"That's it, friends!" these words usually mean "the party is over", "no more encore's", or "last drinks.."
Using them here, in a post under the category of "photos of the week", which usually anounces the recent upload of new pictures, they appear to translate to finito, basta, nada mas, ie the end of "potw" is here. Especially, when the most recent photos date back to mid October.

It doesn't have to be that "bad".

My lapse in posting didn't have anything to do with a paralysed trigger-finger nor any possibly more incapacitating defect of my psycho-physical system. And my antique (in the digital time frame) camera, the trusty old D70, still keeps clicking away merrily.

My thoughts simply circle more and more around the new design - and content - of the next version of "Wolfsview". And with all the other things on my to do list there isn't much energy left for the old stuff.
Doesn't matter, I tell myself, there isn't much resonance, much feedback anyway; neither in the comments nor in separate emails. Not a lot of disappointment either, I guess, over my dropping it.

It was a recent podcast from a different domain of the websphere which gave me second thoughts: I might well be wrong! There could be more lurkers silently enjoying the photos of the week than I imagined.
And to drive the point home, within hours I received a note from an old friend asking for the publishing date of the next badge of pictures.... (thanks, Karl-Ernst)

Naturally, this created a bit of fresh motivation.
To get over the hump, I need additional boost, however.

And that, my friends, is where you come in.

How?

Just click NOW - NOW - NOW >>>> HERE - HERE - HERE





to vote for the continuation of photos of the week !

That's all!


Should you want to add a little more bang to your click: go to any photo and leave a comment, a remark; critique and request will be taken seriously.
As reward you get the link to the latest photo ....

Should I get 30 or more Go's by Dec 13 I'll keep potw going!

CLICK !!! NOW !!!

PS: like all posts in this category this one here will also have a link to a new page in photos of the week, as ultimate lure to take action and vote...

... that's nothing new.

Usually it lives a rather slow and quiet life. That's what most people think, when they take the time and observe it on any given day.

As pilot, especially as soaring pilot, one lives in the sky, lives with the sky.
And there are times when one wishes that this very sky should move on with his life, get going, live a littler faster, please - for example, when the sun takes forever to reappear from behind a thick cirrus shelf, when it takes her ages to reignite the thermals again.
And there are times when one wishes that this very sky ought to stop its show, pause its movie, leave everything as it is - until one has reached final glide altitude in that last updraft of the evening, the last wave before the front moves through.

But what one really wants is a little monitor, a secret page on the Nav-computer or the PDA, where one can put the motion picture called "sky" in fast forward and find out what the atmosphere has planned for the next 15 , 30 minutes.

Oh, a perfidious influx of cold air at low levels, killing all thermals in no time...

Ah, a slight change in windspeed and -direction leading first to the collapse of the wave system, and then to its reappearance in a different location....

More often than not we'd be surprised about all that can happen in no time - or all that's going to stay unchanged "forever"

Well, here's a movie of only 23 seconds on what does and does not happen in.....





...well, in how much real time?

What's your guess - first, spontaneous guess?

Tell me!

No way, Josay...

At least not for the photography I put here on "Photos of the Week".
I realized that today, once more! Just look at the photo of the panadero (he's the one who takes care of all my needs in breads and cookies, just 5 minutes by foot, 2 minutes on bike from the Baerenhaus...)
That photo is no masterpiece. It shows up in PotW simply because I was so ab-so-lu-te-ly amazed how well the digital dream-team of camera and computer managed the brutal contrast of direct sunlight and stark shadow.
Early winter - late afternoon sun, full power straight thru the window - man oh man, I thought, I hope it doesn't fry the chip.

*** ah - and as an aside: since my standard lens went finally south a couple of weeks ago, I used the ultimate manual lens in my arsenal, a 28mm f3.5 PC shift lens, with manual aperture preset and precise manual focus. And good old center-weighted metering. ***

A quick massage in photoshop was all it took.
Quite stunning. And rather unexpected, given the expert's statement that the biggest drawback of digital capture compared to good old film is its smaller dynamic range, its restricted latitude of exposure. And I can't claim to use the most modern sensor technology either - with my 'ancient' D70.

Ok, if one applies all the tricks of photo-chemistry in the fume-room, one or two stops of extra range can still be pulled from some films.

By the time my photography will show up in venues where that matters, I bet the chips have pulled even.

..that's enough. I skip the next step ("..of the Innerworld", which is an essential part of the title of a book by Austrian author Peter Handke)

Here I'm talking about what's happening - or not - on a sunday afternoon in a town close to the political center of the province.
Political center, because geographically the capital Neuquen of the province Neuquen sits right at the eastern edge of the province (and San Martin de los Andes at its western edge). However, together with its neighbouring town of Cipolletti, Neuquen contributes about 75% to the population of the province.

Similar to Minneapolis-St.Paul in Minnesota.

