Author: wjl

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The force awakens

We’re back from Cologne on Zuleikha’s birthday. I took some photos which are only interesting to our relatives plus one portrait of someone who still has to approve it for public display, otherwise I can’t show that as well.

But I still got a portrait of a robot called “BB-8“:

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BB-8

Cute little thing which can be controlled by a smartphone app, or which can explore the area autonomously. I’ve heard it can do some other things, but haven’t really dug deeper into it until now, since for a toy it’s pretty expensive.

Thanks for viewing.

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Season’s greetings, and happy holidays!

It’s one day before Christmas eve, and Zuleikha wanted to show us something she saw when visiting the Christmas market with her class and schoolmates. So we went to Frankfurt after shopping, only to find that the market is being disassembled already, and not a single booth was left open. But the weather was nice (at 12 degrees plus, it’s really too warm for the start of winter which was yesterday), and so we walked the city a bit, down to the river and back. And I took some unusual Christmas photo of some birds in flight:

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Seagulls and swans at the river Main in Frankfurt

We’ll be off for a few days, visiting relatives we don’t see that often, and Tuna the cat will guard the house:

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Tuna the cat, December 2015

Some friends will care for and feed the cat while we’ll be gone.

So whatever you will celebrate (or not), have a good time.

And as always, thanks for reading.

P.S., with technical info:

I’m back to my 25mm lens on the E-M10 camera, and it felt a bit like coming home – maybe I really got used to this 50mm-equivalent focal length. So the photos above from today were both taken with that combination, the one of Tuna with f/1.4 (lens fully open), hand-held at 1/8s at ISO1600 (thanks for the in-body image stabilisation!), and the bird photo with f/4 and 1/1000s at ISO200.

P.P.S.:

Here’s another one, taken today (Dec. 24th) in our living room. Same lens, this time with an aperture of f/2:

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Zuleikha, December 2015

Again, season’s greetings and happy holidays from us.

Thanks for reading.

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Fifty shades of black

Someone recently asked about an article which I’ve written earlier, but which cannot be restored – we don’t have a database backup from that time. It was about the blacks in my photos. And today I’ve got a somehow similar question by email from a friend. And looking in front of myself, on my desk I saw lots of black (or at least very dark) stuff, so I decided to take a photo of it:

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About the technique I use:

– first, I make sure that I have the correct exposure. While for many outdoor scenes I can trust the center-weighted setting of my cameras, indoors I always use a light meter, especially when using a studio strobe like I did here.

– second, and maybe of equal importance: I use the widest possible colour space I can get from my cameras, which is AdobeRGB (instead of sRGB). Some modern printing systems can go even wider, but there aren’t many non-pro cameras on the market which can be set to take Profoto images.

– I expose “correctly”, which means I take everything I can get into the 12 bit dynamics of my cameras. If you have 14 or even 16 bit, all the better for you.

– then I convert from the raw .orf files to 16 bit .tif using the Olympus Viewer 3 raw converter, checking for any over- or underexposure again, and also for a correct white balance (which was set in camera already, but sometimes it can still be enhanced). OV3 doesn’t exist for my Linux machine, so I dual-boot into Win10 or fire up s small Win7 virtual machine to do this. I’m on SSD nowadays, so both ways are fast.

– back in Linux, I use RawTherapee for final checks, conversions to black & white, cropping, and to give images some more Exif data, like a title and some tags.

That’s mostly it. I think the most important steps are to set your camera to AdobeRGB (or to whatever the biggest colour space it offers), and to expose correctly. Having a current sensor with a wide dynamic range (check DxO for this) also helps.

The rest – and any post processing – is up to personal bias and taste. Look at Ming Thein who does a very good job concerning the blacks in his images. Another example would be the Leica photographer Thorsten Overgaard.

Hoping that this is useful,

thanks for reading.

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During and after a short Sunday walk

We were out for a short walk today, and I took this one of Zuleikha:

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Then later we split – Zuleikha and Mitchie wanted to deliver some invitations for Zuleikha’s upcoming birthday party, and I turned back home. On the way I saw one of the two Maine Coon cats of a neighbour family. It wasn’t easy to take her picture, because most of the time she was smooching around my legs, and much too close:

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Back at home, I had cleaned up part of our bookshelf lately, and emptied it of lots of old and outdated computer magazines. Tuna liked to scratch those magazines, and to sharpen her claws on them, but now she made use of the empty space:

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All photos taken with the Olympus OM-D E-M10 (my personal “camera of the year”), and with the Olympus M.Zuiko 45mm/1.8 at f/2.5.

Thanks for viewing.

