The Daily Photography of Andreas Manessinger

1002 - On A Saturday Afternoon

2009-07-12T01:05:00.002+02:00

Yesterday evening the office chair in my study broke, and I spent most of today finding a new one. Well, I eventually did, but it took me a hell of a time. Once I even fell in a shop, because the chair that I tested, had been wrongly assembled. I tried to lean back ... and suddenly the chair tilted over.

Actually that is not really funny. You sit in the chair, you lean back, and suddenly it topples over, and you feel like falling, and then you fall, and you try not to, but there is nothing in the world that you could do. You can only hope that you won't break your neck.

Well, I didn't, and I'm pretty glad about it. Now I'm sitting in a nice and comfortable new leather chair and all's well again.

The Image of the Day was taken shortly afterward, while we sat in the garden of a pub nearby. While drinking a beer and relaxing, I saw this bicycle, the planks leaning against the shed, and I thought this could be a composition.

The Song of the Day is "On Saturday Afternoons In 1963" from Rickie Lee Jones' 1979 self-titled debut album. Deezer has the album, and on YouTube is a video, albeit with inferior sound quality.

1001 - Don't You See How This World Made A Change

2009-07-10T17:21:00.003+02:00

Friday. Travel day. Actually I'm happy I got an image at all. We had rain in the morning and I missed a fantastic image: a young woman all under a hood, in front of a mostly bare wall, no face visible, one arm put forward in a strange gesture, obviously checking if the rain still falls, her appearance nothing but ghost-like.

It would have been a great image, very strange, if, yes, if I had not completely botched it. I just saw her peripherally, raised the camera, had one chance ... and failed. Her feet were cut off, I got her in front of the only part of the wall that was not bare, the gesture was gone, it really had stopped raining and she had taken off the hood. Oh dear!

But that's simply how it goes. On the street you don't have many chances. You see something, you react, and then you've either got it right or not at all. Experience raises the number and quality of keepers, but it will always be a gamble, even in ten years, when I will be a 100% master photoblogger :)

Today's image was easier to get. I saw the multitude of signs, found that the 85/1.8 compressed them enough to make for an image, and then I saw the young man coming from behind. I focused on the sign in the middle, and I only had to wait for him to pass the sign.

Btw, knowing that many of my readers are active bloggers themselves, I'd really like to ask you a question: What is it that you get out of blogging? Why do you do it?

I ask, because apart from the reasons that I mentioned yesterday, I also see this blog (and my photography as well) as part of a diary and as a timeline. I can use my images to locate past events, and frequently my blog entry triggers a fairly complete set of memories.

A project, that I've carried around for some time now, is to document the books that I read. I don't really know what this will be, a critique after I've read it, or simply a list like the list of my Songs of the Day, but I strongly feel the urge to document what I do, and in this case it is primarily for me. We'll see what comes from it.

The Song of the Day is "Don't You See How This World Made A Change" by Blind Willie McTell. I have it on disc 43 of this fabulous 168 CD collection called "The Ultimate Jazz Archive", but if you insist on something smaller, "The Definitive Blind Willie McTell" will also do. YouTube has a video.

1000 - A Thousand Beautiful Things

2009-07-09T21:36:00.007+02:00

It was all over the Blogosphere, you know that 10,000 hours rule, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell, the rule that says that when you put 10,000 hours into something, you become a master at it.

Well, I guess I put at least two hours every day into taking photographs, processing them and blogging about it. Now figure: You're listening to the words of a 20% photoblogging master! Isn't that great :-?

But really, when blogging, you eventually get used to any kind of jubilee. For instance I remember "50 - A Small Jubilee" and "100 - Lazy Afternoon", oh my, how big those numbers seemed. And then "500 - The Half Of It, Dearie". That was really respectable, and this is exactly how I felt. But then, there is nothing like a #1000. I don't know why, but even a 10.000 will not feel that magic. In fact, I have waited for this moment for months, have thought about how it would feel and it feels ... swell :)

A thousand images, that's more than two and a half years. When I think about that time, I definitely see progress. It's not that every image is a little bit better than its predecessor, it's not even that all those images are good, fact is, many of them are lousy, but the pure effort to produce at least one single good image a day, whatever the result is, makes sure you make progress. And I did, I can see it.

It's not that I have developed an obvious style though. I have even tried to resist that temptation, the temptation to search myself a niche and try to defend it. I don't have to, I don't do it for the money.

When you have followed this blog for a while, you have seen many, many different approaches to photography and digital image processing. You saw me use LAB color mode for months, you saw quite some HDR images, one of the recent fads was the use of amber gradient maps for B&W images, now the dernier cri is the use of Alien Skin Snap Art for post-processing. If you don't like it, rest assured, it will go away like all the others did.

And still, those things don't just vanish. They contribute to my experience. Actually that was one of my initial motivations to start blogging: to keep me working, to keep me motivated, to keep me experimenting, all while trying to slowly build up a body of work. And now, after 1000 images, it has long become a part of my life. I guess it would be hard to stop it, and I have certainly no intention to do so.

