, my daughter supported me by holding the umbrella over us, a difficult task for an 8 year old who is not on the tall side. And I got the opportunity to talk about the way the images are captured in a camera, making it interesting enough and explaining why this image needs 20s exposure time. So for both (human) sides this walk ended satisfying, and for the camera as well.

A lively beer garden this place was, only a week ago, as we had the warmest october since the beginning of the weather records (climate change? or chance?). Now it’s a more melancholic view with the empty tables and the grey clouds touching the peaks already. In only four weeks, up there will be snow.

Addendum: For whatever reason, the picture embedded in the blog came out darker than the uploaded version. The latter you get as always in a lightbox when you click on the image.

“I shouldn’t have stayed behind the tripod that long – now it’s really hard to move.”

I found these elders some time ago, but with their leaves on, the stems were always in such a deep shadow that I couldn’t get a reasonable picture. One point for autumn for this one.

Walter Neiger, who writes the blog a picture a day keeps the doctor away with interesting, often whimsical black and white photographs – definitely well worth every visit – wrote a poem by Friedrich Hebbel in the comment to Autumn in Berchtesgaden National Park, which did delight me very much.

After some research I found this translation by Walter A. Aue:

Autumn Scene

This is a fall day like I never saw!

The air ist still, almost of breathing free,

but here and there are falling, without flaw,

the finest-looking fruits from every tree.

Do not disturb ripe nature’s holy day!

This is a harvest that is all her own,

because, today, each fruit that breaks away

falls from a milder ray of sun alone.

 
 
Thank you very much, Walter!

After yesterday’s feasting in colors, today somewhat more sober autumnal colors from the city. This year’s dry autumn weather makes fall arrive in the city earlier than in the countryside, for the sheer lack of humidity in the restricted room for the roots.

“Those who god loves, he lets fall into this country” – a free translation of one of our great regional writers, Ludwig Ganghofer. Probably a bit declamatory, but on the other hand – the early fall days here in Klausbachtal don’t make it difficult to believe that this sentence is true.

My complaints that the perception of “Octoberfest equals Bavaria” is wrong of course deserves some evidence. OK – today I had the luck to experience it (again) and hopefully I can show you some convincing images.

To avoid the impression that Bavaria is some kind of backward-oriented, old fashioned, dyed-in-the-wool conservative country (no, I don’t want to talk about the elections again), just have scrutinizing look at the image to the right: You see that guy in leather pants (Lederhosen) with the Oakley – replica? -  over his eyes? No, Bavaria can be really modern, with Laptop und Lederhosen, as one of our former prime minister had put it. And still some of us don’t forget the really god things from the good old days.

Real brass music and vocals belong to those things, preferably in a small, manageable setting. You may see yourself, the gallery with all the images can be found here.

After a greyish morning the weather became really fine in the afternoon, with warm and slightly golden sunlight, a fine match for the leaves that have not yet started their descent from summer’s green into autumn yellow and brown.

In the city, where the temperatures yet don’t become really low at night, the geranium plants in the flower flower boxes still show their full colors. Geranium are traditional adornment for the houses here in Bavaria. They require however daily care in form of removing the old leaves and dry blossoms, otherwise the start to degrade only too fast, blaming their owners as careless.

Today, garden excursions continued – working on the fascination of the fading colors, trying to emphasize this by not compensation the exposure to the right in postprocessing, instead working with the bright colors and playing with the depth-of-field.

By underexposing half a stop, it would have been easy to reproduce the colors in a more saturated way, changing the yellow and the greens in a way that would more suggest springtime than anything else. And the white, overcast sky helped to retain that autumn feeling, too.

The days are still warm, but the leaves here start to loose their fresh green. Not all of them of course, but brown and yellow now mixes in between the still saturated deep greens. And the air in the evenings doesn’t have that summer’s crispness any more, some high altitude fog makes the sunlight look a bit foul and the color looses it’s blue and assumes instead a more greenish cast

And in the street suddenly the light has no dynamic any more, it’s lack of direction and that ‘foul’ color optically sucks all power out of the streets – dirt looks dirtier now, the trees look tired and the plaster passive. Well, autumn is coming, even if he distracts us with some more blue days. Now is the time of regreding, saving the power and becoming quieter to retain energies up to next spring.

As long as I can think back, my father has been planting his garden. With great sense of style he arranges plants, stones and some decorative objects that please the eye and give a sense of harmony. Combining elements from japanese gardening with traditional as well as foreign plants in pots and flower beds there are many places in the garden that are worth more than one look.

Yesterday I spent some time at twilight out there, mainly occupied with checking a camera body for signs of focusing errors, and one of the targets in the garden were those stones. The raw file needed only little attention, mainly darkening to compensate the expose-to-the-right effect and gave a small, simple but (for me) impressive rendering of the blue hour.

The days becomes shorter, the sun rises later, and the distinctive golden glow of the light is definitely a sign of ending summer. The good thing is that I don’t have to get up that early to stalk the first light, and the golden gleam paints everything in the most favorable colors. In that way, parting with summer is easy, and the misty, cold, grey daysare are still far away.

Early morning has a quality of its own. The mind is not loaded already with all the associations and patterns of the day, and the thoughts can run freely. This new built house seemed to be guarded by the cypress soldiers, whilst an officer in yellow is in charge of the guardsmen.

In maybe two or three years these Thuja bushes will have grown to a veritable wall, completing the repelling expression of this house.

At those times, when Bad Reichenhall was famous and rich and through it’s salt manufactures contributing one third to the state of Bavaria’s budget…

Can you imagine – a small place of only several thousand inhabitants contributing that much to a state’s budget? (Now it is a small place of just a bit more then average prominence, still struggling to find it’s link to presence and future)

At those times this place was so important that Ludwig I, King of Bavaria, sent his star architekt Friedrich von Gärtner to erect an administration building in the style of the capital’s (the City of Munich) most important boulevard.

