chokers

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the translation of 'kropfband' - the traditional necklace these women are wearing - as choker made me mistrust the various online dictionaries, as in my ears this sounds a bit weird. but as they all agree, who am i to dissent.

focusing on the chokers proofed to be difficult when the groups were marching, so i was more then grateful for several unintended stops that gave me the opportunity for close inspection. as everybody was in high spirits - the bad weather had stopped just for this day - photographing was no problem, just seeking eye content asking for consent and then making pictures.

even the impressive zoom with the long lens hood did not create any camera shyness, but of course it is not the right tool to capture unobserved moments. it was a different kind of street photography, where the chance for good picture was to behave so naturally that the subjects just noticed and forgot.

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stalkin' the light

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i guess is what the landscapist might label it, but i can't help: this is part of bavarian pittoresque, like it or not. 10min by bike from my home, the farmers of "schleicherhof" accomodate guests and care for their fruit orchard and their horses. the farmhouse is situated at one of the most scenic points opposite the entrance of the valley to berchtesgaden, overlooking the meadows to grossgmain, a village already on the austrian side of the border.

only 2 steps left from the position where the lead shot was taken, the scenery to the right unfolds in front of the eye. probably this can be called 'kitschig', but at least i enjoyed the minutes up there, the talk with the farmer (well knowing the photogenic qualities of the orchard as well as the vista with the cross, "marterl" in local language), the smell of the blossoms the sounds of the bees within together with the warmth of the late afternoon sun. of course the cars from the valley could be heard, this is reality and not backdrop for a sentimental film.

a catkin and box bouquet like the one i showed in this post usually is put next to the cross in the living room or in the kitchen of the farmhouse, however big specimen of those (referring to probably pre-christian fertility rites) are traditionally put on the meadows for the easter week and later on may end up on the wall of the stable, like here.

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fleeing the church

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i guess it was not the wedding in the church that made the pidgeons flee... the church is beautiful, freshly renovated, which indicates that the roman catholic church in bavaria is still well-heeled in spite of the many difficulties it is facing in these fast changing times.

in the inside the church is decorated in this certain baroque, joyful style that together with traces of incense give a special light feeling, very different to the sobriety you experience in most of the lutheran churches.

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brewery window, dachau

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my stroll round dachau palace also led me to the brewery. the proximity to the palace itself is stunning, especially given the olfactoric annoyance a brewery can create. it seems though that the former rulers were not that sensible regarding smells.

the brewery is now in a quite derelict state, not used any more. here in bavaria the structure of the beer business has completely changed in the last 3 decades, pretty much all the beer is produced by large companies. wherever there is still local beer, people do like it very much, but only some of them are willing to pay a higher price for it. and economies of scale of course work in favour of the big ones, selling "aktienblempel". the latter is a colloquial term for low quality beer with a high return on interest, "aktie" being the german word for share.

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dachau palace window

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weddings can be a challenge photographically, but most definitely they are a challenge for the stomach. to prepare for the refill at dinner, we had an opportunity to wander through dachau palace. this is a small palace, built 1546 and heavily renovated in the 18th century. the vicinity to the church of dachau is astonishing - at those times secular and ecclesiastic powers were really close - and this is what attracted my attention here.

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sky over bavaria

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maybe it's local patriotism only, but we bavarians are convinced that the sky over bavaria is something special, and so we do have the colors blue and white in our flag. a late winter evening, with the air on the brink of carrying the scent of rich soil, still not able to do so because of the partial snow cover, and with the winds having carried away the smoke and fog, suddenly can add a certain transparency (i lack a better word for this) and the sky develops that rich and warm blue, dotted with some feather like clouds just to make the blue and whites glow even more. and then one can forget for a moment being in a chatting crowd, just savoring these wonderful seconds.

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octoberfest: starfly

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high tech flowers at the octoberfest: the successor of the chairoplane lifts the visitors 50m above the ground. at dusk, it looks like a giant flower in front of the sky.

the haunted house could be a synonym for the whole thing: shrieking noise to no end, flashy colors, the whole bandwidth of agreeable and disagreeable smells and a similar bandwidth of visitors and their degree of drunkenness. as a local, i will probably go there round noon on a warm day and stay only for a beer if i can find a place without 105 dbA of the most incredibly stupid music which is not folksy any more

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steinhögl sky on fire

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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.

i was happy to have my new bought cokin nd grad filter with me as these contrasts make exposure difficult enough even without the nd grad. maybe a reverse nd grad would have been even better, but i found only one seller who is asking 'snake oil' (quote d. kilpatrick) prices. so the lightzone regions came in handy to extract that colorful clouds in the sky and create an image as i remember it, quite different from the raw file you see here.

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baroque altar of st. laurentius, ainring

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yesterdays visit to ainring provided some more photos. perhaps not so creative as it is just a picture of someone else's art but this maybe is more a question of amour propre. those statues to the left and right of the baroque altar had something overwhelming for me - when i saw them on the monitor.

the church itself was open, but visitors are restricted to a very small place at the entrance, separated from the room by a heavy cast iron grid. a reasonnable reaction to the many thefts of objects of art in the 60s and 70s of last century. therefore i needed the camera as an extension of the eye to fully percieve the details of the statues and the altar.

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vivid waters

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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.

the rain had stopped only one hour ago, so the leaves were still glistening wet in the new sunlight.

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burning thumsee

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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.

i had a vantage position a bit outside of the festival itself and so i could capture some foreground with the fireworks. shooting raw + jpeg this time, i was astonished about the a700's jpeg quality straight out-of-camera, but ended up again with hand-tweaked (or should i say lightzone-tweaked) pictures from the raw.

the workflow with lightzone is just so convincing: dodging, burning, masking, intensifying - these are all old darkroom techniques, achievable through a very logical interface. not that lightzone doesn't have its quirks - printing is a bit better than broken, it's a memory and processor hog (for that reason alone i wouldn't want a 24mpix camera) and the worst thing is the invisible support on the website together with the incomprehensive documentation. but it still has the for me most logical approach in developing raw files, and the results speak for themselves.

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toned tree

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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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cobweb cone

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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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church of Anger, dominating the village

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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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more barley and poppy flowers

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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.

never before i had used the macro capabilities of my new tele zoom, but here, for the shallow depth of field, it is really indispensable. in a severe attack of lens buying addiction i had succumbed to the new tamron 70-300mm f/4-5.6 tele-macro ld di, which david kilpatrick of photoclubalpha.com had reviewed very favourably here. It definitely is a steal, and the remaining chromatic abberations - for this price you don't get an apo lens - can be easily corrected with a gimp plugin, if necessary.

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poppy flowers in a barley field

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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.

so it was really worth getting up early.

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more tulips

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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.

the tulip to the right is red, but as red is so abundant in springtime pictures, i went for 'something completely different' and used the b&w conversion of lightzone. the region tool allowed me to additionally blur distracting foreground elements.

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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