spring2life take2

Kugelbachweg, Bad Reichenhall

This is the first time that even an in-depth web search couldn’t give me the appropriate translation for the title of this post. “Überhälter” is a term used here in forestry, designing old trees that are left over on purpose in clear cuts, using their protective function for the young trees, but meanwhile also their positive effect for the biodiversity of these areas.

Kugelbachweg, Bad Reichenhall

Kugelbachweg, Bad Reichenhall

Nonn, Bad Reichenhall

For the name of the plant, I have to wait for my colleague U. Z. I have no doubts that she will immediately know what this is.

Update: Indeed she did: Wild Chervil (Anthriscus sylvestris).

Nonn, Bad Reichenhall

Müllnerhorn, Bad Reichenhall

For my eyes, the green of young rice plants is the most beautiful I know, but beech leaves in spring surely come next. And, least I forgot, no touch of the saturation slider. I put an oath on it.

Müllnerhorn, Bad Reichenhall

Kirchberg, Bad Reichenhall

Kirchberg, Bad Reichenhall

Thumsee, Bad Reichenhall

Since the beginning of this year, I have shrunken my photographic equipment quite a bit: from a DSLR with zooms down to a tiny m4/3 G3 with just three primes: 14mm, 20mm and 45mm. It resulted in less bulk and – a different way of seeing and framing. I like it a lot, and as image quality is at least on par even for 12″x17″ prints, there is no remorse.

Strolling through my hometown, I recently found a Pentax M 2.0/85mm manual lens for just €30,- in a shop window and decided to try that with an m4/3 adapter (chinese via eba*) on the G3. What a different feeling that lens gives: All metal/glass, a real aperture and distance ring (no fly by wire) and really heavy in comparison with the tiny Olympus 45mm. Manual focusing is ok as the G3 offers an enlargement of a selectable area in the viewfinder just by pressing down the wheel on the backside of the camera. And I do like that shallow DoF, even as the 6 aperture blades become visible in the reflections already at f2.8. A nice lens, not to carry it around every day (that lightweight, frugal equipment spoiled me), but sometimes a welcome addition.

Munich

This plant, German Felsenbirne, amelanchier ovalis, could be what is called serviceberry in English. However I’ve never seen fruits on one of these bushes, so it might be an urban hybrid, bred for early and rich blossoming but not carrying fruits to avoid delivery of food to birds and rats.

Thumsee, Bad Reichenhall

The wallpaper for May is here for download. Enjoy!

Vorderbrand, Berchtesgaden

To avoid getting declared a troglodyte, I decided to stop posting night pictures. And here is a landscape that I like even more, now that Spring means warm air contaminated with pollen. Cool, moist, quiet – such a forest (photographed two weeks back) would me my delight now. Add to it the wonderful out-of-focus blur of the Olympus 1,8/45, and you can imagine how happy I was.

Bad Reichenhall, Bavaria

Hochschwarzeck, Bavaria

For a moment I had considered “Golden Globe” for the title.

Sidi Bou Saïd, Tunisia

Blog note: This blog suffers since months from degrading performance, culminating in suspension of service because of allegiated overusage of ressources twice this week. I am taking the necessary steps and search for a better hosting. This consumes time however, and a solution probably will not be at hand within days. Please bear with me.

Bad Reichenhall, Bavaria

Enthusiastic business hopes quite often founder here, leaving empty shop windows sometimes even in prime locations. Here the leaves in the pedestrian area seem to have extended right into the shop.

Bad Reichenhall, Germany

Hochschwarzeck, Bavaria

Preising, Bavaria

Hochschwarzeck, Bavaria

This goes with special regards to Chris, who stated that he doesn’t “trust air that I can’t see”. Enjoy and download as usual from here.

Hochschwarzeck, Bavaria

No danger for Dr. Faustus here, as lingering (by car) is forbidden.

Preising, Bavaria

Some weeks ago, we had a typical grey and misty November weather. I enjoyed it in spite of the cold fingers when dealing with the camera.

