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.
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first monday of all months of the adult evening classes semester is a meeting of the local photography group. as it was raining that specific monday the month before, we decided to have another try for an excursion, this time to steinhögl, a 612 m high hill 20 driving minutes from our hometown. we left at overcast sky and rather dull light, but half an hour after our arrival the sun came out again and made us a present with a gorgeous sunset.
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this photo on flickr.
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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.
this photo on flickr.
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that excursion last saturday was extremely satisfying in terms of both the process and the outcomes. so here are two more poppy flower vs. barley shots.
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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.
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.
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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.
this photo on flickr.
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recently i had discussions with colleagues of the local photo group about moving water in photography. there are obviously two fractions: flow haters aka. freeze lovers and soft flow lovers. whilst the latter enjoy the extension to the human eye in form of the camera's ability to show the movement of the water, the first party bluntly rejects such pictures. for me, both forms of rendering are valid but I do enjoy very much the flow, expressing a distinct feeling of time passing, energy coming and dissipating and offering the eyes and the soul a place to dive in, melt in and re-unite with nature.
the image to the right is a crisp rendering of a spot nearby, strong more in the colors and in the v-shaped direction of the falling waters.
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easter monday i got some free time and went to an alpine meadow near the 'queralpenstrasse' (alpine transversal road) just 20min far from home. under the north face of Reiteralm there was still a lot of snow, and from time to time avalanches broke free high above our heads. the woods here have suffered a lot from the storms, weakened as they are by the air pollution they toppled over hectar wise. but on the north side there is still hope that a natural mixed forest will grow up again as the density of deer and roe is not as high as in the opposing south faces, where they feed every spring on the buds of the young trees to devastating effects. the young protection forest does not grow up but ends as extremely expensive mash for future trophies on the chimney wall of a hunter.
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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.
this photo on flickr.
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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.
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this image is a lecture of seeing for me. our photo group was
visiting a local vernissage and i made use of the occasion to train my
fingers, and eyes so i thought. everything very conventional, some nice
snaps of kids and the artist, but no real picture. we went up to
the balustrade with some more collages on the walls and coming down we
had a view of the already almost empty buffet. our lecturer, a
photographer of dozens of years of experience i have to add, pointed
downwards and asked me what i thought about the scenery - and i was
reluctant. he asked again, and me: still reluctant. just when i walked
down the stairs and had a symmetrical view of the table under me and the
peoples surrounding it like dark pillars i saw the picture. and now seeing
it on my screen i really like it.
now tell me: why was i so slow in the uptake?
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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.
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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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the art of engineering: removing all uneccessary parts. engineering my picture, i applied the same maxim - killing the clutter.
when my ladies were skiing, i took an hour off and went my own ways in a different, less populated part of this mountain (hard to find, i can tell you). even harder it was to hold the 450mme zoom to get this diagonal line, because with my glasses i don't see all corners of the viewfinder simultaneously. but in the end i had to do only marginal cropping.
matching song might be "freedom's just another word for nothing have to loose" - kudos for the picture/music combination andreas manessinger.
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there is only little water in weissbach at this time of the year, while in early summer this is a spot well known for whitewater kayaking.
the warm weather of the last weeks made the snow melt even down in the canyon, but the old snow on the path is now almost like ice, so it was not possible to walk deep into the gorge. still there were some interesting spots, and the water carried and displayed a very intense feeling of cold and freshness.
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from yesterday's excursion into weissbach canyon. The light was quite flat on site, but raw processing with lightzone did small wonders. i tried to work out a good effect of the negative space embracing the icicles but still do wonder if it's the best possible crop.
paypal almost ruined the shot. if you could see this shot in full resolution, you would notice it's not razor sharp inspite having been taken with a tripod. But: it was taken with my old tripod, as paypal hold up the (bank collection) payment for the new one for 6 days and therefore it did not arrive in time. and the old tripod is too weak for camera plus zoom. can you imagine how furious I am?
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the sunlight had selectively warmed this leaf so it sunk into the ice over the days. the low evening light then created this almost surreal look with the dark black borders.
it was the first time that one of my twin daughters, now six years old, came with me shooting. fortunately she did not get bored, but i had to explain several times that during exposure she was not allowed to move in order to avoid vibrations in the cassata-style soil.
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catching changing light qualities from the same point of view seems to become an obsession - going through my files i discovered at least five shots from this scenery (see this).
Beeing a backlight fan i couldn't resist this glow which the raw file recorded in all its beauty
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i love this picture, but as the author i am allowed to be biased. i was told it does not contain a center of interest, and in the classic sense, this is true.
what i love in this picture is the shere abundance of colors, forms and structures. mute, like holding it's breath, but there and so manifold that it's almost unbelievable. creation provides, gives, cares...
to make it very clear: i am no evangelical or jehova's witness denying evolution. it's just that i can see both sides now and then.
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