OK, that’s the last post for today and one more song by Element Of Crime:

“Über Nacht” means “over night”, and the Song is from the 1996 album “Die schönen Rosen”. Hear it on YouTube.

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“Gratis Äpfel” – “apples for free” – on the sidewalk in front of a shop. I took this image yesterday morning. I could resist the apples though.

Instead of processing images and making blog posts, I spent the whole evening browsing Amazon for new music. One of the results is that I bought four albums by Element Of Crime.

The Song of the Day is on one of them. It’s “Alten Resten Eine Chance” (“a chance to old leftovers”) from the 1993 album “Weisses Papier”. Hear it on YouTube.

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As usual I am a little behind on schedule. Let me show you one image taken on Monday afternoon in the park of the imperial castle of Schönbrunn. The building is an over-sized pavilion on top of the hill overlooking the castle. It’s called “Gloriette”.

Light on Monday was brilliant, the air was clean, and so it cost me quite some work in Photoshop until I arrived at this HDR-like interpretation. It’s not HDR though, it is simply one image taken through different versions from RAW, Topaz Adjust (or Detail? I can’t remember) and some other tricks.

The Song of the Day is “Empire” from David Byrne’s 2004 album “Grown Backwards”. I’ve uploaded it to YouTube, successfully one more time

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I hope you don’t mind that I stretch a short moment into two posts, but Sunday was photographically unproductive, and besides, I really like these two images.

Juha Haataja recently asked about how much we rely on all the dynamic range our cameras can capture, and the point he made is right, normally what we get suffices, but these two images show why dynamic range is still important.

The image captured by the camera contained all the dynamic range that was possibly there to capture. Of course the sun will always burn out, but everything else was pretty accurate, only the distribution was wrong. I needed +2 EV for the ground in order to make it look like what I saw, and into that image I blended the original exposure. I could have used some HDR tone mapper to do the job, but for this kind of image I prefer to do it myself. The automatic algorithms are great, but they never get the sun right

Anyway. Raising exposure by 2EV brought up some noise in the landscape, but not too bad. This is of course due to the camera’s great dynamic range, and I guess it is these times when I really need the 14 bit capture. Forget about doing that with a JPEG.

The Song of the Day is still “Chasing The Light” from the 1989 album “Leningrad Cowboys Go America”. Hear it on YouTube.

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The weekend is over and I am on the train back to Vienna. I had intended to go swimming, but we’ve had rain most of the two days, and it was much too cold as well.

On Saturday, after we had a consultation with my father in Klagenfurt about the plans for the new apartment in Villach, we drove back and, far in the west, saw sunlight. I didn’t have any images yet, so we decided to try our luck and drive into the south-western valley of Carinthia, a place called Gailtal.

It was already past 6 pm and you know the problem: What should you do, drive fast in the hope to finally reach a last sunny spot, or drive slow, admit that you chase a chimera and be content with whatever you may spot along the way?

We decided to chase the light, and really, shortly after Hermagor we made it

This image is interesting, because I was standing much lower than the church, and normally I would have had to use the image without proper correction of perspective, or else I would have lost much of of it, especially in the lower part. After some experimenting I decided to do it optically incorrect, while retaining almost all of the original composition.

I did this by selecting the upper two thirds of the image, just below the church, right through the hedges, copying that to a new layer. Using “Edit / Transform / Perspective” I grabbed the right upper corner, dragged it to the right, and thus by stretching the image along the upper edge, I corrected the strongly converging lines. Now the verticals were OK, but the building looked compressed, and so I stretched the whole part vertically until the building looked right. I lost the upper part of the sky, but there was no horizontal compression in the lower part of the image, and consequently I didn’t have to crop from the sides.

You can’t do that in general, at least not if straight lines run across the border between the two parts of the image. If you look carefully, you can see a bend in a line of the shack between the wood and the church, but it is really minor, and everything else is in the hedges, where there are no straight lines at all. You can’t use any soft transition, because the two parts of the image only line up along the lower edge, along the cut. It either works or it does not. Here it did.

The Song of the Day is “Chasing The Light” from the 1989 album “Leningrad Cowboys Go America”. Hear it on YouTube.

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When I got my D300 and the Tamron 17-50/2.8 VC back from repair, I was really awed by the raw speed of focusing and the enormous precision of the autofocus.