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Hope

From this morning, on our veranda:

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Hope (Against all odds)

Thanks for viewing.

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To infinity and beyond (my longest “lens”)

Today’s featured article on the German Wikipedia start page was the one about Hubble Deep Field (English version here). That reminded me about a feature on N24, one of the many private news broadcasters which I had recorded, so after dinner we watched that and learned quite a bit about Hubble.

I told Zuleikha that this space telescope was “slightly bigger” than mine, and after explaining the differences (the mirror of mine is 15cm, the one of Hubble 240cm) it made her laugh 😉

Now that she’s in bed, I played around with my DSLR and the longer one of my two zoom lenses. That E-520 is from 2009, has only 10 Megapixels, and is still working nicely. Here’s a shot of the telescope head from quite a distance:

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To infinity and beyond (my longest “lens”)

Took this with aperture f/16 and with indirect lighting from one of my studio strobes. I was about 0.2 stops too high, which I corrected with the Olympus Viewer 3 raw converter, but the image is pretty much like out of camera.

As you can see, the telescope is of the Newtonian type where you look into it from the side. When used as a lens, it has an equivalent focal length of a 1500mm lens on a film camera (real focal length is 750mm, and (Micro) Four Thirds has a “crop factor” of 2, compared with 24x36mm film). So this is indeed my longest lens, which gives something like this:

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Moon, stacked from 21 images

Not quite like Hubble, but a bit easier to handle, isn’t it? A bit cheaper as well…

Thanks for viewing.

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The Tools and Toys 2015 list

The staff over at Tools and Toys just posted their list of some favourite things they’ve found or bought in 2015. Some of that stuff is expensive, but it’s still a worthwhile read. And at the bottom of their article, I’ve found their test of Mitchie’s 20mm/1.7 Panasonic lens which I have on one of my cameras since a while. Took this one of our cat today using it:

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Tuna the cat – full, nice, and warm

In fact what they tested is the version 2 of the Panasonic Lumix 20mm/1.7 lens, and they also have tests of some other lenses we have, like the Panasonic Leica DG Summilux 25mm/1.4, and the Olympus M.Zuiko 45mm/1.8.

This end of the year period is always the time when lots of people make such lists, and LensRentals is no exception. Their list of most rented and highest rated new stuff is even a bit more on the expensive side, since many people just rent what they can’t afford (or don’t need so often that buying the stuff would calculate right).

Hoping that this might be useful for someone, as always, thanks for reading.

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Tuna the cat, sceptical

Took this today with my compact flash on the camera, but turned back- and upwards with using the table cloth as a reflector. Tuna looked sceptical – maybe she knew that I would underexpose it by about one and a half stop?

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Tuna the cat, sceptical

Thanks for viewing.

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The stories we tell ourselves

I’ve been reading a lot lately – well, ‘a lot’ is clearly overstated, but at least I’m reading books again. Real books, no virtual electronic files, because like pictures need to be hung onto walls, books have to be printed and bound.

It all started with a movie tho, and the one which touched me most this (almost passed) year was the Wachowskis’ Cloud Atlas. I found it totally fascinating that they managed to portrait the characters and the general idea (which is based on Nietzsche’s eternal return) so clearly and precisely in only a few hours. This deep introduction into a story’s characters is nowadays far more easy for long-running series like Lost, and even in the past good and long stories like Treasure Island, or even David Balfour needed long movies in 4 or more parts. Cloud Atlas (the movie) manages that in 172 minutes.

But I was starting about books, and instead of reading Cloud Atlas (the book), I decided to start with the first of David Mitchell’s novels, Ghostwritten (German book title is Chaos).

No, I won’t describe it here, but what a book it is! A chain of short stories which all are connected like in chaos theory (where a butterfly’s wings can produce a storm elsewhere). Highly recommended.

And from yesterday to today I was reading Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Woods (German book title is Naokos Lächeln).

And while I also won’t write much about it here, it’s some coming-of-age story like Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, together with a good amount of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, and a good part of Franz Kafka in it. A bit sad, but also highly recommended.

So – repetitions if you like to describe these stories that way. But aren’t all the stories we tell each others repetitions of the same old themes, re-written to explain them to the next generations? These stories, told and re-told from generation to generation are maybe as old as mankind itself (and Tom Hanks shows that very well in the beginning and end of Cloud Atlas (the movie)).

So if you have some spare time at this year’s end, go and have a look at some photos. Real photos hung onto real walls. And lose yourself into them – seeing them online isn’t the same! Or get a good book, and read and lose yourself in that.

The ones mentioned here are good. Life’s too short for bad ones.

Thanks for reading.