spring2life take2

another trip back into bad reichenhall’s glorious past: the karyatides of the entrance to one of the best hotels back in the ending 19th century. bad reichenhall was so famous in these days that even a bavarian king came there for 5 weeks. the spa offered healing of respiratory problems by inhalating brine dispersed by a 14m high and 200m long layer of twigs. the pumping machinery of that times is still partially functioning, and the excursion to those places is already planned.

from this past wealth only a fraction is there nowadays – tourists prefer to go abroad, and the rich clientel of the splendiferous hotel has sharply decreased in numbers. the beauty of some buildings and the scenery and landscape however has survived.

in search of the remnants of the prosperous times of my hometown – we are going to celebrate 850th birthday as a town this year – i am consequently strolling through the older quarters here. the different balcony grids grabbed my attention. whilst most of the old-style attice windows have been replaced by the better insulated and easier-to-clean one pane windows, some of the old balconies have survived without many modifications.

even on one of the houses that have been completely gutted during renovation, they re-attached the completely renovated grids. protection by-law of the cultural heritage does really help here, and savvy architects manage to balance it’s necessities with the functionality of the building. the only following injustice is that the owner bears the biggest part of the higher costs whilst the public enjoys the results. but this is covered up by our constitution, stating that ‘property entails obligations’.

just wondering where this is brought into application in the current financial disaster. but i’m disgressing.

folk wisdom has it – there is nothing to add.

found on a house near river saalach, next to the village of Schneizlreuth.

i am a bit insecure about the translation, the first word “schaff” could also be translated as ‘create’, but the rhythm and flow then is a bit off.

taking up carl weese‘s question and implicit suggestion to present in color what gets it’s ugliness through color.
and note to self: stick with either portrait or landscape if you want to make it a series. a lesson i should have already learned from my krk images…

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.

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.

back to my beloved blue tones. what is humming with tourists during the summer is a lonely path in winter, covered with 30cm now wet and heavy snow. the positive side: you get much better exercise out of a short distance, however holding a 300mm lens in middle of that exercise makes you praise that in-body anti-shake – in camera body, that is.

with the right gloves, even photographing in snowfall looses its scaring quality. yesterday evening i had some spare time between appointments, and due to the weather just sneaked into a place where i had been on quite a number of walks.

snowfall transforms all the vistas, softens contours, hides details (no dense photography any more…) but the mood i did enjoy very much – that approaching night, absence of light, dampening of the sounds due to the snow. those 15 minutes really managed to recharge my batteries.

late in the day the light was soft and the green regained its power after the blazing sunlight. the combination of the red rocks and the plants was very soothing, calming and inviting for a rest.

this is my first try with the beta of the new bibble5. its region feature allowed to keep the shadows in the center away from pure black while the environment was darkened half an f-stop to compensate the effect of ‘exposing to the right’. this way the picture is less noisy an richer in tonalities in comparison to a shot where big parts are in the left half of the histogram.

the old bibble4 id did like because of its speed already, but the lack of region functions meant that selective editing had to be done in gimp afterwards (i am an all-linux guy), and therefore lightzone was the tool of choice for low iso shots – for high iso its denoising algorithms simply are not state of the art.

one of the rare occasions i could break out of that usual mission cycle of visiting one rainwater harvesting tank or well or toilet after the other, and just take 7 minutes on the road, for a moment concentrating only on shape, graphics structure. not that i would take this monitoring not seriously, it is just that my attention is suddenly grabbed by some details.

and i had to learn the hard way that procrastinating means loss. i cannot come back there for reasons of time and transport – i do have the position thanks to a small gps logger i always have in my pocket – so i try to snap whatever is interesting immediately and without too much fiddling.

the harvest then only begins after returning home, and fighting the jet lag through staying up until late gives the opportunity to go through the collections. diamonds i rarely find, but even rust can be rewarding.

what you see here are fence blinds, attached to the fence posts to give a little privacy on the 250m² plots, where a big part of the life happens in the garden.

