spring2life take2

Although the weather indicates the end of ice and snow here – at least of the semi-permanent stuff – I want to share a last image of frozen Thumsee with you. This image create a kind of conflict in me: Usually I restrict myself to very limited operations in postprocessing, kind of the wet darkroom stuff like burning/dodging, contrast operations etc. But here the linear shape of that fallen tree was disturbed by a branch sticking out in the foreground. Without it I like the image much better, so I removed it. But this of course is a critical operation: without limits I might transplant items in the next image, or between images, and I don’t know where this would end. I guess I will stick with my old rule: If I could have removed it by hand, I can clone it out. Just sometimes a little bending of the rules…

A quiet, snowy image again, after the last two more lively ones. I love the repeting forms here, not only of the wipers, but also the arcs, beginning from the canopy to the right, repeated in the bushes, over the cleft in the snow to the roofs of the small cars. Definitely not surprising as Paul Maxim demanded and substantiated for good reason here in his blog, but for me in its quiet harmony still fulfilling.

Whilst downtown masquerade  is the trend of the moment, only 5km out of town you can find incredibly quiet and almost achingly pure moments, like this ice on Thumsee. I created some more images today, but in my eyes nothing could match this quiet pattern of ice, hoarfrost and water.

With this image I send special regards to Martha in Vienna, who has a special appreciation for that place.

Can’t help it: those fishermen on the ice of the Hintersee (a rare scenery in the Bavarian alps) made me immediately think of Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon in their famous movie.

The dreamy effect in the image above results from the lens wide open at f2.2. To get enough interesting detail I used the detail slider of lightzone – bibble5 currently offers no such tool. There was no toning necessary as the evening (non-)light with shutter speeds of 10 to 30s provided a natural blue toning.

This was one of the rare occasions where I dug out my summer lens, the venerable 16-80mm zoom. It renders very sharp images, but the slow f-stops from 3.5 to 4.5 make it quite unsuitable during our current short and dark winter days, especially when the sky is overcast. But here I could stop down to f8, resulting in sharp grasses and florescences but still blurred background.

First sun in the garden, and the kids love to play there. Calling them for lunch does not always result in immediate success, meaning sufficient time to take the camera for some playing with the already intensive sunlight. Different focusing distances are among the photographic means I do enjoy at the moment, together with combining images.

The lake we are heading for in the summer is now a cold, almost lifeless place (besides that one bald coot trying to destroy the reflection). But for a walk it is attractive now, even more so when light snowfall dampens the noise of the cars. Having the tripod with me instead of the fashy walking sticks meant that ground speed was lower than expected by my wife, but she managed to bear with me without suffering too noticable.

Update: Please find the wallpapers for February 2010 are online. You find them in the usual screen resolutions underhttp://markus-spring.info/wp/wallpapers/

Lucky enough not having to drive my car over wintery roads, I got rewarded by the railway system with a perfect winter scenery. They really made my day.

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.

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.

Bad Reichenhall, Old Spa Center with concert hall. 42mme and f2.2 are sufficient to blur the background.

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.

Again from the “park with the bridge”. Currently I have not much time for photography, I hope this will change for the better when the weekend comes.

This bridge is in a park nearby. The reflections I showed you some days back. During yesterday’s grey weather with slight snowfall I needed a break, so I grabbed my camera with two primes (42 mme and 127 mme) and walked round the pond to the bridge. All postprocessing was done with the new bibble5. The more I use this just released stable version, the more convinced I am. For my quite straightforward style and sober, more reduced colors it is an excellent tool, zeroing the need for further processing in a full scale photo editor.

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.

click (as always) on the image to enlarge

There is a bavarian folk singer group that sings with kids for kids, and one of their songs starts with a conversation:

“What’s your favourite season?”
      ”springtime, summer, … fall … winter”
“But that’s all seasons!”
      ”Yes – what’s wrong with this?”

For a photographer’s eyes this seems to be the right attitude: In every season there is something to find, not always big spectacular things, but very often tiny gems. With snow however, it’s a bit special now: My mother-in-law was an active skier, and she still tells about downhill routes that are barely visible now: Trees have taken there place, as for decades now the winters have become shorter here and snow has become less.

I admit being a “warmist”, and so I try to savour the snow even more, knowing that those fairy-tale like winters I had as a child are past and gone. But that is only the least disagreable consequence of global warming.

Processed with the new bibble5 again. The sophisticated regions functionality and the color functions helped to carefully dodge and burn until the fence itself got the necessary bit of emphasis.

Leaving the hill where the kids were sleigh riding once more, today’s hike led into the shadowy areas of the Hochschwarzeck mountains. Not that I found spectacular things there, but the scenery seduced me to play a bit with photographic possibilities.

And finally I got around to re-write my scripts for downloading and geo-tagging all my raw files.Phil Harvey’s exiftool is the core of this functionality, the rest is some shell scripts and perl programs to queryws.geonames.org for the name of the place that image was taken. The end result is an xmp sidecar file that contains the coordinates plus sub-location, location/city and state in a format that gets read and prolifered by my favourite raw converter, bibble5. Oh yes, bibble5 got released just a week ago, and it really is a fine piece of software. When the plugin developers have released their addons for the new version, there is almost no necessity (for my style of photography) to use gimp et.al. on an image any more.

Being out with the kids on a slope for sleigh riding (with all due diligence, it’s just a year that I postedthis), I retreated a bit from the crowd and spent some time at the edge of the woods. The shapes of the logs I always find interesting, but then: this is a subject matter that’s probably photographed to death already. The combination with the people on the hill fascinated me, even more so when using unsharpness as a means of generalisation.

From Peter Stewart's blog

But now for something completely different: Danish photographer Peter Stewart is on my reading list since a long time. He has a collection of (mainly) very quiet, even meditative seascapes. After a period of irregular posting he seems to have found his sources of power again. So if you have a faible for landscapes of the silent, definitely not hue-and-saturation-to-the-max type, then you should mine his blog for real gems and stay tuned for his new work.

One of those occasions, where everything falls into place: The bus is late for some minutes and the person appears in the window. Now: The right lens is on the camera, the right iso already dialed in, I can just take this one shot, the bus comes and off we go. Was it pure luck? A well-meaning muse? Probable fortune is, when chance meets preparedness.

It doesn’t happen too often.

Found on the way to Schönram bog. Today I am too tired even for a rant, in spite of such a reason: the ignominious “results” of the Copenhagen talks (I’d wish they became millstone around the necks of those so-called leaders). Enough said.

Whilst winter is still not in full swing – the rare snowflakes that make it to the ground melt during daytime – in Schönram bog the scarce snow makes up for a beautiful landscape: white areas that contrast against the dark logs, green needles that still peek through the snow.

As it matches the season so well, I have put up a gallery of hoarfrost images that I took last January. It was really cold then, fingers going numb in almost no time. So besides a number of good images this day resulted in the acquisition of a pair of climber’s gloves from Black Diamond. These gloves are meant for ice climbing, the finger-form is pre-bent and the leather strong but at the same time fine enough to enable you to handle the camera. Higly recommended!

It’s still way too warm for the season. Last week it was like an experiment of snowfall, but it ended after three hours with barely noticable sludge on the streets. But the light is grey and tints the remaining leaves and fruits during the day.

Only at night, when the Christmas decoration starts to scintillate, some more warm tones mix into the de-energizing grey and pale blue. But there still remains beauty to be discovered, and new details get revealed to be savoured. Sometimes feeling chilly I enjoy the days.