Three films, one portrait I liked

Maybe I was a bit sloppy. Or maybe I just pressed the shutter too fast and on too many objects. Out of the three Kodak black & white films which I had in my camera lately, I liked exactly 1 photo – a portrait of my colleague Arno, like so often:

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I quickly (and again, sloppily) “scanned” the negative using my OM-D E-M10 with the old Four Thirds ZD 50mm/2 macro lens against a white background illuminated by one of my studio strobes, using a polaroid slide copier holder in front of that macro lens. So what you see here is a digitized version (ca. 13.5MP) of the 24x36mm negative turned positive.

This was also one of the first photos I made with my new old 135mm/2.8 lens, and it’s very nice and sharp even when used fully open like here.

Like always, thanks for viewing.

Tuna from yesterday, Arno from today. Both toned.

Here are two photos I made yesterday and today, and both are toned using the Lab curves in RawTherapee. Arno’s photo was converted to black and white using Nik Silver Efex Pro2 (with the 019 “Fine Art” preset), Tuna was more or less out of camera (and Olympus Viewer could do the same).

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Oh, almost forgot: Tuna was lit with two of my studio strobes (both simply reflected over the walls), while I took Arno’s photo in natural daylight in the company.

Another difference: I photographed Tuna with the 25mm/1.4 Panasonic Leica DG Summilux lens at f/2.8, and Arno with the new, old, and manual OM Zuiko 135mm/2.8, also at f/2.8.

As always, full resolution photos are on Flickr – you get there if you click on the pictures here.

Also as always, thanks for viewing.

Some more digital monochromes

Here are a few more photos which I made with my camera set to black & white:

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Tuna the cat, November 2017 (Panasonic Leica DG Summilux 25mm/1.4 fully open at f/1.4)

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Tuna the cat, November 2017 (Olympus OM G.Zuiko 50mm/1.4 fully open at f/1.4)

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Tuna the cat, November 2017 (Olympus OM G.Zuiko 50mm/1.4 at f/2)

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Arno, November 2017 (Olympus OM Zuiko 135mm/2.8 at f/4)

Thanks for viewing.

Photography, videos, sound recording and so on

Haven’t written much here lately.

Since I’ve identified what I’m actually after with my photography earlier this year, I’m taking mostly family photos – not of any interest to the general public.

And since Mitchie (and also Zuleikha) is/are more into video, I’ve concentrated a bit more onto the audio aspect of that – having been in professional studios not only as a musician but also as a technician, I try to “give back” some of the gathered knowledge from these areas to my family, my colleagues, and so on.

For some colleagues, I’ve made a (company-internal) video already about how to get the OCDC (Open Client for the Debian Community) IBM layers on top of a more or less “naked” Ubuntu 16.04.2, and I’ll make some more about the tools – both hardware and free and open source software – that I use, and about how I use all that stuff. De-Essers, compressors, LUFS sound leveling, something like this. Plus some microphone techniques.

I also tried to help someone in this thread of the LinuxMusicians forum, for whom/which I uploaded some screenshots to Flickr lately:

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Ubuntu Studio 16.04.2 LTS, running from a USB stick on my machine, with running QJackctl and the Hydrogen drum computer

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Focusrite Control software, running on Windows 10

Other than that, I’ll cover some tools like Audacity, Ardour and the Calf Studio Gear plugins, Openshot and whatever I’m using. Since most of these tools are cross-platform, the colleagues might want to use them even on their Windows machines; let’s see.

These will be company-internal screencasts and/or videos, just for those people who want to / have to publish some public stuff on the companies’ official Youtube stream(s). Lots of stuff like that exists already, just look at the streams of people like Curtis Judd for instance. No need for me to add anything public here, since there are so many of these technical tips channels already.

Anyway; I’m quite busy most of the time, and just wanted to explain why you see fewer entries here, or on my Flickr stream.

Soon we’ll also visit some family members in Cologne; it’s about time for that as well. Plus both my brother, Mitchie, Zuleikha, and me want to see/visit the Music Store there – can’t wait for that…

Like always, thanks for reading.

Happy new year!

