“Sizzling Silhouette” would have been a headline matching the ad for an “Erotic Trade Fair” even better, but Debra from A Passion in Frames had already used it for her post of today. Maybe take it as an encouragement to look in her blog.
One of the results of a lunchtime stroll. No story behind, just delight about that blue-white combination. You can’t always resort to greek islands for this color combination, so I decided to take what I could get.
Thoreau’s Walden for sure is not on everybody’s reading list over here, but the craving for the “genuine” life out there in the woods seems to become stronger with every degree of civilisation’s comfort and amenities.
My snowstorm images of the last days finally got distilled into a new small gallery, here.
Sitting in the bus, peering through the front window, I suddenly had this feeling that the scenery of red lights in front of me might unfold into an image worth recording. Some quick fiddling brought out the camera of the backpack, luckily with the 1.8/28mm lens alread mounted, and I took the first shot without thinking, but before the second and third I dialed in exposure compensation. Well, what shall I say: the first shot was “right” in the way that it recorded that ghostly scenery of light sources and reflections, giving not too much clue of the real scenery. The 3rd shot turned out mundane, interesting more as reference for comparison then anything else.
And now it’s high time to tune the formatting of the blog again – the highslide plugin I use for the image popups used up the minimum distance between text and image. This needs to be addressed.
Found in my hometown, where usually naked bottoms don’t get wiped in open public…
Photographed in raw, converted in bibble5 with the Andrea plugin set to Tri-X, fine-tuned in gimp as bibble5 currently doesn’t support the perspective correction plugin. Other than that, it’s just having the camera at hand and reasonably pre-set.
I had planned to show more diptychs, but with the current means of presentation I am a bit unhappy: Combined as one image, the current blog layout shows them so small that they become quite unattractive. Of course clicking on the image enlarges it, but the first impression is not inviting. I started to experiment with some blending methods, but the day job proved to be more time-consuming than expected.
So today’s image is a snap taken when returning from a meeting via subway: One of the stations, next to the museum quarter in Munich, exhibits some replicas of greek statues, hijacked by a graecophil Bavarian king and since then shown in a local Museum.
The raw image was converted in bibble5, and I used a LAB plugin to emphasize the greenish light. But for the last treatment I had to resort to digikam’s local contrast enhancement function, without it the image was too “flat”.
Update: I added a screenshot of bibble5 in action on this image. In the top row you find the thumbnail of the unmodified raw just right to the highlighted thumbnail. The effect of the LAB modification is the extreme narrowing of the blue and green values. The tint was achieved by moving the grey point of the histogram out of the center towards darker.
made of a rainstorm and early morning traffic lights during commuting in Munich. And you are right: commuting traffic is more like a horror trip.
Last weekend was sort of a landmark in the change of the seasons: for the first time we had direct sunlight again in our kitchen since beginning of december last year, as now the sun higher on the horizon again. But the during the week work usually finishes only when it’s already dark again. Learning to see differently, there is so much to discover even at night, and in the city it’s not a problem to hand hold most of the shots, cranking up the ISO to 800 or sometimes 1600.
These different trees were again treated in bibble5, applying a bleach bypass preset after masking out the (already sun-bleached) public transport signs and emphasizing the structure of the naked sycamore tree.
While it is not always convenient to take photographs during winter time, leastwise it is a challenge: familiar subjects change completely, some vanish, others appear, many of them in a quite volatile way, especially when related to snow. Seeing better the more images I take, the orange-yellow color of the snow catched my eye. Together with the black lines of the tramway tracks and the irregular patterns of the pedestrian’s tracks it formed an image where the conversion of matter by light and framing becomes a subject in its own sense. And yes, I am onPaul Butzi’s side, when he emphasizes the importance of subject. If there’s no connection between my mind and the subject, no image will start to exist, just a wasted file.
Found in downtown Munich.
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.
Couldn’t help it: That Santa Claus head next to a red garter reminded me of Salome’s dance and its tragic consequences…
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.
Not only the windtalkers were specialists in unbreakable code, in a certain way all generations have developed their own codex, much to the annoyance of the elders, who did not understand a single word of this language. So this day marks a birthday: I stood before this sticker and no clue at all what it could mean. At least I did not remain stupid, thanks to my mighty friends, the search engines. And to reveal the secret: the “rude girls” is a local series of drum/bass events, featuring djanes and promoting female artists in that scene. Now you know. Me, I prefer that photography to the real music, probably.
