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Go and have a look at Zack’s blog.

Then, after our lunch break was almost over, I took one of Arno, working already:

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First: well. $3.66 for a gallon (which is almost 4 liters if I remember that correctly), well that might be high to US standards. Ours? See here, from November:

That is per liter, and prices now are of course a bit higher again.

Second: this is our car, a Toyota Corolla from around 2002 or 2003 or so, in the garage of my current employer (IBM Frankfurt, Germany):

Some other things you might have to understand when reading this:

We, as Germans, are very arrogant about cars. Cars are our main export articles, the real backbone of our struggling economy, and Germans as such are more than proud of everything they build. In the smaller classes (and creating a class of its own) are the VW Golf (it’s called “Rabbit” elsewhere), and according to German magazine testers, no other car ever came close. I mean, not really close. They do like some Ford or Opel (GM) from time to time, but that’s about it – the Golf is king. Here’s a recent interior shot of my colleague Arno’s VW, taken from the passenger seat:

In the higher (read: business) class, there are mostly sedans, from Audi (belongs to VW), BMW, and Mercedes, the latter being *the* crown jewel of German engineering. With sports cars, it’s Porsche, plus some Beamers and Benzes as well. Even Audi has some very impressive vehicle. But this is Ferrari territory, so let’s not get off-topic too much.

What I wanted to say is that for the typical German, there are German cars. Asian ones are called “rice bowls” – so much for being arrogant. Of course, those who really know (and that is the car makers themselves) have high respect and praise for brands like Toyota, and most recently, Hyundai. They are even afraid of those, because of their really good price-/performance ratios (especially of Hyundai), and the sheer quality (no one beats Toyota in this regard).

Second point you have to remember when reading this: I’m not that typical German. I know a good product when I see one, and in the case of Toyota, I even think I understand and acknowledge their ‘Kaizen‘ philosophy (I have two books about that topic alone). This is, in short, a real no nonsense approach about how we work, and how we can improve it. But before I digress again, let me just tell everyone that I have real trust in the quality of Japanese engineering, and especially the one of Toyota. It’s like they still fight a World War, and win it with high quality. And Korean maker Hyundai understood this very well, and is following suit.

That all said, here is my “dream car” (if there’s anything like it):

That’s a Lexus IS 250, which I cannot afford, and which also isn’t really a maximum MPG car. There’s a Diesel version, but Mitchie doesn’t like Diesels. This one has the size of a Beamer 3, or a Mercedes C Class, but in my opinion it’s much much better (Germans will kill me for that sentence alone). Automatic transmission of course – with over 200hp, you don’t need to change gears manually anymore, really. This is the car I’d really be happy with – except at the gas stations

The successors of our Toyota Corolla aren’t called ‘Corolla’ anymore here in Germany. Due to some unknown marketing thoughts and arguments, these were renamed to ‘Auris’ (probably thinking that aurum (latin for ‘gold’) sounds a lot better than ‘Gorilla’ (German nickname of ‘Corolla’; I’ve also heard ‘Coyote’ instead of ‘Toyota’ (that one came from my boss))).

The current Auris is also offered as a Hybrid, just like the Prius, and it’s about 5k€ cheaper than that one, with a size of about ours:

(These last two pictures belong to Toyota of course, but I assume and consider praising them here is some kind of ‘fair use’)

Ok. Back to Bill, who needs a second car for his wife. They’re currently contemplating about either a Ford or a Toyota Yaris, having also seen some cute but too small Fiat 500 and some Hyundais.

I’ve driven a Yaris for a few days while ours was in maintenance, and they’re not bad. That wasn’t the most recent one, but it was more modern than ours, switching off its engine at each red traffic light, starting it again with just a step on the paddle, but it still took about as much fuel as our Corolla, so I would take a strong look at those as well. The Corolla maybe doesn’t feel that ‘roomy’, but this is because there’s much more built in – it doesn’t have that savings box feel like a Yaris does. That said, our 1.4l Corolla also takes too much fuel – with some 7 liters on 100km, it takes more than the much bigger 1.8l Carina (now Avensis) we’ve had before. But ok – I guess this is what they call ‘progress’. Smaller cars get bigger and heavier all the time, and that newer Corolla has aircon and everything which the lighter Carina didn’t have.

The Ford? Well Germans as such would again say: “nice car, *almost* the quality of a VW” – disregarding that all those brands get very low rates in durability from our automobile clubs, compared to a Toyota (or even a Hyundai). I’ve seen some nice Fords, but they never really got me excited. Here in Germany, Fords are built in Cologne (where I grew up), and they were always competing against Opel (in Rüsselsheim, belonging to GM), and *not* even close to Beamer or Mercedes. On the other hand, quality control with BMW is really bad, which led to some comments like “Bring Mich Werkstatt” (“bring me to the repair shop”, (mis-)using BMW name for fun).