Can I recommend blogging and especially this kind of routine? Certainly, I can. It's a chore, it eats your time like a hungry, hungry monster, but it sure is an experience that I won't like to miss. It's one of those things that force you to make progress, that send you on a journey into the unknown, it's one of those things that - probably - may make you eventually know what it is that you want to do. I sure don't know now, but - after all - I am still only a 20% master photoblogger :)

Well, enough of that, and now for something completely different: my SoFoBoMo book. Only today I learned of a blog entry that Amy Sakurai has written about my book. Mine was one of the three books that she had looked forward to in this year's SoFoBoMo, and seemingly I did disappoint her. I don't know exactly yet what her gripes are, and even if I knew, I could do nothing about it, because the book is done. I could change it, but I won't. I have it printed on my shelf and that's it.

Still, I guess I could share some thoughts about why this book is what it is. Amy mentioned the small size of the verticals. Well, the basic layout, normally one image per spread, with a lot of white space around the images, was dictated by two things:

First, I wanted to make sure that nothing essential gets cut away in the printed version. I had used InDesign templates that someone had made for Blurb book sizes, and though I basically trusted the source, I was anxious to come near the borders. Thus the big amount of white space. In the end it turned out that all my worries were mute, the dimensions of the template and the printed book matched perfectly, but how could I have been sure?

The second thing is, that this year I wanted to make a printed book. Having to choose between Blurb's different book sizes, I chose what I like to hold in my hands. Yes, really, this size, 8"x10" is a size of book that I have at home and that feels comfortable to hold, even for a longer time. See, I have another photobook with wonderful images by Magnum photographer Rene Burri. I absolutely adore his images, but ... I can't hold the book. It's too darn big!

Same goes for a book by Henri Cartier Bresson. Wonderful book, incredible images, but I can't hold it. My arms would immediately fall off, and because I can't hold it, I don't read it. Too bad, but that's what it is.

OK, this explains the size and the format. Amy also mentioned "a subtle repetition of form, an unexpected sameness" of the images in my book. I'm not yet sure what exactly she means, I've asked and got no answer yet, but I guess it's the repetitious use of horizontal compositions that consist of two halves, just like the title image. If so, well, that's fully intentional. I strove for some visual coherence, a stylistic theme, that would hold the book together.

Actually this was a rather late decision. This kind of images was my first inspiration for the book, but while taking images, the focus changed to a more literal interpretation of the word "dreams": Dreams of wealth, dreams of living with the luxury of balconies and roof terraces, material dreams if you will.

Those other images, those vertically split compositions, mostly of graffiti and stickers on sign posts, were introduced to contrast the material dreams. They represent the immaterial dreams of the underground of our urban society, and in the sequence of the book, they are meant as distanced, ironic comments. At least that's what I think about it today.

While doing, I did not rationalize a concept for this book. In fact, this book was made wholly by instinct, and that's another reason why I would not want to change it:

This book is the result and the document of a semi-conscious process, a process that I fully intended and that I found extremely pleasurable. It's not that I refuse responsibility for it, to the contrary, but the process has finished and I would not like to change the documentary. Does that make any sense?

The Song of the Day, "A Thousand Beautiful Things" from Annie Lennox' 2003 album "Bare", was originally selected simply for the word "Thousand" in the title, but interestingly enough, its lyrics describe a conscious view on the world, that I find very familiar, a view that in a way grew in me through my photographing and blogging experience. YouTube has a live video.

999 - We're Not Going Back

2009-07-09T06:55:00.003+02:00

Well, I'm afraid I have to rush this entry. It's early in the morning, I need to go to work, and I have to get the evening clear of any backlog. I'd really like to post #1000 on time :)

This is one of a series of people images taken with the Nikon 85/1.8. You know that I'm not overly fond of this lens, but at times I like to use it. Actually, for street photography it's quite nice.

The Song of the Day is "We're Not Going Back" from the 1987 Housemartins album "The People Who Grinned Themselves to Death". Yes, that's the first band of Paul Heaton, the guy who then went on with The Beautiful South. Deezer has the song on a live album.

998 - Flower Punk

2009-07-08T21:38:00.003+02:00

This entry comes a day late. Sorry, I was busy upgrading a hard disk. Gosh, formatting a 2 TB disk takes forever, and copying 1.1 TB of data ... longer.

Anyway. It's done, my computer in Vienna has almost 4 TB of storage now, I guess as long as I don't begin producing HD video, I'm safe for almost two years :)

These are images of yesterday morning. Nothing special, just two images that I would have happily taken anytime, but lately, how should I say, lately I've become rather choosy.

I don't know if there is a connection with SoFoBoBo and the more project oriented work that I did for my book, in any case I cringe when I combine two images like those of today. Well, I still do it, I don't have anything else, but at least I recognize and I apologize: Sorry for that :)

The Song of the Day is "Flower Punk" from the 1968 Frank Zappa album "We're Only in It for the Money". Hear it on YouTube.

997 - Summer In The City

2009-07-07T01:19:00.004+02:00

It's really true, Vienna is on the wrong side of the Alps. On my first day back, we had two extended periods of rain, the first between 2pm and 3pm with massive downpours. After that it calmed down, only to begin again when I walked home :)

I made some images in the morning, but what really made my day, was this image of people waiting in the rain, with an advertising of our mayor, Michael Häupl, in a kind of stay-in-minds-between-elections poster, stating "Always a hit: summer in the city" :)

The old Lovin' Spoonful hit "Summer In The City" is also the Song of the Day. I have it as a cover version on the much underrated 1997 Stranglers album "Written in Red". Deezer does not have the album, Amazon has no samples, I didn't find a video, thus I can only offer you the Lovin' Spoonful version.

