Month: January 2015

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Since yesterday

Yesterday I installed Debian 8 “Jessie” into a free partition of my primary hard drive. Jessie isn’t ready yet, and the installer still is RC1, but it works and looks great:

Screenshot from 2015-01-30 19:52:45

Screenshot from 2015-01-30 19:53:12

Screenshot from 2015-01-30 20:00:45

Screenshot from 2015-01-30 22:30:48

Get these screenshots in their full resolution (1920×1200) from Flickr if you click on any of them. This will be a great release.

Oh, and as a photographer, you’ll get RawTherapee 4.2 with it, to which you can add film simulations. One-click Kodak Tri-X or Ilford HP5 look anyone? It can also now open the raw X-Trans files from my colleague’s Fuji XT-1 camera, which is quite amazing as well. I have an ISO 3200 picture from that camera which was a bit over 1 stop underexposed, so it’s more like ISO 6400. Still practically noise-free, and the out of camera jpg is great as well. A good one definitely.

But that said, look at Kirk’s out of camera black & white photos from his Olympus E-M5… and our E-PL5 cameras have that very same sensor, plus tilting viewfinders, so I looked at these XT-1 files more out of curiosity.

Anyway – that new Debian version is highly recommended.

Update, from short before midnight:

As beautiful as that new ‘lines’ theme of Debian is, I decided to tweak it and use my own wallpaper again. So this is how my desktop looks right now:

7de_a055656 Screenshot from 2015-01-30 23:47:27

Desktop wallpaper art for my new Debian “Jessie” installation

Thanks for viewing. Good night.

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Her new black dress

From today:

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Zuleikha, January 2015

Update, from later the same day: here’s another one, which Zuleikha wanted to take me for school (part of their homework for the English class):

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Zuleikha, January 2015

Thanks for viewing.

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Video editing on Linux

I haven’t done or tried it since a while, but “Today’s Big Story” on LXer with its headline “The current state of video editing on Linux” grabbed my attention. And the article on opensource.com gives some nice links to learn Blender – I should watch a couple of these, since I was a bit overwhelmed by that program in the past.

The best thing about Linux, again and again? That this is all just an ‘apt-get install‘ away, at least on Debian (and/or on Ubuntu)… 🙂

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Friends shooting friends

From a short (ca. 4 hours) photowalk with friends, yesterday in Mainz:

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Meike & Rhia, January 2015

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Looking through her hair…

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Cigarette break

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Rhia, profile, January 2015

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Meike, profile, January 2015

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Mélanie & Markus reviewing photos, January 2015

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The fading sun in her eyes…

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On the bridge

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Messages

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Jana, January 2015

Full size photos on Flickr if you click on them, as always.

Thanks for viewing.

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Crazy high ISO

No, I’m not Steve Huff, so excuse the title. But what would you expect when taking photos with a Micro Four Thirds camera set to ISO 25600, with no noise reduction? Not much I guess. Well this morning I took a few photos of Mitchie in almost complete darkness, lit only from the back by the remote kitchen light, and from the side illumination of her tablet or phone screen (forgot). At ISO 25600. And guess what – when I removed the colours (the two light sources had different temperatures), I quite liked it. A bit like film, and not too grainy.

What if I tried that even with colour? Here are two of Tuna which I took some minutes ago:

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Again, both taken at ISO 25600 with no noise reduction, and also without sharpening. In fact I didn’t try any processing here and converted the raw files like they came out of camera (with saturation set to “-1”). If you try to change anything (like the saturation for instance), things fall apart quickly. But you can still improve them when converting them to black & white.

Of course the dynamic range of these is reduced, but the noise even doesn’t bother me too much even when looking at them at the size of my 24 inch monitor. I guess an A4-sized print would still be ok.

Pretty amazing what these small cameras can do today.

Thanks for reading.

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Windows 7 support

A day or two ago one of my colleagues told me (or rather us) that Windows support for their version 7 of the operating system ended this week. And yesterday I told the same to a friend who’s also in IT (in a manager position even), and his reaction was a bit like:

“What? We just rolled out version 7! Cannot be – I’m sure you’re talking about Windows XP?”

Well yes and no. For XP, even the “extended” support ended last year, that is correct. But if you look at Microsoft’s “Lifecycle” page, their so-called “mainstream” support for version 7 ended this week indeed. But the “extended” one will continue for another 5 years, time enough for most enterprises to upgrade to some newer client operating systems.

Should you have any questions about this, the page lists 3 commonly asked ones, and have a look at the “what does it mean?” page as well.

Basically, for Win7 that means that you have to install Service Pack 1, and/or to enable automatic updates. That way, your Win7 will still be supported until its “end of life” in about 5 years from now.

Vista? Oh well – two more years if you’re on Service Pack 2 (see my first link above).

Hope that clears any questions.

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Loud and clear…

Sometimes when Tuna the cat jumps right up the kitchen sink, I know that’s her way of telling us that she’s thirsty. So I had to give her something after taking this:

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Thirsty. Tuna, January 2015

Thanks for viewing.