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.
Hochschwarzeck, Bavaria
Preising, Bavaria
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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