pebbles on the rocks

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the very last day of my holidays. spelled 'relief' when all my ladies were gone to school. spent a hell of a time with doctors and administration. finally went out shooting and found my private, yet cold, bonanza. lightzone helped me to show what i saw.

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japanese landscape, bavaria

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japanese layered mountains were my immediate association when i saw the clouds moving up on mt. predigtstuhl, seen from the middle of my hometown bad reichenhall. in fact this shot was quite extreme with a 450mme tele lens, so i had to massage the raw file quite a bit in lightzone to bring out those tufts of the clouds moving in and out, obscuring and revealing.

last week our city council voted against the construction of a statue of lord jesus on the top of predigtstuhl. it seemed a bit to be 'adabei' (bavarian slang for someone who's pretending to create to participate in public attention) and even the churches objected because the feeling was only too overwhelming, that this was just an imitation of rio de janeiro's statue and only for economical reasons.

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coffee still life, krk

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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.

generally speaking, coffee was a key excellence there, a potable remembrence of the heavy influence of romans, later venetians up to post war italians: krk finally became yugoslavian 3 years after the end of ww2. and the taste of the coffee served in the bars is still very similar to italian tradition. but note, the style of preparation here is already more greek or turk, not italian any more

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philemon and baucis, baska version

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the little town of baska at the south end of the krk island, croatia, provided some surprises. a small settlement in the shadow of krk city, it has a lively history as a spa, beginning with the attraction of tchech tourists very early in the last century. now the new part with the resorts and the old center with its narrow alleys are well separate, and the view from this old part out into the bay is magnificient. But even more magnificient is the old cemetery on the mountain, where i found this double cross headstone with the double portrait on it.

the overview from the cemetery shows the bay of baska, impressive with those steep mountains on the surrounding islands. the port lost its importance as a protected bay for sailing vessels with the arrivals of the steamers that only headed for krk on krk. now tourism is the major source of income here, after the vineyards have been devastated during the socialist regime.

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stormy weather

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a photographers dilemma: securing the tent or getting the shot. in the end i (barely) managed to do both, very much to the contentment of the slightly upset wife. the storm was as heavy as the clouds dramatic, the latter visible as shown after some treatment in lightzone.

this kind of clouds i already knew from baroque paintings and i was more then astonished to see that postprocessing algorithms based on pure mathematics calculate similar enhancement as master painters already did hundreds of years ago. back home i will do some investigations for images with a similar sky.

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red ship detail II

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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.

at least here i seem to have overcome it, and so the days are - besides having fun with the kids - full of new things, images among them. vacancies at it's best, that is.

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net off duty

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early morning photo walks do have their merits besides the tourist places not yet being overcrowded. the light is wonderful soft, like in this example here with the net taking a rest off duty.

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ship detail in krk V

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krk harbour is a busy place. during the day dozens of leasure boats fill the air with their noise, the sound of alternatively diesel or 2-stroke fuel is abundant. but what a bonanza in reflections, color patches, harmonious forms it is, especially early in the morning. stay tuned - there is more of it to come.

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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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batticaloa lighthouse

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less words this time. punctum - i have decided to get barthes' book to understand better what he tries to express.

above you have the black and white version of the batticaloa lighthouse picture. in my eyes it has a more detached quality than the color version here which is just so ...natural and vivid. maybe it's my mood that i savour more in the black and white version.

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vesak lanterns

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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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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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tsunami ruins with bike and crow

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nice pat on the back yesterday: in my flickr account i found a mail from a journalist of tamilweek.com, notifying that they had - in accordance with the creative commons license i put on my pictures and blog - taken my blog entries and compiled them to a news feature named portraits from kalmunai. What I found appealing and a positive experience is the fact that they did not clandestinely copy and paste, which is something that so many authors experience nowadays, but behaved like high-standard journalists from the good old days in the midst of the snake pit internet.

content-wise i made my rants about the political situation there heard, now i just wait for the miracle that this has some effect.

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long shadows on the beach

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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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hauling in the net

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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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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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