Plain speaking

                                          Shop sign seen in a small town in Austria.

Austria-in one photo

 Time for a break from cars. I recently came across this photo which I took south of Innsbruck in Austria last year. It really is Austria in one photo. A jagged mountain peak with a few patches of snow,a spectacular waterfall,a meadow full of alpine flowers,an alpine hut,a pine forest and a deep blue sky with a few puffy clouds. All that's missing are a few cows with bells and the Von Trapp family.Leica X1 photo using a polarising filter.

Early morning light

Two photos taken at dawn on the outskirts of Mandalay in Myanmar.I was an unusual sight for the locals-a westerner out so early with a camera in his hand.
For me it's a no brainer.It's the best time of the day to be out and taking photos. The light is soft.It is very quiet.The monks are scurrying off with their alms tins to prayer and a few men are wrapped up standing in the middle of the road having a quiet chat.I can almost smell the smoke from the wood fires.

More early morning photos from Myanmar-firstly a local market in full swing and the soft,golden light coming from the side gives highlighted edges to objects and people and transforms what would otherwise be an ordinary scene.Secondly a herdsman moving his animals along a dusty track.I was lurking in the trees feeling very conspicuous and waiting for the herd to get in the right position.

And in total contrast on the other side of the world in the old part of Salzburg in Austria -another early morning shot.
All photos Leica X1.

Climb every mountain-the Schafberg Bahn

I'm really not into trains except cog railways that do the apparently impossible and climb very steep mountains.One of the best of these has to be the Schafberg Bahn which climbs the Schafberg from St Wolfgang on the Wolfgangsee near Salzburg in Austria. The little red train was apparently featured in The Sound Of Music-a film I have so far managed to avoid seeing in its entirety.
The view from the top of the Schafberg at nearly 2000 metres is  stunning.I have been up it twice-16 years apart -and luckily both times the weather was crystal clear and Julie Andrews was nowhere to be seen. If it was all smothered in cloud it would be a very different story I'm sure.
Whilst I was at the top of the mountain last year two Red Bull Dornier Alpha jets from the Red Bull Hangar 8 aircraft collection at Salzburg Airport flew past.When I say flew past they flew round the mountain and so I was looking down onto them. They were going too quickly and were too small to photograph.
The locomotive featured in the photos is steam powered and a relatively recent build and the boiler is oil fired which is much more convenient than coal. It still smells like a steam engine but without the soot and smut and all the hard work of shovelling coal into the firebox. There is still one original coal fired heritage locomotive on the railway which does a run once a week.
If you are anywhere near Salzburg the railway is really worth a visit but it is very popular so your best option is to catch the first train of the day as I did. Photos taken with a Leica X1-June 2014.

More rainy days...........

The rainy days sequence in the previous post  below has been so well received-thanks for the emails-that I though that I should add some more rainy day photos.Particularly as yesterday we had a very hot day-41ºC on the drive back from Sydney.That's hot by any standards and a good time to wish for a rainy day or two.
First photo taken back in June on a very wet day in Dürnstein,Austria.The rain was there a few weeks later when I took the second ,third and fourth photos in Paris on a wonderful street near my hotel in the 7th arr.
And it was still raining at the Le Mans Classic  when I spotted someone who was prepared for the weather with her red "wellies".
The line up of wet 356 Porsches was also taken at the Le Mans Classic.
The umbrellas by the lake was taken in 2004 in Hanoi on Fuji Velvia slide film on the same morning I photographed the rush hour photo on the first rainy days post.And the sea of umbrellas was taken in Tokyo a couple of hours after the previous wet morning in the park in Tokyo shot.All the recent photos were taken on my Leica X1 apart from the Tokyo shot which was taken on my Canon G7.
In response to the email asking how I take photos in the rain without getting the camera wet my answer is with great difficulty.Cameras and water do not mix-particularly today's electronic cameras where one drop of moisture on a circuit board can literally mean"goodbye Mr Chips".
Some modern camera are weather sealed but this does not mean that they are that waterproof.The cameras I use are not sealed so I stand under an awning,or in an archway as in the first photo or hold the camera with one hand and an umbrella in the other as in the Tokyo shots .Sometimes I put a plastic bag around the camera but that is strictly a short term measure just to keep the rain off for a few seconds.

Just crazy

The craziest or perhaps bravest thing I have seen in 2014 has to be the young ski jumpers practicing in mid June on the ski jump in Innsbruck,Austria.They jump onto wet astroturf.
That's a local cemetery just beyond the ski jump.That must concentrate their minds as they hurtle down.Just crazy.They seemed so nonchalant about it.Like it was something they do every day -which it probaby is.
What I had not realised until I saw them jumping is that their skis run in two channels down the jump.Until then I thought that they had to free ski down the slope steering themselves.
The tiny red dot on the green in the bottom photo is the red skiier in the first photo shuffling off the turf.
 Leica X1 photos taken from the balcony of the observation deck.

Cats,dogs and cameras.

The world's population it seems can be divided into 4 distinct groups-those who like cats, those who like dogs, those who like both cats and dogs- this apparently is a small group-and finally a group who either don't care or who don't like either cats or dogs.
Anyway here are two photos to please the first three groups-the non -carers should just move on at least from this story.
I am really pleased with both these photos.The first I spotted beside a backroad just inside the Austrian border with Slovenia near Villach back in June.The cat was on the windowsill of this old house and the colours were just superb and it was overcast but bright so the light was just right.I stopped the car just past the house,reached for my camera which was on the back seat and fully expected the cat to get up and jump down and make the whole exercise futile.Cats are like that.But much to my surprise the cat stayed in place.
The wonderful dog I spotted looking out of the window of a restaurant on an early morning walk in Paris.I would hazard a guess that it was waiting for its owner to come down and take it for a walk.

