I made photos, one shortly after I began to work at home, the other shortly after finishing work. Looks like this:
Thanks for viewing.
My first day of the second week of homeoffice
What to do in times of a pandemia
Well I can hardly give any tips of what best to do in a “lockdown” kind of situation, when you can’t or at least shouldn’t really leave the house. I can only tell you what we’re doing:
- we went shopping of Friday after my work already, so we were through with that early on. It also helps if you enter the supermarkets as a single person, not with a whole family. Better for the distances we should keep…
- reading is always good – my current favourite fiction author is Haruki Murakami as you might know if you’re reading this blog once in a while
- listening to music and/or watching TV is what I’ll guess what most people would do, and of course we’re also doing that. Long running series like “Doctor Who” are good tips if you like that
- If you’re a computer geek, get involved into some free and open source project – write some code or documentation, or share some tips via an own blog or Youtube or whatever
- We’re the lucky ones, at least Zuleikha and me – we play instruments. Plus we are both members of Wikiloops where you can play with other musicians from all around the globe for free if you like. All you need is some way to get your instrument or voice into a computer, which is usually done with some kind of audio interface – see here for some examples. And Wikiloops just lifted its time restrictions, so even as a new user you can now start down- and uploading at once, without having to wait (or to pay).
- If you are creative in another field – I consider myself a portrait photographer for instance – then do this at home as well. Take photos of your family, or in case you’re alone, take self portraits. There’s always something new to learn, and if it’s only about lighting.
Other than that I haven’t done much this weekend, in fact I wasn’t even out of the house except to feed the birds:
As I’ve read, the rate of new infections with SARS-CV2 aka the Corona virus is slowing down here in Germany. So maybe (and hopefully) it helps if everyone is staying at home or at least keeping a safe distance. And while it’s still way too early to speak of or to hope for a trend, we can still carry on and wait this out, shall we?
Be safe. Stay healthy. And thank you for reading.
Improvised “home office”
Thanks for viewing. And stay safe and healthy.
Almost spring
Coronavirus this, quarantine that, I’m just back from another short Sunday walk, and here are some photos I took on my way:
That was a nice walk, and as you can see the weather was also pretty good. As always you can click the images to see larger versions on Flickr where they are hosted – in fact there’s always the full resolution for printing postcards and so on.
Thanks for reading, and for viewing.
Impressions from a short Sunday walk
Haven’t done this since a while, but today I took my camera with just one lens on it and went for a walk. Here’s what I saw:
About the title of that previous one: no one was in that restaurant or in their beer garden outside. In fact before I even arrived here I saw the first people wearing face masks…
Lots of dead wood in a forest that becomes thinner and thinner year after year.
Then I returned home and took another portrait of our sweet Ms Pointy Ears, sitting on the sofa close behind Zuleikha:
As always, thanks for reading, and for viewing.
In case you like fiction…
Here are four books which I’ve got for my birthday this year, and in the order I’ve read them:
I like Murakami anyway, and I had read some five or so other books of his already – but these here are all exceptional. I think that I’ve read them in the right order, so if you don’t know the man, that would be my recommendation. Other than these I can recommend ‘Kafka on the shore’, ‘Norwegian wood’, or ‘Killing Commendatore’, but in my opinion these ones here are truly good. And that last one, ‘1Q84’ is definitely a masterpiece (and one of his latest if I’m not mistaken, it was published 2009/10 in Japan, and 2011 in Great Britain).
Recommended, all of them.
I took the photo with the same in-camera black & white settings resembling a digital Olympus Pen-F camera like I wrote one day before my birthday, here.
And, as always, thanks for reading, and for looking.
That Pen-F look
Olympus has had this special camera, the Pen-F (talking/writing about the digital one here, not the original half frame film version from days long ago). And that digital Pen-F was special because no other camera did black & white as good as that one, in my humble opinion. They really should consider their decision not to continue it, it was simply brilliant, and lots of people loved it (at least those who bought and owned it).
Now a fellow photographer who has both the Pen-F as well as the OM-D E-M10 Mk2 (which I also have) has managed to get pretty close to the look of black and white images from the Pen-F when using his E-M10 Mk2. So here’s Rob explaining how he did that:
Of course I immediately had to try that, and I used the Mono-2 without grain settings to try. I also noticed that indeed applying a -0.3EV compensation helps with keeping a bit more infos in the highlights. Look:
That’s really very close to Kodak Tri-X if you ask me. And although this was at ISO 1250 it’s still much cleaner than film ever was – if you want to apply grain you can still do so with a few mouse clicks.
Cool. Thanks Rob, your tips help a lot. Really appreciated!
Deer and nutria
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.
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.