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Category: Photography

Austrian GoaTrance Photos: Cosmic Party WUK 27-1-2007

Great party on an icy Saturday night in Vienna.

Goatrance-Girl-Austria Mg 1546
Great dancing from this group of friends
this is what I love about goa
the music, the light and the joy
flowing through one’s whole body.
Perfect moment.

Beautiful people. Nice atmosphere. Full, but not too crowded. Nothing worse than a goatrance party where there is no space to dance.

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EXIF Photo Orientation and OS X

Photo orientation is the way your photos look coming out of the camera – there are two alternatives Landscape (horizontal) and Portrait (vertical).

Landscape Orientation
Landscape Orientation
Portrait Orientation
Portrait Orientation

Many modern cameras digital include a sensor which tells the camera if it is in Portrait or Landscape mode. This includes most modern Canon and Nikon cameras, as well as those of other manufacturers but not including, notably for me, Pentax DSLR up to the *ist DS.

How does it work? The camera leaves a comment on the EXIF file for image software to rotate the camera the same way it was held at the time the picture was taken. Technically this is done with an orientation tag embedded into the picture.

Many image software applications handle these rotations automatically in their most recent versions. In principle, automated photo orientation based on EXIF tags should be a very good thing, saving the user time and trouble. In fact, EXIF based photo orientation is a mixed lot for the end user.

Image software packages handle EXIF orientation in various and complex ways. At a basic level, some software ignores the tag altogether. It’s when the software acts on EXIF orientation things get complicated.

In Mac OS X 10.3.9, Apple’s built-in image and PDF browser preview ignores this tag (Preview version 2.1). Apparently in Mac OS 10.4, Preview recognises the tag and performs the rotation automatically.

iView MediaPro recognises the orientation tag as well (version 3.1.1 and I believe has done so from version 2.6 and up). iPhoto does as well (from version 5 and up but somebody else will have to test this as I won’t run iPhoto on my computer – a friend lost half of her European pictures to its vagaries).

When it comes time to opening your pictures in Photoshop or Elements, you’re also covered. The image will show up correctly orientated. When you save a copy out of Photoshop it will stay that way.

All well and good.

But in the end, the automatic rotation won’t save you when it’s game time and its time to post your images…

As soon as you you try to upload your automatically oriented pictures, a rude surprise awaits. Your images are all sideways!

Auto Rotate Online
Auto Rotated Image Online – Oops
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Tanz Company Gervasi – Areal 6-Trek – Roses in MuseumsQuartier

One of the more wonderful dance performances I saw this year was in the open air in MuseumsQuartier on 4 May. After what has been a truly terrible season at TanzQuartierWien with close to nothing except conceptual choreography or over the hill performers, I was close to giving up on the season. It appeared the dance highlight of the year in 2005-2006 in Vienna was destined to be a restaging of John Cranko’s Eugene Onegin.

Happily the Tanz Company Gervasi pulled a rabbit out of the hat in May, using the entire inner courtyard of MuseumsQuartier in a stunning use of space and projection.

The piece began with a woman dancing alone in front of the Leopoldsmuseum, high above the courtyard. That was soon supplemented by a huge projection of Sabile on the wall of the Leopoldsmuseum.

Sabile Rasiti on Leopold Museum Wall
Sabile Rasiti projected on Leopold Museum wall

Fifteen minutes later a whole troop of dancers rushed the middle of the MuseumsQuartier and layed out a whole dance floor made of cardboard paper. On that improvised surface, the Gervasi dancers made mad battles and duets and solos.

preparing to rollout floor
Preparing to rollout temporary dance floor

I had my camera with me and managed to catch a fair amount of the action. The lens was not too fast so many of the pictures are darker than I’d like and darker than it seemed to the naked eye but a fair amount of the excitement of the event is caught in these images.

preparing to rollout floor
Single combat – Leoni Wahl and Anna Marie Nowak
Gervasi company MuseumsQuartier
Running, more combat Leoni Wahl and Anna Marie Nowak
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Saturday Night in Vienna: Staatsoper Nightbus @ 4am

This is what Saturday night at 4 in the morning in front of the Vienna Staatsoper looks like. Operagasse amd the ring is one of the main places for nightbuses to come. Many of the people out here would have come from Passage a late night discotheque created in what was an underground crosswalk. This is nice Vienna night atmosphere.

Vienna Staatsoper Nachtbus
Vienna Staatsoper Nachtbus
Vienna girl at night
Vienna girl at night
Vienna State Opera at night
Vienna State Opera at night

Vienna is one of the most beautiful places in the world to live. I bless each day I live in this wonderful city.

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Simona Noja – Hommage to Maria Callas

At the end of the Christa Ludwig’s talk, Vienn State Opera principal dancer Simona Noja danced a short solo a five minute excerpt from Maria Callus’s famous performance of Violetta (Verdi’s La Traviata)…. I shot vertically as I find the horizontal frame of a television extremely unattractive for a dance solo, particularly in a room like the Eroica Sall in the Austrian Theatre Museum.

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