not that the impression comes up that ranting about the present situation in sri lanka is my one and only preoccupation. whenever possible i try to find beauty, and so i did here in this ruins of the emperors of a kingdom long forgotten. on the top of a monolitic, magmatic rock, to be reached only by really steep chairs, there was once a palace, inhabitated by emperors – unfortunately entrapped in politics, power, murder. it seems i can’t flee this topic…

as they are dead and gone now, now it can be quite peaceful up there. with the sinking sun however the ak-47 of sri lankan soldiers dominate the climate for the night again.

my colleage in batticaloa told me this about his life (he’s only 37). roughly 30 years this conflict between ltte and the sinhalese majority now scars the life, public as well as private. when he was 17 he had to flee his village, living 3 months in the jungle, because his life was in danger both from government and ltte – a potential terrorist or a forced recruit don’t face a really high expectancy of life.

so you can only speculate what life awaits those boys.

^*in kalmunai, on the east coast of sri lanka. the lady is a newly trained gis specialist and is holding a mobile phone as one symbol for her bridging traditions and the “modern” world. kalmunai is a town where islam values are held very high – in general it is a really patriarchal society. having managed to aquire above average education and balancing it with her life of a mother is what i admire in her.

^* gis is shorthand notation for geographical information system

getting up early and trying to meet again the fishermen i had portrayed in an earlier visit, i found the beach empty, with a force 5 wind making all beach based fishery impossible. so i resorted to collecting small details, of which this fence part is one.

the fact that is a piece of asbestos sheet is interesting in this context, as the sri lanka government still sticks to the opinion that this material does no harm to humans. probably a case of successfull lobby policy.

two days after full moon i finally managed to go out together with a handful of photographer friends to try some night shots of our hometown. the intensity of the moonlight was so high (and my lens protection filter probably not clean enough) that i got lens reflections – i never thought this could happen from moonlight.

“padinger alm” is a popular inn over the valley of bad reichenhall, just on the shoulder of mt. staufen, which you see in the background. image quality turns out to be less then optimal when pixel peeping, but the time was short and the purpose of the shots a slide show, so i didn’t bother to always resort to the lowest iso.

strolling through my hometown, i learned that the last local heroes seem to live right in the mezzanine.

from the ‘instead of eating burgers’ series.

there is something to learn from this shot: either don’t touch basic settings you rely on, or do a thorough checking at the beginning of each shooting session.

of course i did not, and so the first frames, this one among them, were shot as jpeg only, in small size…

there are many aspects on which to judge a government ruling 100 years ago. the cultural revolution in china found resonance among the millions who suffered under a violent regime that in many ways abused human workforce just for the aggrandissement and luxury of the ruling class (and just a flash of thought: what will history books write about current governments and administrations).

still there are achievements, others but in a different way valuable from the revolutions results. a heritage of art forms that still lives today and articulates valid statements, not only in the field of gardening.

found on the wall of a kiosk in the more touristic areas. well, that’s probably capitalism: to sell whatever is requested. and here in my county at home, militaria and obscene relics of 1939-1945 also are requested and sell only too well.

but the combination of heroic posters of the cultural revolution and the iuxtaposing movie? posters is extraordinary.

the exit gate of the forbidden city shone in such a fresh and strong red that it was almost painful in the eyes – and to the sensor, as the histogram showed. a friend later on told me that the preliminaries of the olympic games 2008 had included a real orgy in paint, even in the hutongs, the leftovers of the traditional beijing quarters, where all the roadside walls were painted grey.

of course this was only a make-up and was not connected to substantial improvements. the hutongs were a strong contrast to the splendor of the forbidden city, and a contrast to the modern, multi-story, skyscraper architecture that is the visible result of the olympics boom. the hutongs feature a similar red as the old parts of the forbidden city, but the rest is dreary and grey, except for the more touristic parts.

no words, in my eyes there is nothing to add to this harmonious arrangement

the forbidden city of course was full of people photographing, themselves like the lady in the lead picture (which i found amazing in the iuxtaposition of a single figure against those incountable roofs), each other, the architecture, also me. a european man with a ponytail is so extraordinary that especially gals wanted me to pose together with them. but how can i blame them when i was interested in chinese faces and people.

a long time ago i was quite good in fermi estimates, so i tried to get an idea about the numbers of pictures taken every day in the forbidden city, but alas, i was not able to do a qualified guess.

the availability of electronic gadgets was stunning and gave me a little bit of an idea about the development of spending capacity now in the middle class of china. and in terms of numbers, this middle class already is big.