996 - One Of These Mornings

2009-07-05T23:19:00.007+02:00

OK, this is the last post for today, promised :)

Yesterday I went to bed very early, exhausted from editing all those Vajont pictures, with only the first post written and no end in sight.

This morning I woke up early, in fact it was still night, but I was awake, and so I sat down in my study, and while I worked on the images for "995 - Dies iræ!", I had the camera on the tripod, the Nikon 70-300 VR mounted, mirror lock-up dialed in and a cable release attached, and in that way I casually took photos every once in a while. This is one of them, again with liberal amounts of processing applied :)

The Song of the Day is "One Of These Mornings" from the 2002 Moby album "18". Hear the song on YouTube.

995 - Dies iræ!

2009-07-05T19:01:00.005+02:00

A dam, and not only a normal dam, one of the highest dams of its time, that's a very prestigious project, and even more so, it is an enormous investment.

Imagine a mid-sized valley in the Italian Alps, the river Piave running through it from north down to the Adriatic Sea. Not much north of the provincial capital of Belluno, a small valley, the valley of river Vajont, joins it from the east, narrowing to a gorge where it meets the Piave. Just there, smug to the hillside, on the opposite shore of the Piave, lay the village of Longarone. 1500 people, a church, a train station, hardly worth a stop.

The first two images, the Image of the Day and the historic photography (about 1950), were taken from approximately the same point. On the left side of each, you see the cleft in the mountains, the gorge of the river Vajont.

A dam is a big investment, and when you see that the project goes awry, when you get first indications of a coming landslide, and when a first landslide occurs, and when all experts tell you that there is more to come, much more, what do you do?

You may be lucky, they may be wrong, and your investment is saved. On the other hand, when they're right, you've lost nothing more than you lose when you cancel the project in face of the warnings. Thus if you persist, you have some chance to get away with your money. If not, well, what's the difference?

Such may have been the thoughts of the managers of SADE (Società Adriatica di Elettricità), and purely from an economic point of view they were right, but the difference were between 2000 and 2500 lives.

Initial reports of landslides were suppressed, journalists were sued by the company and by the government, local protests were suffocated, and even the dire warnings of an imminent landslide on the day before the catastrophe were ignored, and even worse, the people down in Longarone were kept ignorant as well.

It is very likely that it would have been possible to at least partially evacuate the people in the danger zone, it is very likely that it would have been possible to at least begin to empty the storage lake, but nothing was done.

Finally, on 9 October 1963 at approximately 10:35pm, the whole side of mountain Toc came loose and slid down at an enormous speed of up to 110 km per hour (68 mph).

An enormous landslide, 260 million cubic meters, crashed into the almost full storage lake, squeezing out about 50 million cubic meters of water, producing a wave that destroyed the lower houses in the village Casso on the opposite bank, 260 meters above water level, and then overtopped the dam by about 245 meters, a fuming inferno of water and mud, that crushed down upon the sleeping residents of Longarone, within an instant killing everyone but a few children, who survived by freak chance.

Wikipedia has more background information and you may also want to read the original report in Time Magazine. See the analysis of Dr David Petley for a more scientific view of the event. Marco Paolini has made a famous TV film, half theatrical recount, half documentary, showing much original footage. It is available via Google Video. Finally the Italian movie "Vajont - La diga del disonore" tries to reconstruct the events.

Now, if you expect the most dire consequences for those responsible, don't be a fool. Too much money was involved and too many men in highest positions. In the end everybody went free.

One engineer committed suicide, and that's ironic in itself, because the work of the engineers was sound, the dam never broke. The fault can't be blamed to the geologists either. Their reports were correct, but ignored. It was a matter of greed and irresponsible management that led into disaster.

All images, along with those of the previous entry, were taken on Friday afternoon, a mostly sunny, partially overcast day. I used the Tokina 11-16/2.8 and the Nikon 70-300 VR. Two images were taken from Longarone up, two from the landslide, over the dam, down to Longarone, and one from just below the village of Casso, i.e. from the opposing side of the valley, down onto the aftermath of the landslide. With some images I have taken more liberties than with others :)

The Song of the Day is the "Dies iræ" from the 1995 recording of Verdi's "Requiem", directed by John Eliot Gardiner. YouTube has a video with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra under Claudio Abbado. Not a bad choice either.

994 - Requiem æternam

2009-07-05T12:58:00.007+02:00

This is the church of Longarone, Italy. Longarone is a small town north of Belluno, and if we hadn't seen a documentary on Arte about an enormous landslide and flood catastrophe, that had occurred there in 1963, we probably never would have bothered to visit the place.

And if we hadn't, we would never have seen one of the most interesting examples of modern sacred architecture. The church was built between 1966 and 1976 by the Italian star architect Giovanni Michelucci, in order to remind of the more than 2000 victims of the disaster.

The church has a central room with circular rows of benches, that rise more like in a theater than in a traditional church. There are side rooms with the baptistery and an open room looking east to the valley of Vajont, from where the flood had come, that almost completely destroyed the old village of Longarone. In fact, the only building that had survived the event, was the steeple of the old church. For some time the old steeple was left standing beside the new church, but in the meantime it must have been torn down, it's not there any more.