Both photos were taken with my Leica X1 as DNG files which I have processed in Lightroom 5.As there are quite a few new readers coming to the blog -welcome-I should say that for me the Leica X1 is just wonderful.Its most attractive feature is its lens and the image quality it produces but also it is small and light and there are no complex menus and useless features to distract you.Just a superb fixed length lens -no zoom lens or interchangeable lenses so no decisions to be made- and plain simple controls.So many photographers burden themselves with too much equipment.A wise old photographer said to me recently that the more equipment you carry the less photos you take.And he is right.

Nowadays you can pick up a s/h X1 for modest money.If you are tempted ignore all the ignorant chatter and BS from the so called experts and pixel peepers on the forums and enthusiast sites and treat yourself.Put an optical viewfinder onto it-the Voigtlander OVF is excellent-and get out and start taking photos.It will do wonders for your photography.But of course if you really prefer to play with toys and talk about features and megapixels rather than taking photographs well the X1 is not for you.....

Another Porsche Museum

Whilst the Porsche museum in Stuttgart is deservedly the museum for Porsche enthusiasts there is an interesting private Porsche museum in Gmünd,Austria which is worth visiting if you are in southern Austria-particularly if you are a 356 enthusiast.
Gmünd is the spiritual birthplace of Porsche sports cars -- the Porsche family decamped there between 1944 and 1950 before they moved back to Stuttgart.It is where the first Porsche sports car was conceived and was tested over the surrounding mountain passes.
The Helmut Pfeifhofer Porsche Museum is located right in Gmünd which is a really charming town-see photo.The museum is not big but the exhibits are varied and interesting.
Gmünd is to the north of Villach off the Villach to Salzburg autobahn.Nearby is the superb Nockalmstrasse -mountain pass road through an alpine national park-see Nockalmstrasse and photo below.That is a superb drive -pity that I was not in a Porsche.Leica X1 photos.

Working the mullock heap

I'm very fortunate to have done an amazing amount of travelling over the years and particularly in the last two years so I have never been short of photo opportunities although nowadays I make a big effort to  restrict the number of photos I take.I am not a fan of"chimping"-reviewing a photo on the LCD screen on the camera immediately after it has been taken-and prefer to look at photos on a big screen before deciding their fate.

About two years ago I persuaded myself that the best way to handle the photos from a trip was to download them using Lightroom and then to sit down and vigorously cull them-deleting all the non star quality photos- in the week after a trip.I then put the starred photos up on the blog and into photobooks and perhaps enter one or two into photo competitions.
I quickly realised that this "take no prisoners" approach meant that I was permanently deleting photos which I may well have second thoughts about later.So now I cull all the obviously flawed photos and identify the obvious stars in the first review and come back to the folder a few weeks or months later and look at the photos again to see if any "gems" are there amongst the dross.It's a bit like fossickers who work through the mullock heaps (waste tailings) of gold mines looking for the tiny nuggets of gold that the miners missed.
Adopting this technique yesterday evening on the photos from my trip to Austria/Germany and Italy back in June threw up the four photos below which I had previously passed over.They are the sort of photos I take whilst walking around to keep my eye in and they look so much better in black and white.None of them will win a photo competition but they are just fun.
All taken with the Leica X1 and B&W conversion done in Silver EFX Pro.

How's it done?

The couple above were performing in a street festival in Salzburg right below our hotel room window in the heart of the old city a few weeks ago.They were attracting a lot of attention and collecting quite a few euros.
How's it done?Well I am pretty sure that it is not levitation or a display of amazing strength so my theory is that the girl is sitting on a metal plate and a complex and strong metal frame goes under her clothes up her back then down and up her arm,up the stick,up his arm and down his back to another horizontal plate which he is sitting on.So in fact they are both sitting down with all the weight being taken by the frame.Sounds too complicated? OK give me another explanation.
I also should not detract from their skill in keeping the contraption in place and keeping still and balanced if my theory is correct.They deserve their euros.

Things I do not understand

I do not understand the obsession so many women have with shoes.Serious shoe collectors are well served in both Austria and Germany where there are so many shoe shops.These two below are oggling shoes in Vienna.Even small towns seem to have a minimum of one shoe shop and in Innsbruck two weeks ago in a shop right next to my hotel they were holding a class teaching women how to walk in very high heels.A serious health hazard and you pay money to buy them and then go to a class to learn how to walk in them.That I really do not understand.

I saw this outfit in a shop window in Salzburg a couple of weeks ago. It is not an isolated piece of nonsense.Does anyone ever buy outfits like this? If so where do they wear them? Or do I need to get out more often?

Jeweller's clocks

Every town in Austria and Germany seems to have at least one jewellers.And they are invairably very well stocked with jewellery and watches -often high end watches.A year or more of Rolex's production must be in stock in Austrian and German jewellery stores.
A  characteristic of the stores is that most have very attractive and often elaborate signs incorporating clocks.These fascinate me and here's a collection of a dozen I photographed on my recent travels.