Well, “chasing” is probably too strong, let’s say I found them. These are two very different images, and the first one does not even really belong here, but, you know, in the service of bringing you fresh pictures, I’m always twisting my rules

Number one is another image from Sunday afternoon. I had just driven over a bridge, stopped the car and went back. Somehow I liked the water, but then, it was absolutely impossible to keep my shadow out of the image. On the other hand, I liked the shadow as well, thus I took the image. The colors are largely imagined, recreated from memory, or what ever you’re willing to believe. Fact is, that white balance was a complete mess and color variation almost non-existent.

The second image is from Monday morning in Vienna. This is a case where I would have needed a 70 or an 85, thus I didn’t take much care framing the image, as I knew, I would have to crop anyway. The image had to go B&W because of some aggressively colored reflections. The toning is a combo of two vanilla Photoshop photo filters, 60% “Deep Yellow” in the highlights, 100% “Deep Blue” in the shadows.

The Song of the Day is “Chasing Shadows” from the 1969 self-titled album “Deep Purple”. Hear it on YouTube.

Mittagskogel. You know this mountain, it’s a landmark just south of Villach, I have had it on quite some image, but it’s actually not so easy to get a good view on it.

This afternoon I was out, hunting it down. You know, I have no real problem with power lines and such, when I can’t avoid them, I make them a subject, but in order for that to work, I need to be able to choose my point of view. With still so much snow and no proper shoes (OK, this was idiotic, don’t tell me ), I didn’t have that freedom, thus I had to look harder.

These two images are what I came up with. Both of them are HDR, processed with Photomatix Pro, for the Image of the Day I also used a polarizer. I like both.

The Song of the Day is “Hunter” from Dido’s 1999 album “No Angel”. Hear it on YouTube.

See the flowers? Oh, that’s only an hour by car from Villach. We took the highway straight down to Italy, left just south of Udine, and there it was: an approximation of spring

Of course for Italians this is still winter, but as soon as you leave the Alps behind, the climate gets mild.

We didn’t search for anything special, just a little bit of cruising around in the sun, enjoying the afternoon warmth of around 15 degreen Celsius.

Other than that, my mind is full of plans at the moment. Software. If you are only interested in photography, I suggest you stop reading now

Every once in a while I make a big project, that then occupies me for a few years. It’s always about software engineering tools. The first big one was a tool for specifying remote procedure call interfaces, and then to generate code for all the glue, i.e. a server main program that had only to be linked with the implementations of the remote procedures, and a client library for calling such remote procedures, without having to know where the servers are, without any initialization mumbo jumbo. The tools produced server stubs for C and Cobol, and client stubs for C and Visual Basic. The project was implemented in C and Tcl/Tk.

The second big project was a tool and method for what we now call Model Driven Design. About ten years ago I had to construct a relatively big web application. I had six months of time, and I knew that it was damn short, given my lack of tools. For political reasons I had to use a primitive Perl CGI framework, and I spent five months to develop a development method and a code generation tool on top. Then I used the framework to make the whole application in the remaining month.

Basically you defined an application as a set of pages, available to a number of roles. Every role has at least one start page, events bring you from page to page, an event normally a button press. Think of it as graphs. For every page transition you have to write a piece of code that processes the input from the last page and fills in the blanks for the next page. If you don’t write the processing code for such a transition, nothing gets processed and the next page is initialized with default values or blanks. Thus the system was perfectly suited for prototyping as well.

It’s a little more elaborate than that, but the principle was to specifdy as much as possible in XML, and then to generate everything but the actual application logic. Of course if you know that much about an application, you can automatically generate all sorts of useful documentation. This one was implemented in Perl.

Since then I have worked shortly in Python (the reason for my profound hate of that language) and now for years in Java. I like Java, I like Eclipse, but I miss my Model Driven Design framework. With Eclipse and Java, the tools have become better, but the category of problems that I solve now, is actually more primitive. I write more glue code, things have not improved. Thus I think it’s time to do it once more, to go and make a big software project.

Of course I am not the only one, there are lots and lots of MDD projects, a lot of clever people working in that arena, but I guess I have a sound understanding of the field, tons of experience, a strong vision, and, building upon two big projects based on specification and code generation, I should be able to come up with some very useful things. Whatever, I’ll try.

The Song of the Day is “Beautiful Italy” from Franz Lehar’s Paganini, sung by the great Richard Tauber in 1937. Hear it on YouTube.

