Rail Fence, Canton, NC - 2009(Click on photo to enlarge.)
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“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”
- Henry David Thoreau
1180 – Round The Bend II
Submitted by The Daily Photography of Andreas Manessinger Blog
Well, I don’t seem to have caught up 
It’s Friday morning now, I am in a hurry, and this is only the image of Tuesday. Maybe in the afternoon when I am on the train to Carinthia.
“440 – Round The Bend” was one of my better images in the past, made with another fabulous lens, the then new Sigma 70/2.8. This time, while on the tramway, I greatly profited from the Tamron’s stabilization. There’s not much in focus in today’s image, but the little that is, is perfectly so.
The Song of the Day is again “Round The Bend” from Beck’s 2002 album “Sea Change”. See the video on YouTube.
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Show Work At Work
Submitted by Howard Grill Blog
Most photographers/artists want an audience. As such, we generally try to get our work published, hung, sold, and shown on our websites. However, for the longest time, I ignored the most obvious and, perhaps, easiest way to show my work and obtain a larger audience. That is to say, I never showed my work at work. Sure, I had framed photos hanging in my office, but not in public spaces at my workplace.
It occurred to me that my workplace was potentially an excellent opportunity to have my work seen by more people than the inside of my office. So I decided to look into having it displayed in a public space. The long drab hallway outside my office seemed to be the perfect location. As some readers may know, I work in a hospital. What many of you might not know is that the levels of bureaucracy in a hospital can rival that of the federal government.
I initially asked permission from the administrator in charge of that particular hallway. He already knew my work and thought it would be a great idea. Hospitals being hospitals however, he had to ‘bump up’ the decision. After having the work reviewed by two vice presidents and agreeing not to hold the hospital liable if the pictures were stolen off the wall….up they went. I immediately started receiving comments from people who had no idea that I photographed.
Conclusion: the workplace can frequently offer a good opportunity to have one’s work shown……so don’t overlook it!
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Photo of the Week
Submitted by Craig Photography Blog
Camera: Nikon D700
Exposure: 0.002 sec (1/640)
Aperture: f/5.6
Focal Length: 120 mm
ISO Speed: 3200
Exposure Bias: 0 EV
Flash: No Flash
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Snowy Fence
Submitted by My Viewfinder Blog
Rail Fence, Canton, NC - 2009(Click on photo to enlarge.)
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Hiding From The Dogs
Submitted by My Viewfinder Blog
Fire Hydrant In Snow, Canton , NC - 2009
(Click on photo to enlarge.)
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A Christmas Thought
A Christmas Thought
“The universal joy of Christmas is certainly wonderful. We ring the bells when princes are born, or toll a mournful dirge when great men pass away. Nations have their red-letter days, their carnivals and festivals, but once in the year and only once, the whole world stands still to celebrate the advent of a life. Only Jesus of Nazereth claims this world-wide, undying remembrance. You cannot cut Christmas out of the Calendar, nor out of the heart of the world.”
- Anonymous
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Diagonal Lines with Photoshop, Pencil Tool
Submitted by Photoplus Tutorials Blog
The Pencil Tool is a rarely used tool in Photoshop. You can create straight lines in Photoshop very easily, but what about diagonal lines? Nothing difficult though.
You can make this effect easily with this tutorial on creating diagonal lines with Photoshop.
The tutorial is here.
Other photoshop tutorials are here.
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1165 – Feeling Blue
Submitted by The Daily Photography of Andreas Manessinger Blog
I’m back in Vienna. Remember when I said it’s only six days and then the days will get longer again? Oh my, time flies, from tomorrow they will.
Image #1 is a morning image. I was late and very much in a hurry. Hmm … how are these called? It’s not exactly graffiti, it’s more like someone’s tag, a signature. I guess “an annoyance” would Ted say 
But still: how do you call something like that in English?
Anyway. I focused on that orange something, waited a second or two until the man was just in the right position, and then I took the image. I don’t even have an idea what it is about. It’s just an arrangement that appeals to me – something that I do time and again. Must mean something, huh?