The locomotive driver probably did not share my adventurous feelings regarding a trip to Rome – and I guess he had to go up to the border to Austria only anyhow. Different perspectives everywhere, and differentiate I did also (again) with a big f-stop, and afterwards in postprocessing by working on that cold-warm contrast as well.
From the number of keepers within that week that I own this lens now it seems that this purchase was a good decision. That (slow zoom lens induced) lack of shallow DoF is the only drawback I see at the moment with my APS-C format camera. But with the right prime it is not an issue any more. That I get high shutter speeds even in the darker times of the day is another benefit, albeit a smaller one when taking that great high-iso performance of the current camera generation into account. Oh – I have to say yesterday’s camera generation, as my model is already 2 years old – an eon in today’s camera makers fast development rhythm.
When Munich is grey, cold and wet, a train to Rome is an alternative definetely worth considering. Well, I guess I am too duteous or too inflexible, and so I chose the well known path to the office.
Originally on the sticker is written “Rettet die Bürger, nicht die Banken”, which translates to the words of the headline. The “socialist german workers youth”, SDAJ does not even play a minor role in the political scenery of today, and only in dispersed parts of the city you can find their stickers or illegally sticked posters. But the headline on the stickers nicely matches the fire like lights in the street.
Beginning with today I have added the opportunity to send e-cards and buy prints or cards from the images on the blog. www.fotomoto.com offers a promising service. As I cannot realistically expect fine art prints from such this lab, I have opted for low prices, always keeping in the back of my mind the words from Tyler Monson: “No work of art should cost more than a fine meal, nor be required to last any longer.”. And in case you did not visit his blogs More Original Refrigerator Art and Here now, gone before long up to now, this might be a good cause.
To avert the impression that my new lens had made me forget how to use a smaller f-stop like 1/5.6 here are three images from a road construction machine. Here I sometimes missed the universality of my zoom, but this restriction of course provoked more flexibility. And I am still asking myself why I didn’t make more use of my 50mm lens, similarly fast. It could be that I am somewhat drawn to the extremes in focal lengths, either really short or much longer than normal. The 50mm I tried for portraits, but this focal length distorts the proportions of the face when you try a tighter framing.
Ok, and an image with wide open f-stop at last – I simply couldn’t help it.
Found in the pedestrian area. Due to the (usually) moderate climate, sycamore trees grow to large sizes here in Bad Reichenhall.
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.
Some peoply say that my all-time disposedness for coffee is bordering addiction already, but be it as it is, I simply had to take this image. And at least it’s subtle enough to make the thought of a coffee only sneak into your consciousness.
Well, the laughter may be electric (so were the movements) but obviously it was not really electrifying. By now, you know for sure that I am not one of the great fans of the octoberfest, an attitude that certainly puts me into quite some distance of the fanatic pro-octoberfest statements like those on the Boston Globe (thanks to Martina for pointing this out).
I am, however, a bit concerned about the impression this event gives the world about Munich: beer abundant, drunk people in somewhat traditional clothing, and, on the back side of the medal, average 10 rapes/octoberfest (official, the dark figure is about 200) and probably 2000 police operations in those mad 16 days. Well, there is not only fun and hight times.
Usually the locals prefer the quieter hours, and in the afternoon you see families with young kids enjoying all the roundabouts, horse riding places and even a genuine flea circus. I have updated my gallery section with an Octoberfest section (Wies’n is the bavarian word for this event, originally meaning simply meadow).
Octoberfest generally is an easy place for candids, but in terms of speed, especially focusing speed with longer focal lengths, it can be demanding. But the people usually don’t object being photographed. Only inside the beer halls the breweries now imposed quite strict regulations to stop the publication of images showing drunk or half-naked customers.
I am more interested in small details like those gingerbread hearts. Last year I photographed them in the food stalls where the color is really overwhelming, especially at night when the lack of light makes it easy to direct the views. The small collection of Octoberfest posts you can find here.
Rarely I have seen such determination as in the posture of this man, wandering to the beer halls of the Octoberfest here in Munich. Prost!
So we had general elections today in Germany, and whilst it will take some hours until we see the official results, it is obvious that the majority of the voters preferred a coalition of parties that told them oh-so-good-to-believe lies: The main messages of the to-be ruling parties is that they will lower the taxes. Good – everybody loves to have more money in his/her pocket. The bad thing only is, there is no money left to be distributed after that crisis. Furtheron that agreement on abandoning atomic energy is at risk, to say the least, in spite of the now accessible proof that in research for an ultimate disposal place truth was the first victim. Fine.
