Balet Bratislava dance of patricians 1

Balet Bratislava dance of patricians 2 2

murder of Mercutio 3

death of Mercutio 4

Juliet mourns her brother 5

Juliet mourns her brother 2 6

Capulet household mourns 7

Capulet household mourns 2 8

Rome and Juliet in bed 9

Romeo with Juliet 10

Romeo dies 11

Juliet discovers dead Romeo 12

Balet bratislava corps de ballet 13

slovak beer

miska and peter

other skies

Did the end of summer have to come so sudden and so soon?

The American Indians measured years in summers. An infinite wisdom.

Herman Fink two lamps at MAK nite

Herman Fink vertical lamp

Herman Fink pole lamp DJ ART PARTY VIENNA

Herman Fink two lamps at MAK nite 1

Herman Fink closeup triple lamp

Artist Herman Fink with one of his lamps

Tanz Baby is a little bit kitsch with David Kleinl going somewhat over the top in his ersatz Falco persona. But like the original Falco, Tanz Baby is playful and fun. Everyone there had a great time.

Here are some photos. 

tanz baby david kleinl bubbles 

tanz baby david kleinl

tanz baby david kleinl

tanz baby david kleinl (6)

tanz baby david kleinl (2)

tanz baby david kleinl (4)

tanz baby david kleinl (5)

tanz baby kristian musser

melt crowd happy couple

melt crowd tanz baby carolina

melt crowd happy dancer

melt crowd seventies chicks

pazit julia melt team

neue donau worlds largest swimming pool

vienna new city from donauinsel

I purchased a half wetsuit on sale on a lark. It's been great. I've worn it half a dozen times already. You can still swim in the Neue Donau in September but for sport swimming this year (more than 15 minutes) you need a wet suit most days.

I bought the Chiaroscuro CD while I was there. Surprisingly the CD is just a shadow of how Fresu and Towner play live together. This is one rare occasion where the live performance clearly outranks what the musicians can do in the studio. I guess you had to be there.

Porgy & Bess artistic director Christoph Huber was very animated after the show as well. It was one of the top five concerts I've ever attended there in five years.

Paolo Fresu on trumpet

Paolo Fresu on trumpet

Paolo Fresu on trumpet

Ralph Towner

Paolo Fresu on horn

Paolo Fresu on horn

All photos Alec Kinnear. Porgy and Bess, Vienna, 22 Febuary 2010.

Tanz Company Gervasi Geckos Kenia Bernai Gonzales Leoni Wahl

And so it is with Geckos.

Here we meet in the rehearsal hall on Laxenburgerstrasse. The ceilings are a bit lower than in a full theatre, the seating more limited. But no matter, Markus Schwarz's light makes the space bigger, pouring light through blinds set up between a side room and the main rehearsal space.

Leoni Wahl Salvatore la Ferla

The décor is a single red armchair which serves as a place for lovers to sit together, for one lover to miss the absent one and for another as a cliff from which she considers self-destruction.

Tanz Company Gervasi Geckos Leoni Wahl psychological tightrope

Gervasi is working with three dancers here, all excellent. The long and handsome Italian Salvatore la Ferla, the compact Kenia Bernai Gonzales and longtime muse Leoni Wahl.

All three begin pinned up against a wall in a very peculiar way.

Kenia Bernai Gonzales Leoni Wahl Salvatore la Ferla against the wall

The threesome binds and parts into two couples in a complicated relationship which never fully clarifies itself. What is apparent is that gradually Leoni Wahl's character drifts into solitude.

Tanz Company Gervasi Geckos Kenia Bernai Gonzales Leoni Wahl 2

Throughout these divagation of the relationship, the dancers express their feelings for one another or their feelings alone through steps and movement.

Tanz Company Gervasi Geckos Leoni Wahl

Each dancer is on a trajectory of his or her own which leads to a somewhat symphonic emotional impression.

Tanz Company Gervasi Geckos Kenia Bernai Gonzales in motion

Geckos lasts an hour but it feels like half an hour, as one just sits back and lets the steps and the emotion of the dancers take over. The sophisticated atmospheric track from Albert Castello helps. While the atmospheric soundspace is neither melodic enough nor innovative enough to make the listener want to take it home, within the space and context it is excellent.

