Valentine’s Day, a Dark Tour, and a New Book Review

Hello subscribers (and welcome new ones)!

This past week has seen two new posts go up on the DT Blog, the first one on Monday, which was 14 February, i.e. “Valentine’s Day”. So, like the year before, I gave you a “Dark Valentine’s” post featuring photos of e.g. heart-shaped razor wire, romantic sepulchral art in various cemeteries – some famous, some less so – and even a bit of lovely intercultural-relations socialist-realist art. It’s a bit tongue in cheek. Take a look.
  

Then on Friday, I uploaded another substantial post, this time a report and photo essay about a tour of Vienna’s Central Cemetery after dark … so that’s not only the usual figurative ‘dark’ but even quite literally dark as well!

I’d been to the Zentralfriedhof (‘central cemetery’) several times before, but seeing it by night was of course an interesting new angle promising valuable photo opportunities. So I took my big full-frame pro dSLR camera along … and that did pay off. The lead photo above is only one example. It shows part of the monumental colonnades behind the cemetery’s main church with some of those red-glass candle lanterns that are so typical for Austrian cemeteries.

I used a combination of A) really long exposures at ISO 100 from the stabilized camera and B) handheld shots at really high ISO values. At some extreme sensitivity values above ISO 100,000 chroma noise naturally became an issue, but even those shots gave good results when converted into black-and-white images, with nice old-fashioned “graininess”. Do take a look at the photos in this latest Blog post!
  

As for my book Atlas of dark Destinations, there’s a new review out (actually appeared on Valentine’s Day too!); it’s a bit shorter and on a perhaps slightly unexpected platform, but it is very positive, so I’m pleased with this review. There are also a few more ratings on Amazon, also mostly positive (87% five-star last time I looked), but still not very many.

Some people have asked me how sales figures are doing, especially given e.g. the recent TV interview (see this previous Newsletter) and the big feature in the British tabloid press (see this earlier Blog post). I’ve now finally heard back from the publishers, and indeed there’s been an “uptick”, with about three times more copies sold in January than in December. The publishers’ US website didn’t have it in stock for a week or so until yesterday (where the webshop cart should have been it said “coming soon”), while they were awaiting stock replenishing. I presume that must mean it has been selling well so far over there. Still we’re only talking numbers in four figures – so it’s hardly the big bestseller that every book author hopes he or she might land. I just hope it keeps selling enough for a reprint to be necessary (so that a nasty little error can be corrected that was overlooked in the editing process).
  

But so much for this time – have a good week.

Best,

Peter