On top of the church, reached by a spiral ramp, there is another arena, and that's what you see in the Image of the Day, looking east. On the left you see a cleft in the mountains, that's the entrance to the valley of Vajont, that's from where death came in the form of an enormous wave of tens of millions cubic meters of water and mud.

The catastrophe of Longarone, better known under the name of Vajont, was not a freak accident of nature. It was a case of human error and reckless greed. There's more to that in the next entry.

The Song of the Day is the "Requiem" by Johannes Ockeghem, maybe one of my most favorite Renaissance composers, not as well known as Machaut or Josquin des Prez, successor to the first, predecessor to the second, creator of the most wonderful "L'Homme Armée" mass of all times. I have several recordings of this "Requiem", and although I have no way to check from here in Carinthia, I believe the one that I've linked to is one of them. YouTube also has a version.

993 - One Of These Mornings - You Gonna Rise Up Singing

2009-07-03T11:11:00.003+02:00

Yesterday was not my most productive day. When I got out in the afternoon, it was not much more than driving to the lake for some swimming, and to a restaurant because I was hungry.

Anyway. I still had a bracketed image of the sunrise, thus I was not too worried. The view is, as so often, from my study, and processing-wise this image was rather complicated. I used two differently mapped images from Photomatix, lots of adjustments in Photoshop, some Snap Art and a little blur to top. Oh well, I like it :)

The Song of the Day is still Gershwin. I didn't want to use the title "Summertime", maybe we get a little more high summer this year, but the lines are of course from "Summertime". The version, that we hear today, is not even sung, and it's one of the more unusual recordings of this song. It's from the 1968 Ten Years After live album "Undead". There is even a video, albeit of very bad quality, on YouTube, but in fact it's so bad, I'd really urge you to go to Deezer for the album.

992 - Rhapsody in Blue

2009-07-02T13:29:00.002+02:00

Of course it's not allowed to make photos in a concert like yesterday's "Porgy and Bess" in Graz, directed by Nikolaus Harnoncourt. Let me only tell you that it was very operatic, complex and technically excellent, although it may disappoint some expectations. Can you imagine that I sometimes was reminded of Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde"? Not by the melodies of course, but by the music's complexity and its shifting layers. We may tend to forget it, but Gershwin did not compose Jazz, and he is well rooted in a long history of composers. Well, I thoroughly enjoyed it :)

Though I have no images from the concert, Gershwin fits nicely. Graz is the capital of Styria, the Austrian province to the east of Carinthia. We decided to skip the highway over the mountains and instead crossed on one of the old roads. I must admit, I have never seen so many Lupines in my whole life. All the mountains wear glorious blue.

The Song of the Day is "Rhapsody in Blue" from the 1994 album "The Glory Of Gershwin", featuring Larry Adler on harmonica, accompanied by Peter Gabriel, Chris De Burgh, Sting, Lisa Stansfield, Elton John, Carly Simon, Elvis Costello, Cher, Kate Bush, Jon Bon Jovi, Oleta Adams, Willard White, Sinead O'Connor, Robert Palmer, Meat Loaf, Issy Van Randwyck and Courtney Pine.

There is one solo piece, "Rhapsody in Blue", at the end of the album, featuring Larry and an orchestra arranged by George Martin. YouTube has a video of the shortened version from the B-side of the 7" single of Kate Bush's version of "The Man I Love". A longer and more intimate version, featuring Larry Adler and his brother Jerry on piano, is also available on YouTube, although the sound quality is regrettably bad.

I have linked to the import version of the album, because the US version did not contain the two songs performed by Chris De Burgh. Btw, did I mention that this album is a MUST??

991 - Mystery Train

2009-06-30T19:11:00.006+02:00

In the morning I was in a hurry again, and being in a hurry is normally pretty adverse to being creative.

I solved the problem by letting the camera do on its own. This is one of a series of images that I took while being on the train. I pointed the camera out of the window, in different directions, in angles that I thought could probably make for an interesting image, and from that series of essentially random images I got at least this one.

In the meantime, after one and a half days in Vienna, I'm on the train back to Carinthia. Tomorrow night we'll see an opera in Graz. Nikolaus Harnoncourt, the great Austrian master of Baroque music directs, no, not Purcell, not Haendel, not Bach, he directs Gershwin's "Porgy and Bess". More about that tomorrow night or Thursday.

Btw, while I sit here on the train and look through dirty windows, outside is fantastic weather, golden light, a sky mixed with blue and scattered clouds. It's pure masochism to even look out of the window. Oh well :)

The Song of the Day is the Elvis song "Mystery Train", interpreted by the Neville Brothers on their 1990 album "Brother's Keeper". Hear it on Deezer.

990 - Oh Yes, Take Another Guess

2009-06-29T22:19:00.004+02:00

I was pretty much in a hurry in the morning. When I left work late in the afternoon, we had traces of sunshine mixed with some raindrops, and halfway that turned into a constant drizzle. Oh well, it IS worse north of the alps.

The first image is from the morning. I had just left the Underground station. So ... you think your camera's got a big, heavy battery, huh? Loser! That's a big battery :)

I suppose electricity in the Underground station had failed and they came with the big truck to our rescue: 400 kVA!! That's a battery.