Kenia Bernai Gonzales Leoni Wahl Salvatore la Ferla

Despite these strong points, Geckos has several weak points. One feels that Gervasi could intervene more forcefully with his dancers. For instance, Leoni Wahl's steps, while absorbing, are another variation on what Gervasi regulars have seen for many years.

Leoni Wahl Geckos Elio Gervasi

As brilliant and energetic a dancer as Wahl is one feels that her movment is becoming too self-referential.

One sometimes wishes that rather than developing the dancers own expression again, Gervasi would impose his own order on them. In line with a desire for greater specificity, I felt that the libretto could be more developed: more precise emotional moments in a story more deliberately told. But a clearer storyline is not as important as a clear choreographic vision.

For the moment, it would do no harm if for a few pieces, Gervasi and Wahl's shared exploration of movement yielded to a clear and trenchant choreographic language.

All photos by Alec Kinnear © Elio Gervasi, the artists and Alec Kinnear. More Gervasi Geckos photos here.

Kaffeesiederball 2010 Nokia N97 Mini high ISO 01

The Kaffeesiederball together with the Opernball are Vienna's two best balls. It's a very close call which is better. I'd say the Kaffeesiederball with its 15 live orchestras is more fun, while the Opernball is more glamourous. But the Opernball is fun too, and Kaffeesiederball has glam aplenty. The contrast between both and banal balls like the Artztball (Physicians' Ball) are striking.

Kaffeesiederball 2010 Nokia N97 Mini high ISO 02

Usually I have some great shots of the Kaffeesiederball but due to an arm strain back at the Austrian Fashion Week which turned into RSI, I'm off the main camera with full lens setup except for special occasions. Quite nice as it means that I can enjoy evenings without trying to capture fleeing time through a lens. Just for fun for a few minutes in the middle of the evening I pulled out the Nokia N97 mini and tried some snaps with it. Definitely not a low-light camera, but I can see that if one caps ISO at 400, the pictures are not at all bad.

The shot of the singer is at ISO 387, while all the others are at 800. Colour correction done in Aperture 3. Aperture 3 had no problem at all dealing with the jpegs and it was great to have Aperture level light and colour correction tools available to get the most of these small noisy photos.

Nokia 97 Mini external daylight pictures are great, btw. The N97 Mini has a much better camera than the iPhone and can definitely replace a standard point and shoot as one's spur of the moment on the road camera.

Kaffeesiederball 2010 Nokia N97 Mini high ISO 03

Kaffeesiederball 2010 Nokia N97 Mini high ISO 04

Kaffeesiederball 2010 Nokia N97 Mini high ISO 06

Kaffeesiederball 2010 Nokia N97 Mini high ISO 05

Daylight Photos from the Nokia N97 Mini

Nokia N97 daylight normal ISO: heavy machinery ripping
apart the last remnants of Südbahnhof. Ironically this building
is only about ten years old. Humans building, discarding, wasting.
All at great expense to ourselves and nature.

If you'd like to see just how good the 4 MP Nokia N97 Mini camera is in comparison to the 2 MP iPhone or other normal cellphone camera, just download the full size version of the last photo. Amazing. I haven't provided the full size versions for the Kaffeesiederball photos as they just don't stand up to scrutiny at higher res.

But when the first great Aperture-Lightroom wars broke out a few years ago, I found myself seduced by the great workflow in Aperture. You are always grading your images and can always improve them with a quick flick of a switch. I also had a terrible experience with trying to move a Lightroom library which flat out died on me. Aperture libraries were  more easily portable. I never cared for either Apple or Adobe's attempts to get me to keep my images in their internal proprietary folders. Both companies quickly realised that photographers didn't want their images locked away somewhere and so lightened up on the ingesting techniques.

So after losing ratings on a few thousand images in Lightroom, I ended up using Aperture and really enjoying the interface which was very similar to Final Cut Pro. Still almost every edit session I used Aperture I would be frustrated by the absence of curves. Sure I found ways to work around no curves by getting very good at manipulating Apple's excellent exposure and enhance features. One could get very close to curves by working with exposure, black point and contrast. In an extreme case, I could always take an excursion to Photoshop.