Well, that was then. Now it’s still beautiful, especially early in the morning, when the low sun lets the sycamore trees cast their shadows on the facade.

in the course of such a long event there are enough occasions to concentrate on the details. the chokers i’ve shown some days ago would be worth a photo essay of their own, and so could be the marchin’ feet together with the lower parts of the costumes.

those half socks, covering only the calfs, are called ‘stutzen’ and are a significant part of the traditional clothes of the men in the alpine region. for festivals and holidays of course they are knitted with decorations, and colour and pattern again show the affiliation to a certain region or nowadays a certain costume group.

the men on these images wear ‘haferlschuhe’, brogues, and these shoes point to the landscape where their wearers live: the thick sole with a good grip predestines these shoes for hills and rough paths.

this is the last installment of the ‘trachten-gaufest’. if you want to see more images of this event, just have a look at the slideshow of these images on flickr.

the ‘gamsbart’, literally chamois beard, is a tuft of chamois hair worn as a hat decoration. needless to say that the size of this thingie closely correlates with the wealth and influence of its owner.

it is definitely *not* made of the hair of a beard as chamois don’t have one, unlike goats, but from the middle hair of the back. that means that earlier only licensed hunters were able to harvest the necessary hair.

hunting was a royal privilege in bavaria (it still carries a bit of this reputation nowadays, along with a unobjective cost-benefit analysis), and the stories of the fights betwean poachers and foresters are an essential basis of literary tradition as well as popular old songs.

bavaria generally and the traditional mountain costume associations (what a monster expression, we just say ‘trachtler’) especially are inseparably connected with brass music. only at indoor events, we call it ‘hoagascht’, guitar, zither and hammer dulcimer replace the wind instruments.

clear shapes and reflections of course make those brass units very photogenic. musically the bands at events like the present one are on a real high stage, and in the last decade fortunately a lot of re-discovered really traditional music went into the programs, replacing the innommable beer hall music of lowest possible niveau.

only the sheer level of the sound became a bit problematic in the moments when the procession stopped with the band playing some 2m away from my ear. but the little suffering for art (not with a capital a, nota bene) is neglectable in the greater context of ‘hue and saturation to the max’.

the translation of ‘kropfband’ – the traditional necklace these women are wearing – as choker made me mistrust the various online dictionaries, as in my ears this sounds a bit weird. but as they all agree, who am i to dissent.

focusing on the chokers proofed to be difficult when the groups were marching, so i was more then grateful for several unintended stops that gave me the opportunity for close inspection. as everybody was in high spirits – the bad weather had stopped just for this day – photographing was no problem, just seeking eye content asking for consent and then making pictures.

even the impressive zoom with the long lens hood did not create any camera shyness, but of course it is not the right tool to capture unobserved moments. it was a different kind of street photography, where the chance for good picture was to behave so naturally that the subjects just noticed and forgot.

in the course of the festivities of the 850th anniversary of bad reichenhall as a city (it was a camp already at roman times) today we had the “gaufest” of the traditional mountain costumes association. the started at 6:00 in the morning with silver salute, which was resumed for probably 45 minutes after church had ended and the groups were assembling for the procession through the city.

from the numerous optical attractions today i show you a small selection of ladies with eagle feathers on their hats. in former times those eagle feathers were given as a present by the respective admirers, who collected them from the eagles nest risking their lives in the hope that this act of daringness would help them to win the heart of the adored one.

in the alpine region the traditional costumes associations are still important groups in the villages and small towns where their festivals of ‘fahnenweihe’ (flag blessing ceremony) and the beer festivals form annual highlights

tomorrow is the second annual world wide photo walk. i do highly regard such events as opportunities to meet and see different styles of photographing, different styles of seeing and getting new ideas. as there was no photowalk organised in or near my hometown, i decided to lead one myself. it will be a small group tomorrow, but given decent weather, maybe clouds mixed with sunshine, we should have sufficient opportunities to see and make good images.

the lead image from today is a door handle from stift nonnreit in salzburg, widely known as one of the sets of the film “the sound of music”.

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.

indulging my passion for canyons, i arranged the last family excursion to target to of the smaller canyons of salzach tributaries. unfortunately i did not pay attention to the lack directions, and arriving there it turned out that this canyon for the lack of a footpath was only accessible with ladders and climbing gear. and before we arrived at the second one, rain set in…

so here i show you two images of the weekend before’s visit to the the ‘salzachöfen’, öfen as plural from ofen, oven, is the salzburg-austrian word for canyon. and while i do like the image with the human silhouettes, i also love the other one where the visible water gives me a better impression of scale.

the axelmannstein hotel, where i found this abandoned showroom, had it’s high times in the 20th of last century. at that time, everybody who was rich and/or famous spent his/her time in this summer health resort, famous for the healing effects of the brine aerosols on the respiratory system. the tailors had their summer business here in bad reichenhall, and in the winter time they went to Merano in south tyrol.

those mannequins made the impression as if the humming life of the catwalk had suddenly stopped like in sleeping beauty’s castle, and time had its effect only in the form of bleaching of the colors and a bit of dust. a really strange scenery.

today was city festival here in bad reichenhall, so a lot of people went around even in areas that are normally not open for the public – a good occasion for a seeing wanderer. on my ways i came to see the outside facilities of one of the oldest and most renowned hotels here, the axelmannstein (which now belongs to the radisson group). on the fence to their tennis court, unused probably for years now as i never heard the typical plop-plop, i found this sign, informing about the siesta hours. stunning for me was the typography: a font that was used around the time of the 2nd world war, but probably not much later. this is the first sign i found with a seemingly eternal life.