We wish all of our readers a happy new year 2017. Since I’ve only made some crappy fireworks shots until now, here are some last ones from last year. Taken Thursday, Friday, and Saturday:

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Arno, playing with Tux (the Linux penguin mascot)

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Cold

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Tuna, December 2016

That last one was taken with the “kit zoom” (of the E-PL5) on my E-M10 camera at 17mm. The camera was still set to an upper auto ISO limit of 3200 from Zuleikha’s birthday party in a dark bowling center, and because of the limited opening of that lens at 17mm (around f/4 or so), ISO 3200 was what my camera used here. This was a few hours before the end of 2016, and little did Tuna know about the upcoming fireworks, and that she’d be hiding under some beds again… those crazy humans!

Thanks for reading.

Smokin’ Arno

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Smokin’ Arno

Taken today on our employers’ roof garden using my old and manual OM Zuiko 50mm/1.8 lens fully open at f/1.8.

– raw development (from .orf to .tif) with Olympus Viewer 3 on Windows 10
– added Kodak Portra 160VC film simulation using Google Nik Color Efex Pro 4 on Windows 10 (free download here)
– added Exif title and some tags using RawTherapee 4.2.0 on Debian GNU/Linux 8.x “Jessie”
– developed from .tif to .jpg using RawTherapee 4.2.0 on Debian GNU/Linux 8.x “Jessie”
(- uploaded to Flickr to link to it from here)

Thanks for viewing.

A week in photos

Wow; it’s a week already since I’ve posted some photos, and a rather busy and fast one it was. So I didn’t take and upload as many pictures as usual, and most of them (in fact all except one) are in black & white.

Like this one here, of Tuna our cat. Tried some Ilford HP5+ film emulation on her, but without the grain:

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The only colour photo I took and actually uploaded to Flickr was taken during a short cigarette break on the company’s roof garden. I was there with my colleague Arno and saw some other colleague (never seen him before), reading a book in the already setting sun. Looked like this:

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Then, two days ago, this:

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Zuleikha was just finishing her homework in normal room light, and from a comparison of more or less standard outputs of different raw converters which I did last weekend, I decided that for black & white, Olympus Viewer 3 gave the best results.

Also in black & white, and taken yesterday during a concert at Zuleikha’s school, Herr Koch on his Flügelhorn (they played “Feels so good” from Chuck Mangione, and indeed that felt and sounded very nice!):

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I also tried to take some of Zuleikha’s friend Yuma who was excellent like always, but my photos weren’t. Guess I’ll have to ask and to invite them for a photo session in good light and in a controlled environment.

And finally, a few moments ago I took another cat portrait of Tuna, this time with bounced flash and guessed exposure (which was a bit too high this time, but I could correct it in post):

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I cropped this one, and set the aspect ratio to 3:2 to get closer to a 135 “small” film (Kleinbildfilm) look. My aperture was f/2 here, so it’s about the same as a picture taken on 135 film with an aperture of f/4, concerning the depth of field.

As always, thanks for reading.

Two photos from Sunday, and two from today

On Sunday, my colleague Gertrud invited us to a concert in which she performed. It was also the 90th anniversary of her band, the “Mandolinenorchester Winkel 1926“. Here are two photos I took:

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It was a bit dark in the Brentanoscheune, so I took that first photo with my 40-150mm lens at ISO 6400. The light was a bit unforgiving for portraiture as well, so I converted it to black & white.

This next one was taken with my 25mm/1.4 lens at ISO 4000, while the Mayor held his speech:

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This shows the whole band, and it was a nice concert they gave – so thanks again for the invitation, Gertrud! We enjoyed it very much.

This morning when I came to work, I read Ming Thein’s blog for a few minutes (this article in case you’re interested), and then I decided to take a photo of my work place:

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But the real nice light was outside, so I opened my window to take this, hand-held at 1/6th of a second:

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As always, thanks for reading.

Retirement of a dear colleague

Today was the last workday of one of our colleagues from Filenet. His name is Detlef, and he and his whole (now former) team are so-called “mobile workers”, which means that we see them only about once a week, but we do so since we’ve moved into the IBM Frankfurt offices over 7 years ago.

Heike (Detlef’s team lead) and her team set up a champagne breakfast and invited our team as well, so I offered to take a few photos. I cannot show all of them, but here are some from today’s event:

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It was fun having Detlef around, and I certainly wish him a nice and well-deserved retirement time. We hope to hear from him once in a while…

… and as always, thanks for reading.