Ephemeral shadows in Zurich Oerlikon, Switzerland

Early spring is a wonderful time to photograph man-made beauty in cities. The sun is low and creates long shadows, lights and reflections and the trees are still bare and project delicate shadows onto facades or other surfaces. Many of these lights and shadows are fleeting beauties and only observed during a few days when the sun peeks through street canyons for  a few minutes. 

As mentioned in an earlier post, I am particularly fond of light and shadow compositions and the projections of trees attract me particularly. The shadows are diffuse or sharp and small or large depending on the location of the sun and the tree with respect to the facade. Buildings may look completely transformed and beautifully painted with a short-lived work of art. Often, it makes me wish to paint the shadows onto the walls.

The tree shadows shown above could only be observed in early spring or fall. The giant facade served as a screen for the shadow play of Black Locust trees (Robinia pseudoacacia).  It was a huge building and I had to stitch several photographs together to capture these shadows. The building has been torn down now and the trees are gone as well (an additional level of ephemerality).

The photograph is part of a new gallery that I have just added to Florian's photos. The tree shadows are a spin-off from the Light and shadow gallery, but I was hesitant whether to count them as natural or man-made beauties. I decided for the latter, because all tree shadows have been captured in urban environments and the shadows are projected onto man-made structures.

I hope you enjoy and I wish you a nice weekend!

Florian.

Real and shadow birch tree, Zurich, 2010

When I recently wanted to prepare the above photograph for printing, I could not find it anymore and realized that I had deleted it unintentionally. This can of course happen very quickly. The photograph may have been still selected when I clicked on other photographs that I wanted to delete from within lightroom or I accidentally marked it as "rejected" (in my workflow, I regularly delete everything marked as "rejected").

Luckily, I also regularly backup our entire hard drive and the disappeared photograph could indeed be restored from a backup taken a couple of months ago. So I really encourage all of you to implement a regular and complete backup strategy. Simply mirroring content on two separate drives is not enough. Whatever you delete accidentally is gone on both discs. I hear of many people who have no backup strategy whatsoever and I cannot help but wonder how it is possible to be so naive. Even a thorough backup schedule is no guarantee that you will never loose data, but a few very simple steps can make your precious photographs and data a lot more secure. If you have no backup strategy, buy an external hard drive immediately and start backing up your data!

The photograph shown here, which I luckily recovered, belongs to the light and shadow gallery and is a composition that I like very much. I came by this birch on a photo bike ride and was immediately captivated by the combination of the real black and white tree trunk with the shadowed foliage on the wall behind.

This photograph is also an ethical riddle: In the above photograph, you will discern an "M" inscribed on the trunk, which is removed (at least partly) in the version below. I am still undecided if I find it justified to remove such "thorns in my side" or not. On one hand, I think that the content of photographs should not be manipulated. On the other hand, the writing on the trunk does slightly disturb me. The best solution is to keep my eyes open for a better composition with an untouched trunk. Do you have an opinion on removing "thorns" as in this photograph?

I hope you enjoy, wish you a nice day and a good week.

Florian.

   

"Manipulated" real and shadow birch tree, Zurich, 2010