Princess Arabella with the awkward relatives

so, rather than boring you all with yet more portraits from sometime last year, i decided to put these ones up.

Douggl & Miranda

i took a bronica medium format camera with me that day, loaded with a konica film (which one exactly eludes me, sorry). manual focus, eyeballing the exposure (cloudy 11, sunny 16), nothing particularly artistic. the scans aren’t exactly very good, but i don’t have a decent scanner, so i used on here at uni.

i love playing around with medium format film, but sadly, there are no more photo labs left in innsbruck who develop the film themselves. meaning, it’s costly as hell. if i take 5 rolls of film, it will be cheaper to buy the equipment to develop it myself than taking it to a shop. it’s ridiculous. so the bronica is gathering dust atm.

more after the jump…

Proud mum

Enjoying the attention

Eva & Miranda

DougglThe sky's a bit washed out, but otherwise i like this one.

View over Zell am See

All comfy in the sled

Arabella & her Oma

Simon & Eva

i think i’m going to have to dig out the MF camera again.

last spring, claudia approached me, asking if i’d be willing to take some pictures of herself and her fiancé, edi, for the wedding invitations. a date was set, and on a rather chilly early spring sunday morning, we went for a walk around schloss ambras park.

this is the image they actually used:

Claudia & Edi

read on after the break for some more pictures.

i edited for a slightly washed out look in the colours, as they weren’t sure if they wanted b/w or colour photos. the desaturated look suited the light we had, so that’s what we eventually went with.

this was one of the pictures to warm up with:

here are some in front of a nice little waterfall:

we found a little cave they sat in with a flash parked behind to add some structure to the rocks:

some stairs up to a little side entrance of the castle:

the first snowbells can be seen in the background:

this film is just amazing. i got goosebumps when he jumped. great piece of work by both the diver and the cameraperson.

i basically just put a flash behind eva, blasting at the white wall and a flash in a reflective umbrella in front. so not quite zack’s setup, but the closest i could approximate in our living room. i didn’t quite get the lighting ratios right, so i had to add a touch of fill slider in lightroom, next time i’ll know better… but see for yourself:

Eva on white

as you can see on some pics, i had banding/sync issues with the cactus triggers. i’m going to have to see if that can be corrected.

Benni invited us round to his place last night to celebrate him turning older than he’s ever been before. here’s some pictures of the evening:

Benni's Birthday, 12/3/10

Benni turns 23. :)

flash gallery

alternatively, here’s a flash gallery:

quick update: eva and i have moved and are more or less finished with the move. flo & ursi came for dinner last night and brought some flowers with them. i love the way the colours just pop against the black background of our *massive* windows.

more tulip pictures on my flickr page.

what a weekend. police band concert on friday evening, playing and emceeing is very hard work. went down really well and was an enjoyable evening.

skiing on saturday at the stubaier gletscher (pictures to follow). “junge solisten am podium” by the innStrumenti chamber orchestra was the evening’s entertainment on saturday.

sunday was a lazy day, spent most of the afternoon playing around with the latest, greatest version of lilypond. the evening was spent at a concert by the kammerchor walther von der vogelweide, conducted by claudio büchler, also the conductor of the uni orchestra.

this was quickly done in the improvised kitchen studio before dinner:

fruit and veg, originally uploaded by tiamak.

the tomatoes and the garlic in the basket have been surprising me every day with the simple colours, so i decided to knock together a quick studio in the kitchen. a large cardboard back-wall made from a weetabix box, lit by an overpowered sb-900, another sb-900 with a dome diffuser off to the right, kindly held by eva. not perfect, but not too shabby for a job knocked together in 3 minutes…

the picture at the top was taken during a short break from transcribing music. the sun hit the glasses just right on my laptop case, and luckily i had my camera sat next to me.

gabi , originally uploaded by tiamak.

i had to setup a really quick portrait for the conductor of our band this afternoon. as he was slightly pressed for time, i asked gabi to jump in as a quick lighting model. and got this shot, which i’m quite happy with.

while i was trying to work out how to do portraits yesterday evening, i got this nice shot of eva:

eva, originally uploaded by tiamak.

next time, i’ll try not to cut off the side of her hair.

and here’s the 2 portraits of our conductor:

