karlspark tree

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there are shots that belong together (like my moon diptych, but also the landscapist does it, and carl weese recently published shots of a yellow suv/green wall that could be seen as belonging together), and so it's just consistent to frame them together.

trees have been and are a favourite subject of mine, maybe inherited from my father, who knows a lot of them by figure, without having to look at leaves or fruits, and it is astonishing that i still haven't set up a separate keyword or collection for them. well - time to go through the archives again. but now it's time for backup of the latter.

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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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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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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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pars pro toto

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i am not the person for rain pictures, so in spite of carrying the camera around today, no shots that deserve better then the 'immediate delete' section. resorting to monday's picture taken during heavy snowfall in the spa garden, i was pondering my options and finally went for the detail: snow and snowfall is more present here, no concurrence with the shape of the tree, valid in itself and therefore distracting from the snow.

of course the concept of dense photography, discussed a short while back on the landscapist and nobodys pictures would recommend a less simple approach, including more information, verbatim background information, but at the moment i am favouring more straightforward compositions, more removing additional elements then adding them.

what i try to find and portray through isolation are the simple, clear things - in spite of knowing that our world is neither clear nor simple. but let me put it that way: if i can recognize the simple things of value, then i can open up my understanding to the complex ones. if i would start with the complex ones, i would get nowhere because of too much distraction. instead i would stop with this subject and turn to the next.

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drama in the snow

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spring does not send any messengers here, instead we had heavy snowfall, frost and rain in the last days. and the snow provided a nice backdrop for this background for this group of wooden sculptures. the one to the right is from this year's new years post. i had tried several times to photograph this group, but during the summer the background is so distracting that all of my shots ended in the null device. and whilst this shot is far from being perfect, it's the first time that the group really becomes visible.

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fun with 6400

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even the snowstorm was no hindrance: on the way home from a restaurant, celebrating the successful first half of the school year, the eldest daughter couldn't stop clowneries with her umbrella in the snow. grateful i am for those iso 6400 i can dial in now. and whilst the objective image quality may be poor, the image gives an excellent impression of that night lighting, snow drifting, kid jumping.

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klausbachtal forest

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in spite of the rain that now soaks the large snow heaps here in the valley, higher up in the mountains winter is still unbroken. a sunday morning, only some 100 m away from the main trail you feel completely alone when the mist swallows all sounds. that always helps me to get the right sense of scale after a busy week, partly in the city, surrounded by all high tech and acting out my high expectations and trying to meet those of others. here in the mountains is the place where i can re-connect and come down to my roots.

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st. pankraz castle and church

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late afternoon light had already left st. pankraz church in the shade. due to the cold air and light wind there were almost no distortions by the heatings from the houses of bad reichenhall under this scenery, only the object contrast turned out to be really low - a bit more then 3 f-stops is really not much. i had exposed to the right, so i hoped there was enough differentiation in there for a detail-rich image. playing with lightzone allowed to increase the local contrast and with the result i am quite happy.

just one thing keeps nagging me: even from the tripod all my shots are tilted to right - it seems almost impossible for me to adjust the camera horizontally. so the next thing to get is a rrs lever clamp with a spirit level. not that i would not like to tilt some shots on purpose, but never getting it level even if i want to is more than annoying.

oh yes, st. pankraz was already the subject of this post. it seems to attract me especially during winter time.

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the old castle

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at the moment those late afternoon hours seem to be really rewarding for me. i had tried to portray gruttenstein castle, only 10 min away from our house, on quite some occasions, but all i got were mere reproductions. today's image is different: the old trees (another found-again partiality) do not reveal much of the castle, but create a mood maybe a bit out of a fairy tale. that's what i enjoy in here, and it still is quite 'straight' photography, not much massaging the raw file.

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looking through the woods

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the blue hour at the moment is quite pronounced, of course the thick clouds make the transit of the light a bit longer. lucky enough i managed to combine the weekly shopping super-task with an hour of walking the tripod. not far from the spot where i took cold winter and the sleeping witch in a winter night the trail i was following suddenly had only one thin layer of branches between me and the village of grossgmain and the untersberg behind it. and especially the branches high above me captured my attention, one of the rare opportunities where i used my 11-18 wideangle zoom.

this lens is quite special: whilst i use it only for a small fraction of my shots, a disproportionate high fraction of those i regard above average. and i had quite a steep learning curve and still do not master it in the way i would like to: making those pictures with a grand subject whilst including a lot of environment information in the background. but my feeling for it grows, and overall it seems to have been a good investment.

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the 'sleeping witch' in a winter night

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with the right gloves, even photographing in snowfall looses its scaring quality. yesterday evening i had some spare time between appointments, and due to the weather just sneaked into a place where i had been on quite a number of walks.

snowfall transforms all the vistas, softens contours, hides details (no dense photography any more...) but the mood i did enjoy very much - that approaching night, absence of light, dampening of the sounds due to the snow. those 15 minutes really managed to recharge my batteries.

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snow and fence

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a lesson in 'learning to see'. i had a bland image on my monitor, taken when i was quite tired at the end of an excursion with the family. i remembered that i had taken it because of the beautiful curve of the fence posts and the shadow curves of the fence's wire, but there was too much optical garbage clobbering the real subject. so out of a 12.7 MB file i cropped 1.5 MB, the resolution of a 2 year old mobile phone camera...

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north face over schwarzbach

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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.

the second picture is an alpine hut there on the meadows. the cows used to graze right in the woods - with obvious consequences for the young trees - but the administration tries to buy out now those old rights.

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Now tell me, is this easter?

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it started to snow on good friday, but the climax was today: 20cm of fresh snow everywhere. ok, not that i would mourn the fate of the pollen that already caused me heavy allergic coryza, but still...

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lonesome track

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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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Schönram bog, deeply frozen

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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Merry Christmas to you and peace to all mankind

my best wishes for this our world and all people living here with us.

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clearing storm over St. Pankraz

St. Pankraz church is built on one of the oldest inhabitated places in the valley of Bad Reichenhall. Accessible through only a narrow footpath, this location was safe from attacks from below and must have been an old ritual place, too. One of my best christmas experiences is connected with this church: walking 1 hour through the snow, with a pitch-torch in the hand, and then attending midnight mass.

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