-

contrary to the common beliefs (read the landscapist for details, especially the nonsense about ‘hue and saturation to the max’) what the ‘beautiful pictures crowd’ does, i was working with the saturation slider in negative direction. the forenoon light, evened out by some clouds, made the spirea glow, so i could reduce the corkscrew hazel to just some decorative silhouettes. probably i should blame it on someone else, maybe (quote again) the creator got it wrong.

in case you have difficulties to find the bluebells: better click on the image and see it large! trying to find the best compromise between sharp water droplets and the impression of fast moving water i did a small series with different exposure times, and 1/100s gave the best result. this was a bit astonishing for me as i had expected the best effect at slower speeds of maybe 1/30s, i guess this is due to the the big amount of water coming down the mountains after the rainfalls.

the raw file was converted with the bibble5 preview 2 version, and despite some flaws, the region tool and selective color tool can give already great results. without it, the bluebells would be almost invisible in the small image size.

having re-vitalized the rubber boots was the first step for enjoying the rain, and having learned to trust the weather sealing of the camera is the second and even more important one. usually i am quite concerned about my gear and don’t want to take a risk, but taking no photos at all because of the rain is not an option. the moss on the trees in the weissbach canyon really seemed to ask to be photographed.

and so did the ‘waldgeissbart’ (aruncus dioicus). unfortunately the compositions showing white out-of-focus dots of the white blossoms in the background of a sharp one didn’t work as expected. but according to the weather forecast i will have the opportunity to re-do this subject.

the amount of rainwater we received in the last two weeks changed also the appearance of the small cascades that are tributaries of the ‘weissbach’, a creek in a canyon not far from home. a canyon walk in the summer is nice as you experience temperature and brightness differences, but at that time of the year the water is low and those cascades are more or less trickling down. now the water is really vivid, and this is what i tried to capture here and afterwards to emphasize in postprocessing.

and not only the waters are vivid, the colors of the leaves are as well. and it was a beautiful different experience from summer’s heat and glaring light. even the kids sometimes stood and looked, which doesn’t happen too often with 8-years old ones. but the white-throated dipper of course was more interesting for them, only i was too slow to photograph it.

as it generally is of interest for bad reichenhall locals, here bilingually with german as the first version:
Im Rahmen des “2. worldwide photowalk” findet am 18.7.2009 der “Reichenhaller Fotospaziergang” statt. Im Rahmen eines gemeinsamen Stadtrundgangs mit Gleichgesinnten wollen wir Fotos machen und über alles reden, was mit Photographie zusammenhängt. Zur (kostenfreien) Anmeldung gibt es hier ein Formular

. Die Fotos werden anschließend auf die Website des Worldwide Photowalk hochgeladen und zusammen mit den Fotos aller anderen Teilnehmer ausgestellt. Da es eine Obergrenze von 50 Teilnehmern gibt, sollte man mit der Anmeldung nicht zu lange zögern.

the idea of scott kelby’s international photowalk is striking. as last year there was no photowalk in my hometown, i decided to take over the task to organize one: http://worldwidephotowalk.com/bad-reichenhall-by-de/. if you happen to be around, i would be more than glad to meet you at this occasion! Register early as there is a limit of 50 participants.

using the most modern electronic gadgets in form of a dslr and a laptop should be proof enough that i am standing with both feet in modern information society. still, forms and textures and colors from 100 years back in many cases enthuse me more than a big number of modern things. especially in everyday life i sometimes feel surrounded by things that raise the suspicion of beeing deliberately created ugly.

but it can also be a certain backwards directed paranoia that bends my perception, yes i do think this is possible. on the other hand, looking at that old cast iron door handle from a farm or trader’s house, i have a hard time coming up with contemporary counterparts (from normal houses, not upper class villas) that tickle my aesthetic fancy in the same way that this old piece does.

a lazy mothers day brought no new images, instead some hours at the lake (17°c, swimming is possible but no real joy). late in the evening now the flat is quiet, time to go through the pictures of the last weeks again. the rosserer pilgrimage still has some images worth converting from raw. the little conductor from the lead shot perseviringly worked in front of the band and was really disappointed when they decided to have a break.

their music was genuine, not a single ingratiation to their modern demiotic, tv-popular conterpart. the german word for this demiotic music would be “volkstümlich” which is easily transmogrified to “volksdümmlich” (dümmlich = stupid) which again could find a nice parallel in “dem-idiotic”.

it’s not that just my other, ranting self just wants to come through again, but this demiotic/overpopular music is more than a nuisance, living on clichees and burying its roots under dogpiles of fake feelings.

form follows function was by no means invented by an architect of the 19th century, no, the farmers everywhere had followed this principle more or less intentionally probably everywhere in the world. in this farmer’s garden from maybe 100 years ago, now rebuilt in a museum village in austria, this guideline shows up in many incarnations: the placement of the flowers next to the fence because the space inside was needed for vegetables, the mixture of vegetables itself, following implied principles of organic gardening, the fence of small fir stems, doubled in density in the lower half to keep of the hen there and deer, roe and cow in the upper region…what i do like is the harmony not only of the forms here but also the colors.

nothing overly vivid is needed, no gaudy colors, yet the color contrast of red and green is attractive, hilarating and harmonious. and if you think the carriage/horseman scenery is too much cliche, let met tell you that it just happened: they arrived, the coachman just patted his horses and spoke to them while the son organised the beer, and then he had his break, chatting with bystanders or just standing. he was him, and it showed in a short and precious moment. the art of photography was to capture without intruding.

no time to go out shooting today. experimented with kids pics again, trying to move from illustration to interpretation, shakin’ off the fear of grain, trying to get hold of that ‘twins’ fascination. they are in many aspects so unresembling, but then again share quite a lot of attitudes like the posture of their head. entering this new territory of interpretation, less straight photography, hopefully also less square in a sense, i still have no validation system to help me judge if i’m right or way off. definitely a thing to develop, but it will take time. so here i go with a first essay on the ‘twins’ topic.

wordless wednesday – everybody is asked to use her/his imagination to find a storyline. enjoy.

and if you want to see it *really* large, click here.

another small series from the rosserer pilgrimage. btw: rosserer is austrian/salzburg dialect for horse breeder. fascinating for me here was the surface of the instrument.

usually you see high gloss, like in the last shot, but this guy’s bass tuba did not pretend to be new and without blemishes. it looked old, well used and beaten, no pretending possible.

but the sound was great, without doubt. and having my traditional ‘bratwurst’ on a table in the back of the band gave me sufficient opportunity to watch the details. the guy sitting next to the bass tuba had one of those shiny, proper, straight instruments, and so i just had to make use of the reflection.

the traditional horse breeders’ pilgrimage from salzburg and surroundings to the church of ‘maria plain’ (see the 2nd image in this post) took place in marvellous weather. as a father of 3 girls, anything horse related of course is an attractive goal for an excursion, and hoping for photographic opportunities of course i did not oppose.