Stefan Laube

Stefan Laube

fantastic program selection and very well played. mr. fritzsch conducted everything by heart, which is a fairly amazing feat if you take a look at the score to the alpensinfone. all in all, it was a very impressive concert and i’m looking forward to future concerts conducted by mr. fritzsch.

second stop of the evening (after grabbing a pizza) was the ambient art lounge, organised by harry triendl. the concept is intriguing, it’s basically a semi-organised jam-session for electronic music. i think the most interesting part of this concept is that ambient music is generally created in a studio and heavily tweaked and refined. getting a group of people together with a set of rules (my favourite: tolerable volume. ) can result in chaos, or as shown yesterday, in some very enjoyable ambient music.

we caught the tail-end of an art installation by urbeil consisting of soundscapes supporting a critical text dealing with the andreas hofer cult and emancipation. (a different form of dealing with andreas hofer’s historical image can be found in an earlier posting).

the idea behind the jam session, as far as i can tell, is that everyone is allowed to bring their equipment and set up before the session starts. everyone gets piped into the master mix and can take part however they want. this singer laid vocals over the soundscapes being created by the guitarists on stage. sounded cool, but the lighting also made for quite cool photo-opps.

pictures

nikon d90, 50mm f/1.8 and 24mm f/2.8 primes running at ISO 1600 in manual mode. i love these two lenses for low-light photography. i had a flash with me, but decided not to use it, as i wasn’t sure what the etiquette was. pictures were post-processed in DxO to get rid of the noise, slightly adjust the black point and improve the contrast (which is already good straight out of the camera). i’m fairly happy with the results, even though one or two pictures could do with some slightly different enhancements.

here’s the slideshow:

alternatively a standard HTML album:

Ambient Art Lounge #16

Ambient Art Lounge #16 at the Live-stage Innsbruck.
Official Page

overview of the barricade

spineless chairs

chair hinges

close-up of the barricade

close-up of the barricade

more information about the protest can be found on the sowimax blog.

montmartre lane

this picture just screams “timeless paris” for me. i like it.

here are some other of the favourites:

paris in the rain

place des abbesses metro station

the famous gargoyle on notre dame

still sorting the others out. but more will follow…

well, the last photo blog-post was from the landesfestumzug. since then, i’ve had the chance to photograph some tame wildlife, sports action, concerts, candids and some sailing.

IFI staff day, 24/09/2009

we had an IFI staff day towards the end of september. it was an organized trip with an action-packed morning, good lunch, followed by a lazy afternoon with huskies and birds of prey and a bbq to round it all off. here are some pictures:

IFI Staff Day — Hochseilgarten Kramsach

Fun and games and lots of adrenalin at the high-rope course in Kramsach.

IFI Staff Day — Husky-Ranch Angerberg

Relaxing afternoon with huskies.

IFI Staff Day — Birds of Prey

Impressive demonstration of owls and eagls.

IFI Staff Day — Archery Session

Playing with bows and arrows before a BBQ at the high-rope course to round off the day.

surprise class regatta, YKA; 26-27/09/2009

the YKA hosted a surprise class regatta at the end of september. i sailed with andi on graffiti again (the same skipper i sailed with on the lago di garda at the end of august). we won the regatta, which put andi in the overall winning spot for the austrian class association.

saturday was windy-ish, on sunday we spent most of the day hanging around waiting for wind. when it did turn up, it was flukey and turned and died down just before the only race for the day was about to be started. gave me a chance to get some pictures while out on the water though:

Surprise Regatta, 27/09/09

Regatta for the Austrian Surprise class hosted at the YKA, 26-27/09/2009.

Weltfest at the Treibhaus, 02/10/2009

emir, a good friend and great percussionist, volunteers at the integrationsbüro here in innsbruck. they organize a large “world festival” every year; this year, emir asked me to join the photography team of 4 photographers to photo-document the event. we basically spent the evening enjoying the festival and taking bucketloads of pictures. i really enjoyed the evening, and hope to be invited back again next year. here are all the pictures:

Weltfest 2009, 2/10/2009

I was asked to take pictures at the Weltfest in the Treibhaus.

a separate post will follow soon with the pick of my favourites and a bit on equipment and workflow.