The next image is from the afternoon, near my workplace. This is a garbage container of some construction company, and the sign on it reads "Please don't fill in refrigerators and PC monitors". I wonder if they take TV sets or sofas :)

I used the Nikon 24/2.8 for all images. Post-processing is similar to what I did the last days, Topaz Adjust and Snap Art. The exact settings, which Snap Art effect I use, how much I modify it, which Topaz effect I use, whether I add lines made with Snap Art "Stylize" or not, what kind of masks I use, the opacity values, all that varies from image to image, thus it wouldn't make much sense to create an action. It's more of a pattern than an algorithm.

The Song of the Day is "Oh Yes, Take Another Guess" by Ella Fitzgerald. I have it on a 10 CD box of her early recordings, that is most probably not available outside of Austria, Germany and probably Switzerland, but you find the song on many compilations, e.g. "Ella And Her Fellas". Deezer has the album, YouTube has a video.

989 - One More Time

2009-06-28T18:18:00.004+02:00

I could have gone out today, really, but instead I preferred sleeping on the balcony. Nice Sunday activity, I tell you :)

Well, you and I have not missed anything. Weather was a mixture of dense, dark clouds, dense dark clouds with rain and not so dark but still dense clouds without rain. Only in the evening I have considered going swimming one more time. I did not, because time is short and I am off to Vienna in the evening. Instead I'm writing this entry.

This is another image from yesterday. Seeing what the weather was, I have already processed it in the morning. It's a composite of two vertical exposures that both were a bit off of my intended composition. The place is again old grounds, and the processing uses the same tools as yesterday, Topaz Adjust and Snap Art, along with various masks and opacity settings.

The Song of the Day is "One More Time, Chick Corea" by the 1970s German A-Capella band Singers Unlimited. I have a 7 CD boxed set called "Magic Voices", and you can also get the song on a cheaper 2 CD collection called "Complete A Capella Sessions", mind though, that these sessions are far from complete :)

Go to Deezer to hear them. You won't regret it.

988 - Standing On Old Grounds

2009-06-28T01:33:00.004+02:00

Today the mixed weather continued, but I really can't complain. Although we had our more than fair share of rain, there are no floodwaters in Carinthia, while the rest of Austria suffers badly. Some towns and villages north of the Alps and in the east of Austria are completely under water.

Again I used a short period of sunshine to drive down to the lake for some swimming. On my way there, I took a little detour into the area where I've lived for the last 20 years. When you know that it will rain again in short time and you need an image, it's always a good idea to be on well known territory.

Post-processing was again done with the help of Topaz Adjust and Snap Art. This time I have used Adjust selectively by applying a mask. It really worked wonders on the brightest clouds.

The Song of the Day is "Standing On Old Grounds" from Clarence Bucaro's latest album "'Til Spring". I only have the sound sample on Amazon's site, but here's quite a long video with Clarence being interviewed and performing three songs from the album.

987 - It's A Green Dream II

2009-06-27T09:46:00.003+02:00

Weather is changing rapidly at the moment. I used a short period of sunshine, to go swimming and make some images. This is another experiment with the new plugins: Topaz Adjust and Snap Art. It is clear now that I will buy both. I still have to look into the other Topaz plugins, Clean and Simplify may be useful in some situations.

I always use these effects in separate layers, combine different effects from the same or different filters, and use varying opacities, sometimes dependent on tonal value (Blend-If sliders) and masks. You see, I'm pretty much afraid of using canned effects and producing generic looks :)

The Song of the Day is again "It's A Green Dream" from Paolo Conte's 2000 album "Razmataz". This time I have a video for you. Love this song!

986 - A Little Piece Of Advice

2009-06-26T11:20:00.007+02:00

This is a little piece of much too late advice for all those who began SoFoBoMo 09 and finally decided to give up on it.

Let me first make one thing very clear: whatever your reasons are, they are respectable, and as in starting such a project, the decision to bury it, is all yours. Still, reading some blogs and thinking about it, I got the impression that I should share some experiences, that probably would make it easier for some people some other year.

A book is a big effort. When you look at photobooks that you can buy, you immediately see that most of the images have been taken over an extended period of time, and certainly not within a single month. Furthermore I think it is reasonable to assume, that the actual bookmaking is normally not done by the artists themselves. This all puts a SoFoBoMo participant at a not insignificant disadvantage, and in a way we all have to compensate for it.

The rules are set, we all have a life and supposedly all have to work for a living, thus the frame is a little more narrow than it seems upon first sight. Let's take last year: I learned of SoFoBoMo 08 very early, I guess I read the official announcement post on Paul Butzi's blog, but then a period of procrastination and doubt began.

Can I do it? Do I have something to say? Am I able to string 35 images together and make a book with a meaningful sequence?

I have pretty many bicycle images in my collection, and the first idea was to make a book about bicycles. A quick look into my image database made clear though, that I had never ever made more than maybe half a dozen good bicycle images in any month. Sure, you can look for them, but you are still dependent on them being there in the first place.

I pondered some other possibilities, and I was already determined to give up, when the first success stories came in. This SoFoBoMo thing began to hurt my ego. And then I found what I could do: Make a lot of images in one single day, and simply use the temporal sequence to tell a story. I had some other ideas, but finally I took my tripod, a bag of lenses, drove to a canyon in the mountains nearby with a creek and some waterfalls, made more than a hundred exposures, and that was it. No trouble with the sequence, no trouble with any big story, moral impact or what. It was simply a book about a walk through a canyon. People still liked it, because it is quite a nice canyon.