my first take on portraying horses and teams of horses was more so so than successful, but among the better shots are some nice portraits of coachmen and -women.

over the next days i will fill up the flickr set of this event and maybe post some more here.

no, i won’t bore you with this topic here again. but raw power this is, the power of the green weißbach waters (which is kind of oxymoronic as weißbach means white creek) cascading down in their canyon. having worked quite a while on this picture i am still not completely satisfied. i think i managed quite well to bring out the deep colors of water and moss as well as the brilliance of the reflections, but compositionally the right border puzzles me because of the out-of-focus blur. f-stop was already 11, 16 might have been better but at an focal length of 180 mm-e i doubt it would have rendered the rock in complete sharpness. i tried some cropping, but for several reasons i want to stick with the old barnackian 3:2 ratio (i estimate it to be more dynamic than 4:3) and then i loose too much of the diagonals, rocks and whitewater. so i will have to live with it. a view camera might have helped to solve this problem, or 2 shots with different planes of focus (i had used a tripod anyhow) and following combination in the gimp. alas – would/should/could doesn’t really help, so i enjoy what i have got and what i am able to destill out of it.

is there a life outside the raw (file)? probably there is. and i do know, yes, that the eye of the photographer is important for the picture, her or his feeling for composition, balance and all those factors that have to be considered in “the moment it clicks”. but all this fiercely defending the jpeg as the only necessary format that a good photographer needs (ken rockwell comes to no good remembrance here) in my eyes suffers from a singular flaw: the file from the camera is just another factor for a successful image.

it’s an undisputable fact that great photographic art can originate from media that do detract some factors from the photographers influence – think only of the polaroid process – and some pictures work because of qualities that allow to disregard technical qualities in the printmaking process. but the raw file in my eyes is the equivalent for the film original, the basis for an image, basis in a process that reveals image components that would remain hidden without diligent work.

decades ago this work could only be done in the darkroom, now the computer screen has replaced for many of us the darkroom work (let’s put aside the new possibilities of this tool or toolkit), but at least i do similar things as before: dodging, burning in, now complemented with local contrast enhancement and local sharpening, partial control of saturation etc.

the preview image to the right at first glance looks dull, but working with the new layer tools of bibble5 (still in preview) and subsequent local contrast enhancement plus refocus sharpening in gimp created a whole new image out of the raw file.

no, at least for pictures like this there is no life outside the raw.

can’t help it: as a pupil this facade of your school just serves one duty: make you feel small, confronted with such uniform power. of course didactics inside this building have changed now, and every year dozens of girls successfully finish their education, but the outside still breathes the spirit of past centuries where the church was a power factor, supportive sometimes, oppressive not infrequently.

spring time makes the spirits rise, and of course martin luther’s proverbial apple tree as a symbol of undestroyable hope makes the apple tree and it’s blossoms well suited for an allegorical image. this horse (you may remember it from this post) certainly has found a paradise garden.

so today i rode my bicycle to his pastures, optimistic to find the apple blossoms now open, and i did not come in vain.

a traditional orchard like this one is rare nowadays in our intensified agricultural production devices (it’s not soil anymore, no, certainly not) and the owner probably would have converted it as well if he wouldn’t now grow tourist accomodations with associated riding occasions instead of milk cows. for the latter’s milk he would now get a price lower than even the basic cost per litre. this is the other side of progress.

in the mountains there is still abundant snow, especially on the north slopes, so the nights can become really cold – a permanent threat for all the blossoming trees. let’s see how much of that fragile beauty is left when i come back after my two commuting days.

the spa district of bad reichenhall sported one beautiful villa next to the other, some used as early hotels, but many more just expression of the taste and wealth of their owner. those times are long ago, and the wave of renovation of the last 50 years has spared some places. depending of the financial power of their owners and/or the property scheme, a small number was run down and is now slumbering like the castle in sleeping beauty.

the parcels being in a pricey neighborhood but the renovation costs equally high, these places probably have to wait until the next change of ownership by inheritance and an irrefutable offer of an investor to get woken up.

the state run places like the spa center are almost everywhere in excellent condition – the comparably high tax load in germany makes (not only) this possible. and herewith i am also presenting the magnolia-must-be picture for 2009 (don’t know if i find another, better one…)

the castle of the bad reichenhall district ‘kirchberg’, in the vernacular dialect lovingly called ‘schlössl’, is the cradle of the spa activities of my hometown. dating back to 1130, it originally served as an estate. changing owners led to various utilisations, and in 1723 it got rebuilt in the now visible baroque form.

in the recent past it served as an upper class restaurant for a while and now is in private property. not the most prudent caretaking for such a historical building, as you can easily see from the lock in the door, which was inserted without only the minimum care for a historic place

but the painting and the forms still are widely intact, and the weatheredness of the color makes up for interesting details. sometimes it is really rewarding to explore the photographic possibilities nearby, especially regarding the lighting situation. here i didn’t have to take it at first chance but could come back when the light was a suitable, cloud dampened backlight.

the quality of the viewfinder was *the+ critical argument for my first dslr – wearing glasses, a high eyepoint makes a big difference. but even the good finder of my current camera didn’t show me recognizably what this shot would look like later on – the blurs of color, dabbed over the background like from an impressionist painter I did simply not see in the viewfinder. the bokeh of my tele zoom, focused at 450 mm-e on the background, created the most awesome stipples out of the cherry blossoms and some foreground leafs. and once more i was glad about my decision to *always* shoot raw: whilst the original showed a slight purple cast in the background, resulting from the low sun peering through dark clouds, bibble and especially the brenda plugin helped me to form an image that met my memory of the light situation. again – no saturation slider touched, no ‘vibrance’ added.

two days before i had tried the same scenery with the focus on the cherry blossoms. the result wasn’t nearly as good as there was no clear separation between what’s sharp and what should be unsharp, with a resulting not-really-sharp impression and lacking emphasize on what i meant to be singled out.

now i am content with the result.