First day out of the cage, and the day showed no mercy. Yes, it was sunny in between, that was while I sat at work in front of the computer

Anyway. This image is of one short moment in the morning, when I saw the reflection of a milky sun in a window. I tried my best, even shot a bracketed sequence, combined the exposures in Photomatix Pro, but really, I would have despaired without Photoshop. Two hours and many layers later I am not pleased with the image, but not disgusted either. I guess it’s OK, but then …

I’d probably have liked a dog in the foreground to the right, on a major diagonal, opposed to the light patch of the reflection, although, even if I had had a dog in the frame, it would have probably been the wrong pose and certainly a problem with the bracketed exposures. Well, this is an image where I woudl even copy a dog in, but alas, my dog library is rather scarcely populated

The Song of the Day is “Shine On” from James Blunt’s 2007 album “All The Lost Souls”. See a live version on YouTube.

What’s a bicycle? It’s simply some lines. I’m not attached to bicycles more than to any other kind of object, it’s just that they have so useful lines

I don’t ride bicycles. No more. I did it ten, fifteen years ago, and then I decided it’s too dangerous. Well, you can let traffic regulations penalize you, keep to bicycle lanes that were obviously always an afterthought, can fight pedestrians and dogs, unable to overtake slow riders on those narrow lanes, always in danger of getting killed by careless car drivers anyway.

Or else you play the real game, ride fast, ride on car lanes, are part of the traffic. That’s what I used to do. This way the bike was an incomparably fast means of transport, winning effortlessly against cars or public transport, at least in a city. The problem is, using car lanes is forbidden now, at least where there are bike lanes. Sounds reasonable, would be reasonable, but only if the bike lanes were actually constructed for fast riding, allowing for overtaking, and wouldn’t constantly change sides for no reason, every time with a low priority semaphore.

But even if I had my way, it would still be dangerous. I stopped using the bike when I had an accident, about ten years ago. It was entirely my fault. I had stopped at a semaphore, second behind a small red car. I knew I had to be fast to get over the next few crossings without having to stop, thus when the car in front of me accelerated quickly, so did I. While switching gears I viewed down to the chain for only a split-second. I had had problems with the chain not changing gears properly some weeks before. Bad habit, I know. Just at that moment the car suddenly stopped, as sudden as its acceleration had been. The driver wanted to turn to the right into a garage. Oh dear. I’m not sure if I had been able to stop if I had not looked down. Maybe yes, maybe no. I was slightly too near in any case. As it was, I had no chance. I managed to slow down almost to a halt, but only almost, and the result were two dents from my handle bar on the car’s back door and a damaged helmet of mine.

Nothing bad did happen, I felt a little dizzy, the bike was OK, and I drove on to work. The problem is another one:

I know I made some mistakes, and the car driver behaved strangely, first starting like for a race, and then only two seconds later braking hard, but the problem is, this can happen anytime again. If I want to make sure that nothing like that can ever happen again, I have to drive in a way that would make me crazy. It’s no fun. I hate it.

Or else I don’t ride bicycles at all. That’s what I did since. But then, photographing and riding bicycles, that’s probably pretty incompatible anyway

By the way, this image is from January 26, and tomorrow I’ll go working again. The snow is not at all inappropriate. Most of today it was snowing lightly.

The Song of the Day is “Simply” from Sara Hickman’s 1989 album “Equal Scary People”. It’s not a really good match for the image, in fact it’s a lousy match. It’s a love song, but as a love song it is so beautiful, that I just had to have it here today.

Sara Hickman is great. I have two of her albums, both quite old now. I had not followed her career since, but when I looked today, I found that she has made quite some albums since, almost one per year – and almost nothing is available as digital downloads, many not even as CD any more.

Interestingly enough I found a beautiful, private live performance of this song on YouTube. Imagine, you’re invited by friends for Thanksgiving, by chance Sara Hickman is there as well, and she even sings a few songs for you. How much luck is that?

I’m still at home – and I can’t even begin to tell you how fed up I am. I have made no single image since when? Sunday?? But anyway, I’ll stay home tomorrow, and on Friday I’m back to work and then in the evening back to Carinthia.

Speaking of Carinthia, this is an image that I took more than a month ago on Mount Dobratsch. I didn’t use it, because I had more than enough images for “1210 – Solid Rock“, but today I am thankful for it. It’s also fitting in a way, because while the sun shines in Vienna, there was snowfall in Carinthia during the whole day, and it is predicted to go on until tomorrow. The weekend may see some sunshine as well. We’ll see. Let’s hope I’m fit for photography

This wooden sign is by the side of the road, almost at its end, at a height of about 1700 meters. I really liked the texture in the snow. What you see here is the result of a series of experiments, directed at conserving the highlight detail and the general feeling of depth, and at the same time showing a kind of blinding brightness. Thus I had to be careful: too much local contrast would have pushed the whole image into a medium gray, and that’s far from what I experienced while I was there. All in all I think the result is OK.