instead of struggling with maths, i preferred to fall back to photographing roofs, tiles and numerous shades of red on the walls. satisfying that was.

in the maze of the forbidden city, you always get carried on by the masses of tourists (local tourists in my case), but when you manage to reach a corner you can stay for a while and watch the delicate beauty for example of the roof tiles.

in yesterday’s blog entry i already mentioned b. brechts “questions from a worker who reads”, and this thought accompagnied me throughout the palaces and palaces and palaces. it kind of gets a special connotation in china, as the masses are so big that it’s only to easy to not notice them as individuals as we would do naturally in our home country.

so it was a feast for the eyes, tiring a bit after 4 hours, and the border to the garden area was most welcome at that time.

it seems that the history of the chinese emperor’s regime is in an adapted way now repeating: legions from the working class are doing low paid jobs whilst a small number of highest class are enjoying boundless wealth. The abundant treasures of the forbidden city reminded me immediately of b. brecht’s poem “who built thebes with its seven gates?”.

freezing cold it was in there and soon it became crowded, too. the sheer number of buildings with their rich ornaments and roof decorations was impressing, the rare water bodies in the interior brought welcome opportunity to enjoy outer reflection, too.

the dark red (“ochsenblut” in german) was strong, especially in its continuity through the whole palace region, but astonishing was the fact that a chinese visitor chamaeleon-like was adapting this color.

since 20 years december 1st is celebrated as world aids day. it’s only too easy to perceive this as a problem of “the others”, subconsciously letting your prejudice block the thoughtful observation. It’s a task for all of us to show solidarity and support, it is this what makes us human.

fighting this terrible disease deserves our attention and help, especially when when it hits the poorest among the poor. but it also deserves attention when teaching our kids, in order not to offer only oversimplified solutions, but the open, clear and concise knowledge how to avoid the risks.

the picture to the right is copyright united nations. you can download it from here. the lead picture shows a chinese condom vending machine, found in nanjing.

any questions in which direction to go? where you are?

there is one major challenge when wandering alone through a chinese city: how to come back. the namecard of the hotel is a lifesaver, so i always had two in my pocket. but not every taxidriver has good eyesight and/or knows the way. to make it more difficult, nanjing for example had 4 nanjing hotels, and it took me a while until i knew to ask for the jinjiang nanjing hotel. and even then: the hotel was in a corner of a block and had 3 entrances, looking all different. people you ask in the street don’t speak english and/or don’t know where they have to send you.

so once i left the shuttle bus to walk the rest of the way late at night, got the wrong direction and landed in a cul-de-sac, which fortunately turned out to be the end point of a bus line. showing the hotel name card, i was sent from one bus driver to the next and motioned into a bus, where a lady of maybe 25 year in white cotton gloves started to maneuver the bus through the nightly streets. after 20 minutes of silence she suddenly gestured to show the card again and urged me to get of the bus right there. so out on the street i was, and after several tries to get information from the rare pedestrians, i finally got a cab. this cab drove the street for 150m, turned around, went back again 150m, entered through a gate and after another 100m dropped me – in front of my hotel door.

strolling at night, in the rain and without tripod usually is not a standard situation for good shots, but having only 8 days in china i wanted to get out the maximum of it. and this construction site offered some dramatic light effects, especially when the welding startet.

street photography in the true sense of the word, and dangerous it was: in europe we don’t see and electric bicycles, and in china when you see them it is already quite late: quiet and fast they are, and in the rain the drivers were not too willing to take care of a mad photographer…

backyards in nanjing are not meant for foreigners. just 150m away from the main road i found this parking lot, chinese style. trying to work out the best way of visualising the sheer abundance of bicycles, after 5 minutes i heard somebody speaking in my back. lucky enough i did not turn around immediately but shot some more frames, this one among them. a short break on my side was used by the voice to approach me. it turned out to be a policeman, who friendly (thou shall not annoy the foreigners…) but firmly insisted by gestures that i had to leave this place. my guess was that there is nothing like a right to photograph in china…

backyards are very rarely enjoyable sights (there is a reason why they are backyards anyhow) but they usually offer good insight how people are living. in the present case the officials probably regarded it as disrespectful if this normal side of life of their citizens gets photographed and published.

