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.
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our spa gardens exhibit quite a number of contemporary art pieces, mostly sculptures. normal, not accentuating lighting situations don't help to bring attention to those, and for some the place chosen is simply uninspired.
yesterday's snow however made the scissor-type portrait of a violinist (guess it's mozart, he is (ab-)used everywhere here for public relation purposes - I stand corrected here: it's anna-sophie mutter, a german star violinist) really interesting.
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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.
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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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.
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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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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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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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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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it seems that this is my blue period. fortunately enough this concentrates on photography and is not a general description of my mood.
however the self-assignment of 'learning to see' seems quite a bit harder here in the wintery bavaria than it is in sri lanka. it's not the time restrictions - on business trips they are even tighter - but the familiarity with the visual impressions around, i think. so opening the eyes, seeing without categorizing, absorbing optical stimuli and becoming aware of beauty in the well-known is what i learn.
beauty is a keyword in yesterday's post of 'the landscapist' mark hobson. whilst i do agree with large parts of his argumentation thread, i am not sure if this 'chasing the light' is something to condemn: what many of those landscape photographers do accomplish is to portray a perfection in nature that is unknown to the majority of mankind. in my eyes this can be way beyond mere pretty-ness, this can be beauty. and this beauty can be the bridge to love, and this love is the first step to acknowledgement of value, of worthiness.
if this feeling for value could only a little bit balance the race for hypothesized shareholder value, i think a great many of mark's concerns would be alleviated.
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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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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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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.
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back to cold reality. here in my hometown winter is going strong. the scenery above could well be from astrid lindgren's the tomten, here on youtube.
i don't want to chime into the 'waiting for springtime/i love winter' posts. winter is not my favourite time of the year, but it is the season we will see change all too soon due to the warming of the atmosphere. so i'll catch it while i can.
today i want to pick up ilan breslers idea to feature a blog which i think is worth to be read: a blog from russia, http://photo.alick.ru/. i can't read any letter of the posts, but some of the photographs are fascinating. so feel free to follow the link under the thumbnail to the right. and of course, check ilans blog here.
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another pre-written post. should give me some time to go shooting and enjoy myself ;)
and the contrast of the hoarfrost and the 30°+ in colombo is just too nice to think of.
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it was today. -12°c make you very grateful for your gloves and very ungrateful towards camera 'engineers' creating itsy-bitsy-teenie-weenie rubber knobs on the remote control of your camera, which refuse to be operated with gloves.
i had found a small streambed just below a seamill, which sported besides the usual icicles also this wonderful transparent ice sheets between the rocks. well worth freezing off my fingers for one hour...
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after yesterdays cold colored post, here is something warmer. i need it, as we have temperatures well below 0°c for several days now, with the side effect of blue sky and wonderful sunlight especially in the afternoon.
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from the 'instead of eating burgers' series. the tripod at home for sure is pretty useless. on the other hand, that overlay of noise on the fine structures in a certain way matches my eyesight degrading with upcoming twilight, so there is not much to complain. temperatures were cold, and color temperatures as well.
i have developed a certain preference for landscape shots without sky, that is one of the reasons why i do prefer here the lead shot.
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from the 'instead of eating burgers' series.
there is something to learn from this shot: either don't touch basic settings you rely on, or do a thorough checking at the beginning of each shooting session.
of course i did not, and so the first frames, this one among them, were shot as jpeg only, in small size...
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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.
this photo on flickr.
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