Since some days the temperatures are slowly rising, the snow mixes with rain and the ice on the lakes and ponds changes sound and color: the sound gets powerless, foul and the color undecided, the reflectivitiy is lost. Definitely signs for the end of the winter, even if the snowdrops are still invisible in most of the places. Thumsee again is a place for recreation, to re-gain power, to recharge and find peace.
Having packed up work, it’s almost dark again, especially when thick clouds dim the little daylight even more. This matches the winter’s cold, and it makes the warm light out of the windows even more attractive. The best time to see and capture this is twilight, just before the street lights get switched on and shift the light’s colour to a, well, less attractive one.
The building in the background to the right is the old royal spa center (featured here, here, here, last image) and here), which has the most beautiful hall here in Bad Reichenhall, used for concerts and receptions.
Photography is not in highest esteem by everybody, but the people in my surroundings are accustomed to my switching to a cyclopean life-form from time to time. And the kids, so I thought up to yesterday, should see it as perfectly normal as they know about my hobby/obsession/… But my daughter was cringing when she saw me walking behind that lady with the orange coat: she felt my behaviour was completely indecent. It seems that next time I’ll have to go alone to buy bread if I dare to take a camera with me.
This morning I had 15 minutes after having dropped wife and kids at their respective schools. Without gloves and cap, I was glad that the time was limited as my hands were numb afterwards. But I enjoyed the play of the snowflakes and the intensified effect of aerial perspective, so these 15 minutes were really prolific. Having only the “wrong” lens, the 127mme tele, was not a problem at all. The compression effect also enhanced the snowfall, and all images got kind of a similar signature look.
Today morning’s snowfall managed again to cast a spell on our garden. And besides the optical merits, it made me happy on a different level: All those hazel and alder pollen that had started to pollute (see that unison?) the air and made me announce my arrival wherever by loud and unstoppable pollinosis-induced sneezing: Now they are crushed on the ground, wetted to innoxiousness and frozen to death. Sometimes I am gleeful for a reason. It’s only that I now I just have a small grace period.
For me the necessary balance for carnival’s blithesomeness. 30 minutes out at the shore of a pond, looking up into the grey clouds and sometimes getting a glimpse of the mountains above is real recreation, alas not a very companionable one. But there is time for every event under heaven, an appointed time…
My preference for shallow depth of field is well known, but of course it is not suitable for each and every subject. Since some time I am experimenting with means to transport the specific way in which the camera records to the viewer. Shallow depth of field is, as well as bokeh, a concept unknown in human seeing with the naked eye, as we are constantly accomodating and combining the images of the different focal planes in our visual conception. Combining two such images in a kind of diptychon is – for me – a promising way of enhancing the visual experience.
I hope a grey day in Salzburg, with a subject photographed probably a gazillion times, is a suitable example for this approach. Oh yes, and don’t forget to click on the image to view it large.
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.
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.
Monochrome light like this I’ve met only rarely: Besides a little bluish cast, the subject matter is almost completely without color. Only when viewing the original file at pixel size I found yellowish spots in the rocks, but the rest are just shades of white and grey. Even the fir trees had lost their green over the distance. But even more intriguing for me was that curved slope that is like a curtain, opening just a partial view on the mountains in the background.
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.
A year ago we have had some really cold days even before december started, but this year it’s been a wam fall and up to now a warm winter. The situation above I do remember as a freezing cold scenery where I added just a tiny bit colder color temperature to better visualize what I had felt. But this year – it’s more a summer evening scenery than anything else.
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.
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…