The Image of the day is one of those cases when I like to use Nikon Capture NX 2. I liked the colors and tones of the JPEG from the camera, but I wanted to crop the image slightly. In such cases I don’t crop the JPEG and save as JPEG again, no, I always use the RAW file. The problem is, that I currently use ProPhoto RGB as my working color space, thus the camera profiles in Adobe Camera RAW do not match as they are supposed to do. Capture NX 2, on the other hand, perfectly reproduces the look of in-camera JPEGs.
The Song of the Day is “Feeling Blue” from Eric Burdon’s 2006 album “Soul of a Man”. Hear it on YouTube.
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1164 – Simple Joy
Submitted by The Daily Photography of Andreas Manessinger Blog
21 Images? How on earth do you cope with that? Well, my solution is, to present most of them unedited. Only three have been tinkered with.
The Image of the Day, taken at a bus stop, needed some serious saturation enhancement and minor cropping, the image of the mirror (first of the thumbnails) needed minor cropping from the left, and the image of the flags was cropped and a vignette added. Everything else is, with the exception of automated resizing, presented as straight from the camera.
This was an experience that I had needed. A bright, cold winter day with fresh snow. Now I feel again, why I had enjoyed last winter so much.
I could have taken the car and looked for some untouched nature with virgin snow, but our culture is much too much obsessed with virginity anyway, and I wanted to have the simple joy of the real experience: just taking a walk in the neighborhood, down to the river, about an hour with me, my D300 and the Tamron 17-50/2.8 VR.
And now I shut up and leave you alone with the pictures
The Song of the Day is “Simple” from “k. d. lang’s 2000 album “Invincible Summer”. OK, wrong season, still a nice song. See a live performance on YouTube.
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1163 – Let It Snow
Submitted by The Daily Photography of Andreas Manessinger Blog
I deny any responsibility for this image. Eric Jeschke made me do it. Over on his blog he posted an entry called “Night Swimming“. Pure sadism and needless showing off, if you ask me
Well, I suppose living on Hawaii has its merits. Eric tried to console me with the fact that they miss snow on Hawaii. Eric, it doesn’t console me, it makes things worse
Here it is, that’s what today looked like here in Villach. I had planned driving to Klagenfurt and renting a car, a Mercedes Benz Sprinter, to leave it in Villach over night, and to drive to Salzburg tomorrow, to transport Michael’s belongings to Vienna.
For the road to Klagenfurt, we avoided the highway. Nothing worse than being stuck on a highway in winter, and according to the radio, there were several accidents on Carinthia’s highways this morning. Instead we tried the normal road, but as early as in Villach we had our first near-accident. While driving straight ahead at 35 kmph, the car lost grip on one side, spun around, and I was quite thankful that no other car was near. This sealed it, I canceled the Sprinter, we’ll have to move Michael’s things another weekend.
The Song of the Day is “Let It Snow” from the Special Edition of Michael Bublé’s 2007 album “Call Me Irresponsible”. Hear it on MyVideo. It’s the same song that we had in “792 – Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow“, only then it was by Manhattan Transfer.
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1160 – In The Cold, Cold, Night
Submitted by The Daily Photography of Andreas Manessinger Blog
Michael is in Vienna now. Yesterday we had a look at his new apartment. On Sunday I will help him move his things from Salzburg to Vienna. It’s going to be a short weekend. Sigh!
It was very cold yesterday. I made this image while I went from work to Michael’s prospective apartment. In my imagination I had made lots of good images, but when I saw them at last, most were flawed in one way or the other, but that’s OK. It saves me time processing
The Song of the Day is “In The Cold, Cold, Night” from the 2003 White Stripes album “Elephant”. Can it be that Michael gave me the CD? Would be a funny coincidence
YouTube has a live performance.
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Photo of the Week
Submitted by Craig Photography Blog
Camera: Nikon D700
Exposure: 0.006 sec (1/160)
Aperture: f/1.6
Focal Length: 50 mm
ISO Speed: 200
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County Chronicles, There’s No Place Like Home
Submitted by Craig Photography Blog
You can check out some of my night photography photos that were just published in a book written by Ceane O’Hanlon-Lincoln “County Chronicles, There’s No Place Like Home”.