The Ford is an ok car, I’d really have a look at that one as well, but I would also insist on a MPG test drive – the ones my former employers had were all a bit more thirsty than what the maker claimed.

Regarding durability and price-/performance ratio, I’d take a hard look at the new Hyundai i30 before considering a (smaller for the same price) Toyota. This is also in the “Golf (Rabbit) class”, and VW are really afraid of that one.

That said, I’d buy the Toyota. A Corolla/Auris most probably; small gasoline or even that hybrid one. Hope that helps, Bill…

Here’s my favourite present from today, taken with daylight:

And here are two more, both with an ISO 800 setting:

You still haven’t seen everything (like my camera strap). Finally, just for the fun of it (no present), apples again:

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“Why?”, you might ask, since every camera has a very reliable meter built in already, which you can set to integral (whole picture), center-weighted, or even spot metering. Ok; let me show you why.

This photo of my birthday cake, with Zuleikha slightly blurred in the near background would have produced a problem in any of the in-camera metering settings mentioned above – because of that bright white styrofoam packaging of the (industrial made) cake, which takes up almost one third of the image. This should be white of course, the girls face still “natural” (which, when using spot metering onto her face would mean 18% gray), and the background in the kitchen doesn’t matter that much – its artificial light cannot be corrected anyway.

So the educated and experienced photographer would overexpose such an image. But by how much? It’s one full stop in this image, but until you get there with guess work, you might need several tries, with checking the histogram on your camera display, and that is still guess work.

But read the light with a meter, instead of the more or less reflective object with you camera, and you’ll get it right with the first try. Whites will be white, blacks will be black, and all of a sudden it doesn’t matter anymore if you try to catch a bride in snow, or the black cat in the coal cellar. Life gets easier indeed.

That photo by the way would have been much stronger when cropped to, say, 16:9 (like a HD TV would show it), like this:

But, while taking the picture, you still have the same problem.

Another scenario where a flash meter can help is when you try to light up indoor scenes against a bright background, like in this one:

I used flash here for the cake, which would otherwise have been a pretty black silhouette against that window with the daylight from outside. Maybe a reflector instead of a flash would have helped as well, but still – trying to figure out the amount of contrast between the inside and the outside light without using a meter leaves you with lots of trial-and-error until you get it halfway right. Oh, and please don’t take these photos here as serious attempts of art; I made them only for the purpose of this article.

Finally, the device itself:

This is one of the cheaper models from Sekonic – the same one which is used by professionals like Zack Arias (who recently bought a $25,000 camera, so he could afford more expensive meters I guess). The numbers you see displayed in this picture are also the settings used to take it, and in this case, the measuring of the camera was very close to them. But: take that meter out of the frame, and the camera would struggle again (in fact it won’t, but it would of course “see” that big white styrofoam and would turn it into a perfect 18% gray without human intervention – remember, computers are silly).

And, just to show it again doing the job which I originally wanted it for:

As you can probably guess from the displayed numbers, this photo was taken with the help of flash light. The flash was right and behind the object, and bounced from backwards over the ceiling. No front flash was used, and the daylight coming in from the front was almost 2 stops under. I would have guessed an exposure with an aperture of 5.6, which would have left me with a photo which would have been 2/3 stops underexposed. If you “correct” that in post production – and who doesn’t, from time to time? – you would increase noise which could have been avoided right from the start, with using a more “correct” exposure (I have to use those parentheses, because something like a “correct” exposure of course doesn’t exist – it’s always the intention which counts). Or, after using an aperture of 5.6, and checking the histogram, I could have gotten closer to this in steps, or simply take more photos, like when bracketing. But this is something you can do with stills only – that best shot of your model, daughter, or bride will never be perfectly lit when you don’t care and think about it beforehand.

That’s why I wanted one. And that’s why people like Neil say something like: “It will make your life much easier”. I’m glad that I finally have it.

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What you see on top of that cake and book is a camera strap, plus a selfmade card from Zuleikha on the left. I’ll probably post more photos later today, first we have to celebrate.

On the left you can see our building ‘B’, where I work. Opposite of us is Deutsche Bank, where a truck was just turning when I took this.

After that, I went to our entrance hall, where some ‘early birds’ (colleagues) met already. I wanted to get as much hall as possible, so I set the lens to its widest setting and took this:

Only one of these colleagues stood still enough to not end up blurry, as you can see. But it was the building I was after…

Then Heike took my camera and even climbed her desk to take this photo of me – cropped to 6:7 format and converted to black and white in post:

Thanks a lot, Heike!

And during our lunch break, Arno and me drove to a nearby home improvement store, where he wanted to buy some things. I took these two photos of some flowers, and some strange garden horses (or even unicorns? Hard to tell):

All of these photos were taken with the E-PL1 and its kit zoom, the first two with using my tripod.

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Cropped this one to 3:2 format for a change, and treated it a bit differently using Corel AfterShot Pro.

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