hintersee, nr mittersill; 14/08/2009

this one’s been on the backburner now for a long while. when eva and i were tripping back and forth between tyrol and salzburg for two weeks this summer, we also detoured to one of my most favourite locations in the mountains – the hintersee near mittersill. this is a tiny little mountain lake created by an earthquake 800 years or so ago and a fantastically picturesque location. there are some very nice landscape pictures and a couple of quirky ones of eva here:

Hintersee, 14/8/2009

Short walk at the Hintersee near Mittersill with Eva.

that concludes the looooooooong backlog post. to quote the master of available light, joe mcnally, “more tk…”

there was much criticism before the celebrations—andreas hofer is considered by some as an extremist and terrorist. more recently, there was a terrorist movement in south tyrol aiming to “reunite” trentino and south tyrol with austria. the south tyrolean “Schützen” (translates loosely as riflemen—they’re voluntary groups of traditional riflemen who see it as their job to uphold traditional values, whatever they may be) especially support reunification and the political left-wing consider them extreme right-wing. as the tyrolean (both south and north) schützen made the main body of the parade, some politicians and media claimed that the whole parade was a celebration of right-wing ethos.

as an active participant in the parade yesterday (as a musician), my feeling was that there was a political undercurrent to the parade and of course, some people, albeit a small minority, took the political element to extremes. however, the general feeling of the whole event was a celebration of tyrolean tradition.

according to the organizers, there were 26,000 participants; police reports state there were over 70,000 spectators. the weather was perfect, and the centre of innsbruck was packed with people. the whole spectacle lasted about 5 hours. anyone watching the event in town or on TV definitely saw a lot more than we did. we met at 10:15 in the tivoli football stadium where the organizers staged about 10,000 of the participants. this is a panorama of some of the participants waiting in the stadium:

10,000 people, maybe more…

the parade was supposed to start at 11:00, for some reason, the organizers had forgotten that politicians like to talk, so it didn’t start until 12:00… this meant that we had a lot of time to waste in the stadium; some people spent the time drinking:

Beer carrier

others sleeping:

Sleeping trombonist

the staging had been calculated to the minute and the stadium slowly emptied:

Lonesome musician

what the austrian army (who’d calculated they could get the whole parade finished by 14:00) hadn’t considered was that sorting out 10,000 non-military personnel would take longer than expected. the parade also didn’t move through town as quickly as anticipated, so we didn’t leave the stadium until 13:50. we had to march for about 20 minutes to actually reach the official starting point of the parade. marching through town with all of the spectators cheering was quite an experience.

pictures

i didn’t have a chance to take pictures while we were marching, but i did manage to get a load of character pictures of people in our band while we were waiting in the stadium. we have some fantastic faces:

Andreas Kiechl

Catharina Moritz

Clemens UnsinnLord Nonsense himself…

Cornelia Senoner

here’s the whole album:

Landesfestumzug Innsbruck, 20/09/2009

Speckbacher Stadtmusik at the Landesfestumzug in Innsbruck.

erntedankfest

the bus picked us up in kufstein, where it wasn’t quite raining. the bus trip, was as always, good fun:

Norbert

Wattenmit einem Tennisschläger

stefan, our tubist, did a great job of running us out to vienna in pouring rain. his driving skills were put to a serious test in vienna when the gps nav system sent him through a series of extremely narrow and winding little lanes. it was an impressive show of skill.

Stefan

Sauwetter

thankfully, hannes wasn’t allowed to drive (note the beer can and the funky hat):

Hannesals Busfahrer

numerous stops along the way:

Mondsee

Pinkelpause

we finally got to vienna and quickly got changed in the hostel (student accommodation) we were staying in. the heldenplatz in vienna is ideally located for a big festival, between the imperial palace:

Marketenderinnenvor der Hofburg

and the viennese town hall (in the background):

Mario

the concert on saturday evening didn’t go too well—the combination of numerous beers and a long bus trip took their toll on some musicians. this is the only picture of the concert itself:

Arminbei "Evergreens"

afterwards, we cleared our stuff back into the bus and went looking for fun and drinks after an impromptu photo-shoot-out in front of the imperial palace:

Ende vom Konzert

Güntervor der Hofburg (und Geli)

sunday morning, everyone was up bright and early and not too hungover, which was surprising. we caught the tram into the centre of town, günter & i amused some of the passengers by getting 19 tickets out of a coin-operated machine using the change the girls had taken through selling schnapps the evening before. the concert on sunday was a lot better than saturday, there are even pictures, thanks to our friendly sound engineer benjamin whom i gave my camera to:

Unterm Konzert

PosaunenSimon, Michael, Günter

there was even a friendly rat who decided to help us out by conducting:

Die Sendung mit der Maus

after the concert, we grabbed a bite to eat and left for home. numerous stops were needed along the way:

Markus

we eventually got home in the early evening after a seriously enjoyable weekend in vienna. a big thankyou to günter, michael & mario for all the organizational work and a big round of applause for stefan for the fantastic drive.

pictures

travelling with bands always give great opportunities for pictures. this weekend was no exception.

if i had to pick five favourite pics from last weekend, it would probably be these ones (in no particular order):

Vorbereitungen

Evavor der Hofburg

Mario

Bianca

Biancaund ihr Spiegelbild

here’s the whole album, all 98 pics:

Conradler in Wien, 12-13/09/09

Trip to the Austrian Bauernbund Harvest festival with the Conradler (www.conradler.com). Serious fun and games and two concerts as well.

world war II memorial:

WW 2 Memorial

washington monument:

Washington Monument

reflecting pool:

Reflecting Pool

lincoln memorial:

Abraham Lincoln

korea memorial:

Freedom is not free

capitol:

Capitol

one of the films i had broke, so the pictures of the vietnam memorial didn’t really come out. i was a bit annoyed at that, but it’s a reason to go back again.

pictures

the pictures were taken with a nikon F80 on Ilford FP4 film. most of them were taken with a nikkor 24mm f/2.8 with a red filter. most of the pictures have only been slightly cropped to get rid of some white borders from the development process. some were straightened.

Washington DC, December 2006

Lineup

Rundgemälde-Suitefür Blechbläser von Florian Bramböck

Trumpets:

• Florian Klingler
• Manfred Lugger
• Markus Kuen
• Raimund Walder
• Josef Seeber

Horns:

• Silvia Klingler
• Karin Albrecht

Trombones/Tuba:

• Otto Hornek
• Lukas Klingler
• Bernhard Großlercher (also Euphonium)
• Fabian Kerber
• Werner Kreidl (Tuba)

Percussion:

• Michael Oberaigner
• Christian Norz
• Karl Mair

Program

Bernhard, Lukas, Otto & Charlie

The program was varied, ranging from Renaissance to Jazz, and very entertaining. The highlights were Florian Bramböck’s Rundgemälde-Suite, which was premiered, and a suite from Carmina Burana by Carl Orff, arranged by Otto Hornek for the BCT. The full program they played:

• Giles Farnaby, Mal Sims
• Diego Ortiz, Tres Recercadas
• Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Psalm 91
• Florian Bramböck, Rundgemälde-Suite

• Carl Orff, Suite aus Carmina Burana
• Gordon Langford, London Miniatures
• Traditional, Auf Tirolerischen Almen
• Heiner Wiberny, Ulla in Afrika

Sadly, they only got to play one encore, but the audience seemed a bit zoned-out after Brass Machine, which was a fantastic way to end the evening.

Pictures

Yesterday before heading out to the concert, I stumbled across a post by Zack Arias where he showed some experimental multiple exposures he took during a concert. I tried that trick as well and came up with some interesting results:

Posaunenmontage

Schattenspiele

bct Montage 2

And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for, the link to the whole album:

Brass Connection Tirol, 26.08.09

Brass Connection Tirol at the Kitzbüheler Sommerkonzerte. Premiere performance of Florian Bramböck's Rundgemälde-Suite

(testing blogging from my iPhone…)

Günter Auer advertising for Tiscover…

so, five years after going there w/simon, sarah & theresa, i finally made it back to prague. i love that place. the innsbruck police band was invited to FESTPOL 2009. sadly, we didn’t have too much spare time away from group activities, so i’m going to have to go back again.

the best pictures i took are on my phanfare page

a fantastic weekend in south-east wales.

more pictures at my phanfare page

everyone keeps on saying about the right moment for the picture. well, here are two shots to prove them right.

and yes, i’ll believe you now…

both pics are 2pic composites knocked together in photoshop from handheld shots with my little dinky canon ixus. the first picture (the one with the great colours) was taken about 7 minutes before the second. glad i looked out the window at the right time.