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Palais Harrach

In March 2005 a small book with old photos fell into my hands. The faded prints showed Vienna as it once was in sepia photographs taken between 1890 and 1910.

Would I still be able to find the original streets and buildings? And more importantly – Could I capture the same perspective with my camera?

Vienna, Am Hof

Early photography equipment was heavy, bulky and probably not much fun to use. The enthusiasts of yesteryears had to struggle with emulsion-covered plates and leather bellows. I had to struggle with a restrictive wide-angle lens that did not allow me to capture the same perspectives as my colleages of a hundred years ago.

Much of the matching between photos was done on the computer using various disortion and perspective correction tools. A close match could have been achieved by using a Tilt/Shift lens. The contrast and colour scheme in the new photos was modified to dampen the contrast between the over-saturated digital look and the softly sepia tones.

Credit is given to the original photographer when it is known. The resulting collages are annotated with stories about the locations, its buildings and their history.

All 8 collages are in the Vienna Now and Then gallery below …
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Autumn in Lainz

The autumn (or “fall” as it’s known as in the colonies) is one of the best times in the year for walking, hiking and any other form of locomotion in close proximity to undisturbed nature and wildlife. For lack of any primary rainforests in close proximity I made for the wooded hills of the Lainz Game Park on the eastern periphery of Vienna to take in the fresh air and gentle warmth of the fading summer.

Wild boar

The park is not a zoo, but rather a nature preserve with a dense population of wild boar and deer. So dense, in fact, that I didn’t see any roaming porcines on this visit – The gallery below includes photos from a previous trip as well as recent ones.

Like any large-scale project in Vienna, the park was created by one of the emperors of the olden days. Ferdinand I. of Austria claimed the area as a royal hunting ground and secured it with a sturdy stone wall in 1781. It wasn’t until 1919, when monarchy as a stately form of opression became illegal in Austria, that ordinary folk was allowed to stretch their lowly legs in the park.

Hermesvilla

In recent years the park has been converted into a family attraction with cafés, playgrounds and educational stations where curious little ones and oblivious elders can learn about the fauna and flora that grows, creeps and crawls around the wooded hills. However, there are still plenty of quiets paths and one can walk for miles on end and still miss one of the three watering holes in the park. The cosiest of which is a café in the Hermesvilla, a stately manor house built in the 1880’s by combining neo-Baroque and Art Nouveau styles. It was a gift from emperor Franz Joseph I. to his wife Elisabeth of Bavaria.

Vienna view

When the kids are entertained by playing with dung beetles and the grannies are chattering over coffee and cake (the teutonic equivalent of tea and biscuits) the rest of Vienna moves to higher ground. Everyone and their picnic baskets converges on the Wienblick (lit. Vienna view) hill where they unroll the blanket, uncork the wine and unwind on the lawn to enjoy a glorious view over the city. The so-called Tenno-stone marks the spot where the japanese imperial couple Akihito und Michiko admired this very view in July 2002. I placed a small pebble beside the inscribed slab of granite to leave my own personal “Fred-stone”.

Golden pholiota

When I got bored roving the leafy undergrowth I discovered my macro lens in the camera bag and started to point it at the smallest things I could find. All I forgot was a tripod and my photos of mushrooms, lichen, moss and insects would actually have been in focus. I did catch a nifty spider though which was less than 1cm long.

Lainz Game Park

After most of those shots failed I turned to wide-angle. For a while I forced myself to take every picture at 10mm (equiv. 16mm in 35mm film terms) focal length, which made for some optical comedy just short of distorted “fish-eye” dramatism. When I finally got my feet out of the frame, there were even such wide angle opportunities where the forest canopy admitted so little light that hand-held exposure became very difficult. (Mental note: next time – take car, load tripod).

See more photos in the Lainz Game Park gallery below…

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Top Gear Extra

Richard Hammond

They figured out that a car is the best way to get from London to Oslo, that a car is more economical than a train and that the best way of getting a truffle from Italy to the NatWest tower is a Bugatti Veyron – a car.

Jeremy Clarkson

James May

The team of BBC’s “Top Gear Extra” has given us the best in blokish immaturity when it comes to cars or anything else on wheels (a nun in a monster truck), skis (the ski jumping Mini), paddle wheels (the arctic truck in Iceland), tracks (the tank vs. Landrover race) or cars parked on top of detonating buildings (the half-dead beaten Landcruiser).

They also proved that rockets are the way forward in car design. A rocket-powered device shot old cars at an improvised giant dartboard in a quarry. Rockets are also the only way a Leyland Mini could be persuaded to perform a spectacular ski jump in Lillehammer. A rocket-powered dragster has also proven to be the superior method of turning old caravans into a smouldering pile of polyurethane ashes.

There was however, one bit of rocket-powered news I wasn’t prepared for:

Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond remains seriously ill in hospital after a crash in a jet-powered car while filming for the BBC programme.

The 36-year-old was taken by air ambulance to Leeds General Infirmary’s neurological unit on Wednesday.