But it seems that nobody cares about this. Better than facing reality is an illusion like in today’s picture: behind the reflection of middle-class houses wait the mercedes-benz cars for everybody.
Since the weekend, parts of Munich are in a state of emergency, as the Octoberfest has started. For reasons almost completely opaque to me, within 16 days up to 7 millions of national and international visitors drink approx. 5 million litres of beer in temporary beer halls while listening to to dem-idiotic music that is so loud that municipal engineers have to check that it is at least not immediately damaging the sense of hearing.
But even for the locals here the Octoberfest is still attractive and a reason to wear traditional bavarian clothing (or what designers decide to deviate from it). The lady in the image above I met in one of the attractive, now completely gentrified quarters of Munich in front of an old house, probably dating back to the 2nd half of the 19th century. The colors and cut of her dress, ‘Dirndl’, are quite traditional, without visible ingratiation on fake cottage style.
Graphically appealing as it is, my heart does still not beat for streets like this. Fearing the small town’s tight social control, the lack of variety, the sometimes hardly tolerable stubbornness and/or naivite in the countryside, I still do not feel at home strolling through the city where I have spent my youth. So I live from week to week with the balance and tension of these antipoles and learn to enjoy the fine balance, trying to visually embrace all the interesting sceneries here and there.
Those lichens have gotten a political importance here in Germany, as their disappearance was discovered to be an indicator for high air pollution. I do well remember that probably 12 years back we did a map of lichens in the city of munich to document the air pollution. As the consolidated efforts of european, state level and municipal administrations were successful, the lichens are back in the city now. And now we are waiting what will be a noticable indicator plant for the climate change.
You see, the billboard vs. car top is fascinating me. More than in the countryside or a small town, the city still has the flair of unlimited possibilities, and in this context advertisements seem to sit in a much more suitable habitat than in a town of let’s say 15.000 inhabitants. What would be just a reason for laughter there looks like a real possibility when proposed in the glamourous environment of the city: you just need the right shoes and your posterieror will magically reshape…
I am not always fond of small town / countryside life, but its more down-to-earth attitude is very sympathetic.
Office rooms on the ground floor with at least partial possibility to peek in from outside are rare. Therefore I was a bit astonished when I saw that Chagall poster on the wall and, after a while, noticing the head of the employee, motionless, either on the phone or using a computer in a very concentrated manner.
The posts and wires that form the shadows on the office walls come from a side arm of the multitude of railway tracks that lead to Munich terminus. Turning around by 180° and walking some 20 meters, the scenery was as such:
Moving to the new wordpress blog still has some issues. Notifications are coming in that commenting does not work, the feed does not show images, load times are too long, the blogroll is not sorted correctly and so on. Even with 2 computers at hand it is difficult to find out the culprits, and it is time consuming.
Probably the web 2.0 functionality of the fusion wordpress theme with its usage of the jquery library has some compatibility issues with certain browsers, and maybe wordpress needs another plugin to pep up the feeds. A lot of things to explore, but the weather forecast for the weekend predicts rain, so there are probably some time slots to tune the blog.
Today’s fine weather seduced me to make a detour on my way home, leading to unknown places along the main railroad track into Munich terminus. I had left the office building for maximum 2 minutes until my mind had switched completeley to photography and recreation. Great.
The image to the right is probably in danger of being kitschy. Still, the city has its quiet corners and some of them offer remnants of wilderness contrasting with machinery. And since several years, the ecological value of those niches is accepted and measures are taken to ensure that those stepping stone biotops don’t get degraded by accident. New development plans do take into account the biospherical qualities of those areas and respect lifelines for some rare species inhabiting such places.
Revolutions without fighting, bloodshed and destruction do have their merits, even 90+ years later: When the monarchy in Bavaria was abolished in 1918, the palaces, castles, gardens etc. became public property and in the course of the years became almost completely fully accessible for the public. Some of the most beautiful gardens now serve the promenaders and joggers and attract a huge crowd of visitors throughout the year. Buildings inside the parks are now transformed into restaurants where everybod
y enjoys the fine royal ambiente.
Last week my parents celebrated their golden wedding and invited family and friends into the Nymphenburg park’s restaurant in the former orangery. Busy with my camera I followed my family and got the opportunity to photograph them in a really royal scene
ry.
It’s easy to guess from the headline that I am not smoking. Not smoking any more, that is.
