already back home, the holidays remembrances do not yet fade. in krk on krk (i love such puns) the lanes were busy from 09:00 in the morning to midnight, but merely steps away from the 2 main alleys i found this coffee still - of course a key stimulus for a heavy coffee drinker like me.
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my hometown seems to be a colorless, pale place in comparisons with the colors i see here in krk, croatia - or is it my eyes that suddenly open to see more then they use to do at home? george barr already had a go on this topic here and from what i know from fellow photographers, this seems to be a quite common problem.
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this photo on flickr.
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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.
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some days ago i discovered the landscapist blog. what an amount of food for thought, in a way almost intimidating. man & nature # 19 ~ reading a photograph grabbed my attention, and even my illiteracy regarding barthes' punctum thesis did not stop me from at least trying to follow.
later on, going through my pictures again, i was pondering this idea of the punctum again, trying to find a connection to my own body of work. the picture above maybe comes close - do you discover the punctum?
maybe i should read the original of this theorem. the landscapists interpretation at least seems to be flawed in the sense of ignoring the cultural roots of all our interpretational skills, and my image of the vesak lanterns is an example for this. from perceiving the subject, the odd combination of barbed wire and colorful lanterns, you don't get the point of the picture even if you know where it was taken and what vesak is - one of the most important buddhist holidays in sri lanka - and this point cannot be photographed or included by omission, but it has to do with some further knowledge.
the picture was taken on the east coast of sri lanka, in a region where tamil villages mix with muslim ones. without influence of racist politicians, all these ethnics and religions coexist with the buddhists, and those are the absolute minority in this region, almost non-existent outside of army and police. an army, which is at war since 30 years with the tamils who form the majority on the east coast. hence the barbed wire. punctum.
but maybe i got this whole idea wrong...
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the regular "der thumsee brennt" (burning lake thumsee) open air concert of the philharmonic orchestra met mixed weather yesterday. the concert itself had to be interrupted several times due to drizzling rain, but the fireworks went off into almost clear sky.
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batticaloa beach again - a real bonanza of photographic opportunities this has turned out to be. my first pictures dates back to 2004, still before the tsunami. at that time i had only 1.5 days there and was surprised about the peaceful place batticaloa was then. to my utmost luck my friends idea of going there with the families for christmas holidays did not materialize. 2nd day of christmas 2004 the tsunami struck.
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the raw files from the last sri lanka mission are still a treasure chest. today i found this one. some adjustments in lightzone created a picture that appeals a lot to me - definitely not a "picture that sucks" as it was the topic of paul lester's post yesterday.
the recipe given there 'practice, practice, practice' is a good one, but in my experience somtimes a pat on the back from an experienced, open-eyed fellow can help a lot to bring one's vision forward. that's the reason why i am deliberating about visiting a workshop.
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sometimes 30 minutes can be sufficient: a walk alone in grey, wet weather at the borders of a lake, a short view in the woods and the silhouette of an old strong tree. Of course it was dark in there and so i was glad for my tripod. the polarizer had to help avoid too bright reflections from the leaves. the final imaged showed an intense green, but not in as many variations as i had hoped for a strong picture, so i took my chance in the conversion to b&w and some toning.
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what a boost for my ego: last monday the 'sueddeutsche zeitung' (1.35 mio readers) has printed the picture above together with a report about the results of munich's activities in eastern sri lanka.
[edit:]regarding the ego: of course the whole project is a gratification per se: being able to dedicate your energy to the improvement of the life circumstances of victims of such a large scale disaster is a value by itself. it's only that i am not always an ideal selfless person-
therefore you will understand my disappointment about the fact that my authorship wasn't mentioned... well, joy and sorrow always take turns.
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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.
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now for something completely different. i found this cobweb in schönram bog on one of my random visits. early morning, full of dew, a beauty of architecture and form follows function philosophy. creating an image was a bit tedious, of course the angle finder was at home, of course there was just a light breeze that invalidated all the support the tripod could give, so this image is the best out of many attempts.
the postprocessing turned out to be difficult: lots of options, but no immediately convincing one. i tried black and white but had the feeling that i lost to many nuances in the cobweb itself. so i ended with this, desaturated and contrast increased and - maybe the most important manipulation - a cropped out sky. that sky offered a nice warm color but in my eyes was too distracting. but i am still not fully content, as there seems to be too much foreground not adding to the picture. on the other hand i'd prefer to stick with the 2:3 ratio. so this is probably not the final version.
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the beauty of sunrise again. the kitsch-or-not-kitsch debate i have decided for myself to be not-existing anymore: beauty is a superior principle, taste is something indivdual and nobody has to like or dislike what i happen to like. for me this beauty (and my activity of capturing it) has a high value of its own, otherwise i would not bother to overcome jet lag, face tmvp militias in the form of 16yr old boys wearing kalashnikovs (oh no, not terrorists, on the "good" side!) and walk to a beach lugging around 2 kg of glass and electronics. so much for motivation.
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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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this image is a mystery to me. i regard it very highly (otherwise i wouldn't show it), but flickr seems to have a differing opinion, or better no opinion at all of it. all the pictures i put on flickr get views, comments even without promoting them, but this one: not a single view in the three days since it has been uploaded.
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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.
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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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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.
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