Just back from a short trip to Mönchbruch where I took a few photos. Here are two of them:
As always, thanks for reading and viewing.
Deer and nutria
And today, Zuleikha took my picture
We haven’t done this in a while, so today I asked our talented daughter to take my photo together with my bass. I set up one of the studio strobes and a grey background for this, then borrowed Zuleikha’s piano bench, and we had a bit of fun with my camera. I liked this one, especially after converting it to black & white:
photographer: Zuleikha
A bit of a fake double bass posture, but that was part of the fun 🙂
As always, thanks for reading, and for viewing. And thanks again to our small one for being so kind to take her old dad’s picture again.
Second internet outage since this year…
Wow. This time our line including telephone and some HDTV (3play) was cut off for almost 24 hours – seems that UnityMedia is up to some restructuring since they have been bought by Vodafone? Let’s hope that it’s stable from now on…
I took a photo of our cat again yesterday, this time with proper light (one of my studio strobes bounced over a wall). Then I cropped it into a 16:10 format to use it as a screen background, turned it into black & white using a Kodak Tri-X film simulation, and vignetted the corners a bit so that my Conky system monitor output (in white) can still be seen layed over it, as here:
As always, thanks for reading, and for viewing.
Happy new year!
I wish everyone who reads this a happy new year 2020.
Ours started with a bit of concern – Mitchie had let our cat out in the night of January 1st after most of the fireworks were done – and then we waited. And waited. And waited. And after 2200 (10pm) and at temperatures below freezing point I was really worried.
But then, about 10 past 10 she finally showed up, smooched us all a bit, ate, and then fell asleep on a carpet right in front of our TV set. I took her photo hand-held using my small Panasonic 35-100mm zoom lens, and converted it to black & white with Silver Efex (on Windows):
And by now she’s had breakfast, and is sleeping again – this time on my bed.
I’m so glad that she came back.
Thanks for reading.
Ice crystals (Impressions from a short walk on Dec 30th, 2019)
Just listening to an awesome live recording (22 tracks in the mixer/DAW) from our fellow Wikiloops drummer mpointon who also plays in a Pink Floyd tribute band – so I suggest a listen, it’s really cool… Echoes Live – fits this article somehow 🙂
Speaking of the ‘loops, Shi mentioned that she was going out for a walk, and looking out of the window myself I thought yeah, that winter light is so cool with the sun so low, I should take my camera and go for a walk as well. So here are a few impressions of my walk, mostly close-ups of ice crystals:
So as you can see, that walk was chilly but nice, and so was the light. Martin’s music is over while I’m writing this, and Mitchie – who’s an even bigger fan of Pink Floyd than I am – just agreed that this sounds like the original.
As always, thanks for viewing, reading, and/or listening.
Fifteen
Today 15 years ago, just one day after the Tsunami in Indonesia, Zuleikha was born in a hospital in Bremen. Not even a month later, she was resting on me a bit after I came home from work:
Later we moved from Bremen to Freising (near Munich) and then again from Freising to here (Mörfelden-Walldorf, district of Groß-Gerau but close to Frankfurt as well). And early on Zuleikha discovered her love for music, or at least for my guitar in this photo when she was 5:
But my hobby was mostly photography during that time, so I took a few nice photos of her, like this one from short before she turned 10:
Musically, she decided to play the French horn in school, and took piano lessons for herself. Here she is on a solo gig when she was just 13:
And by now she is a member of Wikiloops like me, and we already have an album which contains three of her solo piano pieces:
You can find a link to it on the right, so go and have a listen if you wish.
And today, she’s fifteen:
And since I talk German with her: herzlichen Glückwunsch zum Geburtstag, Schätzchen!
As always, thanks for viewing, reading, and listening.
Across the river and into the trees
Here’s a photo from a short walk of today. I simulated film again, this time it’s Fuji Provia:
a photo from a walk on Dec. 26th, 2019
As always, thanks for viewing.
Merry Christmas MMXIX
To all those who celebrate it, we wish a Merry Christmas 2019.
I don’t have any new music (yet), just a few photos:
This is an in-camera black & white photo (also simulating an orange filter) of Tuna from early Sunday morning. She doesn’t eat much since then, so at the moment we’re a bit concerned about her.
We’ve also got a nice Christmas and season’s greetings card from Shi – and I had nothing similar to send as a reply (I’m really not that good in the graphic arts as she is), so I took a photo of an old Welsh song which I’ve played with the orchestra this season. Also uploaded it to Wikiloops to greet all other musicians as well:
Happy holidays 2019 from a bass player…
This is more a New Year’s than a Christmas song, and you can read more about it or hear it if you wish. I took this and the following photo using Mitchie’s nice little 20mm f/1.7 Panasonic Lumix G lens.
The next photo is of Tuna again, close up and with Mitchie’s lens wide open at f/1.7, so just one eye is sharp – and everything else more or less blurry. I also used a black & white conversion in software this time, and simulated an Ilford HP5+ film in RawTherapee. Midtoned as usual, which means the whites are white, the blacks are black, but those middle tones are more brownish than grey:
Two different light colours in this one, natural daylight from outside, and artificial light in our living room. And I liked that high contrast effect from the film simulation in this case.
Edit: here’s another photo from today. In this one I simulated a colour film, Fuji Astia – and also cropped it into a 3:2 format like from the time we were still using film:
Hope that our cat is better soon.
As always, thanks for reading, and for viewing. Nice holidays to you all.
Mirror?
I haven’t done much this weekend – in fact it almost didn’t feel like a weekend at all, since I was busy with the server again (and still am). But in between I could at least take another photo of our cat. Not sure what she saw there – herself, or some potential prey through her own dark silhouette?
Cropped it into a 3:2 aspect ration like from Kleinbildfilm, and used midtoning and also a HP5+ film simulation from RawTherapee.
As always, thanks for viewing.
First snow
What a surprise. When I left home this morning, everything looked pretty normal. But when I arrived at work (only 18.5km one way), we had first snow. And this is how that looked like (quick out-of-camera pictures without any post processing):
That latter one was hand-held at about 1/5th of a second (first one taken with the camera on a table tripod).
As always, thanks for viewing. And now have a nice Santa Friday 🙂