There are countless other possibilities along the same lines. Walk through a city and show it off, preferably not only the usual "sights", maybe more the "in-betweens". Make some images every 100 meters. Look back. You'll automatically connect the images by showing the progress of your walk.

Make the same for a walk through a small town. Begin outside, go through the center, close outside. Let a day pass and show it in your images. All that is what I call "natural sequences". Don't be shy to use them. They are interesting for the viewer, and they solve one of your biggest problems, the problem of what to photograph and how to present it.

Natural sequences of photographs taken in one day, that's one thing that I can vouch for. The other is, to simply do what you always do, take images of what you always take images of, that's what you have the most experience with, that's what you are best at, and when you do it all the time, that's obviously something that you never tire of. The only thing you need is a very broad topic.

That's what my effort this year was. "Urban Dreams II" is a book of images that I very likely would have been attracted to take anyway. Not necessarily in this month, not necessarily as a collection, but it is simply my way of making pictures. OK, I began to experiment, and now a not so small part of them are horizontal compositions where the image is cut in two distinct parts. This is something that I have not done very often, but I could do it without ever being in danger to not get enough images. Through the whole process I was on my home turf.

I have seen other strategies that work well. Some people have made their books of images that they made on a short or long trip. This can be a variation on "natural sequences", though it need not be. In any case they used images that most likely would have been taken anyway.

Whatever you do, I think it is very important to minimize your risk. Making a photobook in 31 day is crazy enough, especially when making also means getting familiar with publishing programs, PDF files and how to get them small, learning publishing lingo and all that. All these strategies minimize risk and should enable you to get fun out of the process.

Again, I know this advice, if it's any good, comes much too late and I'm sorry for that. It's only that I had to learn these things by myself.

I'd be very interested in two things: If you did not complete, what were your particular reasons for it? And do you think that following one or the other of these strategies would have made life easier for you?

The Song of the Day is "A Little Piece Of Advice" from the 2000 Beautiful South album "Painting It Red". Sorry, no video, but Deezer has the album.

985 - The Harsh Truth Of The Camera Eye

2009-06-25T03:31:00.005+02:00

I'm in Carinthia, it mostly stopped raining sometime in the afternoon, but I still had not the least inclination to leave home.

Instead I have worked on this forest image of Sunday. I have used it to try out another one of those plugins Ted recently mentioned. This time it was the demo version of Topaz Adjust. Basically what this tool adjusts is local contrast, and in that way it is similar to good old HIRALOAM (high radius, low amount unsharp masking), PhotoLift and some other tools. You have a small number of presets to choose from, and from there you can modify all the parameters. One of them is the number of zones in which the program divides the image. The more zones, the more equalization.

Topaz Adjust may be another tool that I'll add to my chest. It's useful, because the effect is easy to achieve, and it is hard to get without this specific tool. It also looks different from what PhotoLift produces. I further suppose it may come very handy in B&W images, where tonal redistribution is always an important task.

We didn't get a full-fledged sundown, mostly because there was no sun to speak of, but there was still some color in the sky, and in the hope to catch something usable, I went down in front of the house and took some images.

All in vain, but when I got in, and because I had the ultra-wide mounted, I began experimenting with the circular window in the corridor of the ground floor. That's what became the Image of the Day.

... time passes ...

And suddenly it's morning :)

I could not finish yesterday's entry in the middle of the night. Well, I probably could have, but there was a brooding feeling that something was missing. And that's fine, because I just learned that Janine's blog had its 365^th post! Congratulations to her first year!! Head over to her site for a very original take on portrait photography, and when you're there, give her the cheers :)

The Song of the Day is "The Harsh Truth Of The Camera Eye" from Morrissey's 1991 second solo album "Kill Uncle". There seems to be no video, but Deezer has the album.

Why exactly this song? Oh, for two reasons: the window in my image reminds me of a whale's eye (or something like that, never had one face to face), and on Mark Hobson's blog (this post and some around that) I read another series of rants about Selection vs Interpretation in photography. Selection meaning his kind of photography, trying to be true to what he actually sees, interpretation as a target of his scorn seemingly meaning oversaturated landscape clichés.

Oh well. Sometimes it makes me a little tired, because those arguments go literally nowhere. There is no "truth of the camera eye". Selection is the first and probably most important way to direct the viewer. All the tricks of image processing can't cover up what selection failed. But that's something that Mark agrees with anyway. I guess Ted Byrne would agree as well, and what he does is certainly very far away from Mark's vision of what photography is and should be. In fact we all seem to agree. Can't we just conclude that there are good, original images that speak to the viewer, and a lot of not so good, not so original images that don't? Would save us one or the other heated argument, but then, who's interested in saving arguments?

984 - Travelin' Man

2009-06-23T09:28:00.004+02:00

Surprisingly enough, this morning I find myself on the train to Carinthia again. Nursing leave. Nothing to worry about, but I suppose it may keep me in Carinthia for the rest of the week.

I just read that Janine, commenting on yesterday's rain image, hopes for an even higher level of summer, but at least for today I have to disappoint her: It still rains and if at all possible, it is even less inviting than yesterday.

