Like an old friend…

Right outside and in front of our veranda, there’s that tree. Very old, very tall, several storeys high. People don’t treat it too well, they throw cigarette butts and other things not only onto our veranda, but also into that tree. Some of its branches broke off already, and I’m not sure if that tree will make it much longer. Some day I’ll have to go out and take a proper picture of it before it’s gone. Or before we are.

This is as good as I could frame it using Mitchie’s 20mm lens, and without getting anything else into the picture:

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Like an old friend. Olympus E-PL1 and Panasonic Lumix 20mm lens. Straight out of camera, only renamed for consistency.

Thanks for reading.

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The beautiful light

This is sunlight, reflected off our wooden floor:

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A tripod, two light stands, and a bookshelf. Olympus E-PL1 with Panasonic Lumix 20mm lens.

Somehow I managed to focus on those photo magazines in our bookshelf instead on my main subjects. But that doesn’t matter – I wanted to show the (reflected) light here. And like every landscape photographer knows, you have to act quick. When you see it, you have to take the photo – a few minutes later, and that light will have changed dramatically.

Thanks for viewing.

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Finally we have some sun again

The weather today is a lot nicer than the one of the last weeks, so of course I also had to take some pictures whenever I saw something which caught my eye. Like, for instance:

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There’s a whole wide world behind your walled gardens (or: the world through our fence). Olympus E-PL1 with the 14-42mm “kit zoom”.

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Nature taking back. Olympus E-PL1 with Panasonic Lumix 20mm lens.

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Mass murder. Olympus E-PL1 with Panasonic Lumix 20mm.

Thanks for viewing.

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Still cold…

It’s still cold here in Germany, so after our dinner I sat on the sofa and took a blanket. “Tuna” the cat came to me and found that wonderfully warm and comfortable as well. So I sneaked away to get my camera and to take her picture:

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“Tuna” the cat, sleeping. Olympus E-PL1 with its 14-42mm “kit zoom”.

Thanks for viewing.

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Earlier this morning

From this morning, in my employers’ garage:

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Our car (Kirk Tuck would say: the studio car). Olympus E-PL1 with 45mm lens. ISO 320, hand-held. Almost like out of camera.

Thanks for viewing.

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Quick snapshot

I’m still trying out things with my Debian Wheezy which I’m running since 9 days now, but today short after dinner, I also took a quick snapshot of Zuleikha, drawing:

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Olympus E-PL1 camera and 45mm lens. ISO 200 but “pushed” about half a stop in post production, so this is more like ISO 320 or so. No other manipulations except adding Exif data like name and copyright notice.

Thanks for viewing.

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News and tidbits (a post without photos)

I haven’t been taking too many photos last week, and none at all yesterday. Why?

openlogo-nd-75Well first I was busy with the new Debian 7.0, also known as “Wheezy”. I installed it last week Monday, and until now I never looked back. Tho there are still a few things missing (like a working lm-sensors shell extension, more to that one later), and tho my brother Willi had some serious troubles with his older onboard Nvidia 6150 graphic and the new and free ‘nouveau’ video driver, I pretty much liked what I saw. So while I installed it into a separate / (root) partition from my older Debian 6.x (aka “Squeeze”), I never really felt the need to look back. You have to use a system to get to know it, right?

The weather still isn’t that nice, with single-digit Celsius temperatures at times, so we haven’t been out for too long. But whenever we could get out, and if it was only for a few minutes, we did. I posted some of the photos I took, but it wasn’t much.

And yesterday morning, my PC greeted me with the message “CPU Fan Error – press <F1> to resume”. Checking the BIOS showed me that the fan was spinning with some 300 RPM, and even less right after I started the machine. So after some searching and digging around, yesterday evening I installed Mitchie’s old and original “boxed” fan onto my CPU, and when starting it with that one, it showed rotations of over 800 RPM right after the start. Much better, and I was really glad that it actually was the fan only, instead of some mainboard PWM failure, maybe due to some old capacitor or such – that would have been impossible to repair without changing the whole mainboard. If only Gnome 3.4 had a working lm-sensors shell extension (formerly these were called ‘applets’) to show me the machine health and those rotations while it’s running – see update below – but maybe I can configure ‘conky’ to show me the output of sensord. Later. But to get an idea of what I’m talking writing about, here’s what the sensors-applet (still on Gnome 2) shows me on my Lenovo Thinkpad at work:

sensors-applet

While my machine was still running fine this morning, this server and this web page weren’t, so I also had to care for that. Sorry if you’ve tried to access lonien.de or if you sent some mail and got any errors; should be fixed right now.

