The weather is as it has to be expected in April: Rapidly changing from really hot in the sun to rainfall, and in the morning the rain can even be mixed with snowflakes. The early blossoms have to face all this, and the beautiful Forsythia will probably wither soon and change their proud yellow against a dying brown.
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.
travelling home last week I was really p***ed: again the fast train from munich was late and the connecting train was gone when we arrived. such is the service of the deutsche bahn. my bad mood prevailed for quite some time, proportional to the non-facilities of the province railway station that freilassing is. it was late, a thunderstorm was coming and i had to carry some things so the hands were not free for the camera.
after a while my better side prevailed and i managed to get some shots of the trains in the upcoming storm as well as the fellow victims in this inhospitable location.
and when that guy on the next platform started his wheelies in the dry zone under the roof, just stopping before he got out into the rain, i was fascinated enough to forget about my anger and switch my camera to those fine iso 6400, not fast enough to stop his motion but sufficient for panning.
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.
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.
St. Pankraz church is built on one of the oldest inhabitated places in the valley of Bad Reichenhall. Accessible through only a narrow footpath, this location was safe from attacks from below and must have been an old ritual place, too. One of my best christmas experiences is connected with this church: walking 1 hour through the snow, with a pitch-torch in the hand, and then attending midnight mass.
suddenly summer is over. cold rain starts, and the snow suddenly is visible again not high above my hometown. strange feeling to operate the camera with wet, cold, unwilling fingers again.
used lightzone for linux to differentiate the sky and faint mountains.