sorry, i simply had to use this pun now. the light at the moment is gorgeous, especially if the sky is scattered with clouds and the backlight is less pungent and more revealing. even the lens flaws (my not-often-enough-used tamron 11-18) and the raw conversion problems don’t stop me to include the direct sun in the picture. f22 makes up for a nice star effect even without any criss-cross-filter – i do well remember the hype around those in the 80th of last century.

the animals enjoy the fresh pasture, too. this white stallion grazes at schleicherhof, subject of yesterday’s post, and enjoys its charity. with probably 30 years (24 according to the horse trader, but popular wisdom here in germany recommends to never believe a horse trader) there is no work any more, maybe a bit posing for the kids and the tourists, not to forget the photographer.

i guess is what the landscapist might label it, but i can’t help: this is part of bavarian pittoresque, like it or not. 10min by bike from my home, the farmers of “schleicherhof” accomodate guests and care for their fruit orchard and their horses. the farmhouse is situated at one of the most scenic points opposite the entrance of the valley to berchtesgaden, overlooking the meadows to grossgmain, a village already on the austrian side of the border.

only 2 steps left from the position where the lead shot was taken, the scenery to the right unfolds in front of the eye. probably this can be called ‘kitschig’, but at least i enjoyed the minutes up there, the talk with the farmer (well knowing the photogenic qualities of the orchard as well as the vista with the cross, “marterl” in local language), the smell of the blossoms the sounds of the bees within together with the warmth of the late afternoon sun. of course the cars from the valley could be heard, this is reality and not backdrop for a sentimental film.

a catkin and box bouquet like the one i showed in this post usually is put next to the cross in the living room or in the kitchen of the farmhouse, however big specimen of those (referring to probably pre-christian fertility rites) are traditionally put on the meadows for the easter week and later on may end up on the wall of the stable, like here.

another trip back into bad reichenhall’s glorious past: the karyatides of the entrance to one of the best hotels back in the ending 19th century. bad reichenhall was so famous in these days that even a bavarian king came there for 5 weeks. the spa offered healing of respiratory problems by inhalating brine dispersed by a 14m high and 200m long layer of twigs. the pumping machinery of that times is still partially functioning, and the excursion to those places is already planned.

from this past wealth only a fraction is there nowadays – tourists prefer to go abroad, and the rich clientel of the splendiferous hotel has sharply decreased in numbers. the beauty of some buildings and the scenery and landscape however has survived.

in search of the remnants of the prosperous times of my hometown – we are going to celebrate 850th birthday as a town this year – i am consequently strolling through the older quarters here. the different balcony grids grabbed my attention. whilst most of the old-style attice windows have been replaced by the better insulated and easier-to-clean one pane windows, some of the old balconies have survived without many modifications.

even on one of the houses that have been completely gutted during renovation, they re-attached the completely renovated grids. protection by-law of the cultural heritage does really help here, and savvy architects manage to balance it’s necessities with the functionality of the building. the only following injustice is that the owner bears the biggest part of the higher costs whilst the public enjoys the results. but this is covered up by our constitution, stating that ‘property entails obligations’.

just wondering where this is brought into application in the current financial disaster. but i’m disgressing.

folk wisdom has it – there is nothing to add.

found on a house near river saalach, next to the village of Schneizlreuth.

i am a bit insecure about the translation, the first word “schaff” could also be translated as ‘create’, but the rhythm and flow then is a bit off.

laufen at the salzach river tries hard to keep history vivid, the shown signboards are just a small excerpt of these efforts.the encroachment of public space with the various monstrosities that you find in bad reichenhall and many other places does not take place here.

of course, the wish to make business here as everywhere brings along the usual so-so display windows, and houseowners with only average feeling for adequate material did just shove in the most ugly anodised window frames, but the overall feeling of a historic city, especially on the main square, is still present.

in the countryside, the volunteer fire brigade is on duty at many official events, too. last weekend, two cities at both sides of the german-austrian border, laufen and oberndorf, arranged their two cities course for runners of all age groups over a track of 6km, and the volunteer fire brigade was responsible for the safety.

more interesting than the runners, crossing the bridge over river saalach salzach connecting the two cities, was that volunteer firefighter in the lead shot, waiting for the runners to come and pass by.

update: i stand corrected – johannes huss informed me about a geographical mistake. it’s the river salzach, not saalach, which separates laufen and oberndorf.

this wooden ornament decorates the door to maria bühel, a pilgrimage church dating back to the 17th century. located not far away from the holy-night-chapel in oberndorf, austria, it is a quiet place, not getting that tourist attention as the former one.

the architecture and the baroque paintings in the inside are marvellous, and i have decided to go there again early in the morning, by foot from the river salzach, following the path of the raftsmen for whom this church was built 4 centuries ago. and hopefully i will find the sacristan then to open the barrier and allow an unrestricted view of the paintings and statues.

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.

shop windows can tell a lot about the owner. in the case of this jeweller, i often saw pieces a bit off the mainstream of a sanitarium’s offerings. it turned out the owner still works as a goldsmith, immediately behind the shop windows. my question to come and take some pictures was answered positively.

when i arrived, he was just finishing a small golden pendant and setting the stone, so i had enough food for my lens. trying to avoid flashlight ’cause i never get that really right, i was glad to have iso 2000 available. together with in-camera-stabilisation and an old f2.8 lens it was more than sufficient.

there are shots that belong together (like my moon diptych, but also the landscapist does it, and carl weese recently published shots of a yellow suv/green wall that could be seen as belonging together), and so it’s just consistent to frame them together.

trees have been and are a favourite subject of mine, maybe inherited from my father, who knows a lot of them by figure, without having to look at leaves or fruits, and it is astonishing that i still haven’t set up a separate keyword or collection for them. well – time to go through the archives again. but now it’s time for backup of the latter.

it seems that i start to enjoy turning down saturation more and more. the weather was grey, daytime was busy, no fresh shots but still some old ones deserving to be evaluated and worked upon. in my eyes it’s not a disadvantage of shooting raw that i have to re-judge my images again when deciding which one to convert and edit, it’s a bit like old-fashioned black and white darkroom work: it made and makes no sense to mechanically convert/develop because the results were and are average at best.