But here I was more fascinated by the replicating leaning forms that manifested themselves in the viewfinder. To emphasize this a little bit I used bibble5’s layers for burning and a bit desaturating the borders. The more I play with this software, the more interesting it becomes despite its overly long beta status and still unresolved bugs. It is just the right tool for my way of handling the raw files, quite straightforward, no fancy effects, just carefully helping to show what’s already in the raw file. As a linux user, all that lightroom and photoshop is a non-option, so I am even more glad that bibble5 now fulfills such a great part of my processing wishes.
And despite all criticism in the forums about bibble’s slow development process, this definitely is not a case of ‘hopes to ashes’.
I found this scribbling on a mobile phone advertisement poster in the train station in Munich. To be honest, my colleague found it, I just took the picture again with a short focal length and in a different angle.
The slogan of the mobile phone company is “You are not on this world to be silent”. Well, the author of this scribbling really took it literally. But I can’t deduce if he wanted to criticize all that talk about climate change or the absence of such a discussion among many young people. But at least he provoked my thinking.
taking the camera always with me has become a habit since quite some time. it helps me to get into that feeling where the images come to me and i do not have to fuzz too much about photographing but can merely react and cut out that noteworthy slice of time. but i still cannot toggle this feeling – sometimes it is there and i can see 10 good sceneries in an hour, and sometimes nothing comes. getting distracted by company very often but not always is an adverse factor, so is nervousness, but also the wilful intent to find images.
Usually however, attentiveness and a certain ease of mood seems to motivate the muses to come and kiss me.
the way home from office in munich invariably leads my steps along a hairdresser’s shop on one of the main roads, and the light and reflections as well as the colors are always interesting. this window was already subject matter for this post, but this time i caught the barber in action.
who invented the white-balance automatic? and who told me to leave it switched on? egad, sometimes i feel sympathy for mike johnston’s ‘the leica as a teacher idea. at least no whitebalance-automatic that, as every automatic, does as good as it can, but doesn’t help me thinking. and getting the balance manually, just by optical impression, was impossible for me, at least at first take.
note to self: one more automatic to switch off on certain occasions. oh yes, and i do this when shooting panos, but here i simply forgot.
the wet weather here in bavaria was not only in the headlines of the yellow press. even serious newspapers ask meteorologists for scientific explanations and/or longer-term forecasts – which are impossible to give for our geographic situation. the only reliable trends are for higher average temperatures, but this is not so surprising. and for local weather in the next 2 weeks it doesn’t determine anything. and umbrellas keep being accessoire du jour.
but the bad weather makes it easier to set aside some time to read sofobomo books. i started to read the books of photographers whom i already knew from their blogs but quite soon got hooked and peeped into other books – only to the effect that i have a reading list now and am quite determined to read all of them. i hope i can finish before next sofobomo starts…
the rainy weather continues, but, having adapted to it at least photographically (and anyway sitting in the office during the day) i do not mind that much any more.
even here, from the train window, the rain has it’s merits. and i would definitely not like to swap seat with those drivers that are speeding through the rain.
now we are already one week into sofobomo 2009, and i still even have no idea of a theme. i am really greatful for that fuzzy month which offers a great deal of flexibility, so i am still very optimistic that i will be able to finish a book. problem is that i am bound for a new 10 day business mission to sri lanka one week from today, and afterwards for 2 weeks of holiday with the family. either period can bring or cannot bring sufficient occasion for shooting, but in both cases time for editing and compiling will be restricted to the two last weeks of the fuzzy month.
reason to be pessimistic? no, other then last year i am much more confident in my skills, both visually and technical, i have already a scribus framework for a book, so i will manage to accomplish the task and finish in time if not some completely unforseeable and unsurmountable obstacles turn up.
today’s shot is from my commuting days in munich, a barber closing his shop for the evening, carefully having decorated the window with the flowers. i like the several subjects combining in time and space in this frame. and what looks quite straightforward still has 5 layers to select areas for darkening, sharpening and intensifying the colors.
grey sky in the morning, but the cranes formed an interesting pattern. Seeing it in large reveals some minuscule red lights of the signals, nice counterweights for the mainly blue tones.
the sludge in our driveway became the material for some experimenting with the saturation level: how much of color saturation can you remove and it still remains a color picture, giving a different expression than a real conversion to black and white. it was astonishing how far i could go.
