How To Tell It’s Christmas?

DSCF0007FUJIFILM X-T1 (14mm, f/8, 1/250 sec, ISO200)

When I drove home last Friday night the temperature was 18 degrees Celsius. Plus 18 degrees Celsius! I almost wanted to go to the beach but than I remembered that I don’t live in California.

How to tell its Christmas if its warmer than on an average, rainy summer day. I don’t know. Yesterday we tried again to get some Christmas feeling and met good friends at one of the thousand Christkindel markets in Vienna. This one is much smaller and quieter than the extremely busy ones at the Schoenbrunn Castle, the one at the Spittelberg or the one in front of the majors house but the upper Belvedere castle provides a nice background.

DSCF0009FUJIFILM X-T1 (14mm, f/8, 1/340 sec, ISO200)
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DSCF0024FUJIFILM X-T1 (14mm, f/8, 1/200 sec, ISO400)

The sky was blue but it was much colder than on the days before. It was still above zero degrees but the strong wind made it much colder. We walked around for a short while and I took some shots. I started with the 23mm lens but quickly changed to the 14mm to ensure that I capture enough of the pretty castle too.

At this time of the year Vienna is more crowded than during any other season but if you compare to the cities of Asia it still feels empty. Of course you can find some eccentric looking people and some grumpy faces (it’s Vienna) but it is far from the street shooters heaven you may find in Bangkok, Hanoi or Chennai. I guess I got spoiled.

DSCF0027FUJIFILM X-T1 (14mm, f/7.1, 1/600 sec, ISO200)
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DSCF0045FUJIFILM X-T1 (14mm, f/3.2, 1/80 sec, ISO640)

Because of the gutsy wind we decided to go inside to have cake and coffee. It’s not sunny California and it isn’t bursting and colorful Asia but there are a couple of things that aren’t too bad here: Coffee and cakes are two of them. According to Wikipedia there are 1.100 Viennese Coffee houses. That’s a lot. Much more than the 666 pubs of Dublin. To “quote” James Joyce “it would be a good puzzle to cross Vienna without passing a Kaffeehaus”.

And the nice thing about a Kaffehaus is that you can sit inside for hours like it is your own living room. So we sat there and chatted till after sunset. I almost missed the famous blue hour – almost. We walked out just early enough that I was able to take a couple of shots before the sky went all black on the shortest day of the year.

DSCF0048FUJIFILM X-T1 (23mm, f/2, 1/80 sec, ISO1600)
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DSCF0066FUJIFILM X-T1 (23mm, f/1.4, 1/100 sec, ISO1600)

Sorry that I haven’t managed to show you some snow in my Christmas blog post but there isn’t any where I live and there isn’t any in the rest of Austria either except on some mountaintops. But a Chistkindl market, a Kaffeehaus (with a big “Sissi” painting on the wall) and a beautiful castle isn’t shabby. You can’t ask for more “Sound of Music”.

If you like the colors it is Fuji’s new Classic Chrome. I just updated my camera’s firmware and now I can shoot my fastest lenses wide open in bright daylight and have access to the beautiful Classic Chrome setting. Thank you Fuji, that was a nice Christmas gift.

There is nothing left to say except: “Merry Christmas to you”. Thank you for reading this blog.

DSCF0094FUJIFILM X-T1 (23mm, f/2, 1/60 sec, ISO2000)