Music. Photography. Thoughts.
Here are some photos we took since Friday – half of which were taken with my camera, the other half with Mitchie’s:
Tulips, Moerfelden-Walldorf 2018
Tuna diva, Moerfelden-Walldorf 2018
Wolfgang, Moerfelden-Walldorf 2018 – photographer: Mitchie
Dying flowers and a bass guitar, Moerfelden-Walldorf 2018
Thanks for viewing.
I had that DM Paradies 200 colour negative film which was in our bookshelf, and expired since over three and a half years. So I loaded it into my camera (see two posts below), and used it. And today I’ve got it back. Here are three photos like the lab scanned them off the film, with grain and not very high-res. I still like them:
My colleague Arno isn’t in the office at the moment. So today I put some of the prints from that film onto his desk for when he returns. I documented that with the digital E-PL5 and its kit zoom at 14mm:
Thanks for viewing.
Yesterday Zuleikha officially joined the “teenie” club. I took a photo of her in mixed light while she received some greetings and wishes on the phone:
Birthday wishes on the phone
Zuleikha, December 2017
(just turned 13)
Since it was impossible to correct the colour cast of the mixed (warm) LED and the daylight from outdoors, I tried several options in Nik’s Silver Efex Pro2 software. But in the end, the in-camera black and white conversion worked best.
Thanks for viewing.
I haven’t written anything since over a week. And I also didn’t take many photos, partly because my colleague Arno is off for his holiday, partly because the weather didn’t play nice at times, and I haven’t been out that much during my lunch breaks.
But apart from the usual cat photos, there were some opportunities, like a pre-Christmas concert from Zuleikha and some of her schoolmates. So let me show you some here:
Don’t stop!
Power lines, a chimney, and clouds
Me at work, lit by my monitor
The next ones don’t have titles. They’re all titled “Vorweihnachtliches Konzert der Prälat-Diehl-Schule”
http://praelat-diehl-schule.de/vorweihnachtliches-konzert-der-praelat-diehl-schule/:
Then I took some high ISO images, with the maximum ISO set to 6400 (and the camera did make use of that at times)…
And all of a sudden, we had some first snow:
The making of… a snow cat
“Your new Mützenständer!” – that is what Zuleikha said to Mitchie when she saw her mum’s cap on my bass guitar…
As always, thanks for viewing and reading.
Played around with Silver Efex Pro 2 again today, on this:
This is the original photo, with the “Natural” setting of my Olympus OM-D E-M10 camera. In Silver Efex Pro2 I used the “020 Fine Arts” preset this time, which is a bit more high key than the 019 one, and which also adds the frame border you see here. What I also did was to selenium-tone it (number 4 in SFx).
Here’s another snapshot from today. It’s the Latin version of “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets”:
And as always, thanks for viewing.
Today I made photos for Zuleikha, all with the white background like in my last article. Zuleikha needs some photo for application letters – next year those kids will do a practical fortnight in their preferred professions, and they have to find jobs themselves, it’s just part of the game.
I took Zuleikha’s favourite photo from the session and also made a black and white version of it, just in case, and just out of my own curiosity. Looks nice with the “019 Fine Arts” preset of Nik Silver Efex Pro2 (plus a bit of final tweaking in RawTherapee like always):
Here’s another one of Zuleikha’s choices, tho this ain’t for applications 😉
Our chosen ones are all on Flickr, so Zuleikha can use and download them on demand whenever she likes to or needs them. I have unlimited storage space on Flickr; time to make use of that 😉
As always, thanks for viewing.
All with the 45mm lens on the Olympus E-M10 camera. The last one was taken a few minutes ago by Zuleikha – thanks kiddo!
Thanks for viewing.
Yesterday we were out for a short walk in a small village on the other side of the nearby airport. Here’s Zuleikha sitting on a bench near the river:
Back at home, I was doing the usual daily practice routine on my bass, followed by playing around with some standards. As some of you might know, I have the “New Real Book” since some 30 years or so, but it doesn’t contain every standard you might look for – for these, you’d also have to get some of the older classic real books, or better yet, iReal Pro for your smartphone and/or tablet computer, which comes with about 1,300 free classics. And other than the name suggests, this also exists for Android devices. But these are chord sheets / playalongs only, like the original real books these tracks don’t come with the melody due to licensing restrictions.
Here’s also a new version of the collab with jonetsu/nominal6 on Soundcloud. He mixed in my fretless bass quite nicely already, tho the piece is still considered work in progress. In the LinuxMusicians forum entry you can also see some screenshots of the commercial Harrison Mixbus 32c console (on Linux of course) with which he mixed it – together with some nice plugins which I don’t have on Ardour (and which he used for the bass). Anyway, go ahead and listen to that small ambient piece in case you’re interested. It’s under a CC license which means that you could for instance use it for own videos and the likes.
So – currently I’m back to work, where I just upgraded my WordPress to 4.8.1 before writing this (together with updates of two plugins). And today I’m expecting a call from my brother who will visit our aunt, and who will probably need my help with her Linux machine during my lunch break.
And later on, I’ll probably continue working on “Blue Bossa” on my bass…
Thanks for reading.
Last Sunday, Zuleikha played piano together with some of her classmates of the piano teacher’s class at the local sports hall. Mitchie took it on video, and I recorded the piano (a nice sounding Yamaha Grand) with my Røde microphone, the Focusrite interface, and the company notebook (a Lenovo Thinkpad P50 running the IBM Open Client for the Debian Community, which is currently based upon Ubuntu 16.04 LTS).
Then I used every minute I could to learn new (to me) programs like Cinelerra.
In the end we’ve got a nice sounding movie with all the kids playing, and I also learned how to use fader automation in Ardour (tools like these weren’t even available while I was in the studios during my youth). Cool stuff, and the highlight for me personally was Zuleikha performing one of her own compositions – even some of the other kids were quite impressed by that. Cannot show the whole video here, but I’ll ask Zuleikha if she’ll put something online on her blog – maybe only some of her own playing (we’d have to ask too many parents to show everything here). If yes, then I can put up a link to it here.
On Saturday, June 17th, the latest and greatest version of Debian was released to the public, as promised. And I’ve got and installed it last night, just after finishing the video. It’s nice, and everything worked pretty much out of the proverbial box for me. I did an upgrade followed by a dist-upgrade like recommended, and the whole process didn’t last much longer than just half an hour. Nice.
And now, just a few minutes before writing this, I discovered a nice video on Youtube:
This is Adam Ben Ezra on his double bass.
Enjoy.
We’re just back from visiting some relatives in Cologne. Haven’t done this since a while, so it was about time. And while being there anyway, Mitchie and Zuleikha wanted to see the Stollwerck Chocolate Museum, which now belongs to Lindt. I took Zuleikha’s portrait in front of a rebuilt classic store:
Zuleikha at Stollwerck (now Lindt) Chocolate Museum, Cologne, April 2017
As always, thanks for viewing.