You can pre-order the book (here)
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3D Box with Photoshop
Submitted by Photoplus Tutorials Blog
Let me show you how to make a 3D box interior with Photoshop. Some call it making a room. All you need are two photos.
I have taken these free stock images. The photo of the girl has a white background.
And, here is the 3D box or room, with the girl inside it.
The tutorial is here.
Other Photoshop tutorials are here
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Glow Lines with Photoshop
Submitted by Photoplus Tutorials Blog
You can add Glow lines to any photo. All you need is the Pen Tool and a few layers. If you have not used the Pen Tool, try this tutorial. You will be able to use it. I have made this tutorial very easy to follow.
I have opened this free stock image.
And, there are the Glow Lines.
The tutorial is here.
Other Photoshop tutorials are here.
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1159 – I Can’t See Your Face In My Mind
Submitted by The Daily Photography of Andreas Manessinger Blog
I’m falling behind for no reason but being tired. It’s Thursday morning and this is the image for Tuesday. I made it while my friend Christian and I returned from dinner, and before we heard music until 2am. After that I was not exactly in the mood for image processing. Yesterday I came home late, processed it, chose a title, and then decided to lay down for only a short nap. And here we are: two days behind
Esther Emma and Flo asked me how I did the post-processing in “1158 – Sophisticated Lady“. Well, here we go:
It’s two versions from RAW, a dark one for the background, a lighter one for the foreground, and then in Photoshop I used some plugins: Noise Ninja, Topaz Detail and Topaz Clean. I used Noise Ninja on both versions, and by painting on the mask I used the light version for the face. With Topaz Detail I added some local contrast to the face, giving it more definition, but of course that raised noise again. I countered that with a skin beautifier effect in Topaz Clean, added some neutral blur (described towards the end of “571 – Them There Eyes II“). Somewhere in the mix there is also a push in saturation, done with my usual combo of Hue/Saturation layers in different blending modes, described in “683 – Welcome To The Republic“. Throw in a light vignetting layer and you’re done.
You see, there is not so much variation in my processing technique these days, and the reasoning is simple: When I change light in part of the image, I must change local contrast as well, otherwise it would look unnatural. When I do these things, I have to counter noise. Using the skin beautifier from Topaz Clean is a bit radical, but for a mannequin it is OK. On real people you have to be very careful with it, at least when you want to keep them recognizable. Topaz Clean tends to make them years younger, and that’s not always what you want, or better, that’s what you don’t want most of the time. But again, on this mannequin it was a very effective way to eliminate noise, the blur mostly adding glamor. As Flo recognized, the lights of the shop’s decoration in the background look like a pearl necklace, and that adds to the glamor as well.
That’s it. As for this post’s image, well, that’s a face stenciled upon a shop window, and behind the window is an add for a clearing out service. You see parts of the words “Entrümpelung”, “Dachböden” and some more, plus some phone numbers. I saw it while Christian and I walked to my place. I had some other images, but this natural overlay of graffiti and text struck me as an interesting detail. I love it how you can focus near with the Tamron 17-50/2.8.
The Song of the Day is “I Can’t See Your Face In My Mind” from the 1967 Doors album “Strange Days”. We didn’t have The Doors in quite some time. That’s bad, but it can be remedied
YouTube has the song.
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1158 – Sophisticated Lady
Submitted by The Daily Photography of Andreas Manessinger Blog
Vienna. An image taken at 5:08pm. And there is hope: It’s less than a week, and then the days will begin to get longer again. Slowly at least
So far it is just getting colder. I took this image of a mannequin outside a shop in Vienna’s 7th district. I have completely re-lit the image, and actually I am pretty pleased with the result. Click on the thumbnail and compare the JPEG from the camera with my version.
This was just one possible way to go. It’s always like that and this is the nice thing with digital post-production: you have a chance to completely change the image after the capture. I could have achieved a very similar result with flash, but that would have meant off-camera flash, probably a remote trigger, things that I have (flashes, not triggers), but that I found tedious to haul around.