Bad Reichenhall, Bavaria

First of all: Thanks to all of your for encouraging words re. my epic failure in a competition. Of course my disappointmant was big at first, but meanwhile I am over it. I guess my images and the expectations of the jury were just in some parallel worlds – no meeting possible. As it’s now almost 01:00 in the morning I’ve postponed further responses to your comments until tomorrow, instead I found one image of a friendly fall landscape, taken last week only. For November, where cold and dreary and sometimes even snowy weather is to be expected, this pastoral scene looks almost too friendly, too inviting. But I enjoyed the warm weather and golden light, knowing that it’s only a question of time until the cold time will come and stay for long and dark weeks.

Hochschwarzeck, Bavaria

Hochschwarzeck, Bavaria

Hochschwarzeck, Bavaria

An artless image probably, but for me the art is in the creation. Have a good weekend everybody!

Munich Train Station

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

Adlgaß, Bavaria

Adlgaß, Bavaria

Thumsee, Bavaria

Thumsee, Bavaria

Jezevac, Krk

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

Bad Reichenhall, Bavaria

Taking on the topic of trees in the city, these “talking” shadows caught my eye.

I was not aware about the extent to which a self-set theme can intensify seeing. Ok, I was interested in trees before, also in that conflict area of nature in the city, so I did not have to go out of my way, but the thematic reflection, the pondering on the facets of city trees created positive attention that was gratified by new awareness of image-worthy sceneries.

George Barr from the “Behind the Lens” blog had recently opened a discussion on the topic “Do we need to do projects”, which provoked a variety of answers (and a slightly academic deviation). That Brooks Jensen of Lenswork had used trees as his example of how to anchor images in projects I read just now – my tree imaging had already started before.

Despite the urban heat islands, vegetation in Munich is in many places still in a pre-vernal stage, with cherry trees and sometimes Magnolias being the notable exception.

The city tree subject remains interesting, especially in this stage when the trees are more a structure than a corpus. Pre- and after-work strolls led to a number of interesting frames and even more challenged ones, deserving further exploration of the topic.

Trees have numerous technical functions in the city, being it absorption and slow release of rain water or the filtration of particulate matter from the air, not to mention shade and habitat they offer to all kind of creatures. The metaphysical qualities of the trees have gained importance even more with progress of urban lifestyle, and Bertold Brecht’s statement from “Mr. K. and Nature” is as valid now as it was written:

“Now and then I would like to see a couple of trees when I step out of the house. Particularly because, thanks to their different appearance, according to the time of day and the season, they attain such a special degree of reality.”

Read more here in google books

The city of Munich for sure is one of the “green” cities in Europe, thanks mostly to the former kings who created the park “Englischer Garten”. But also in the very center of the city you find huge trees, facing exhaust gas and polluted rain water seasoned with de-icing salt during the winter. Optically and size-wise they concur with the buildings (Munich is also special here, allowing only 5-storey buildings in the inner city), and I do enjoy their organic shapes opposed to the 70ies style sober window patterns here.

The cold and already snowy October weather had only been an interlude, for now it’s pretty wam again. But in the city the colors have lost their power, their radiance, and this creates a certain feeling of alienation here.

I simply couldn’t resist

Resist I can however to comment on the results of the U.S. elections. Which is anyhow the best thing to do as I would lack words.

So I close my eyes, ears and mouth and nurture the sensitive and fragile plant of my creativity, trying not to dung it to death with cynicism or pure despair.

No words sunday…

Where is that button for “seeing”? This image found me on the way to the pharmacy, suffering from a heavy cold and otherwise pretty much oblivious for everything going on around me. For sure I was not in a deliberate state of “heightened awareness” (to quote the Landscapist, here), but perhaps that flu induced tunnel vision just helped me to blend out the unnecessary things and “just see”. Don’t know if that’s a reasonable explanation, however it for sure is not a recipe to be followed voluntarily.

On a side note: If you look at the large version of the image (by clicking on it), make sure you get the full size by clicking on the “square with arrow” symbol to get the original size instead of a browser-calculated downsized version.

Fall is progressing, many of the leaves already on the floor, but some of the weeds’ stems are still standing, dried, prone to fall with the next rain soaking their brittle structure.

My recents strolls through landscape and city were easy, recreative and at the same time prolific. Recently the amount of gear I use (and carry) reduced itself drastically: at the moment I have less need for both long or very short focal lengths. Most of my images were/are created with either the 28mm/85mm primes or the standard zoom, substantially wider but also substantially slower – most of the time I settle for the faster primes. And instead of feeling restricted, it seems I concentrate more by less concentrating, ’cause I simply don’t scan the extreme narrow or wide angles, and instead the images discover me. Very agreeable!

