waiting for the spectacle

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it seems that i start to enjoy turning down saturation more and more. the weather was grey, daytime was busy, no fresh shots but still some old ones deserving to be evaluated and worked upon. in my eyes it's not a disadvantage of shooting raw that i have to re-judge my images again when deciding which one to convert and edit, it's a bit like old-fashioned black and white darkroom work: it made and makes no sense to mechanically convert/develop because the results were and are average at best.

additionally to toning down saturation i found that adding a bit of vignetting is good for some images. even if it's only a small, barely visible amount, it seems to center the view quite a bit. it is a bit a contradiction to my own infuriation about the vignetting my standard lens adds now and then, but the latter is beyond my control and not predictable for me, and probably that is what annoys me so much.

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sludge or: winter wants to stay

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the sludge in our driveway became the material for some experimenting with the saturation level: how much of color saturation can you remove and it still remains a color picture, giving a different expression than a real conversion to black and white. it was astonishing how far i could go.

but winter does not want to go. in spite fo the kids' easter decoration, the garden is still covered under 2" of wet snow. at least the stamina of the hazels are, too, according to the bavarian saying: there is rarely a damage without some kind of profit going along...

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vamping up tradition

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rainlight saving time started today. 'dis is a well thought out marketing idea of some leasure outfits lobbyists, nothing else. as bavaria is really strong in traditions, we had our easter egg fountain this year again, with more than 4000 hand-painted eggs. closer inspection leaded to the conclusion, that guinness beer now got incorporated into our cultural heritages, along with more halloween style eggs.

anyhow, nobody will ever be able to suggest that we are anti-modernist.

the original items sold at that occasion are those catkin-and-box bouquets, directly connected to the fertileness-roots of all easter traditions. these usually got blessed in church at palm sunday and later on found their place next to the crucifix in the living room of the houses.

but i also found a nice runner-up for my personal 'ugliest thing in hometown' collection, 2nd row at least.

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hometown monstrosities in color

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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...

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fallen trees

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trees are a for me a symbol for beeing deeply rooted, constant, connected with this planet. always sad to see them fallen, the more so when snow reveals details that could be assumed as remnants of their struggle.

i am constantly learning to make use of even small slices of time for photographing. the price for this is the weight of a not so small camera bag i am dragging around. but with my preferences for raw files and long or short focal lengths, it would not make sense to go with a point'n-shoot or only one lens when i don't know what will turn up.

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rilke's panther is a jaguar here

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going to the zoo still is fun for the younger kids, but leaves me more unhappy than ever.

his gaze, going past those bars, has got so misted
with tiredness, it can take in nothing more.
he feels as though a thousand bars existed,
and no more world beyond them than before.

the full text of rainer maria rilke's poem "the panther" you can find here.

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spring behind the curtains

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slowly slowly it seems to come. the air is still cold most of the time, but the sun already powerful. still the salvia plants have to remain in the house, but this way they make a nice, promising pattern.

today's second shot is the church of maria plain, next to salzburg. and while i like this powerful place very much, the shot itself is not satisfying, it leans to much to the illustrative side and i miss a bit of expression in it. well, the tripod i use did not deliver what i was expecting. time to change tripod?

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here comes the sun

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ok, april is the month for fast changing weather conditions. not yet april? don't mind, let's just enjoy the sun.

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rock me, amadeus

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our spa gardens exhibit quite a number of contemporary art pieces, mostly sculptures. normal, not accentuating lighting situations don't help to bring attention to those, and for some the place chosen is simply uninspired.

yesterday's snow however made the scissor-type portrait of a violinist (guess it's mozart, he is (ab-)used everywhere here for public relation purposes - I stand corrected here: it's anna-sophie mutter, a german star violinist) really interesting.

but even those rusty penguins did not show enthusiasm about the cold weather anymore. but the snow cap brings a nice accent on them.

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snowy snowy trees

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spring again got defeated when after a cold night snow set in. whilst i am no fan of grey sludge on the streets, the graphical effect of the thin snow layer on the still leafless tree had its merits.

so i took what was there as long as it was there. not much postprocessing, some minor local contrast enhancement and a tiny bit of sharpening was all. the magic for me is in the patterns.

time to start the sofobomo preparation in the evening. last year's china photo have to make up for training material. scribus has a lot of bells and whistles including adjustable kerning, so you can tweak your book to your heart's content. starting with a completely empty page however is challenging, so the first thing i did was checking and re-checking with existing examples to find out a recipe for an attractive book.

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munich, thiersch-place

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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?

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commuting speed king

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carl weese made me rethink my decision to convert my hometown monstrosities to black and white. yep - the german saying that someone has tomatoes on his/her eyes seems fit here: i was so concentrated on that wideangle effect and the dynamic lines that i just did not pay attention to the subject: overdone color to the perdition of our kids optical systems. so i will re-work my raw files and possibly re-shoot the subject.

in the meantime one of the reasons to carry my camera everywhere: the commuting train to munich is not so banal when shot in the morning light where the blue of the sky nicely complements the striking red of the waggons. and i confirm on oath that i did not touch the saturation slider.

and the morning light was so beautiful that it even caused me to drop the newspaper (anyhow bad news everywhere, thomas is so right). the world does not change if we look out of the window to pay attention to every day's beauty, but it might give us some power to fight the big and small evils everwhere.

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if you happen to come through munich

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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.

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hometown monstrosities

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this i wanted to do for a long time already: portray the pollution of my hometown's pedestrian zone with plastic surrogates of the old roundabout, blatantly constructed to empty the pockets of parents not able to fight the whining and grouching of their progeny, offering 87 sec of brrrrm or high pitched voices together with some movement.

the newest generation of those one-armed bandits has proximity sensors, puking ring-tone like sounds to attract unblamable kids, assuming that the are degenerated already by having listened to too many strip cartoons.

ok, i admit being ill-tempered today, maybe full-scale pollinosis adding to my fretfulness, but, believe me, those awfully colored plastic monsters encroaching daily life have been a nuisance since quite a while, optically as well as concerning the behaviour of the kids, spoilt by too lenient adults.

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faucet in the pump room

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back to my roots - back to b&w. paul lester&squot;s post never have a favourite weapon made me think about the influence of my preferences and the development of my photography.

black and white were my photographic origins as a student, and some of those pictures i still do regard very high. now b&w is much easier, sean mcpucket&squot;s bibble plugin andy even allows to choose film/developer/paper combinations for that old-time grainy look - i don&squot;t know how realistic those settings are, but frankly i don&squot;t care if my digital tri-x matches the real one, i prefer that contrast distribution over dark and light parts of the histogram is pleasing, and so be it.

my hometowns spa garden with the pump room produced the subjects where i tried to re-vive my b&w skills. here everybody waits for the guests and patients to arrive, the effects of the economic decline will be obvious in the next weeks even here in the gardens.

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"don't throw anything out of the window"

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the dull light of todays afternoon could not motivate me to go out shooting, instead i spent some time with scribus, familiarizing myself with the sofobomo requirements to layout my pictures in a harmonic way.

the image shows pictograms on a train window, taken at this weeks commute to munich. i always carry my camera on these trips, but rarely use it that early in the morning, as usually my photographic brains are even more asleep then the rest of the body. but this time it had worked for me.

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the new synagogue in munich

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my first disappointment about the shots from the new synagogue in munich proved to be premature. scrutinizing the raws, in found the above one combining the massive, block-like quality of the building not only with the light emanating from the entrance door in the foreground, but also with the movement of the lady just in front of the wall. the latter made my 'punctum'.

lesson learnt: dont judge precipitate (and don't throw away raw files too early).

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