Other photographers: Trey Ratcliff

I’ve decided to show the work of others here as well. Sometimes that’s possible, sometimes I would have to ask their permission first. It’s possible if/when others have or use the same or a similar CC licensing for their photos as I do – in that case, you can, if not, ask them. Easy as that.

One who is very well known, maybe because he shares freely, maybe because he’s simply that good – is Trey Ratcliff. Presenting him here isn’t really necessary, as he has lots of followers and people who admire his work. He’s pretty good even with HDR, and wrote some tutorials about it, and he has lots and lots of cool landscape and/or cityscape work.

His blog is called “Stuck in Customs“, since he’s also traveling a lot. And from his latest post which he called “Facemasks of Toyko“, here’s the first one he showed. Taken with a Sony A7R camera and using a manually focused Leica 50mm/1.4 lens:

Shibuya Hair, by Trey Ratcliff

Well worth a visit, if you don’t do that anyway already.

Thanks for viewing.

A week with the 14mm lens

I want to further explore how to take wide angle photos, something I’m not really good at. So I mounted my 14mm lens onto the camera at the beginning of the week, and never took it off until now. I didn’t get any breathtaking or world changing photos until now, but at least I experimented a bit with it, like shooting straight into the sun, using high ISO settings, or trying to fill the frame with the 88 keys of Zuleikha’s piano. So here are some from the week which ends soon:

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Celltower silhouette at noon. 3 stops under-exposed.

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Thirty perfumed candles, stacked up in perfect squares by Zuleikha. ISO 5000, no noise reduction.

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88. +1EV exposure compensation, lit by a 6W LED reading light turned away from it. Turned back half a stop in post.

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The creek

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The land where trees have numbers

Thanks for viewing.

A Sunday walk, and what grandma made

Took a few photos during a walk we did today:

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Fallen tree

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Zuleikha’s hiking stick

And this morning I took a photo of what my grandma – the mother of my mother – made for the whole family. This morning’s photo wasn’t good enough, so I took the same one again this evening:

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Egg warmer, made by my grandma

Pretty genious idea, isn’t it? And no – they’re not for sale, even if I could make these myself.

Thanks for viewing.

Cat on the fence, at dusk

When I went out for a smoke last time, Tuna joined me. And instead of leaving our veranda through the fence, this time she decided to just sit on it. It was getting dark already, and tho the sky looks very bright here – in fact it’s overblown in this picture – this is ISO 2000 with the lens opened to f/2, at 1/80th of a second, so it was darker than it may look here. I applied “auto gradation”, but no noise reduction, and did only minimal post processing like always:

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By the way, I like Flickr’s new image viewer a lot, especially the small camera and lens symbols and the exif data, if the photo has some. The dark background is also kind of cool. Very well done, bravo!

Screenshot from 2014-03-29 19:32:32

Thanks for viewing.

Two photos which I took today

During the last three days I didn’t take a single photo, which is unusual. And today I took four, of which I’ll show two here, both from the lunch walk with my colleague Arno:

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These new Telekom buildings

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Tubular bells

Thinking about those images on Flickr, they all have links to this blog which are now broken. Still haven’t figured out what to do with them – I cannot edit some 2,000 image descriptions…

Update: ok, here’s another one which I took minutes ago, in very low light (only from the kitchen, next room). As you can see, we need new coffee cups soon. ISO 5000, no noise reduction:

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Mitchie’s coffee cup

Thanks for reading.

The server is running again

Ok – I have completely reinstalled our virtual server from scratch, starting with a minimal Debian 7 “Wheezy” image, and during the last two days I installed and configured every service you need on such an internet server. Mail was the biggest problem due to some silly config error, but that is up and running again as well.

The content? Well I don’t care that much, neither did my brother Willi, so we’re starting once more with a blank table. But we’re still looking for Mitchie’s most recent database backups. Could be on some CDs somewhere.

This page? I’ll figure out what to write about, and what to show. And after two long evenings, I can go to bed a bit earlier again, just like Tuna would do…

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Thanks for reading.

Hello world!

We had to reinstall the operating system and all applications on our server. So all previous content from lonien.de is gone for the moment, and will be filled again whenever we have time to do that.

It’s still work in progress, so thanks for your patience and understanding.