The notorious “Fallen Leaves” of this season are hard to avoid. But then, why should I – they provide a unique and quickly changing coloring, grabbing the view in many variations and situations, even when scrunched, like these.

… and I do swear that I didn’t touch the saturation slider.

To have break from the notorious colorful fall leaves here leaves in a different context: Autumn in Germany traditionally is the time to plant trees, and this is was they did behind my office building.

Pun intended

Leaves again, but this time in a different scale and context. This image profits a lot from beeing seen in large and on a dark background, so – as always – feel free to click on it.

An hour or so later than the images for yesterday’s post were captured, the sun was already to low for intensive direct light, and everthing got a softer, maybe a bit elegic appearance. Still, limiting the depth of field seemed adequate for me to express the felt solitude and time of decay in my images.

Up to now, bokeh for me was something soft, to be achieved with a longer focal length. But last week at the river Saalach backwaters, the afternoon sun came almost violently through the already sparse leaves. I did not want to romanticize this light, and so I switched to my 28mm (42mme) prime, a fast lens that I love for the normal angle of view it has on APS-C, and for its macro capacities: it focuses almost to the front lens. The unsharp regions regions show not those soft transitions that I am used from my 85mm lens, but I found it matching to the overall lighting situation. Of course focusing was not really simple, as wide open the DoF is to measured in single-digit millimeters, but several attempts at the same subject helped to get an acceptable result. Next time I might try continous exposure mode, something I had never needed up to now.

This flock of houses I visit (irregularly) over probably a decade, from the very beginning of the construction up to now, where houses and gardens have melted into the older structures and become part of them. But fresh ideas are still visible and now leave a positive, less artificial impression than in the beginning. On the one hand this for sure is a question of familiarization, but as the whole situation is less ostentatious, details like this yellow door become welcome and are not part of something peregrine any more.

In a certain sense this also would hold true for the immigration debate here in Germany, where many of the (not only) petty bourgeois dart their common angst of social descent against the visible unfamiliar, closing perception and replacing percipience with prejudice: doors are not yellow, they never have been.

The fact is that the German society and economy would crash immediately after all immigrants of the last 40 years would have left. And I have no doubt that the same holds true for pretty much all states of the so-called first world.

Temperatures have dropped here, and the drizzle now is so cold that it’s really uncomfortable outside. This image is from somewhat better days, when fog was doing miracles in the street.

Admittedly I am drawn to quiet color schemes, restricted palettes, harmonious forms. And I am always glad when I find it in landscape, being it rural or natural. I guess this is so because it is rare.

Again from my stroll through the park. I enjoyed very much the characteristics of the color, coming out much stronger in the absence of direct sunlight. All images were made with the 1.4/85, stopped down usually to 2.0, resulting in a wise compromise between bokeh and acceptable DoF/achievable focus accuracy.

As sunset is early meanwhile – I am waiting for the end of Daylight Saving Time – I decided to leave work early and spend some time in the park, catching the sunrays at low angles, beautifully backlighting some foreign grass in the background. That preference for backlight dates back into my boyhood: In some photography book I had read that backlight is supposed to be the most difficult, yet most rewarding kind of light. And whilst I’ve produced tons of waste that way, especially slides, the results indeed where often interesting enough to justify the effort. The image above for sure is nothing extraordinary in terms of subject matter, yet the sharp backlight makes it special.

Probably the one and only true fall flower, at least in Europe: The Meadow Saffron’s German name is “Herbstzeitlose” (Herbst = autumn). It blooms now and makes best use of the weaker competition for pollinators. As beautiful as it looks, as poisonous it is, and in earlier times intoxications were not rare among humans as well as grazers. But the alcaloid Colchizin was and is used for medical purposes, too.

At least for the lens it proved to be harmless, and I could sing a similar song of praise for my venerable Minolta 1,4/85 as Andreas Manessinger does for the Nikon counterpart here.

Hearing descending steps on the road below, I decided to react quickly: Dialling down the ISO, cramming in the slowest possible f-stop I estimated I should get a low shutter speed, slow enough to render the pedestrian in a blurry manner, avoiding the impression of a frozen moment and setting her in contrast to the static rectangles of the buildings. I managed, and internal stabilisation helped to keep the sensor steady.