…

As I watch TV on my PC, I get distracted every so often and start to look up some interesting fact on the internet. I read about the accident while I was actually watching an episode of Top Gear Extra and started to google for pictures of the Spyker C8.
The world of motoring is devastated. The self-proclaimed “DRIVING GOD” (while driving a Bowler Wildcat off-roader) was very nearly killed while strapped to a rocket.

Please, get well soon, Richard.

Blokes the world over need Top Gear like their cars need petrol. I know that Top Gear is being watched by millions across the planet and they will all be anxiously waiting for your return to Television.

Don’t leave it all to Jeremy “Power” and Jamie “Slow”!

We need more of your “misfiring” “teeth whitening” “brake horsepower” !

So, you never know what day it is ? Or maybe you are looking for a dash of colour on the wall behind your desk ?

What better way to liven up the day at the office than put up a calendar with some colourful, educating and entertaining underwater photographs of nudibranchs.

Although Nudibranchs are commonly known as seaslugs, they share nothing of the gooey slimy-ness with their terrestrial cousins. These creatures are cherished by hundreds of thousands of divers for their dazzling display of colours and their bewildering variety of shapes and sizes. Some call them “the butterflies of the oceans“.

The natural history team at Seachallengers has invited underwater photographers from around the world to participate in the new 2007 Nudibranch Calendar. The main critera was that all photos had to be of some type of opistobranch. In the end more than 100 photographers from 30 countries dug up piccies of all sorts of slugs in a variety of sizes, poses or states of reproduction (As hermaphrodites, nudies do get quite kinky).
Right up until the submission deadline, I was pretty convinced that I had nothing worth publishing. Nevertheless, the dive bums Dave Behrens and John Moore convinced me to give it a go and I submitted a bunch of my own photos.

Lo and behold, two of my photos were selected and they appear in the calendar as a fullpage (yes I have a whole month to myself) and a smaller filler picture … all in glorious technicolour.

Dave & John have compiled a sample month to get an idea of the quality and layout. And, before you ask, no my picture is not in the sample. You’d have to get a copy to find out yourself :-)

Herrnbaumgarten view

Herrnbaumgarten is a small market town of just over 1000 souls which lies at the heart of the Weinviertel (“wine district”). This part of Austria is usually known for its fine wines, but this village has made a name for itself in a completely different department – “the art of taking life with a smile and a grain of salt”.

Signpost socks

The mystery of the “wacky village” (das veruckte Dorf) starts to unfold on the approach from the winding B-roads that pass through the surrounding hills. Numerous signposts direct the unsuspecting visitor ever closer to the mirthful attractions.

Signpost socks

Usually one would not raise an eyebrow at a small piece of clothing draped over a signpost. An attentive passer-by could have found it and left it in good view for the unlucky rambler, should he return to fetch it. But when that garment is a sock and when it is nailed to the post next to 5 other socks, things start to get funny.
I did not see the pattern in this until I found a second and a third signpost that had socks nailed on them. There were signposts directing me to ludicrous destinations at even stranger distances. There was even a signpost directing me to the next … signpost. In the end, however, they all led to a museum in the centre of the village with that distinctively jolly air about it.

The NONSEUM

NONSEUM courtyard

The jovially named “society for the utilisation of intellectual surplus” presents a museum of a different kind. The NONSEUM presents a wonderfully cheerful concoction of useless inventions and other oddities that should and can not be taken too seriously.

Meeting glasses

The items on display combine the conventional with the unfamiliar, the legendary with the factual, they playfully ease the visitor’s reservations about contemporary artistic form that often seems to clash with traditional cultural perception.

Here’s a small list of several exhibits:

• Collection of historic button holes – no buttons, no stitching, just the holes from the likes of Sir David Livingstones, Napoleon and Goethe. Supplemented by a fossilised button hole from the triolithic epoch.
• Meeting glasses – The open eyes are painted on to grant the wearer a graceful kip while the boss is so enthusiastically caught up in last years sales figures. The concept finally made it into the mainstream as Homer Simpson’s jury duty glasses in the episode “The Boy Who Knew Too Much”
• A floppy walking stick that features a practical hinge, which doesn’t break when the walker stumbles and falls.
• The portable anonymity bar – no more brown paper bag with peep holes for constantly pursued celebs, the black bar infront of your eyes will render your phiz completely unrecognizable.
• The “no-splash” toilet for the modern man who approaches the bowl in an upright posture.
• VacuPed, the Human powered vacuum cleaner
• Eyeglasses (Waldviertel style)
• Automatic nose picker
• Hat with a mechanical airing, er.., mechanism
• Mobile walking stick
• Collapsible zebra-crossing – can be unrolled on any street to allow safe passage
• &c, &c

NONSEUM courtyard

The museum is open most saturdays, sunday and holidays from spring till autumn. The websites nonseum.at and herrnbaumgarten.at have more info in german for those who want to share the frolics.

Below is a small gallery of photos of Herrnbaumgarten village and the exhibits at the NONSEUM …

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