The Song of the Day is “Alone” from the 1996 Beautiful South album “Blue Is The Colour”. Hear it on YouTube. Not exactly related to the image, but a great song like almost all of Paul Heaton’s

I regularly infuriate Ted Byrne when I post images like this, and in a way I can understand it, imagining him scrubbing graffiti from his house’s walls. Yup, it’s destruction of private property, and especially, but that won’t make a difference to Ted, when it’s not even remotely artistic.

Yet I can’t imagine a city without these marks. No, I can’t even wish for it. It wouldn’t feel natural. You can threaten, you can punish, doesn’t matter. It still happens. You can’t prevent it – and that’s good. Look at that image, look at the layers. This is the closest our cities get to being natural, fractal, organic, aging, decaying. It’s not always nice, but neither is a carcass in the wilderness.

I’m still at home, still sick, still posting past images. This is from March, 1^st and though I hope to be out again sometime this week, we could go on like that for a few hundred days. It’s interesting plundering the archives.

The Song of the Day is “Dirty Old Town“. We had a song of that title in “739 – Dirty Old Town“, but that were The Pogues. This time it’s David Byrne with a completely different Song from his landmark latin/crossover album “Rei Momo”. See a rare live performance, David Byrne some 20 years ago, on YouTube. A real gem.

I’m back in Vienna, but I’m sick and at home. I’ve slept most of the day, and although I made a few images out of the window this morning, I’ll spare you the results.

These two images were both taken last week on the same day as “1237 – I’m Gonna Lock My Heart“. The first image is actually a failure. I probably should go back and try it again. The problem is, that I took two exposures with that walking man in the frame, one too early and the other, this one, too late. I’d have liked to have him a little bit more to the left, the scene less condensed, and then I would not have been forced to crop so much in from the left.

I’ve also played with some alternative crops, for instance a square that comes in even more from the left and that also cuts part of the scribble from the right, and although it is in some ways better, it does not satisfy me in the end. So this is a failure, but it is the kind of failure that interests me.

The Image of the Day was the other option from the same day, and I’m actually glad that I could finally use it. I would have forgotten it, but I really like the various strong lines in different directions, and the feeling of depth that they create.

Other than that, I’ve learned something. You know, here in the heart of Europe we have a political and social system that is very different from that in the US, and we tend to see the Republicans as evil, as being against freedom. Part of that is a fact that we’ve talked about often with Ted Byrne, namely that we associate completely different things with “left” and “right”, but especially with the political right. For me a Nazi is right, for him a Nazi fights for a system with tight governmental control, thus in his view Nazis are essentially left. Well, whatever. I guess in the meantime we have learned to appreciate each other’s positions.

But that’s something I had to think about, when I saw the recent TEDx talk by Lawrence Lessig. I really urge you to view this talk for three reasons:

First, I believe it carries an important message. I simply like what he says and I believe it’s true.

Second, it is enlightening on a completely different level, because it shreds some of my deeply ingrained prejudices. Unfortunately it also proves that politics are a damn complicated field. Well, and

Third, it is just an incredibly clever presentation. This man can really talk and this man really knows how to make a point. I heard it with interest and pleasure, hope you like it too.

The Song of the Day is one of my recent Sinatra acquisitions, the Johnny Burke / Jimmy Van Heusen composition “It Could Happen To You“. Hear it on YouTube.

This may seem like another “so-what” image, and in a certain way it is. Actually it is not a real image – meaning an image that I’m proud of – at all. It’s a memory, and to be precise, it’s a future memory.

This is of course the morning view from my study in Carinthia again. It’s not particularly interesting, just a morning, and during the last 17 months (so long have we been in Villach … so long), I have shown you many versions of this view, some of them maybe even good.

This is all going to fade away. Nothing will remain but a sweet memory.

See the red and white ribbons? They are all over the place, marking the outlines of furture buildings. So far they are nothing but a nuisance, making a lot of noise when the wind rushes in, but I suppose it’s only a matter of weeks until the bulldozers come.

It fills me with a certain nostalgia to know that this place will never again be what I have learned to love. But then: that’s life

The Song of the Day is “Sweet Memory” from the 2008 Melody Gardot debut album “Worrisome Heart”. See a live video on YouTube.

That’s gonna be a short one, promised

The image is one more from yesterday morning. Actually, yesterday’s two images and today’s one were taken in sequence.

Hmm … why this image? Don’t ask me. It somehow appeals to me. Maybe it tells a story. Maybe not. You decide

The Song of the Day is “Don’t Ask Me Why” from the 1989 Eurythmics album “We Too Are One”. YouTube has the video.