Using the same camera always and everwhere seems to pay out. Of course sometimes I’d enjoy a small P&S, but I do fear the effect of being not completely in unison with the tool, the camera being quirky in the wrong moment. Juha Hataaja from Lightscrape does wonders with his LX-3, and besides his visual and creative powers he knows his tool after 125.000+ exposures. I could imagine that this really makes up the distinction from many of the interested hobby photographers: Doing it, excercising it, coming to a level where all the settings become self-evident and the tool becomes part of eye and hand. In the end it’s what Herrigel describes in “Zen In The Art Of Archery”. And it seems there’s no shortcut.

Saturday morning provided opportunity for a short stroll through the neighborhood when overcast sky and slight fog were still prominent. I like this kind of light very much, and as I had only two fast primes with me, the light level was not a problem. Only the autofocus was, wide open I sometimes had the feeling it’s more like hit or miss. Oh well – in the end it was worth the trouble, but I definitely would not want to depend on it for street or reportage like photography. And it seems I am not alone with this issue, even Andreas Manessinger complains about a similar problem with his Nikon.

The beginning of the cold season usually awakens new melancholic feelings in me, this year is not different from the last ones. The wall with traces of dirty rainwater was already subject of a post one year ago, but this time I concentrated more on the almost repelling character of a cold rhythm of roof tiles, plaster, trees.

Sunday ended with a short excursion, one of the daughters with me. Talking a little bit, explaining to her an older film camera but also various plants and insects, and enjoying the last light of the sun, already hiding behind rain-filled clouds, but still providing a golden shine. Quality time, a reservoir for a week full of work.

And this is another aspect of landscape photography, not the grand scale, and not the glorious light and full creamy color. I recently had a conversation with Martin Storz of the public eye blog, and I would highly recommend to have a look at his blog and his take on ‘landscape’.

One third of June has already passed, so I am really late with my wallpapers. But as I do like this pair of images so much, especially the delicacy of the Iris, I decided to publish those anyway.

The reflection in the first image is the replica of a Thai Temple situated in the pond in one of Munich’s biggest parks. It was set up 25 years ago for a national garden show and I did photograph it several times over the years, but it has a whimsical quality making the direct images all looking somewhat out-of-order, maybe because of a certain sterility of an unused yet best-maintained religious building. The reflection or a peek through the surrounding leaves works much better for me.

Found on the descent from the world’s largest glacier cave in Werfenweng. In the cave photography is forbidden, at least for tourists, but it would be anyway complicated (and dangerous for non-climbers) to create a suitable lighting situation.

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.

One more addition to my collection of leaves that could not complete their fall to the ground. My subconscious associated Leonhard Cohen’s “Suzanne” with it, but in spite of re-reading the lyrics I could not find the chain of arguments.

The other leaves you can find here in in this small gallery.

A Happy Easter to all, together with my deepest wishes for peace.

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.

As winter cold works its way towards spring time, the old leaves that survived autumn hanging on the twigs no loose more and more of their structure. The normal brown-black changes again and with the vanishing of parts of the cells brighter layers become visible for a short time. Rain and snow will wash them away again, and the next fierce gusts of wind may well blow the remnants to the earth. Winter is the time for this.

Those shades of blue in the open sky and reflected in the snow have their own fascination. And there is no need to play with the saturation slider, simple underexposure by only a half of a f-stop got me the most wonderful blue I could imagine.

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.

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.

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.

You see, my obsession with shallow DoF continues. Even so, the images are very different: An almost abstract rendering of the red fruit on a background that dissolves into unidentifiable shapes and the spadix in the second image, that shows up in front of structures that, whilst blurred, still carry some information about the environment of this plant.

The “great landscape” image of that place is still work in progress. The art is to increase the tones in a very subtle way without jazzing it up, and to find a more interesting crop than the the original frame is. It will take a bit more time for thinking and trying

Despite of the frost the bramble leaves have kept a marvellous deep red, so deep that indeed I decided to turn down the saturation a bit in order to avoid an artificial ‘vivid’ look that was significantly enhanced by the warm sunrise light. The birch leaves did not need such treatment, their thick and meanwhile dry material does not glow to the same extent as the bramble’s do.