taking a break from the roster-determined duty hours in our booth, i used my time to closely watch some artist in an exhibition hall creating their pieces. light was low and of mixed quality, so again high iso had to come to the rescue.

checking again bibblepro for linux, i found its built-in noise ninja far superior to any other solution i had tried up to now. i am still missing lightzone’s ease of use and stringent workflow, but especially with high iso shots it’s definitely not up to bibbles class in terms of image quality.

taking a rest from ‘re nao’, the chinese expression for ‘hot and loud’. for me, who is coming from a small town in the bavarian mountains, a city like nanjing with 7.5 million inhabitants is really stressful. so i did enjoy this quiet garden with the harmonious forms of the roofs, the ponds and the plants which look nice even in late autumn.

this bonsai i found in zhonghuamen, a restaurated gate in the 12 m high city wall – the longest in the world as the guide told me proudly – and an elder couple was taking care of these trees and enjoyed my attention. unfortunately i was to shy to ask them for the opportunity of a portrait…

zhonghuamen itself consists of three gates in a row, in between deep spaces where every enemy would become easy prey for the soldiers standing on the wall. notice the modern skyline of nanjing in the smog, not so far away.

even with all those 8-lane roads in nanjing, very often nicely framed by newly planted sycamore trees, the bicycle remains the major means of individual transport. bike lanes are broad here, adapted to the masses that use them. astonishing for me is the number of electric bicycles which are a good example of eco-friendly and environment-friendly individual mobility.

air quality however is deplorable as you can guess from this shot. some bicycle riders use masks covering nose and mouth, but those of course will filter only the largest particles. as long as the factories and power plants around are emitting unfiltered, the air quality will not improve.

usually i don’t show photographs of public viewing events – quality is bad and it’s in a way only a third hand experience.

but this was so touching i almost cried, a fact that should happen only once every 5 years. this couple, lacking one arm and one leg, moved so harmoniously, alone and together, it was really incredible.

reflecting, i admit having had some uneasy feelings afterwards, too. the chinese try so much to impress that this performance only too probably can have been just one world’s first of a kind with which they wanted to impress us. but anyhow, for me it was a deeply moving experience.

i came to china open eyed – ok only partly after that long trip – and open minded, and up to now my astonishment is a positive one, in all respect except the fog. i do hope it’s just natural fog and not heavy air pollution, because if so, it must have killer qualities. the people i met were friendly, the food is just gorgeous and the visual treatments abundant. i need more time to process my images, so this is just a treat for the images to come. stay tuned – internet is slow here, so commenting will be difficult, but at least i can upload and blog.

and before i forget: high iso with the a700 is just great and indispensable here, as fog means low light already at 04:00 pm. the picture above is just a normal bibble pro/noise ninja registered conversion. If you want to se where it is, just follow this link to google maps. the coordinates were taken with a small i-blue bt747 gps logger.

before you are afraid that this turns into a monothematic blog of kid pics – these are the last ones i’d like to show from kalmunai. sri lanka again experiences a wave of violence, and the east coast i visited 3 weeks ago is now more or less a no-go-area for foreigners.

those kids have grown up in the civil war, and whilst kalmunai itself has not been in the center of real war-like actions, road block everywhere and killings in the villages have always been present since more than 25 years.

early morning hours are my most prolific time of the day. the fishermen, the outrigger boat, all these picture were created from 6 to 8 am. the light is soft at that time but does not have that orange cast of the sunset hours.

and the public is definitely different – only at that time you see the students in a light suitable for portraits. at noon, when they return, the harsh sunlight is everything else but pleasing.

those two kids are living in the battlefield of 2004′s tsunami, there school, now rebuilt, is also in the zone of massive destruction. they seem to push aside their remembrance of that mayhem. but the smile in their faces can be misleading: talking with social workers shows the whole bandwith of psychological injuries, and the skin that has grown over these is still very thin.

another euphemism: idp. in the case of this man (and up to 200.000 others only in the eastern region of sri lanka) the government had decided that in order to have a free firing range against the tamil insurgents, everybody had to leave their villages.