but winter does not want to go. in spite fo the kids’ easter decoration, the garden is still covered under 2″ of wet snow. at least the stamina of the hazels are, too, according to the bavarian saying: there is rarely a damage without some kind of profit going along…
grateful i am for the fact that my job leads me out of the countryside into the big city (munich) every week. in spite of the ww2 destructions, many places are still or again intact, and a lot of substance has survived the centuries. the councillors follow a quite strict no-scyscrapers policy, on the one hand leaving munich a bit in a small-town state, on the other hand avoiding the not so small risc of 2nd, non-war destruction.
and what a harmony you can enjoy there, and what a difference this is to my hometown, where the fountain sculptures shown to the right shall enjoy the guests. sometimes i have the feeling that well-meant will never reach well-done. am i just oversensible?
a treasure not only for the photgraphically inclined, but probably also for art business happened to be hidden in an innsbruck basement: the original pictures of magnum’s first exhibition, 1955, fittingly titled ‘magnum’s first’.
cartier bresson’s images of his session with mahatma gandhi, only hours before his assassination, are there, followed by the immensely powerful picture of mourning relatives and friends in his sleeping room. the images are still as found glued to the wooden plates, roughly cut from the panel on which they were shown in the sixties of last century and then forgotten in 2 large boxes.
so if you happen to come through munich until may 8th, 2009, this is certainly an exhibition not to be missed.
my first disappointment about the shots from the new synagogue in munich proved to be premature. scrutinizing the raws, in found the above one combining the massive, block-like quality of the building not only with the light emanating from the entrance door in the foreground, but also with the movement of the lady just in front of the wall. the latter made my ‘punctum’.
lesson learnt: dont judge precipitate (and don’t throw away raw files too early).
bad weather with rain, temperatures just above 0°c, low light because i could leave office later than planned. but still, after an uncomfortable day some visual excercise deemed necessary to compensate for all the frowning and sweating because of murky software. the planned target for my activities, the (not so) new synagoge of munich (see here, definitely worth a return) turned out to be not so attractive because of the dull light, and so i headed home. taking a shortcut through a building block however got me immediately hobbled.
that silvery sphere, open-worked and reflecting inside and out, was just amazing, and the tiny rest of daylight together with the lamps in the surrounding offices made up for the most wonderful symphony of reflections. so i stood there and watched and shot until the fingers were numb and the protection filter in front of the lens was sprinkled with raindrops.
up to now i could not make out the artist who had created this sculpture (one of the rare cases where google did not come up immediately with a solution), so there’s some work left. and a lesson learnt: don’t rule out bad weather, instead go out shooting.
and now for something completely different…
commuting to the city twice a week certainly helps changing perspectives. and if i can convince myself to get up really early and get to the office a little bit later, then opportunities like this show up, just by strolling 2 stops instead of taking the tramway. and in terms of dynamics of the lines as well as making optically use of what is there, i did learn a lot from this graffito.
i guess it was not the wedding in the church that made the pidgeons flee… the church is beautiful, freshly renovated, which indicates that the roman catholic church in bavaria is still well-heeled in spite of the many difficulties it is facing in these fast changing times.
in the inside the church is decorated in this certain baroque, joyful style that together with traces of incense give a special light feeling, very different to the sobriety you experience in most of the lutheran churches.
dachau, situated approx. 40km away from munich, is a small town with a history: temporary domain of one of the well renowned bavarian writers, ludwig thoma, 1867-1921 (who unfortunately enough had a mostly pushed aside renommee as anti-semite) and site of the first nazi concentration camp in germany. the concentration camp is now a memorial place, and a majority of bavarian pupils have their first real exposure to 3rd-reich cruelty there.
the memories of ludwig thoma are conserved at least for economic reasons, and even 100 years later some houses there seem to have retained a bit of the look-and-feel of those days.
in a sense this is an attempted conservation of an aura that has lost its life and importance since a long time, but reading thoma’s (non-political) books can fire one’s imagination where his characters might come to life in an environment like these old houses.
my stroll round dachau palace also led me to the brewery. the proximity to the palace itself is stunning, especially given the olfactoric annoyance a brewery can create. it seems though that the former rulers were not that sensible regarding smells.
the brewery is now in a quite derelict state, not used any more. here in bavaria the structure of the beer business has completely changed in the last 3 decades, pretty much all the beer is produced by large companies. wherever there is still local beer, people do like it very much, but only some of them are willing to pay a higher price for it. and economies of scale of course work in favour of the big ones, selling “aktienblempel”. the latter is a colloquial term for low quality beer with a high return on interest, “aktie” being the german word for share.
