The little huntress likes this place:
As always, thanks for viewing.
Wilma’s lair
Wilma and Cookie
As always, thanks for viewing.
Trying RawTherapee
My camera is set to black & white most of the time. So the preview image both in its electronic viewfinder as also on its display are black & white, and so is the raw file if you open it with Olympus (or now, rather OM Systems) Workspace which is the proprietary raw converter you’ll get for free together with the cameras.
Problem is, that’s for Windows and MacOS only which I don’t like.
If I open the file with other raw converters on Linux, like RawTherapee or Darktable, I see the raw file in colour of course. And since both have good black & white film emulations, and mostly everything looks just fine in Ilford FP4 or HP5, this time I decided to leave it in colour. So here is Wilma on our veranda from today:
After using RawTherapee for the conversion with pretty much its standard settings meaning that I did nothing else than im- and exporting it, I still took the converted image into Gimp to apply “Auto White balance” which just stretches the contrast quite nicely – much faster than trying this inside the raw converter.
So that’s it – a colour photo treated with free (as in speech *and* as in beer) software only. The only disadvantage is that I’ll *have to* see the image in colour first, even if I want it to be in black & white.
Anyway, as always, thanks for reading and for viewing.
Cat siesta
It’s warm, and so the cats are resting. Here are Cookie from yesterday, and Wilma from today:
Cookie just came back and is eating while Wilma is on the sofa still…
As always, thanks for viewing.
…
Whispering: thanks for viewing… 🙂
Wilma is here :)
In fact, at the moment, both neighbours’ cats are here – Cookie is sleeping on the couch, and Wilma on my bed. Here she is resting against my leg:
We’re happy to see that little whirlwind again – but I wonder what happened to her offspring, haven’t seen any (yet)…
As always, thanks for viewing.
Cookie on the veranda
As always, thanks for viewing.
Cookie, resting most of the time
Cookie the neighbours’ tomcat which visits us pretty much daily by now can be very active – I saw him catching three or four mice lately, and even a bird; never thought he’d get one of those… but when he’s in, he’s mostly resting. Like, half of the day or so:
I cropped that last photo into a 21:9 format, and maybe that was just invented for sleeping cats? Looks like, doesn’t it?
Wilma the much smaller female is also visiting us again, about which we are very glad, that one’s just lovely. But she almost never sleeps, at least not yet and not here, so it’s much harder to get a photo of her. Mostly she’s much faster than my camera can focus, so for a photo of her you’ll have to wait a bit…
As always, thanks for viewing.
Cookie, and about the current sweet spot
Thom Hogan has a blog post about 4k being the current sweet spot. That means that a 12MP camera like the Nikon D3 – 15 years old now – is still good enough for anything.
Well, my el cheapo Olympus OM-D E-M10 Mk2 (which I still like more than the more expensive models, simply because the display only goes up and not sideways) has 16MP. More than enough even if you’d like to crop, which is what I did with the latest portrait of Cookie which is in 5:4 instead of the camera’s usual 4:3:
When I saw him lying there on that carpet, I went and grabbed my old and trusty 50mm/f2 macro lens from the Four Thirds system, and took his photo with it.
He just came back with another mouse to pay for that portrait, but since I didn’t open, he now sits under a tree and enjoys it himself.
Oh, and yesterday Wilma visited again, first time since about half a year or so. And Mitchie thinks that she had a cesarean. But it was so nice to see her again, and she smooched about everything which couldn’t run away 🙂
As always, thanks for reading.
Cookie on the watch, and resting
Cookie, our male visitor from somewhere in the neighbourhood, is very busy lately. One could easily call him our “chief mouser” now, like the one at 10 Downing Street. I lately saw him tracking down, hunting, killing, and also eating a couple of mice, and he’s always on the watch for more:
Of course, even a cat has to rest sometimes (like 16 hours a day). So here he is shortly before the sun reached him in the afternoon:
At the moment, he’s resting on the sofa (the door to Zuleikha’s room, which probably is his favourite place in our flat, is closed)…
As always, thanks for reading, and for viewing.