additionally to toning down saturation i found that adding a bit of vignetting is good for some images. even if it’s only a small, barely visible amount, it seems to center the view quite a bit. it is a bit a contradiction to my own infuriation about the vignetting my standard lens adds now and then, but the latter is beyond my control and not predictable for me, and probably that is what annoys me so much.

rainlight saving time started today. ‘dis is a well thought out marketing idea of some leasure outfits lobbyists, nothing else. as bavaria is really strong in traditions, we had our easter egg fountain this year again, with more than 4000 hand-painted eggs. closer inspection leaded to the conclusion, that guinness beer now got incorporated into our cultural heritages, along with more halloween style eggs.

anyhow, nobody will ever be able to suggest that we are anti-modernist.

the original items sold at that occasion are those catkin-and-box bouquets, directly connected to the fertileness-roots of all easter traditions. these usually got blessed in church at palm sunday and later on found their place next to the crucifix in the living room of the houses.

but i also found a nice runner-up for my personal ‘ugliest thing in hometown’ collection, 2nd row at least.

taking up carl weese‘s question and implicit suggestion to present in color what gets it’s ugliness through color.
and note to self: stick with either portrait or landscape if you want to make it a series. a lesson i should have already learned from my krk images…

trees are a for me a symbol for beeing deeply rooted, constant, connected with this planet. always sad to see them fallen, the more so when snow reveals details that could be assumed as remnants of their struggle.

i am constantly learning to make use of even small slices of time for photographing. the price for this is the weight of a not so small camera bag i am dragging around. but with my preferences for raw files and long or short focal lengths, it would not make sense to go with a point’n-shoot or only one lens when i don’t know what will turn up.

slowly slowly it seems to come. the air is still cold most of the time, but the sun already powerful. still the salvia plants have to remain in the house, but this way they make a nice, promising pattern.

today’s second shot is the church of maria plain, next to salzburg. and while i like this powerful place very much, the shot itself is not satisfying, it leans to much to the illustrative side and i miss a bit of expression in it. well, the tripod i use did not deliver what i was expecting. time to change tripod?

ok, april is the month for fast changing weather conditions. not yet april? don’t mind, let’s just enjoy the sun.

our spa gardens exhibit quite a number of contemporary art pieces, mostly sculptures. normal, not accentuating lighting situations don’t help to bring attention to those, and for some the place chosen is simply uninspired.

yesterday’s snow however made the scissor-type portrait of a violinist (guess it’s mozart, he is (ab-)used everywhere here for public relation purposes – I stand corrected here: it’s anna-sophie mutter, a german star violinist) really interesting.

but even those rusty penguins did not show enthusiasm about the cold weather anymore. but the snow cap brings a nice accent on them.

spring again got defeated when after a cold night snow set in. whilst i am no fan of grey sludge on the streets, the graphical effect of the thin snow layer on the still leafless tree had its merits.

so i took what was there as long as it was there. not much postprocessing, some minor local contrast enhancement and a tiny bit of sharpening was all. the magic for me is in the patterns.

time to start the sofobomo preparation in the evening. last year’s china photo have to make up for training material. scribus has a lot of bells and whistles including adjustable kerning, so you can tweak your book to your heart’s content. starting with a completely empty page however is challenging, so the first thing i did was checking and re-checking with existing examples to find out a recipe for an attractive book.

this i wanted to do for a long time already: portray the pollution of my hometown’s pedestrian zone with plastic surrogates of the old roundabout, blatantly constructed to empty the pockets of parents not able to fight the whining and grouching of their progeny, offering 87 sec of brrrrm or high pitched voices together with some movement.

the newest generation of those one-armed bandits has proximity sensors, puking ring-tone like sounds to attract unblamable kids, assuming that the are degenerated already by having listened to too many strip cartoons.

ok, i admit being ill-tempered today, maybe full-scale pollinosis adding to my fretfulness, but, believe me, those awfully colored plastic monsters encroaching daily life have been a nuisance since quite a while, optically as well as concerning the behaviour of the kids, spoilt by too lenient adults.

back to my roots – back to b&w. paul lester&squot;s post never have a favourite weapon made me think about the influence of my preferences and the development of my photography.

black and white were my photographic origins as a student, and some of those pictures i still do regard very high. now b&w is much easier, sean mcpucket&squot;s bibble plugin andy even allows to choose film/developer/paper combinations for that old-time grainy look – i don&squot;t know how realistic those settings are, but frankly i don&squot;t care if my digital tri-x matches the real one, i prefer that contrast distribution over dark and light parts of the histogram is pleasing, and so be it.

my hometowns spa garden with the pump room produced the subjects where i tried to re-vive my b&w skills. here everybody waits for the guests and patients to arrive, the effects of the economic decline will be obvious in the next weeks even here in the gardens.

i am not the person for rain pictures, so in spite of carrying the camera around today, no shots that deserve better then the ‘immediate delete’ section. resorting to monday’s picture taken during heavy snowfall in the spa garden, i was pondering my options and finally went for the detail: snow and snowfall is more present here, no concurrence with the shape of the tree, valid in itself and therefore distracting from the snow.

of course the concept of dense photography, discussed a short while back on the landscapist and nobodys pictures would recommend a less simple approach, including more information, verbatim background information, but at the moment i am favouring more straightforward compositions, more removing additional elements then adding them.

what i try to find and portray through isolation are the simple, clear things – in spite of knowing that our world is neither clear nor simple. but let me put it that way: if i can recognize the simple things of value, then i can open up my understanding to the complex ones. if i would start with the complex ones, i would get nowhere because of too much distraction. instead i would stop with this subject and turn to the next.

spring does not send any messengers here, instead we had heavy snowfall, frost and rain in the last days. and the snow provided a nice backdrop for this background for this group of wooden sculptures. the one to the right is from this year’s new years post. i had tried several times to photograph this group, but during the summer the background is so distracting that all of my shots ended in the null device. and whilst this shot is far from being perfect, it’s the first time that the group really becomes visible.

back to my beloved blue tones. what is humming with tourists during the summer is a lonely path in winter, covered with 30cm now wet and heavy snow. the positive side: you get much better exercise out of a short distance, however holding a 300mm lens in middle of that exercise makes you praise that in-body anti-shake – in camera body, that is.