The various groups of birches, just at the border of the tarn and interspersed into the pines in the elevated areas form excellent graphical elements with their white bark. The morning hours were not really cold, especially not for november, but this year we have the warmest november since 35 years.

Oh, but don’t care – our elected and not so elected leaders won’t bother when meeting in Kopenhagen (at least most of them). The most important thing is this generation’s prosperity – which is only relative when 1/6th of the world’s most affluent state had to live in ‘food uncertainty’ in 2007.

Song of the day? ‘Oh what a wonderful world’. What else.

Update: try to see the pictures at least in 1024px height by clicking on them – the downscaling to the posted size lets vanish quite some details.

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.

The weekend was weather-wise pretty much grey in grey, so this picture from last week might be a good representation. It is the time between the bright colors of fall and the beginning non-colors of early winter, where the drizzle is still stronger than the snow. But it is the first year where I can photographically enjoy this time, too. Only partially it has to do with good gloves and a good tripod, the bigger part is a fresher, free view that identifies beauty in more of its incarnations.

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.

Not related to today’s historical date, these maple leaves grabbed my attention because of their graphical complementarity.

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.

One of those golden autumn days we had today. In the evening I went to one of the creeks, but the best image of today turned out to be this one, taken on the way to the post office – the sun in the spa gardens was warm and inviting. Inviting for this leaf probably, too, to dry up a little bit more and fall down, leaving the twigs bare until next spring.

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.

Maybe I am overdoing it with my faible for low DoF, but then I find the autumn leaves in that context really wonderful – beauty not in a grain of sand but in a single leaf, alone or against just the idea of a background, blurred to an extend where the colors only signal the wonders of an autumnal forest.

Today I finally held in my hand what I was looking for since re-starting photography: A probably 15 years old second hand Minolta 1.4/85mm lens. Aah – that were the times when all lenses were built completely from metal. That definitely gives a solid feeling! And then that front lens, what an amount of glass! But I didn’t bother for long with admiring the outer qualities, instead I used my lunch break for a walk in the nearest park. That shallow DoF and blurry background is amazing (the shot above was taken stopped down half a f-stop) but what was demanding at least for the first frames is the discrepancy between the viewfinder image and what gets recorded on the sensor: In the viewfinder you simply do not see that shallow DoF and background blur or bokeh. The reason is the “optimisation” of the former ground glass into an array of micro-structures that are much brighter than any groundglass could be, but similarly to a loupe offers a virtual image to the eye. And this image does not obey to even only widely similar optical laws of the rendering on a groundglass. Well, without that artifice the viewfinder would be unbearably dark with the zoom lenses that are the standard now.

I am a happy camper for now, as this lens allows me to bask in low DoF images and, as I hope, those wonderful airy discs of out-of-focus light sources. Additionally I will try those fine portraits where only the pupils are rendered sharply but already nose and ears get enwrapped in soft and flattering unsharpness.

I have to admit that processing this image took me overly long time, despite it looks so uniform. The difficulty was in the intended rendering of a dark, humid forest. I had to overcome my inhibitions to leave a substantial part of the histogram unused in order to get that impression of a dark forest. Opening up enough shadows to get details into the picture was simpler then, choosing the right amount of sharpening tricky again. And that dry tree to the left originally had a tad too much red for my taste – but at least a stem’s shape is rectangular, so it was easy to mask it and treat it separately.

From this image I will create desktop wallpapers with calendar, so stay tuned.

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.

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.

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.

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!

“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.

Nice new blog, isnt’t it? I got several thumbs-up comments and was happy – sleek new design, not too distracting and all. But – those comments came from those who could comment. And with ‘could’ I don’t want to hint to their ability to write, but to the sheer technical possibility to get their comment posted. Those who couldn’t comment were very well knowledgable and able to click the submit button – alas, that fine fusion theme does not play nicely with older browsers like firefox 2.0 or internet explorer 6. If there would be only some optical quirks or marginal display deviations, I would not care too much because browsers do have their own idea what is correct, and sometimes they don’t, but in this case probably the jquery javascript library had its issues with the way it was used here. And in the end this blog is about photographic content, not web 2.0 javascript gimmicks without real value. Locking out users because of the version of the browser deems me to be outright stupid.

