Category: cat

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Busy times

We’ve been doing a lot during the last weeks, and then again, not so much. First it was Ramadan, so we slept during daytime (with times like 21:40 to 2:50 for eating and drinking approximately, you don’t have much time left to sleep during those nights).

I also didn’t take many photos. Some of colleagues, some of friends, and lately of our new office (we’ve moved within the same building). So here are a few:

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Working during lunch break

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The heavens above

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Three girls and a dog

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Dog

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Sebastian and friends

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A new place to sit and to work

We also got Tuna vaccinated, but we don’t have to give her to some cat “hotel” during our upcoming holidays – we’ve found someone who will care for her here.

Thanks for reading and viewing.

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Weekend warriors

Like most people who still have a regular job, and for whom photography is just a hobby, it’s mostly the weekends when I can take photos. So here are two from yesterday and from today:

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Tulip

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Photographer and model (Zuleikha and Tuna)

Thanks for viewing.

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Tuna at EV1

Here’s a photo of our cat, in really low light. EV1 means 1/15th of a second at ISO 3200 when using f/2; she was only lit by the distant dining room light and the TV set:

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Tuna the cat, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2016

Converted using Darktable 2.0.1 on Linux. Profiled noise reduction.

Thanks for viewing.

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Two photos from today

One outside, one inside:

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Family photo

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Tuna the cat on the piano bench in low light, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2016

Thanks for viewing.

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A few photos from a common Sunday walk

At the moment the temperatures are very nice, so after breakfast I suggested to go for a walk. Mitchie took her camera with my 50mm macro lens to get close-ups of the cherry blossoms, so I decided to go a bit wider and to get some more context within my frames. So I took the E-PL5 as well, and set my 14-42mm zoom lens to 17mm, which equals an angle of view of about 35mm on a 24x36mm film camera. The following photos were all taken with that focal length:

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Zuleikha and Tuna, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2016

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Zuleikha and Tuna, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2016

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Cherry blossom, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2016

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A ruin and a bird, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2016

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Property of National Geographic?

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Read this later…

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Spring, finally

Thanks for viewing.

P.S.: Tuna stayed out at least 2 hours more than us. Then she came back, and after the usual smooch greetings, she laid down in her chair to rest a bit. I took this portrait of hers with my E-M10 and the 25mm lens at f/2:

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Tuna the cat, back home after her Sunday walk, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2016

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Two more photos from this weekend

Here are two additional photos I took, both using flash:

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Birthday flowers, 8 days later…

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Tuna the cat, February 2016

Technical info:

For the first photo I mounted my Yongnuo compact flash at the position and into the direction which normally our 5W LED reading light has. The flash had its included diffuser cap mounted, and the power setting was 1/4. On the camera and under the flash I used the Yongnuo CTR-301P trigger, and the lens was my 45mm at f/2.5.

For the cat portrait I used the same compact flash with the same setting and remote on my computer desk. This time the cap was not mounted, and the flash pointed indirectly to the walls above my monitor, camera right. On camera left, one of my studio strobes did the same at 1/8 power, optically triggered by the smaller compact flash. Here the lens was my 25mm at f/2.8. I cropped the picture into the 3:2 format after adjusting the tilt a bit (about 0.3 degrees to the right).

Thanks for viewing.

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Three different – but “canned” – black & white conversions

Here’s a photo from Tuna from this morning. First one with “monotone” conversion, like Olympus calls it, by the Olympus Viewer 3 software – which does the same like when you set the camera to black & white directly:

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Tuna the cat, February 2016 (out of camera)

For the second one I used RawTherapee’s channel mixer on default settings:

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Tuna the cat, February 2016 (channel mixer)

And the third conversion was done with using the luminance equalizer, also with RawTherapee:

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Tuna the cat, February 2016 (luminance equalizer)

As you can see, the out of camera black & white and the one where I used the luminance equalizer are almost identical, so this is how Olympus does it in camera. If you do it in RawTherapee you can still fine-tune some settings, but as a starting point they’re both pretty close.

The channel mixer – with its default settings, more to that in another blog post – treats at least the blue channel differently, see my dark blue jacket on the chair, or the small carpet behind the cat (or the letter “R” of the “Happy birthday” in the background). Here you can adjust each of the colour channels separately and simulate different black & white films (I guess – but still have to check – if the also “canned” film simulations do the same with adjusting those channels only). I’ll test that later.

In the Gimp, there’s that very interesting GEGL C2G conversion. But with using Debian stable, I’m also still using the Gimp in version 2.8.x (also stable), and only the current developer version (2.9.x) uses more than 8 bits for each colour, so tests with that have to wait (I guess the jump will be as big as the one if you go from Photoshop Express to the real big – and expensive – version).

The photos you see on the internet are all 8 bits per channel only, since standard RGB jpg files are 8 bits, compressed. But it’s still a big difference for printing and also if you work with other colour spaces on a calibrated monitor (the best of which are 10 bits / channel).

Anyway. Before I get too technical, remember that it’s the *content* of the photo which counts.

Thanks for reading.

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Two photos of Tuna (our cat)

Kirk Tuck was praising the small “one inch” sensor cameras lately (and you have to put that in parentheses because their sensors ain’t one inch at all), and Bill Beebe lately wrote why he is still sticking to Olympus µ43rds, like I do as well.

Today I was using my older E-PL5 camera with its “kit zoom” set to 17mm, which equals an angle of view of 35mm on film cameras. The newer E-M10 is much faster to operate with its two wheels, but sometimes I just love to have an electronic viewfinder which you can tilt upwards 90 degrees, and to get another point of view with the lower camera.

Using that combination of camera, lens, and viewfinder I took two photos of our cat today, which I both cropped and processed as black & white photos using RawTherapee’s “channel mixer” (no film simluations, but the built-in possibilities of that raw converter):

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Oh, and photographers should watch a documentary about Bettina Rheims which I saw and recorded yesterday, and which you still can see on Arte+7 for about a week or so. Even if you don’t understand German and/or French, it’s still worthwhile to see one of the great living photographers of our times at work. Fair warning: most of her stuff isn’t really “safe for work”, but it’s real art nonetheless, and it starts with an exhibition of hers at Christie’s in London – one of the higher priced auction houses worldwide as you might guess.

Wonderful, and at least as good as the BBC documentary about David Bailey I once saw.

Thanks for reading and/or viewing.