Every other week friends in Cipolletti organize a "Feria", something like a combination of yard- and art-sale, and recently they had invited me to one of their events.
Therefore, I spent many hours in the Innerworld of an old Bodega and a few hours in the Outerworld of Cipolletti's squares and streets.

is for the stargazers on the southern part of the globe what the Big Dipper is for their colleagues north of the equator: the most famous constellation.
It is, however, more difficult to identify, it reveals the characteristic pole of the celestial hemisphere only to the curious, insisting observer. In that sense it is a typical constellation: "a group of celestial bodies (usually stars) that, to an individual observer, appear to form a pattern in the sky or appear visibly related to each other". (thanks, wiki...)
Keywords here are, obviously, ".., to an individual observer, appear to form...or appear visibly related..."

Thanks to this definition, I eventually understood, why I occasionally use this term "constellation" when trying to explain how something unexpected like sudden insight came to pass. It's nothing more than me, individually, seeing a particular combination of factors and their relation in the cause or outcome of an action, an event.

As, for example, the one about four months ago, when Carlos told me one morning that he'd like to have a video shot to advertise his Book-Cafe in the local movie theater. Didn't I own a camera? Perhaps I would want to shoot the piece?

Ah, the Southern Cross! Carlos as the pointing star Alpha Centauri, Truji, Curri and Brian as the stars of the Cross itself, all "constellated" in a way to point towards my Sony and me.

It took its time until we had identified this pattern in the nebulae of sparkling ideas, in the cluster of a thousand possibilities. Two evenings of wild brainstorming created the plot and a script, four weeks produced a raw tape, two more weeks and we had a first version of "Cinco Sentidos - the video".
All in all the "Making of..." took two months.



Now, we're waiting for the theater-admininstration to put it in action, here, in San Martin.

You, out there, can watch it here....

We're all heroes, in the eyes, the opinion of somebody, somewhere, sometime.
No need to get excited.
After all hardly anyone of us is honoured by a monument, cut in stone, in bronze, or marble. There is no appropriate societal context for that quality of public appreciation.
Fortunately, there isn't!
Firstly, because such a context could turn rapidly and entirely unexpectedly into a "controversialtext" when the contemporary perspective changes its viewing angle.
And secondly, not every city-walk has to be a slalom around statues.

Why am I getting into this heroe-stuff?

Not because I would have been able to navigate through Buenos Aires without any use of city maps, guide books or GPS assistants, soley by relying on statues.
But rather because every now and then I'd experience an encounter with heroes a la surprise.
Encounters, depending on point of view, of rather diverse quality.

It took me about 20 hours from late summer to late winter.

And equally as long from 40º South to 40º North.

I noticed, with a healthy dose of surprise, that Boulder, Colorado, lies almost exactly as far from the equator as San Martin de los Andes. On the other side, however. Consequently, a trip from SMA to BDR brings me in about 40 hours from summer to winter. And although I travelled at the end of the season, the difference was rather harsh. Dry and hot in the lower Patagonian Andes, eight inches of new snow and barely above freezing in the foothills of the Rockies.

But this wasn't the only difference, as a glimpse through the viewfinder reveals..
.

...in business!
which means: "everything's cool, dude", or " no worries, mate" as Colin, my friend in the Free Republic of Boulder, would say - with a ton of Sydney nostalgia resonating with every single word...

..in busy-ness!
which means: back in the vortex of acitivities.

Contrary to my expectations - or rather: to my fears - my mayday calls to the rapidweaver geeks and cracks met with instant empathy. I recieved solid advice how to solve the mysterious upload problem which kept me from publishing anything new.
Actually, I received even more, a lot more. Nik, the support guru of RealMacsoftware, sent me the registration code for an update to the most recent version of rapidweaver, at no cost!
"Try this, then try that. But, you know, we really don't support that version anymore. Why don't I mail you the code for an update, then you can use that with your present version of the MacOs or even the latest one, should you decide to step up"
Wow, that's what I call customer service - Thank you, Nik!

It turned out, interestingly enough, that it wasn't exclusively a problem of RW 3.5! One of the plugins I use on almost every single page, gobbled up so many bites with every photo inserted, that the site got bloated beyond believe and suffocated the 2 Gigs of RAM every time I tried an upload.
One hack-night later my site had lost half of its fat and none of its content.
And, on top of it, V 3.6 runs a lot more stable.
This much re: back in business.

Having solved the upload problem the busy-ness came back instantly. Selecting photos, running them through post processing, cropping, inserting and uploading, that part is routine.
Right now, however, I'm in Boulder, at my friend Colin's. And there, with him, his wife Cathy, his son Brendan and all their - and my - other buddies, there's always something going on. Time seems to move faster. Once there, everything which usually fits perfectly in my daily routine needs to be put in overdrive.

Here are two visual metaphors for this transition to busy-ness