It’s not that much easier this way, maybe much to the contrary. I suppose it is easier to learn lighting such a scene with flashes, than it is to learn how to achieve it in Photoshop (and you still need a decent exposure to begin with), but I like pondering about images, studying them, and when I’ve made up my mind, creating the image according to my vision. And all this happens in the comfort of my warm apartment. Probably that’s the real progress
The Song of the Day is “Sophisticated Lady” (this time really a Duke Ellington composition ), sung by Ella Fitzgerald in her 1958 “Birthday Concert” in Rome, Italy. That’s a great record. I mean, I like her, even in her most commercial studio albums, but Ella live on stage, that was a very different thing. Just hear for yourself on YouTube.
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Big Easy Christmas
Submitted by My Viewfinder Blog
Christmas on Royal Street, New Orleans, LA - 2004
(Click on photo to enlarge.)
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The Best Camera
Submitted by Howard Grill Blog
Perhaps you are familiar with Chase Jarvis and his iPhone app for taking and sharing images, as well as his book The Best Camera Is The One That’s With You: iPhone Photography by Chase Jarvis (Voices That Matter)
What I find far more interesting (since, for one thing, I don’t own an iPhone) is Chase’s website The Best Camera, where one can see a live feed of images being posted from people using his application. The volume of images is amazing….and even more amazing is the creativity behind a very large percentage of them. I have to admit, I don’t think I am ‘into’ the phenomena myself, but it is interesting to watch it all happen.
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Returning
Submitted by Ankush Vimawala Photography Blog
I will be taking a break from the blogosphere for the next 21 days 
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1157 – Moments Of Silence
Submitted by The Daily Photography of Andreas Manessinger Blog
You know this habit of mine, taking a song title, making it the title of the Image of the Day, making the song Song of the Day. Well, today is different and this is, because I got stuck in the middle.
I have a file with all my song titles. First I search this file for keywords that I feel match my image. When I have found something, I look if I can find a video, preferably on YouTube. I also check in my Index of the Songs of the Day if I have already used the song. If so, I may use it again or look further.
Today I had a very short time of about 40 minutes for photography. But still, I got into the mood quickly, and taking photos was an intense experience, almost meditative, out in nature, first on a small country road, then in a forest by the river. It was an experience of silence and joy.
Well, “silence” was one of the words that I looked for in my list of song titles, and when I found Shara Nelson’s album “What Silence Knows”, I immediately loved the idea. The problem is, that the title track was not available on YouTube. In fact, the only song from that album that’s on YouTube, is “One Goodbye In Ten”, and when I heard that, I knew I wanted it to be Song of the Day. It’s such an incredibly beautiful song, and if you don’t know the album, I can only recommend it heartily. Here’s the video.
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1156 – Leaving The City
Submitted by The Daily Photography of Andreas Manessinger Blog
This is not an image of today, this is another image of Friday, still from Vienna, taken from the rear of the tramway as I approached the railway station. Today I was lazy, played computer games, slept in the afternoon, and in the evening I attended Andreas Frei’s annual Christmas party.
I mentioned Andreas several times, he is the guy who just made the post-production for the movie “Mount St. Elias” (where he contributed two songs), recently produced singer Jean Nolan’s album “Born Ready“, is a great musician himself – and just a good friend. It was a great evening, except for photography
On the other hand, in a way this image is also an image of today, because only today I remembered that I had taken it at all. It was still on the camera, because at the time that I took it, I had already decided to make yesterday’s “1155 – Born To Be Wild“.
The Song of the Day is “Leaving The City” from Róisín Murphy’s 2005 album “Ruby Blue”. Hear it on YouTube.
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Inspiring Quotes – John Sexton
Submitted by Ralph Nordstrom Photography Blog
Whether in the classical darkroom or the digital darkroom, I think alterations to the image should only be made when it’s necessary to achieve your visualization about the photograph. I have particular concern for photographers that approach image making with the cavalier attitude of ,”it really doesn’t matter… I can fix it in Photoshop!”
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