first time since many years that i went for the carnival parade here – the curious daughters, wanting to collect sweets, being the main motivation. and many of the fanciful costumes where a joy to look at.

but really alarming was the amount of alkohol beeing consumed also by minors (12 years upwards) – especially as the police was leading the parade. don’t misunderstand me as party pooper, but certain limitations are out of discussion. and nobody should deplore any more underage victims of binge drinking if it gets tolerated at such events in bright daylight. all this is only cheap lipservice.

even the snowstorm was no hindrance: on the way home from a restaurant, celebrating the successful first half of the school year, the eldest daughter couldn’t stop clowneries with her umbrella in the snow. grateful i am for those iso 6400 i can dial in now. and whilst the objective image quality may be poor, the image gives an excellent impression of that night lighting, snow drifting, kid jumping.

in spite of the rain that now soaks the large snow heaps here in the valley, higher up in the mountains winter is still unbroken. a sunday morning, only some 100 m away from the main trail you feel completely alone when the mist swallows all sounds. that always helps me to get the right sense of scale after a busy week, partly in the city, surrounded by all high tech and acting out my high expectations and trying to meet those of others. here in the mountains is the place where i can re-connect and come down to my roots.

late afternoon light had already left st. pankraz church in the shade. due to the cold air and light wind there were almost no distortions by the heatings from the houses of bad reichenhall under this scenery, only the object contrast turned out to be really low – a bit more then 3 f-stops is really not much. i had exposed to the right, so i hoped there was enough differentiation in there for a detail-rich image. playing with lightzone allowed to increase the local contrast and with the result i am quite happy.

just one thing keeps nagging me: even from the tripod all my shots are tilted to right – it seems almost impossible for me to adjust the camera horizontally. so the next thing to get is a rrs lever clamp with a spirit level. not that i would not like to tilt some shots on purpose, but never getting it level even if i want to is more than annoying.

oh yes, st. pankraz was already the subject of this post. it seems to attract me especially during winter time.

it seems that this is my blue period. fortunately enough this concentrates on photography and is not a general description of my mood.

however the self-assignment of ‘learning to see’ seems quite a bit harder here in the wintery bavaria than it is in sri lanka. it’s not the time restrictions – on business trips they are even tighter – but the familiarity with the visual impressions around, i think. so opening the eyes, seeing without categorizing, absorbing optical stimuli and becoming aware of beauty in the well-known is what i learn.

beauty is a keyword in yesterday’s post of ‘the landscapist’ mark hobson. whilst i do agree with large parts of his argumentation thread, i am not sure if this ‘chasing the light’ is something to condemn: what many of those landscape photographers do accomplish is to portray a perfection in nature that is unknown to the majority of mankind. in my eyes this can be way beyond mere pretty-ness, this can be beauty. and this beauty can be the bridge to love, and this love is the first step to acknowledgement of value, of worthiness.

if this feeling for value could only a little bit balance the race for hypothesized shareholder value, i think a great many of mark’s concerns would be alleviated.

at the moment those late afternoon hours seem to be really rewarding for me. i had tried to portray gruttenstein castle, only 10 min away from our house, on quite some occasions, but all i got were mere reproductions. today’s image is different: the old trees (another found-again partiality) do not reveal much of the castle, but create a mood maybe a bit out of a fairy tale. that’s what i enjoy in here, and it still is quite ‘straight’ photography, not much massaging the raw file.

with the right gloves, even photographing in snowfall looses its scaring quality. yesterday evening i had some spare time between appointments, and due to the weather just sneaked into a place where i had been on quite a number of walks.

snowfall transforms all the vistas, softens contours, hides details (no dense photography any more…) but the mood i did enjoy very much – that approaching night, absence of light, dampening of the sounds due to the snow. those 15 minutes really managed to recharge my batteries.

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.

this building was re-built after the 1834′s blaze of bad reichenhall, that destroyed most of the city, by an architect of one of the kings of bavaria. the reason for this royal care was simple: over times the saline of bad reichenhall had earned up to 30% of the bavarian state’s total income.

nowadays its importance is barely above minimal: creating salt by boiling sole of course is energy intensive and expensive, and salt ressources are almost abundant.

still, both of them have individual optical merits.

two days after full moon i finally managed to go out together with a handful of photographer friends to try some night shots of our hometown. the intensity of the moonlight was so high (and my lens protection filter probably not clean enough) that i got lens reflections – i never thought this could happen from moonlight.

“padinger alm” is a popular inn over the valley of bad reichenhall, just on the shoulder of mt. staufen, which you see in the background. image quality turns out to be less then optimal when pixel peeping, but the time was short and the purpose of the shots a slide show, so i didn’t bother to always resort to the lowest iso.

(pun? what pun?) sometimes the pictures come at you when you just lift your eyes to search for your way. i tried variations of this, some with a small roadside cross as foreground, but in the end the tightly framed plain shadow on the facade was the most convincing shot for me. well – kill the clutter is one of the few advices i try to follow…

after yesterdays cold colored post, here is something warmer. i need it, as we have temperatures well below 0°c for several days now, with the side effect of blue sky and wonderful sunlight especially in the afternoon.

taking a walk, it was just a natural decision to stay on the warm, sunny side of the river for quite a while, and instead of icicles i found seeds and last years fruits.

the very last day of my holidays. spelled ‘relief’ when all my ladies were gone to school. spent a hell of a time with doctors and administration. finally went out shooting and found my private, yet cold, bonanza. lightzone helped me to show what i saw.

strolling through my hometown, i learned that the last local heroes seem to live right in the mezzanine.

from the ‘instead of eating burgers’ series. the tripod at home for sure is pretty useless. on the other hand, that overlay of noise on the fine structures in a certain way matches my eyesight degrading with upcoming twilight, so there is not much to complain. temperatures were cold, and color temperatures as well.

in these pictures i actually had to turn down the saturation in bibble in order to better meet the mood of the situation.

i have developed a certain preference for landscape shots without sky, that is one of the reasons why i do prefer here the lead shot.

from the ‘instead of eating burgers’ series.

there is something to learn from this shot: either don’t touch basic settings you rely on, or do a thorough checking at the beginning of each shooting session.