But the absence of curves was always a wrench in speed and precision of editing. Curves are the single holy grail of subtle and powerful colour and tone editing. Just set your white balance and start working on your curves. By the time curves are set right, there should be very little left to do in a photograph, as long as you are staying in the realistic category.

Adobe knows the importance of curves too, which is why Adobe Photoshop Elements didn't include curves at all until the latest version and why even now curves in PS Elements are crippled. Curves cannot be applied as an adjustment layer (i.e. non-reversible) like Levels, nor do you have direct control over the S curve. At $700 for Photoshop with $300 updates almost every year, working curves are a very expensive proposition with Adobe.

With Curves now in Aperture, there is a pro level alternative to Adobe and the Photoshop world. You can do all your development in Aperture and only need resort to a bitmap editor for minor tweaks. Workflow is much faster with non-destructive curves built right into Aperture.

Time for some show and tell. Here's a couple of sample images to show you just how much curves can do for you.

Version one: developed using the Aperture 2's Exposure and Enhance. Lots of issues with digital noise due to pushing too hard. I ended up having to make the left side of the picture too hot to get enough light on the dancer's face.

aperture 2 no curves no dodge:
(dancers Salvatore La Ferla, Leoni Wahl, Kenia Bernal Gonzales
in choreographer Elio Gervasi's Geckos, November 2009)

This picture has an exciting look but the middle dancer's face is much too dark and there is a lot of noise on the wall in the other dancer's shadow. The male dancer's pants end up becoming the center of interest.

aperture 3 with curves dodge

In Aperture 3, with a quick non-destructive dodge and burn, I am able to brighten the middle dancer's face and cool off the male dancer's pants. The curves allow me to improve contrast without turning the photo cartoony or generating large patches of image noise.

Apple Aperture Exposure Enhance

Curiously, the first result required a lot more tinkering. There are eight separate variables in play in the Exposure and Enhance panels to get close to the single intuitive panel of Curves.

Apple Aperture Curves

Here's another example. In this case the first image is the unprocessed RAW image (just use the M button for Master to see it). The second image is modified only with curves. Well not quite, I liked what I was seeing so I cheated a bit and added a quick vignette and burned the sky out behind the model to keep the center of focus on her eyes.

Canon 5D image unprocessed Apple Aperture

The unprocessed photo is attractive enough but pale and bled out. The sky is too bright and there is too much to distract from the model's face. Her eyes and skin don't have as much pop as one would wish.

Image after curves Apple Aperture

Here's how simple that fantastic effect in curves is, with just a big of vignette and burn to improve the core enriching contrast from curves.

Curves Vignette Burn Apple Aperture

How was performance in Aperture 3 on a Macbook Pro 17" 2.5 GHz with Nvidia 8600 512MB graphics card on a 30" monitor?

My photos were on an external FireWire 800 drive with the library kept on an internal 7200 RPM drive with 300 GB of free space. My library includes about 13,000 images and is 50 GB by itself, i.e. mid-size.

• Throughout the import and upgrade process, terrible.
• With full-size previews on, terrible.
• With previews and the absolutely foolish Faces function* completely turned off (generated once at project import), great.

Apparently people who have the integrated graphics chips like the 9400 are suffering now. Typical Apple marketing tricks - stay away from the low end computers if you want to use their pro apps. If you want to save money buy the previous generation high end at end of line, as they will have to support the flagship computers for a few generations (those computers belong to their best customers).

Apple's Aperture 3 can turbocharge your turnaround as you can get much better images much faster with curves than any other control. Unlike Adobe, pricing as usual with Apple software is very reasonable. $200 to join the game, $100 to continue if you've already been playing.

Additional Resources

For another take on Curves for natural light photographs and the new tools in Aperture be sure to watch Apple's video interview with Chase Jarvis.

* Faces is a junky gadget and should not be included or even turned on. Most pictures do not show a face full front-on. And if you can't recognise the faces in your own pictures, your problems are more serious than not having the latest version of Aperture. Time to see a senility doctor.