Music. Photography. Thoughts.
We were at an aunt’s place over the Christmas holidays, and after she got some prints of some photos I took at her place, she kindly allowed me to show the one portrait I took of her shortly before we left again on Zuleikha’s birthday.
She’s the only remaining sister of my late mum:
Genoveva
Thanks for reading.
Today (Tuesday) Zuleikha invited some of her friends to her birthday party. She wanted to go bowling again, so this is what the kids did. I took some photos, most of which I cannot show without getting allowance for that first, so here are only two:
Impressionen vom Bowling
Impressionen vom Bowling
As you can probably see, the hosts dimmed the lights and switched on disco lights, and the kids were absolutely delighted about that, but for photography that was of course a challenge. I used the brightest lens I had (Panasonic Leica DG Summilux 25mm/1.4) wide open and the camera at ISO 1600, and still I’ve got a lot of movement blur. But that often adds to the vibe, because the kids were moving simultaneously and most of their time, so in lots of photos I have exactly one detail (face, hand, ball etc.) sharp.
Just uploaded a few of them into my dropbox for the other parents, and of course for the kids as well.
We all think we’ve had a great time, and hopefully all of Zuleikha’s guests enjoyed it also. Should anyone of you read this, then thanks again for coming; it was a pleasure to have you around.
Thanks for reading.
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:
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:
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:
Zuleikha, December 2015
Again, season’s greetings and happy holidays from us.
Thanks for reading.
We were out for a short walk today, and I took this one of Zuleikha:
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:
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:
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.
My colleague Arno and his wife are on Ko Samui, and our colleague Nabil is on Phuket. Some ten days ago, Arno sent a picture which he took with his phone, writing that he doesn’t really want to come back…
Reminded me of our last time in Malaysia, which is five years ago already. Well, paradise, yes, maybe. For us. But first and foremost, it’s hot. You’re sweating without doing much:
Zuleikha, Malaysia 2010
So after noon, you sometimes just sit around, feeding keropok to the cats:
The kids – here are some of our relatives – play and pose, but even under the trees in some other kampung further North, it’s hot – and at night, you’ll get eaten up by mosquitoes:
Finally, here are two portraits I made during that holiday (I’ve shown them before). The first one is of Comel who is now married and has a baby boy herself:
Comel, July 2010
And the second one is of her brother, who sadly isn’t amongst us anymore:
Mohammed Haniff, July 2010
So is Malaysia, or is Thailand paradise? Like I wrote above: Well, paradise, yes, maybe. For us. But that is only because first these people – relatives or not – will do everything they can to make it paradise for you, and second we’re ignoring most of their problems.
Have to go back there soon…
Thanks for viewing.
WordPress 4.4 “Clifford” is out, and together with it came the Twenty Sixteen theme which I’m using here. I changed the almost black border to a white one, everything else is standard until now.
Zuleikha changed her layout, too as you can see above. And Mitchie is also working on an old/new page, see below…
Click on the screenshots to visit their pages.
Thanks for reading.
P.S.: still playing around with that theme… so be prepared for further changes 🙂
Took this one for Zuleikha yesterday, so she could blog about it:
Tuna the birthday cat
By the way, I used Mitchie’s Panasonic Lumix 20mm/1.7 lens here, at an aperture of f/2. Still love that one – it’s the perfect lens for the µ43rds system IMO, and this and the Oly 45mm/1.8 would be more or less all you need for a starter kit for general and portrait photography. Highly recommended (and I get nothing for recommendations).
Alternatives would be the 25mm lenses from both Panasonic (f/1.7 or f/1.4) or Olympus (f/1.8), or the 17mm/1.8 Olympus. But 40mm-equivalent is very close to the sensor diagonal, so I consider this one as the real standard lens for the system.
Thanks for viewing.
Today I was working on our server a bit, updating and checking things, and everything runs smoothly. I was wondering about the past a bit while I did all this, and so I checked.
Netcraft first “saw” us in the year 2000, which means that I used Netcraft’s services to check on us. The Internet Archive, and its Wayback Machine still have some stuff starting from 2001, and our site looked like this, or like that. I also had my own hosting company during 2001, called “fairhosting.de”, but nothing much of it is left, and that was later taken by domain grabbers. From 2005 Netcraft’s site saw us hosted by other companies.
So while the oldest history might be from early 2000, I think I actually registered the domain in 1999 – would have to check with Denic to find out. And, as I wrote on one of these early pages, the internet as we know it now was barely 10 years old (that means the mouse-clickable web, some other stuff like internet news is older).
Fifteen years only, and even less since people started to stare at small screens while walking the cities. Feels much longer tho – but imagine how life was before that (hint: it wasn’t worse).
Thanks for reading.
Yesterday was another concert from the music school in Mörfelden-Walldorf, and Zuleikha played there and wrote about it. Mitchie took a video of it, and I’m sure that they will embed that one as well.
Oh, and Zuleikha also very much enjoyed Hoverboard on xkcd, and she wrote about that one as well.
Update: she’s in the news as well:
Thanks for viewing.