After all that SoFoBoMo action I try to catch up with blog reading, and yesterday night I read Mark "The Landscapist" Hobson. This is always amusing, because Mark is not only a brilliant photographer, he is also never shy of confrontation. Of course he found fault in Mike Johnston's advice to aspiring photographers, to only use a Leica, a single lens and B&W film of a single type for a year. Actually it's not so incredibly much fault that he found, but it's enough for a heated debate. Many people may take offense at Mark's sometimes slightly aggressive style, but I love it. Here is a man who has strong opinions, grounded in great knowledge and long experience, who fiercely defends them and who is a talented and witty writer as well. It's not for the timid, but it's deeply enjoyable :)

Why I mention Mark? Oh, only because he is the Master of the Square, and every time I'm exposed to his imagery, I feel a strong temptation to get square as well :)

The Image of the Day was taken this morning out of the rear window of tram line 18 in Vienna, just before I reached Vienna South Station. Think of it as of "826 - Goin' Down Slow" under adverse conditions :)

The Song of the Day is "Travelin' Man" by Anita O'Day. I have it on disc 2 of the 4 CD collection "Young Anita". Deezer has a version on the album "Let Me Off Uptown", no idea if it's the same recording. I can't check it at the moment. Anyway. Anita is never a bad choice.

983 - Summer Turns To High

2009-06-23T00:01:00.004+02:00

It's the first day of summer. At least that's what it's supposed to be.

In reality it pours down like mad, it is relatively cool and the weather forecast mentions snow lines. They are in a very safe distance above us, but at this time of the year even the idea of snow is obscene :)

Anyway. It is as it is. The bicycle detail was shot in the morning. Uhhh ... "shot" again? Oh well, maybe it's OK to shoot bicycle details, as long as nobody else gets hurt :)

The Image of the Day shows the impressive summer situation that I encountered when I left work early. For both images I used the Nikon 24/2.8, a lens that I selected because I knew I would not have to struggle with flares and ghosts anyway. It's a very relaxing change from the Tokina 11-16/2.8, because again I can focus relatively near (still not as near as I like) and the focal length feels so incredibly natural.

Do you know that feeling, when you do something, that you used to do regularly and with pleasure, but have not done long since? That feeling of returning? Well, that's how it felt :)

The Song of the Day is "Summer Turns To High" from the 2001 R.E.M album "Reveal". Sorry, no video, I can't offer you more than Amazon's sound sample.

982 - Three Ways to One

2009-06-21T22:02:00.004+02:00

OK, the rain stopped, in mid-afternoon I took the car, drove into the next forest, looked for a way, some nice lines, anything that would possibly work with an ultra-wide, and here is the result.

I have used a polarizer, set the minimum shutter speed for Auto ISO to 1/8s, and then I took a series of images in this place.

I tried to get as low as possible, in order to use the cracks of the asphalt as foreground, I tried to keep any high-contrast sky out of view, and because the resulting image was too much tilted even for my taste, I have warped and twisted it around in Photoshop until it would fit :)

Today is summer solstice, and as bad as the day was in between, it ended in the most magnificent sundown I have ever seen in my life. Imagine a clear, bright sun coming in very low. Above a dark cloud cover. A sunlit rural church, behind it the most impossible storm clouds, dark violet with mixed in patches of deep orange. Honestly, in Photoshop I would not dare to do that. I would pull the trigger, I would tone it down, because no sky will ever look like that and ... Damn, it did and I was on the train!!

Yup. That's the reason why you get nothing but a forest road. Sorry for that :)

But there is another thing that I have learned and that I want to share. It's nothing photographic, more philosophic, but I try it anyway.

Michael visited us today and confronted us with a hypothetical question. He had been to a discussion in Salzburg where the question arose, and the hypothetical situation was the following:

Imagine a trial for rape. The defender argues that the victim had invited the rapist with her provocative clothing. The judge is a muslim woman wearing a hijab. The prosecutor claims the judge to be biased.

Actually the situation is rather stupid and my solution would be, that as long as there is not a law that forbids wearing certain clothes while executing certain offices, there is no merit to the claim at all. The judge may indeed later be found to have been biased, but the same could be true for anyone, and everything beforehand is nothing but prejudice.

Michael argued in a different way. He says that we are a secular society, and that religious symbols, regardless of the actual religion, are incompatible with the function of a judge. Openly wearing a religious symbol is always a public embrace of a certain set of believes, and believes are by definition prejudices.

OK, that's the setting. The interesting point now is, that Michael and I come from the very same position. Both of us agree that we live in a society that at least claims secularity, that a truly secular society is what we should strive for, and still we go different ways.

Michael's idea of banning religious symbols in certain contexts where the bearer acts as a representative of the state, is more or less the French way. My own position is liberal, relaxed, probably libertarian, basically it's "Judge people by their doings, not by what they wear, and you can't judge them before they act".

What I find so fascinating, and why I share this stupid scenario, is my sudden realization, that a philosophical position in no way determines your actions. Both ways can be argued and defended on good grounds, and both of us could claim the same reasons. Still we would execute either tolerance or force, trying to defend the same position.

