spring2life take2

Salzburg, Austria

Bad Reichenhall, Bavaria

Bad Reichenhall, Bavaria

Hochschwarzeck, Bavaria

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

Forstamtsstrasse, Bad Reichenhall

Trappentreustrasse, Munich

NH-Hotel, Ludwigsburg, Germany

The peak in tourist season is said to be over, but still hordes of tourists crowd the small streets of Krk. The morning is the best time to avoid this – for me demotivating – scenario, and often there are new, improvised and short-lived sceneries, ready to be savoured and transformed into bytes for further perusal. I like this jaunty proceeding, independent from complicated techniques, so very conversant with the camera that it becomes just a natural extension of the eye. Holidays!

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.

In case you wonder: Wearing red underwear on new year’s eve is a tradition in Italy, Spain, Chile and (maybe) Mexico. Just to bring you luck…

And if it’s not a real tradition, at least it is marketed as such. Optically it can have it’s merits, even for father christmas.

Couldn’t help it: That Santa Claus head next to a red garter reminded me of Salome’s dance and its tragic consequences…

The harbour water is not such an attractive medium – oily, smelly and so on, probably the same in every harbour of the world. Amazing enough locals are fishing there, and I guess even that fish is ending on the table.

But the reflective qualities of the water are still intact, and the way the ripples dissolve the form of the ships was really amazing.

Those images just required some adjustment of the black point and a bit tuning of the curves. It was already late in the day when I took the images and the low light required a high sensitivity resulting in higher noise levels in the shadows. But the Bibble5 beta did a great job here.

In the back of my mind there was this sentence “A Rose is a Rose is a Rose”, immediately connecting with this image. Still I was not sure where from I knew the words, thoughts targeting Antoine de Saint Exyperie’s Little Prince… Until google and wikipedia corrected me, nominating Gertrude Stein as the author.

But this rose looks withered already in august, which is a bit unusual. The explanation is (again) the long rainfalls which made the water level rise so much that this rose stood in the water for some weeks, ruining the roots and make the leaves and blossoms fade much too early.

Still this rose is a rose is a rose…

these images, created while commuting in the rain, might have also fit martin storz’ always-take-the-weather project on his blog ‘the public eye’, but i decided to show them here as part of my bokeh mini-series. and for martin i will try to create a sunny weather image, given that we get such a thing in the next days.

for me these airy disks are something genuinely photographic, along with shallow dof, which can not be reasonably reproduced in painting or other arts and crafts. maybe this is the reason why i get so fascinated by those two phenomena.

and as always: click on the images to see them large in a javascript lightbox.

real life kicking in can mean: coordinate reprojection utility has to be done before yesterday, printint utility does not work, car has to go to the workshop, kid 1 has to rehearse violin, kid 2 harp, kid 3 is unhappy with the maths test, wife away for a parent-teacher conference, the most urgent letter has to be written today, and a good friend shows up in the evening…

this is when i love the trainspotting quote “choose life”

over at paul lester photography, paul praises david du chemin’s just published book ‘within the frame’. living in germany, i probably have to wait some more days until my copy arrives. the pieces david offered to read in advance sound as motivating as paul’s reflection of his first glance does, so waiting for a book this time is a bit harder than it uses to be.

developing my visualisation powers, not yet my vision, this year seems to be much easier than a year ago. and the unexpected thing is that my interest in photographic gear becomes lower than during the times i had experienced as photographically fruitless. even my love for photo magazines diminuishes, probably because i see clearer now what is just featuring new things, sometimes plainly and painfully superficially.

sofobomo for me is planned as a further boost of my capabilities. in the past months i have tried to compile coherent series and learnt a lot out of that: when shooting i have to have this purpose in the back of my mind. just shooting plenty does not guarantee the connection between good single images. in the meantime i use my free minutes like today when commuting to sharpen my sight and my sensibility for gestalt and color.

a big advantage of the (pre-)alpine region i am dwelling in is the long duration of spring you can get by moving just a little bit. whilst the petals of the apple trees now lay in the street of my hometown, washed down by the rainfall of the last 3 days, just 10km to the south spring is still in its early stages. here in weißbach canyon the intensive green of a beech tree is still sensational as the other vegetation is still more in the pale and brown stadium.

and the rusty red of the lichens on the lime rock is just now extraordinary as there is not to much red to be found in the surroundings. in a week the scenery will have changed with blossoms and flowers everywhere.

for sofobomo, which has it’s first day of the fuzzy month today, weißbach canyon is one of my options. the flow of water there is a continuous fascination, and if my other options don’t work (or if i feel bold and want to make two books) i will surely come back there.

carl weese made me rethink my decision to convert my hometown monstrosities to black and white. yep – the german saying that someone has tomatoes on his/her eyes seems fit here: i was so concentrated on that wideangle effect and the dynamic lines that i just did not pay attention to the subject: overdone color to the perdition of our kids optical systems. so i will re-work my raw files and possibly re-shoot the subject.

in the meantime one of the reasons to carry my camera everywhere: the commuting train to munich is not so banal when shot in the morning light where the blue of the sky nicely complements the striking red of the waggons. and i confirm on oath that i did not touch the saturation slider.

and the morning light was so beautiful that it even caused me to drop the newspaper (anyhow bad news everywhere, thomas is so right). the world does not change if we look out of the window to pay attention to every day’s beauty, but it might give us some power to fight the big and small evils everwhere.