so they were living in corrugated tin sheet buildings while everything they had was at the mercy of the army, the insurgents and the wild elephants. there is not much left now, as you can imagine. but idp sounds correct, nice.

this conflict is with 25 years and over 70.000 killed one of the longest and bloodiest in asia. silently, almost forgotten, as there are not states fighting against each other but “only” army and insurgents.

the violations of human rights are incountable, usage of child soldiers for example, to name only the worst. and both sides are equally abominable: the government for racist actions, under-cover-killings, the other side for forced recruition or using even kids as shields, again only to name examples.

with the looming defeat of the military arm of the insurgents, it now gets even worse. while the government deliberately arrests tamils in colombo (see these news on bbc), the rebels take up to 200.000 people hostage against the progress of the army. 200.000 kids, men, women of whom even the united nations have no information of where they are and in what status…

aah, did i ever say that sri lanka could be a paradise?

the non-availability of clean drinking water clearly is one indicator of poverty. in this area of batticaloa, sri lanka, the soil does not provide drinking water from wells through the whole year. as the next permanent well is 5 km away, the typical wedding present for a couple residing in this area consists of a bicycle and a set of water cans.

through European Union funded project activities, ferrocement rainwater harvesting tanks now will complement the traditional dug wells and alleviate the household chores, freeing valuable time especially for the women.

thanks to the help of the unhcr, these civil war refugees are offloaded again next to the remainders of their village that they had to leave 2 years ago when the sri lanka government had decided to “liberate” the east coast. aah, it’s so easy: the government decides to displace, and the international community does not have many options but to assist so that government’s actions don’t result in a humanitarian catastrophy. so the refugees come to camps, and when government allows, the UN can bring them back to what war has left from their belongings. and when this picture looks as if a lorry had just dumped a load, well, it was almost like that.

after having lived in a shelter, one family one room, cooking outside, platform to lift the beddings above the water that in rainy seasons is on floor level, most of the refugees are glad to go back. so they queue up under a glazing sun in the transport area, bear the screening by the army and the special task forces and then get transported back in buses, their belongings brought after inspection for weaponry on some tractors.

and there is no question that the unhcr does a good job here. after returning with a tarpaulin kit as a first measure of protection, shelter building groups will come and assist the refugees in repairing damaged houses or set up provisional ones. quick impact projects afterward may come to their support and may create new means of earning a livelyhood.

but all this poverty is not a result of a natural catastrophe, but results from the inability of government and insurgents to negotiate a peaceful solution for the conflict. this is the shame.

martin doonan posted some days ago about blog action day and this years topic of global poverty. as poverty is what i am constantly confronted with when on mission in sri lanka – and what guides my actions, too – i gladly took up his reminder and registered. so you will see in the following days many pictures around this matter.

those fishermen in batticaloa i visit regularly since 2005, just see here, here or here. many of those lost relatives and all their belongings in 2004′s tsunami. the curve of their net and their silhouettes are an ongoing fascination for me

the man in this portrait is actually a beneficiary of our project, and i hope to get more details about him soon. up to then take this as an expressive face with trails of deepest injuries.

the local heroes in sri lanka are a sad affair: that ‘martyrs day’ poster is from eprlf, eelam people’s revolutionary liberation front. this group now fights together with the sri lanka government against the ltte, liberation tigers of tamil eelam. and doleful heroes they (and many of the others) are: yesterday 3 young tamil men were found on the coast, hands bound and shot to death. this is a fight of so many groups against each other, on the side of the goverment or against it, among themselves or against an (imaginative) enemy.

i was trying to seek beauty here, wander with open eyes and a quiet mind, but this sad reality does not let me go. everywhere, and even more in every talk you have with a local, that tragic reality of especially the life of the tamils here is present

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…

japanese layered mountains were my immediate association when i saw the clouds moving up on mt. predigtstuhl, seen from the middle of my hometown bad reichenhall. in fact this shot was quite extreme with a 450mme tele lens, so i had to massage the raw file quite a bit in lightzone to bring out those tufts of the clouds moving in and out, obscuring and revealing.

last week our city council voted against the construction of a statue of lord jesus on the top of predigtstuhl. it seemed a bit to be ‘adabei’ (bavarian slang for someone who’s pretending to create to participate in public attention) and even the churches objected because the feeling was only too overwhelming, that this was just an imitation of rio de janeiro’s statue and only for economical reasons.