Thanks to Carl Weese from Working Pictures and also WPII Pictures in Public and also Oren Grad from Things seen  I was able to track things down. After some testing I decided to go with a new theme, which needs of course some modding to make it fit for my needs, so don’t be surprised if the look of the pages undergoes some further changes. But for a while, I think I will use the ‘minimalism’ theme. Keep it simple, stupid!

A lazy day at the lake and not much to photograph until I saw the wind play with the leaves of that japanese maple tree (acer japonica). Here in Europe they are quite popular in the gardens because of that wonderful red of their leaves even in the midst of summer.

The image alone I found not interesting enough, but that development from the static leaves, suddenly showing their bright underside in a gust of wind and heavily shaking when the wind becomes still stronger, that was it for me.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

this is why am here. it is good to know that the support we try to bring really reaches the people in need. and when content meets form, out of beauty happiness can rise. sorry for being pathetic, this is an unstaged shot right out of today morning’s site visit, and maybe the jet lag also has its effect.

ok, kids pics always go to the heart, but i can’t help to like it. we can talk about the lighting situation, backlight/striplight in both situations, reduced color sets also which almost leave out a part of the spectrum, so a lot of my ingredients for a good picture are there.

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

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

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.

this was aroma therapee without the possibility to escape: sun drenched cedar woods on the west coast of krk island. you could walk for hours in a strong scent of cedar resin dissolved in the hot and salty coastal air. in a spa you would pay quite some money for this experience and the healing effect it is supposed to have on your bronchia

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.

sometimes 30 minutes can be sufficient: a walk alone in grey, wet weather at the borders of a lake, a short view in the woods and the silhouette of an old strong tree. Of course it was dark in there and so i was glad for my tripod. the polarizer had to help avoid too bright reflections from the leaves. the final imaged showed an intense green, but not in as many variations as i had hoped for a strong picture, so i took my chance in the conversion to b&w and some toning.

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.

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.

flare obviously is a weak spot of the tamron 11-18, on the other hands the situation present was pretty extreme and the front lens not completely clean. oh yeah, there is something to learn from every shot… the rock formation down there is really gorgeous and i decided to come back in june to get some flood water shots. 1954 water level was so high that the whole canyon was flooded, some 5 m higher than the standpoint of this shot.

the 2nd image is from the same canyon, just a detail of the rocks. the whole place, a visitor balkony glued to the rocks maybe 10 m above the water and 20 or even more m below the surface makes you feel pretty small and humble, especially if you are almost alone like this time on a rainy father’s day.

rainy day, subdued light, so the Father’s day was not a overly buoyant affair. still the walk with my nephew and his hour-long talk about the playstation and the possible hacks (oh how far away am i from a boy’s hobbies – my toys are much more expensive at least) were some fun. he silently carried my tripod and never complained when i was stopping for a picture.
the different kinds of green and the white of the cherries make up for a great scenery. this image again did teach me that close framing helps to concentrate what i really want to show. i was negligent when shooting, so i had to to re-compose through cropping.

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think pink was a mountaineering related slogan some 20 years ago, connecting environment awareness with fashion and style. searching the web turned out that it still exists in both senses, however i could not find statement about it’s importance nowadays (again in both senses…)

here this title is to take literally, thanks to the tulips in my garden and my new 17-70mm lens which has a p&s-like macro focusing right from the glass of the front lens. first and foremost i bought it to reduce the number of lenses (and number of lens changes in dusty environment) for the upcoming business trip to sri lanka, beeing a replacement for my trusty 17-35 plus 28-75, but this macro function is really handy, too.

what a wonderful world: convinced my wife and the kids to walk along the whole weissbach canyon. ok, there was a wholesome goal, mauthäusl inn, with a terasse overlooking part of the canyon, and the prospect of an icecream worked more than accelerative. and we had a break in the canyon, which offered the opportunity for this shot – the other parts of the path we had to attentively guide the kids in order to avoid an unintended bath. conclusion: walking with kids is fun as long as you take it as what it is, not as an opportunity to make all the pictures you’d probably like to.

the oscillation of the strong sunlight in parts of the canyon is what i visualized here, enforced by the fidgety pattern of the rock.