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.

the cold grey weather we had, just above freezing, perfectly matches the blue-grey colors here, with the chillies a perfect complementary in color as well as characteristic.

the chinese society undergoes a fast transition. this is strongly visible also inside the cities, where those who do not manage to be on the rising side live under very simple conditions. i did not want to think about winter temperatures in accomodations like this.

everything else I do know precisely thanks to the exif data, even the place:

This is the result on clicking on this link and switching to satellite map. technical background? a cheap gps logger, the transystem bt 747 and (because i am a dedicated linux user and programmer) some perl code to find the correct coordinates via the exif time stamp of the picture. similar software is available for windows and the mac. nice gadget, and saves some note-taking.

the trip to china brought +20gb raw files. going through the directories (when shooting in big numbers, i organize my files one folder per day) i still am in day 2 and try to discover the keepers or at least the not so-so ones. the shot above i like – otherwise i wouldn’t show it, of course – as it depicts that scenery outside of fu-zi temple in nanjing as a typical chinese urban mixture of young people in western style clothes, but again the temple and the connected philosophy and its symbols as nowadays again appreciated setting.

nanjing as a megacity of 7.5 million inhabitants is as modern and/or western as it can be in the contemporary china, but still using traditional symbols as decoration. even manpower-driven rikshaws are present, in former times deprecated because of the exploitation of the kulis.

feasting in red was a major attraction in the past holidays. here are two last images, the upper one really grabbed me with its strong forms. red is a major signal color with its own significance in the human perception system, and it is a rare color in my habitat (of course these facts are connected, an abundant color could not have that signalling capacity). here in old europe, especially in the bavarian countryside almost nothing is painted in bright red, and cars that are have a decent ‘show off’ quality and therefore get despised.

but that croatian fisher boat wore an almost painful red, and when i saw it in the first morning sunlight this red was boosted by the low sun to almost insufferableness.

my hometown seems to be a colorless, pale place in comparisons with the colors i see here in krk, croatia – or is it my eyes that suddenly open to see more then they use to do at home? george barr already had a go on this topic here and from what i know from fellow photographers, this seems to be a quite common problem.

at least here i seem to have overcome it, and so the days are – besides having fun with the kids – full of new things, images among them. vacancies at it’s best, that is.

the first time i made really use of the blue hour and the my old zoom. focused to close distance, wide open, the bokeh really becomes great. which is no wonder at the other hand as there are no diaphragm blades involved. again, anti-shake saved my day as handholding 320mm effective focal length at 1/20s shutter speed is next to impossible, even when leaning to a lamp post. iso 1600 as a usable sensor speed is a value in itself (as is auto-iso, when you are in a hurry), though i have to admit that with other subjects the grain is below the optimum.

it took some time, but it seems that i grow more and more accustomed to my camera and can detach myself from technique and concentrate more and more on seeing. and in the end, *this* is it what really matters.

i confess, i confess, i confess: i too am guilty of the inevitable spring flower macros, encroaching the photographic websites from all directions now. ok, flickr has always high times for flower shots, and a lot of people turn up their nose on this. but even andreas manessinger already found himself seduced by flowers again… mea culpa, mea culpa, mea culpa.

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so what: only rarely i have found such pure colors, such unity of form and color, and such photogenic qualities helping my vision and craftsmanship to overcome pure reproduction and turn into feeling, sensing.

so i confess being guilty. but i don’t mind.

i get the taste for available light again. fortunately i was seated at a table from which i got support for my elbows. i liked specially her self-forlornness in front of a stage with very active performances.

on a sidenote: supporters for the freedom of tibet were waving banners. the chinese consulate-general wanted to get them removed. but of course this was “Hauptmarkt”, not Tiannamen…

outside the temple, a sheer sinfony of reds welcomed the visitor – carried to the extreme by the matching outfit of the woman.

the dim light in the chinese temple was really a challenge that I could overcome with highest ISO setting. But I thing the mood is well retained and transport through this spektrum of reds emerging from the darkness.

taken at a get-together of a german-russian friendship association.

I was really astonished how some of the pictures developed due to the long shutter speeds.

processed with lightzone.