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

kind of a retro mood for soft and unobtrusive colors caught me today. maybe one of the reasons are paul butzi’s post what makes you a photographer and paul lester’s the beauty of the everyday. for a balanced, full life, savouring the very moment without peering for the abnormal, extraordinary is a warranty for success. and to cherish these feelings, to appreciate those unspectacular moments, one of the best things to do that i know is taking a walk in the pre-alpine hills. even 15 minutes can suffice like in sunday’s visit to the hospital, where the nanny of our daughters is recovering after serious heart problems.

the light was soft, but i wanted to have an even softer impression so i carefully desaturated the reds of the roofs and only very minimally intensified the foreground grass a little bit. the picture meets the mood of this walk very well.

commuting once a week to the office by public transport offers photographic opportunities (it is a burden, too – 2 hours in early morning buses/trains, well, some of you will know). carrying the camera with me every week did not really pay out, in spite of all efforts. this week i got this picture when waiting at a crossing, getting the bus driver lightened by the reflection of the headlights in the white train surface, with the dashboard lights adding some surreal glow.

technically it is more than astonishing: 5000 ISO is a sensibility we could only dream of in film days, but also beeing able to use a shutter speed of 0.4 sec (on a 16mme wideangle) without tripod, thanks to in-body-stabilisation is a great achievement. so i have to make even better use of these possibilities.

diverting from my usual techniques i used bibble to convert the raw file. the current 4.1 version lacks the wonderful region tools of lightzone, but has a much better noise reduction on noise ninja basis. and, it is available for linux.

2008 memories of the ’46 revolution on the balkans: a small standpost fountain, no water running any more, instead a lump of cement in the basin. the red so faded that it deserved to be upped during postprocessing. this all seems to be a sign of normalisation after 50 years of more or less strict socialist/communist government and strictly divided power blocks. now in croatia whoever can enjoys slowly growing prosperity, but there is quite a number who cannot. in terms of exchange, of seeing each other with less prejudice, that development i think for sure was a win.

another take on minimalism and a fond remembrance of the holidays. here in bavaria the mornings are already cold with 12° C, but there are good chances for a nice indian summer. the good habit of getting up early and do some photography i have kept alive, but in the moment the ‘creative juices’ are not flowing that well. but there is sufficient work on the raw files left, and sometimes the one or other image with potential turns up.

a photographers dilemma: securing the tent or getting the shot. in the end i (barely) managed to do both, very much to the contentment of the slightly upset wife. the storm was as heavy as the clouds dramatic, the latter visible as shown after some treatment in lightzone.

this kind of clouds i already knew from baroque paintings and i was more then astonished to see that postprocessing algorithms based on pure mathematics calculate similar enhancement as master painters already did hundreds of years ago. back home i will do some investigations for images with a similar sky.

early morning photo walks do have their merits besides the tourist places not yet being overcrowded. the light is wonderful soft, like in this example here with the net taking a rest off duty.

finally in holidays in croatia on the island of krk. too tired after almost 8 hours of driving to go out and make pictures of the evening light, at least i got up early and captured that fine layered island hills. beach life is not really for me – it bores after 2 hours – but the old city and the harbour promise a lot of visually appealing subjects. and as the campground sports wifi connectivity at the reception, i hope to be able to keep posting.

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yesterdays visit to ainring provided some more photos. perhaps not so creative as it is just a picture of someone else’s art but this maybe is more a question of amour propre. those statues to the left and right of the baroque altar had something overwhelming for me – when i saw them on the monitor.

the church itself was open, but visitors are restricted to a very small place at the entrance, separated from the room by a heavy cast iron grid. a reasonnable reaction to the many thefts of objects of art in the 60s and 70s of last century. therefore i needed the camera as an extension of the eye to fully percieve the details of the statues and the altar.

water is always an interesting topic for me. todays trip to drop my daughter at a birthday party resulted in a walk along a small creek in Ainring, not far from home.

the rain had stopped only one hour ago, so the leaves were still glistening wet in the new sunlight.

