Music. Photography. Thoughts.
Yesterday I’ve been watching a video on my phone when Cookie decided that he wanted some closer proximity, so he came and laid down with/beside me:
This is straight from my phone’s camera, no editing whatsoever:
As always, thanks for viewing.
It’s still hot here in the middle of Germany – yesterday I saw some 32 or 33 degrees, and today the same. Even now it’s still 28°C while I’m writing this.
The cats, both Cookie and Wilma, came and slept here, and I took some photos of Wilma. Yesterday she was in a corner of Mitchie’s desk:
And today, on the bench between all sorts of stuff:
I think Cookie slept on my bed yesterday, and on the couch today. Then eating, drinking, and by now both are out again.
As always, thanks for viewing.
Took this less than an hour ago. As usual, my camera was set to black & white, but since I “developed” this using RawTherapee 5.8 on Linux, I thought why not try a colour film simulation? So I chose Kodak Portra 400 (the camera took ISO 400, so that fits), and I cropped it into a more cinema-like format of 64:27 (which is 4³:3³, see Wikipedia about it). The simulated Kodak film gives the image some very pleasing and warm colour tones, I like that a lot. Should probably try the real thing in my Olympus OM-2N film camera.
As always, thanks for viewing.
Took this today, and “developed” it using RawTherapee 5.8 on Debian GNU/Linux:
Triggered the camera with the mobile phone, and cropped the picture into a 5:4 format. I used my Olympus OM-D E-M10 Mk2 camera with Mitchie’s Panasonic Lumix 20mm/1.7 lens at an aperture of 1:1.8.
Like always, thanks for viewing.
Continuing to use RawTherapee 5.8 instead of the OM Workspace raw converter for which I’d have to boot into Windows, I made this today:
I used Mitchie’s 20mm/1.7 Panasonic lens because she has my 17mm/1.8 which is much faster in auto focussing for her videos. I also used colour at the moment for these tests…
Cropped the image into a 2:1 format which is more cinema-like.
As always, thanks for viewing.
The little huntress likes this place:
As always, thanks for viewing.
As always, thanks for viewing.
Wow, these are good… I forgot that NASA also has a Flickr account, so they’ve uploaded some of their (and ESA’s) first JWST images to Flickr – and the Flickr team blogged about them in The Universe is on Flickr: See NASA’s first images from the James Webb Space Telescope.
The problem with astrophotography is that it’s a numbers game – you’ll have to invest quite a bit even as a hobbyist to just get some decent gear, both hard- and software. And then you’ll have to spend many nights out in the dark and cold, and later assemble all these taken images, and still you’ll be nowhere near the quality of Hubble, or now, the James Webb telescopes. Except of course if you’re a conglomerate of NASA, ESA, and others who put up some 10 billion dollars for such a thing…
Me, I don’t have any motors for my telescope, so even with manually tracking the moon (which is quite fast if you view it through some 1500mm-equivalent “lens”), it’s still a challenge to overlay all of the taken images, plus you can’t even really focus the whole thing – touch it, and you’ll see nothing except some dancing large object. For deep space imaging, you’ll really have to go outside and far away from any nearby city, and spend your night in the dark. And freeze – you’ll get the best ones in winter.
So bravo to the big agencies, and to anyone who really is into this – and thanks for the nice photos.
As always, thanks for reading.
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.
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.