Ok. On to paid work now. And later, hopefully, I can also take some photos again.

Thanks for reading.

Update from 20:45, same day: Seems I was unfair to xtranophilist. Always read first, complain later. His suggestion to run

glib-compile-schemas ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/temperature@xtranophilist/schemas/

worked very well, and now I have a working sensor output again. Looks like this as long as I don’t open it to show much more:

Screenshot from 2013-05-14 20:49:36_640w

Thanks again for reading, and thanks to xtranophilist as well!

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From a short walk

The weather is still only so-so, and most of the weekend was very dull and grey, with single-digit Celsius temperatures at times. So when the sun peeked through a few holes in the clouds today, we took the opportunity for a short walk of maybe 40 minutes or so.

And when the sun is shining, it really looks like spring now, with nature claiming back some of the space:

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Spring around Robert-Koch-Str., Olympus E-PL1 with Panasonic Lumix 20mm lens

I was once again trying Mitchie’s 20mm lens which is wonderful. A 40mm-equivalent focal length sometimes just feels right. It shows a bit more context around people than a 50mm-e, but is not as wide as a 35mm-e. Very nice. Maybe it’s because it’s actually closer to the sensor diagonale than those so-called “normal” lenses…

About this picture: first I thought it was rather mediocre, not as nice as another one of Zuleikha and Mitchie (which I cannot show here because Mitchie wouldn’t want that). But then, viewed full-screen on my monitor and from a distance, I saw that that street sign almost vanishes behind those ranks, so I liked it enough to upload it to Flickr, and to show it here.

Thanks for viewing.

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Looking at a premium product

Yesterday morning, Olympus introduced us to their newest flagship of their “Pen” line of mirrorless cameras, the E-P5. I read the first hands-on reports from Ming Thein, Robin Wong, Pekka Potka, and of course it also was published at the same time on pages like DPReview. Now it’s Saturday evening, and I’m still reading. And while I was doing this, I looked at my E-PL1 camera with Mitchie’s 20mm lens attached, and thought: “Yeah, cute little products these are – let’s take a picture!”. And so I did:

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Still life with two “Pens”. Olympus E-520 with 50mm macro lens and Simock E300 Studio strobe bounced over the ceiling.

Most of the comments I read from “normal people” (which mostly translates as hobbyists like myself) are that this new E-P5 is too expensive. It costs about as much as an OM-D E-M5 and tops that if you add the new VF-4 viewfinder and a lens.

But unlike the reviewers mentioned above, most of these commenters never held it in their hands until now, and from what the reviewers report, and what the published images show us, I can believe that it’s a big difference to lesser and cheaper products indeed. Maybe like the difference between our Toyota Corolla, and a Lexus (cannot compare it to an “S” class, because that’s already reserved by Leica as well as Mercedes-Benz) ;-)

If these mentioned prices are correct, which means about 1k$ for the body, or $1449 as a “kit” with the VF-4 viewfinder and the 17mm/1.8 lens, it’s in my opinion still a very fair offer. You’d get that new big bright high-res viewfinder practically for free, and part of that very good 17mm lens as well. So what’s to complain about?

I was always of the opinion that these small mirrorless “Pen” cameras are like Leicas for the rest of us mere mortals. And this one will surely feel like one in your hands. If you see it that way, then a price of less than 1.5k$ seems downright cheap, for a premium product – doesn’t it? Still better than a Hasselblad Lunatic, or whatever they called these.

So I applaud Olympus for bringing out this one. Just like I did for whatever I used and you see here, like the E-PL1, the E-520, and last not least the OM-2N as my screen background. Plus that new E-PL5 which Mitchie has, and which has the exact same sensor like these higher priced OM-D E-M5 and E-P5 cameras.

About my photo: yes, you see dust everywhere. So what – I’m not trying to sell something here.

Thanks for reading.

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Peeking through the fence…

Just playing around with Mitchie’s 20mm lens again:

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Olympus E-PL1 with the Panasonic Lumix 20mm lens almost fully open. Minimal post-processing as always. No sharpening at all.

Thanks for viewing.

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