Month: August 2014

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Zuleikha: playing. Cat: sleeping.

Some hour or so ago:

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Zuleikha: playing. Cat: sleeping. (Me: using my Olympus E-520 camera with the 40-150mm zoom lens, manually focused. In-camera b&w setting used.)

Thanks for viewing.

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Countershot

Yesterday Zuleikha took my picture while I took hers:

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Panasonic TZ7. E-PL5 with 45mm lens at f/2.

Haven’t seen her photo yet. But who knows – maybe she’ll blog about it as well?

Thanks for viewing.

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A thing of beauty

Debian Jessie Beta1 inside an Oracle VirtualBox inside Debian Wheezy (which is the current stable version of Debian Linux and my main desktop):

Screenshot from 2014-08-27 20:06:05

They really ship XFCE by default, cool. And even RawTherapee 4.1 should make it into Jessie before the freeze (in November or so). At the moment, it’s still 4.0.12 in Jessie and 4.0.9 in Wheezy.

Best things in life are free, aren’t they?

Thanks for viewing.

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On a meadow, in a bush

Two photos from a short Sunday walk, both of flowers. One wide, one tight:

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Flowers on a meadow. Olympus E-PL5 camera with Panasonic Lumix 14mm/2.5 lens at f/5.6.

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Flowers in a bush. Olympus E-PL5 camera with 45mm/1.8 lens at f/4. Vignetting added with the Olympus Viewer 3 raw converter (“Pinhole filter”).

Thanks for viewing.

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Roadblock

Today was the last day of my 2 weeks of summer holidays. And after dinner, we went out to see why the road over the bridge out of our small village will be blocked for the next three months. Nothing much to see yet, but:

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Timber

Whatever they will do, they seem to need wood for doing it. Anyway – the road out of the village is blocked already:

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Roadblock

Which means that for the next three months I (and lots of others) will be forced to drive through the whole village with 30km/h to reach another bridge, or to go around the airport over a different motorway where there’s even more traffic, and that’s about 17km more. Or take the train, which would easily double or perhaps triple the normal commuting time.

Let’s hope it will be worth it. And let’s go at least 15 minutes earlier for the next three months.

Thanks for reading.

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Portraits of things

Sometimes – or rather, quite often – I take photographs of what I refer to as ‘found objects’. Which means that normally I don’t alter or even touch them, all I do is to find the right angle and/or light to take a photo of such objects. It’s a bit like taking a portrait of a thing, and this can be environmental or with gently blending out the background, whatever you like. It’s a bit like performing finger exercises on a musical instrument, and in my opinion it also trains your view quite a bit – you can actually learn from this.

I just took a photo of a small bottle of yoghurt drink with using my studio strobe and a beauty dish. But you don’t have to use any fancy lighting, a small battery-powered compact flash bounced off a wall or a reflector would give you pretty much the same result:

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Fitness drink

I used my Olympus E-PL5 “Pen”-type camera with a Panasonic Leica DG Summilux 25mm/1.4 lens set to an aperture of f/3.2 – for which I had to turn down that studio strobe to 1/32nd of its maximum power output.

If you do this for a while, you can actually do it blindfolded – and that gives you the opportunity to care only about the light, the composition etcetera – so when you actually have a breathing object, you’ll have enough confidence to do just the same. It’s caring for the one you photograph instead of thinking about technique and gear.

Thanks for viewing.