That's it. No big image, no big insight, only the conclusion that things can get pretty complicated when you begin to look into the details :)

The Song of the Day is probably a little less song-like than some may expect. It's "Three Ways to One" from Ornette Coleman's 1997 album "Colors: Live from Leipzig". Yes, that's the guy whose album "Free Jazz" gave name to the whole genre. I personally know some people who strictly refuse to call that music, but on the other hand, I keep getting the same reaction to Schönberg as well :)

Deezer has the album for you to hear. Give it a try, relax, go with the flow, and you may even find yourself tapping, maybe even itching to move to it :)

981 - Wild World

2009-06-21T11:59:00.003+02:00

It's Sunday, exactly noon as I'm writing this, and it just begins to rain again. I should have risen early, because we had sunshine in the morning. Oh well, we'll see what I get for today, but let's postpone to for the next entry :)

This is one image from yesterday's short trip down to Italy. We wanted to escape the bad weather in Carinthia, and escape we did.

The image was taken from the yard of the church of Cesclans. See the map for directions. If you ever happen to be in the vicinity and need an impressive view, this is the place to go.

The Song of the Day is "Wild World" from the 1970 Cat Stevens album "Tea for the Tillerman". See a live video on YouTube.

980 - Standing At My Window

2009-06-20T15:12:00.004+02:00

SoFoBoMo is mostly over for me, but I greatly enjoy browsing through the other books that have been created this year. There are 125 complete books so far, and there is still no end to it. I haven't seen all of them, it's more like one or two a day, thus I'll speak the last congratulations probably next year, at a time when those people work on their next book :)

By the way, speaking of books, yesterday I got two packages from Blurb, one with the first version where I had not yet found out how to properly design the dust jacket in BookSmart, and one with the final version.

I wanted to wait and see if the quality is any good, before I go and announce the book.

Well, it is. I had expected little flaws, but both books are very well printed and bound, the quality is as high as one could expect from a book bought in the next book store, and color management was a complete non-issue.

Of course the images have less vibrant colors than on my monitor, but that was to be expected. Ink on paper has another gamut than my monitor, but the colors translate in a very natural way, leaving the images completely intact. I had saved my pages as images in sRGB and simply dropped them into BookSmart. Maybe using their color managed workflow would have produced even better results, but at least last year Doug Plummer found it to be lacking. I'm not even sure if Blurb still offers it. Anyway. As I said, it's a non-issue.

I already mentioned it in a comment on Colin Jago's blog, when I congratulated him to his simply wonderful book "No Waiting", holding your book in hands, printed and bound, that's an extremely satisfying experience. Even if nobody but me may ever buy this book (though, if you're interested, just click on the badge below :)

Urban Dreams II

By Andreas Manessinger

Book Preview

it is still satisfying. I don't know why. It may be a little bit of fooling yourself, but it feels good anyway. Thus, if you participated in SoFoBoMo and you wanted to stop at the PDF: think twice! Most of the work is already done. Exporting the pages to BookSmart is not much work and the reward is an incredibly good feeling. Btw, having it printed may be the only way to show it to a lot of people, parents frequently included.

The Image of the Day is a view from a window in the stairwell of the house where I live in Vienna. It's another experiment with the Alien Skin plugin Snap Art. Actually I like it pretty much, the more, the longer I play with it, and I guess I'll end up buying it. It's nothing that I'd want to use every day (yesterday I tried and didn't), but sometimes the simplifying effect fits the image well. It's simplification and generalization at the same time. There may be more of it coming.

The Song of the Day is "Standing At My Window" by delta blues singer and guitarist Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup. I have it on disc 55 of "The Ultimate Jazz Archive", but you may get it on "Complete Recorded Works, Vol. 1 (1941-1946)" as well. Hear it on Deezer.

979 - Sunset

2009-06-19T18:40:00.003+02:00

Yesterday it was extremely hot in Vienna and I went swimming. It turned out to be an excellent idea, because today weather was rainy and at least in Vienna it's supposed to stay that way. At the moment I am on the train to Carinthia, there it's still sunny, with at least some chances for a sunny weekend. If not, we could always make a trip to Italy.

This week I recognized that I had ripped no more than 50% of "The Ultimate Jazz Archive" so far, and so I added another 20 CDs, thus I have 104 of 168 discs done now.

The Song of the Day, "Sunset" by jazz saxophonist Sonny Stitt, is on one of them, it's from disc 99.

You may probably prefer to buy a single CD instead of 168 (though you miss the bargain of your life). If so, "Sonny Stitt/Bud Powell/J.J. Johnson" is for you. It has exactly the same version of the song and Deezer has the whole album for you to hear.

978 - The Congregation

2009-06-18T07:29:00.005+02:00

Ted Byrne is to blame. He made me do it. I swear!

You may have seen Ted's recent experiments with the Alien Skin plugin Snap Art.

Well, we had some conversation about the merits of said software, and - without having tried it - I uttered my concerns that these were simply some canned effects, that everything made with it would look like Ted's recent works.

Maybe not. Since then I have installed the plugin (along with "Bokeh" and the whole "Topaz" plugin bundle), have experimented a little, and I can see ways to put at least Snap Art to use. By the way, "Snap Art" is an incredibly stupid name, obviously catering to the non-artist crowd that may at times want to produce "something artsy".

In reality this plugin is incredibly configurable. You have lots of pre-configured effects, but then you can begin to twist the parameters to your liking. And of course you can combine different effects with layers, blending modes and opacities.

The images shown here were made in reverse order. The Bamboo restaurant is the earliest, maybe still looking a little byrnesque, the street image looks more like where I wanted to go, and the Image of the Day finally has the composition as well.

The Song of the Day is "Come Together". We had the Beatles version in "171 - Come Together", this time it must be Ike & Tina Turner. See a video on YouTube.