giving the pictures on the todo-list more attention – for lack of new convincing shots, that is – i found this one again and after in-depth inspection i am astonished again about the fine rendering of colors and details at iso 1600. This is really a great achievement and well worth last years investment in a new camera body. and in this context the new nikon d700 with its suspected low noise at high iso is really attractive. poor me who has invested quite some money in sony mount lenses… sony unfortunately seems to go the ‘more megapixel’ way which will definitely not make me buy a new camera body, and if it’s only for the reason that all my postprocessing can just handle the present 12 million pixels per picture and will slow down to unusability with the 24 million pixels the new sony will offer.

acknowledging the fact that 99% of the views on my images come through the internet at resolutions of ~ 1 million pixels, and for the rare prints and exhibitions the resolution of my camera’s sensor is sufficient, just more megapixels is simply not attractive at all. ’nuff said.

if there is a single one photographic situation that i do like most, it’s backlight in all its variations. it gives so much opportunity for drama, for hiding distracting things, for abstracting from a world full of diverting colors into the essence of shapes and silhouettes. in the picture above as well as in the prior “kalmunai fishermen” the beauty of form is intensified.

in grey past a.k.a. my film days, backlight was always difficult, specifically when shooting slides. in my experience, dslrs are well suited for backlight especially in situations where you can easily chimp or bracket. and my sony a700 seems to keep a lot of highlight information in its raw files for discovery with a suitable tool, lightzone in my case.

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saturday mornings visit to schönram bog was a success in terms of recreation, but not so much in terms of pictures. the frog concerto was good to hear but impossible to visualize and overall i was too late for the early morning mist that gives that bog such an impressive ghostly atmosphere – sunrise is at 5:15 at the moment and the 30 minutes of driving were enough for the sun to develop sufficient strength to quickly dissolve the remainders of the fog. it seems that i have to encourage my ‘go’ a little more – see paul lesters blog on the joy of waiting.

anyway, from my last mission to sri lanka there are some pictures left that i regard as worthy to be shown. like this one. it was taken with a 20 year old minolta zoom at iso 1600, and i am all over astonished again when i search for traces of image degradation that could be attested to this high sensivity.

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bavaria still is one of the roman-catholic heartlands. no politician will stand a chance opposing the church – the green party at the moment has to learn this the hard way, it seems. this domination was in former times even a physical one, as you can see in this picture: the church really towering over a village of maybe 10² houses.

This image needed some more postprocessing: removing CA with gimp, adding saturation to the not so blue sky, incrementing local contrast etc. i am still amazed about the performance of this budget/lightweight/small tamron lens.

getting up early to catch the first light was definitely the right thing to do today, as the sky became overcast before noon and stayed like this until the evening. i finally got over my feeling of inertia which quite often strucks me after my missions to sri lanka: so many contradicting emotions overwhelm me, compassion with the suffering people not the smallest, that it takes time afterwards to get up and go again, searching for harmony, beauty (not daring to use the word art). but when i was there i was just delving into that feeling of seeing, beeing there, experimenting, framing, that i completeley loosened up and this way really relaxed.

so it was really worth getting up early.

the tsunami devastated Sri Lanka more than 3.5 years ago. it’s traces can still be seen in the faces of the people. that man to the right, probably 15 years younger than me, lives and works next to the place he lost his family, barely 50m away from the shoreline. conversation was difficult, so he silently offered me a glass of tea and we stood there closemouthed in a place where i was already short after tsunami, covered in the smell of decaying corpses under collapsed houses.

the west and south of sri lanka got rebuilt pretty fast and well, as this is where the singhalese majority leaves. the east with the muslims and tamils was always neglected and still is. or could you imagine a city of 100.000+ inhabitants not having a single loader and truck? hospitals not sporting a toilet for the men’s ward? and still a number of tsunami affected families live in temporary shelters. as do the sometimes 180.000+ internally displaced persons (an excellent euphemism for war refugees) alone in this region. those war refugees get no compensation, in the camps they wait to be allowed returning to the shattered remainders of their villages after one or the other army was there. and racism shows its ugly face everywhere, making tamils fight muslims, tamils kill tamils, singalese fight tamils without end.

untypical for tulips, these are white. my favourite raw editor lightzone, which is now available as a commercial and supported product for linux – thanks lightcrafts – proved to be an excellent tool to just enhance the local contrast in the one focused tulip. the shot was taken with a more than 20 year old glass which i do like very much for its creamy bokeh when used white open.