of course i did not, and so the first frames, this one among them, were shot as jpeg only, in small size…

done with the china series, carl weese’s blog example as well as paul butzi’s current statement motivated me (again) to record what i see.

in this fire ladder a crafted blacksmith commissioned by an art-inclined houseowner have created a functional item with aesthetic value. in winter time, the iron leaves are there alone, whereas in summer they mix with their natural counterparts.

where this is? here, thanks to my gps.

probably. reason enough he would have with all those headlines on war, injustice, hunger, epidemies. you haven’t noticed? ah, they are not soo big today, nothing special, just the normal daily dose.

this is a wooden statue in my hometown’s spa garden. often i’ve tried to make a picture out of it, and now again it’s just a bland, central-composition. it just has gotten a meaning. for me, that is.

japanese layered mountains were my immediate association when i saw the clouds moving up on mt. predigtstuhl, seen from the middle of my hometown bad reichenhall. in fact this shot was quite extreme with a 450mme tele lens, so i had to massage the raw file quite a bit in lightzone to bring out those tufts of the clouds moving in and out, obscuring and revealing.

last week our city council voted against the construction of a statue of lord jesus on the top of predigtstuhl. it seemed a bit to be ‘adabei’ (bavarian slang for someone who’s pretending to create to participate in public attention) and even the churches objected because the feeling was only too overwhelming, that this was just an imitation of rio de janeiro’s statue and only for economical reasons.

kind of a retro mood for soft and unobtrusive colors caught me today. maybe one of the reasons are paul butzi’s post what makes you a photographer and paul lester’s the beauty of the everyday. for a balanced, full life, savouring the very moment without peering for the abnormal, extraordinary is a warranty for success. and to cherish these feelings, to appreciate those unspectacular moments, one of the best things to do that i know is taking a walk in the pre-alpine hills. even 15 minutes can suffice like in sunday’s visit to the hospital, where the nanny of our daughters is recovering after serious heart problems.

the light was soft, but i wanted to have an even softer impression so i carefully desaturated the reds of the roofs and only very minimally intensified the foreground grass a little bit. the picture meets the mood of this walk very well.

yesterdays visit to ainring provided some more photos. perhaps not so creative as it is just a picture of someone else’s art but this maybe is more a question of amour propre. those statues to the left and right of the baroque altar had something overwhelming for me – when i saw them on the monitor.

the church itself was open, but visitors are restricted to a very small place at the entrance, separated from the room by a heavy cast iron grid. a reasonnable reaction to the many thefts of objects of art in the 60s and 70s of last century. therefore i needed the camera as an extension of the eye to fully percieve the details of the statues and the altar.

water is always an interesting topic for me. todays trip to drop my daughter at a birthday party resulted in a walk along a small creek in Ainring, not far from home.

the rain had stopped only one hour ago, so the leaves were still glistening wet in the new sunlight.

the regular “der thumsee brennt” (burning lake thumsee) open air concert of the philharmonic orchestra met mixed weather yesterday. the concert itself had to be interrupted several times due to drizzling rain, but the fireworks went off into almost clear sky.

i had a vantage position a bit outside of the festival itself and so i could capture some foreground with the fireworks. shooting raw + jpeg this time, i was astonished about the a700′s jpeg quality straight out-of-camera, but ended up again with hand-tweaked (or should i say lightzone-tweaked) pictures from the raw.

the workflow with lightzone is just so convincing: dodging, burning, masking, intensifying – these are all old darkroom techniques, achievable through a very logical interface. not that lightzone doesn’t have its quirks – printing is a bit better than broken, it’s a memory and processor hog (for that reason alone i wouldn’t want a 24mpix camera) and the worst thing is the invisible support on the website together with the incomprehensive documentation. but it still has the for me most logical approach in developing raw files, and the results speak for themselves.

now for something completely different. i found this cobweb in schönram bog on one of my random visits. early morning, full of dew, a beauty of architecture and form follows function philosophy. creating an image was a bit tedious, of course the angle finder was at home, of course there was just a light breeze that invalidated all the support the tripod could give, so this image is the best out of many attempts.

the postprocessing turned out to be difficult: lots of options, but no immediately convincing one. i tried black and white but had the feeling that i lost to many nuances in the cobweb itself. so i ended with this, desaturated and contrast increased and – maybe the most important manipulation – a cropped out sky. that sky offered a nice warm color but in my eyes was too distracting. but i am still not fully content, as there seems to be too much foreground not adding to the picture. on the other hand i’d prefer to stick with the 2:3 ratio. so this is probably not the final version.

bavaria still is one of the roman-catholic heartlands. no politician will stand a chance opposing the church – the green party at the moment has to learn this the hard way, it seems. this domination was in former times even a physical one, as you can see in this picture: the church really towering over a village of maybe 10² houses.

This image needed some more postprocessing: removing CA with gimp, adding saturation to the not so blue sky, incrementing local contrast etc. i am still amazed about the performance of this budget/lightweight/small tamron lens.

that excursion last saturday was extremely satisfying in terms of both the process and the outcomes. so here are two more poppy flower vs. barley shots.

never before i had used the macro capabilities of my new tele zoom, but here, for the shallow depth of field, it is really indispensable. in a severe attack of lens buying addiction i had succumbed to the new tamron 70-300mm f/4-5.6 tele-macro ld di, which david kilpatrick of photoclubalpha.com had reviewed very favourably here. It definitely is a steal, and the remaining chromatic abberations – for this price you don’t get an apo lens – can be easily corrected with a gimp plugin, if necessary.

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getting up early to catch the first light was definitely the right thing to do today, as the sky became overcast before noon and stayed like this until the evening. i finally got over my feeling of inertia which quite often strucks me after my missions to sri lanka: so many contradicting emotions overwhelm me, compassion with the suffering people not the smallest, that it takes time afterwards to get up and go again, searching for harmony, beauty (not daring to use the word art). but when i was there i was just delving into that feeling of seeing, beeing there, experimenting, framing, that i completeley loosened up and this way really relaxed.

so it was really worth getting up early.

untypical for tulips, these are white. my favourite raw editor lightzone, which is now a