recently i had discussions with colleagues of the local photo group about moving water in photography. there are obviously two fractions: flow haters aka. freeze lovers and soft flow lovers. whilst the latter enjoy the extension to the human eye in form of the camera’s ability to show the movement of the water, the first party bluntly rejects such pictures. for me, both forms of rendering are valid but I do enjoy very much the flow, expressing a distinct feeling of time passing, energy coming and dissipating and offering the eyes and the soul a place to dive in, melt in and re-unite with nature.

the little Weißbach canyon becomes more and more a place of rest and regeneration for me, and capturing the stimulation of all senses in a photography is an everlasting challenge.

the image to the right is a crisp rendering of a spot nearby, strong more in the colors and in the v-shaped direction of the falling waters.

easter monday i got some free time and went to an alpine meadow near the ‘queralpenstrasse’ (alpine transversal road) just 20min far from home. under the north face of Reiteralm there was still a lot of snow, and from time to time avalanches broke free high above our heads. the woods here have suffered a lot from the storms, weakened as they are by the air pollution they toppled over hectar wise. but on the north side there is still hope that a natural mixed forest will grow up again as the density of deer and roe is not as high as in the opposing south faces, where they feed every spring on the buds of the young trees to devastating effects. the young protection forest does not grow up but ends as extremely expensive mash for future trophies on the chimney wall of a hunter.

the second picture is an alpine hut there on the meadows. the cows used to graze right in the woods – with obvious consequences for the young trees – but the administration tries to buy out now those old rights.

after winter came back into our valley for three days and brought some fresh snow, i used some free hours to go back to weissbach canyon to look for water and ice. those layers above covered several square meters of rocks. in the end they stopped my exploring of the canyon as they were impossible to cross, but the made a really good subject for a picture. this one is in fact a combination of four single shots in helicon focus to achieve overall sharpness. some massaging in lightzone helped to guide the eye a bit.

the image to the right was taken at the same spot. the forms of the frozen leaves and the harsh shadows remind me of some long forgotten letters.

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spending some time outside on one of our favourite spots i noticed those deeply rooted, strong trees – probably hornbeams.

It is part of a series i took, just follow the link. i am considering to re-shoot this with different focus distances, given i can install helicon focus via wine on my linux box. sharpness in all parts of the image would be an added bonus here, i think.

the art of engineering: removing all uneccessary parts. engineering my picture, i applied the same maxim – killing the clutter.

when my ladies were skiing, i took an hour off and went my own ways in a different, less populated part of this mountain (hard to find, i can tell you). even harder it was to hold the 450mme zoom to get this diagonal line, because with my glasses i don’t see all corners of the viewfinder simultaneously. but in the end i had to do only marginal cropping.

matching song might be “freedom’s just another word for nothing have to loose” – kudos for the picture/music combination andreas manessinger.

there is only little water in weissbach at this time of the year, while in early summer this is a spot well known for whitewater kayaking.

the warm weather of the last weeks made the snow melt even down in the canyon, but the old snow on the path is now almost like ice, so it was not possible to walk deep into the gorge. still there were some interesting spots, and the water carried and displayed a very intense feeling of cold and freshness.

from yesterday’s excursion into weissbach canyon. The light was quite flat on site, but raw processing with lightzone did small wonders. i tried to work out a good effect of the negative space embracing the icicles but still do wonder if it’s the best possible crop.

paypal almost ruined the shot. if you could see this shot in full resolution, you would notice it’s not razor sharp inspite having been taken with a tripod. But: it was taken with my old tripod, as paypal hold up the (bank collection) payment for the new one for 6 days and therefore it did not arrive in time. and the old tripod is too weak for camera plus zoom. can you imagine how furious I am?

walked the new camera yesterday, or better tried to sneak off from christmas shopping for some photo opportunities. weather was almost grey in grey with only some holes in the fog, bitter cold and the car a real homy place. and usable as a support too, for example for this shot with 300mme focal lenght which always is a defiance for my not too steady hands.

the new camera is as good as I hoped that id would be, the high resolution just amazing, but the faster and less condition-dependent autofocus the real plus for me. i hope that i can train it to take good pictures by itself as the 7D did, up to then i will try to do my best.

this was the last remembrance of summer we got this autumn. the light was in an astonishing way similar to springtime, coming through an already thin roof of leaves high above us. it’s not very often that i dare to include the sun in a picture i take with my 11-18 mm zoom, as this lens is quite prone to flares. but here it worked out very nicely.