one of the best sources for beer in munich actually is outside of munich: freising not only hosts the oldest brewery of the world, but for sure one of the smallest. the ‘airbräu’ inn at the airport of munich brews the beer in front of all guests in the bar parlor. the beer is convincing, the optical impression of the fittings even more.
reason enough to start my journey with a visit of the airbräu – no beer also, as it was early morning – and then let the etihad plane bring me to abu dhabi. no beer there, just too tired and not wanting to miss the connecting flight.
octoberfest with the camera was fun, and i was lucky to have company in person of a colleague who protected me from drunkards pivoting one liter glasses of beer (the famous “Maßkrug”) in front of my lens. The beer halls were too noisy for me – you have to drink in there, talking slows down drinking so the band pushes the volume of the music to the limits in order to increase the beer consume – but outside the sellers of the gingerbread hearts grabbed my attention.
you can find quite a number of them, and the hearts are a real relict of the early times of octoberfest. of course now you find international inscriptions on the hearts, too, but the basic form still is the “i love you”.
and when processing these shots, i found a way to make use of lightzone’s regions to simulate a bit of vignetting, both in brightness, but also in selective sharpening.
octoberfest alone is a reason for quite a “Rausch” (inebriation). but bavaria’s all time governing party has just lost landslide-like 17%, and their strongest supporters have been and still are the “Trachtler”, men and women wearing traditional clothes and quite often of a conservative mindset.
so probably this disaster was one more reason for those guys to drink.
*do legst di nida: local speak for: this is so strong, you have to lay down…
high tech flowers at the octoberfest: the successor of the chairoplane lifts the visitors 50m above the ground. at dusk, it looks like a giant flower in front of the sky.
the haunted house could be a synonym for the whole thing: shrieking noise to no end, flashy colors, the whole bandwidth of agreeable and disagreeable smells and a similar bandwidth of visitors and their degree of drunkenness. as a local, i will probably go there round noon on a warm day and stay only for a beer if i can find a place without 105 dbA of the most incredibly stupid music which is not folksy any more
tuesday they ordered me to exchange my business mobile. not worth mentioning normally, but this gave the opportunity to see munich’s new steel/glass constructed technical town hall. in my eyes a well designed and crafted construction, though i don’t know if the workers here are happy with it.
at least i was, optically, and the light was sufficient in spite of the completely overcast sky to shoot hand-held. again in-body-stabilisation is a key factor for success here. glad that the sony has it.
one of the rare occasions i did more to a picture than dodgin/burning/sharpening aka. their equivalents in lightzone. the red light on top of the antenna mast was there, but not as prominent as it is now. in the the evening light and so much out-of-focus, it is a mere glow in the raw file. lightzone’s regionized saturation and blur tools helped me to make it better visible and in this way to create the visual descant i regarded necessary in this picture.
in retrospective, last week’s 13min. wait for the bus were a really creative time slice. 4 images that i regarded worth showing taken in a really short timeframe…
and i am lucky, too, that i still have them: having no cardreader at hand, late in the night i moved them from the cf card to my fathers computer’s /tmp directory in order to transfer them over the network to my laptop. too tired to think i shut down his computer immediately after moving, and linux clears the /tmp space at that occasion. bummer! but: search engines to the rescue, in this case Aurélien’s room – it is no problem to recover deleted files from a vfat file system. so i did not loose a single raw file.
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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.
as it is brighter now when i leave the office, more photogenic sceneries show up. waiting for the bus, large numbers of bikers, ringing their bells, chased the waiting passengers from the bike lane. across the street, the scenery was different – the biker graffiti seemed to get chased by the cars.
spring in the city has its own photogenic qualities. what i love most is the opposition of nature against man made structures. and, again, i have discovered my love for shallow depth of field. usually a bit difficult to aquire with an aps-c format dslr, the more than 20 year old minolta 3.5-4.5/70-210 zoom makes this possible at least at the long end.
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I had looked at this facade quite often during day- and nighttimes as the offer a rich play of effects – just see onion spire, reloaded
Whilst the moving body parts in the gym windows of the first floor don’t really lend themselves for a (static) photograph, the reflections do so quite well.
the artificial climate I feel in the city is (for me) very well represented through this reflected tree.
I do love the city lights at night, especially when they emphasize parts of the architecture not visible during the daylight.
Detail from the basis. I like the contrast between this very strict sober style
and some of the old houses in the surroundings.
The outside pretty much emphatises the Wailing wall. The building is discussed
controversely here in Munich, but for me it evokes positive emotions, and it is
a challenge to cope with it’s aesthetics.
reflections, originally uploaded by springm.