Try that one time: use manual focus for a few days, and preferrably do that with a manual focus lens. I have two of them now, the 50/1.2 and the 24/2.8, and both feel so enormously better when focusing than any modern AF lens, it’s a pleasure to use them. Try using such lenses for a few days, then switch to a decent AF lens and feel the awe

But then, oh my, am I slow focusing manually! On the other hand, this is part of the appeal of these lenses. They slow me down. I wouldn’t use them for action, but for subjects like today’s, there is nothing wrong with them.

The Song of the Day is “Cool Disposition” by Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup. Hear it on YouTube.

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Yup, nothing wrong with the Tamron. It works better than ever. QED. I guess I can go back to the manual focus primes soon

The Song of the Day is “Drive My Car” from the 1965 Beatles album “Rubber Soul”. YouTube has it, but you know it anyway. Not a bad match for a battered old Mini Cooper, if you ask me

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Today I got a phone call. My camera was back and with it the Tamron 17-50/2.8 VC. I didn’t mean to, but I left work early nevertheless.

Uhhh … what can I say? It works. Everything works. Autofocus on my D300 works again, the Tammy works again, no, the camera wasn’t even dusty. And … my, does this lens try to impress me!

And it does. Still, I wouldn’t feel comfortable to recommend this lens any more. I’ve made my experiences and I wouldn’t want you to suffer like I did. But then, so far this particular specimen works absolutely flawlessly. No focus problems, no problems with the aperture blades not closing down, no problems at all.

I’ve tried it. I’ve tried setting the zoom to 50 mm, pointing it rapidly into one random direction, at something at a random distance, and it just worked. Yes, there were some images that were blurred, but setting the minimum shutter speed to 1/30s and/or waiting just a fraction of a second to let the stabilization lock on usually sufficed.

Do I feel fine? You bet

I made an excellent image of a bike rider. I tracked him, I took an image at f2.8, he looked at me, a little surprised but not hostile. The image was taken in bright sunlight, it was sharp, had dramatic shadows, and somehow it was just the place and the moment. Everything came together, fell in place. I loved that image. It was just the product of an impulse, seeing, raising the camera, focusing and releasing the shutter, all together in one moment.

Then I deleted the image. Accidentally. I mean, I’m no idiot, but every once in a while I do such outrageously stupid things. I didn’t take any more images and at home I tried to recover the file, but it was too late. I couldn’t find it. It was gone.

Some while later, when I already sat in my living room and tried to use one the files left, I saw this amazing light outside.

My living room looks to the east, and when the sun sets, when its rays come really low, they reflect in the windows of the buildings on the other side of the garden, and this reflected light fills my living room with a sudden flood of warm gold. It doesn’t last very long, only a minute or two, but during that time it is breathtaking.

The Song of the Day is “Goodbye Sunshine” from the 1993 Ceremony album “Hang Out Your Poetry”. Ceremony was a band around Chastity Bono, and they made no more than that single album. What a shame. I absolutely love the album.

I couldn’t find the song on YouTube, and so I took the liberty to upload it. Seems like I didn’t offend the copyright gods this time

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It’s still supposed to be Summer, only it ain’t. People here in Vienna wear autumn clothing, which I refuse to do, but at the moment, while I sit in my living room, writing this post, my heating is turned on. This is a first for this season, and I feel comfortably warm, while outside the winds are howling.

The image that you see here was made with the new Nikon AI-S 24/2.8, and it was taken from under an umbrella. I guess I was not the only one who felt uncomfortable

The Song of the Day is “That’s How I Feel Today” from The Little Chocolate Dandies. You find the song on many compilations, depending on the member of the band you look for. Among others that includes Coleman Hawkins, Benny Carter and Fats Waller. YouTube has a version from 1929.

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So The Bike Photographer strikes again

I guess this was the last image with the Nikon AI-S 50/1.2 for a few days. I actually did it, I bought a Nikon AI 24/2.8 for €160. This is quite a good price, especially considering that it came with a hood. Unfortunately the weather here is unpleasantly wet and cold, completely untypical for this season, and this takes a bit of the joy out of photography.

The Song of the Day is “I’d Be Waiting” by Xavier Naidoo. See the video on YouTube.

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