![Click to enlarge: Storm Front Above [f/9, 1/800 sec, 40mm-e, ISO 200, Sony A700]](http://markus-spring.info/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/dsc48110b.jpg "Click to enlarge: Storm Front Above [f/9, 1/800 sec, 40mm-e, ISO 200, Sony A700]")
University of Salzburg, Austria
Same location as where this months’s wallpaper was created, but according to the exif data just three minutes later and a different part of the sky. What looked threatening in fact brought only a small amount of rain.
Again from yesterday’s photowalk: One of the main tourist attractions here is the Old Saline, dating back to 1837 and filled with the most advanced pumping machinery invented at that time. The staircase to the miner’s chapel (here) proved a rain protected vantage point for this image.
The rain today even got interspersed with snowflakes, and so it was everything else but springtime feeling. The coffee tables outside took a break, and so I will do.
I was so busy with that small scenery of grass and lake in almost complete darkness, hiding under a large umbrella held by my tip-toeing daughter, that I did not look up to the mountain and the clouds on the other side of the lake until the kid’s voice told me something about a strange light in the sky. With the clouds moving fast, this mystery soon was resolved: the mountain top hotel of Mt Predigtstuhl, were the world’s oldest large-cabin funicular drops passengers since the year 1928. But in the moving clouds one could have thought that a spaceship was looking for a place to land.
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…
the prospect is wet: meteorologists predict heavy rainfall for my hometown, up to 100mm within 24 hours, which means flooding of many secondary roads and potential damage to the railways, too.
in the long term, i guess it’s better to get used to weather extremes as this might be the future: the climate change will come not as a steady increase of temperatures but as more unstable weather conditions that challenge the vital infrastructure. but probably in a week or so the cat will dance on a hot tin roof again.
ok, so what do you expect from april. but this weather definitely has its photographic merits, too.
technically i feel a bit suspended in mid-air at the moment. my favourite raw editor, lightzone is available for linux only as a time limited public beta at the moment. only 5 days left and still no official announcement from the company. i do enjoy the smoothness of this application so much that i am without hesitation willing to pay the full price for a license, in spite of the availability of other good raw converters. lightzone has such a tremendous ease of use and blatant similarity to wet darkroom techniques, that it became my favorite ‘developer’ in almost no time. so please, lightcrafts inc., go ahead with a linux version, either fully company supported-full price licensed or for (almost) free as a community support version.
it started to snow on good friday, but the climax was today: 20cm of fresh snow everywhere. ok, not that i would mourn the fate of the pollen that already caused me heavy allergic coryza, but still…
Bad Behavior has blocked 331 access attempts in the last 7 days.