the tulip to the right is red, but as red is so abundant in springtime pictures, i went for ‘something completely different’ and used the b&w conversion of lightzone. the region tool allowed me to additionally blur distracting foreground elements.

those two shots were made during a two hour excursion with friends from the local photo group. having worked very concentrated for the whole day, it was a pleasure and recreation to come into a “flow” of photographing, just focusing on composition, framing. this happened regardless of the expected results and forms a great part of the pleasure photography gives me.

rainy day, subdued light, so the Father’s day was not a overly buoyant affair. still the walk with my nephew and his hour-long talk about the playstation and the possible hacks (oh how far away am i from a boy’s hobbies – my toys are much more expensive at least) were some fun. he silently carried my tripod and never complained when i was stopping for a picture.
the different kinds of green and the white of the cherries make up for a great scenery. this image again did teach me that close framing helps to concentrate what i really want to show. i was negligent when shooting, so i had to to re-compose through cropping.

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what a wonderful world: convinced my wife and the kids to walk along the whole weissbach canyon. ok, there was a wholesome goal, mauthäusl inn, with a terasse overlooking part of the canyon, and the prospect of an icecream worked more than accelerative. and we had a break in the canyon, which offered the opportunity for this shot – the other parts of the path we had to attentively guide the kids in order to avoid an unintended bath. conclusion: walking with kids is fun as long as you take it as what it is, not as an opportunity to make all the pictures you’d probably like to.

the oscillation of the strong sunlight in parts of the canyon is what i visualized here, enforced by the fidgety pattern of the rock.

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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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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a lesson in ‘learning to see’. i had a bland image on my monitor, taken when i was quite tired at the end of an excursion with the family. i remembered that i had taken it because of the beautiful curve of the fence posts and the shadow curves of the fence’s wire, but there was too much optical garbage clobbering the real subject. so out of a 12.7 MB file i cropped 1.5 MB, the resolution of a 2 year old mobile phone camera…

back to salzburg after a long time, and for the first time on the mönchsberg. the weather was fine for a short time and the sun already low at 3:00 pm which caused fine shadows and a great plasticity in the structures below. my favourite is this jumble of roofs and chimneys, lined up along a curved street with market stalls deep down in the shadow.

the cupolas and towers of the churches of salzburg of course form a nice scenery for themselves, and especially from this high vantage point of the so called “stadtalm” they are arranged almost in layers. aah, and if i only could blog the taste of the beer up there…

the old sycamore tree with its expressive figure and cortex iuxtaposes nicely the oh so mundane ‘parking tickets’ signboard.

lightzone again proved to be a valuable tool to darken the background a little bit and except it from the sharpening algorithms.

the second shot is the shadow of St. Ägidius church here in Bad Reichenhall. i love the sharp silhouette of the branches against the soft shadow of the clocktower.

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after winter came back into our valley for three days and brought some fresh snow, i used some free hours to go back to weissbach canyon to look for water and ice. those layers above covered several square meters of rocks. in the end they stopped my exploring of the canyon as they were impossible to cross, but the made a really good subject for a picture. this one is in fact a combination of four single shots in helicon focus to achieve overall sharpness. some massaging in lightzone helped to guide the eye a bit.

the image to the right was taken at the same spot. the forms of the frozen leaves and the harsh shadows remind me of some long forgotten letters.

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after the storm has been ebbing, i dared to go out again without having to fear flying branches or roof tiles. winds were still fierce so I captured the moving leaves.

a second try where the shaking spring snowflakes here. So my new tripod proved to be a stable support for the camera even in such windy situations. the strange thing is that nobody of my friends shares my joy about the tripod. everbody tries to avoid using one whenever possible. but my impression is that some shots i would have never gotten without one, some shots come out a lot sharper, and, the most important thing: it slows me down! i take more time to think and afterwards to chimp and check the composition on the display and i got the feeling that overall it’s sometimes worth the hazzle.

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.

i tried to get a japanese painter for this scenery. found none, so i did it my way.

this kind of layered landscape fascinates me since i can think, so i try it again and again in spite of the danger to get stuck in a cliché

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