Thoughts during the breaks
I don’t know if it was Dick (Richard) or his wife Diana who took this one of me end of August last year, but I do like it (tho the nice Jazz Bass isn’t mine):
I also made a b&w conversion of it, with a bit of a white border:
As always, thanks for viewing.
Last time we went to the local drugstore, I took a pack of their cheapest film stock again, so that is what I’m using these days:
Of course, for quick shots like these (using studio strobes), or if someone asks to have their picture taken, I’ll still use digital. But for my personal stuff I just wanted to have that other kind of “look” back again for a bit.
And as you see I got three films for under 8€, but still I won’t waste much of that – so it will last a while until I can show something here again. Something analog I mean.
Back to making music as well in my limited spare time. So be patient with me please.
And as always, thanks for reading.
Today during lunch break I took my camera for a short walk again – taking some photos of a relatively new construction area just on the opposite side of the street. So here are some photos straight out of my camera, no processing at all:
That last one was taken out of a window at my employers’ office. All taken with my E-M10 Mk2 and the PanaLeica 25mm/1.4 lens.
As always, thanks for viewing.
A first cat snapshot since we’re back from England:
Taken with my Olympus OM-D E-M10 Mk2 and the Panasonic Leica DG Summilux 25mm/1.4 lens at f/2.0, converted with Olympus Workspace on Windows 10 and with RawTherapee on Linux. Uploaded to Flickr manually.
As always, thanks for viewing.
Here are some photos which Mitchie and Zuleikha took, including some of me (which you rarely see around here because mostly you see photos taken by me, not of me…) – so, about chronological:
So these were some of the photos which Mitchie and Zuleikha took. I’ll leave it to them to show you some more on their own blogs.
As always, thanks for viewing.
I showed you that portrait photo of a young woman already which I took in front of the British Museum. And I’ve made that one with my usual workflow which was/is to first convert the raw .orf file with Olympus Viewer 3 in Windows, and then to tag and add Exif data and other small adjustments with RawTherapee on Linux. All well and good, practised and tested on thousands of my images.
But with new software versions come new tests, and so I found that by now, and for me, Darktable also has its merits. It’s especially great for rotating, adding frames, and even adding GPS data with simply dropping the photos onto an OpenStreetMap.
I also wanted to see the photo in black & white.
So after another conversion from .orf to .tif, this time with the newer Olympus Workspace (the successor of the former Olympus Viewer 3), I first loaded the resulting .tif into Silver Efex Pro 2 – and decided that for a portrait of a young woman the standard conversion method might be the best option. I then did the same with Olympus Workspace (same as if it would have been done in-camera) to compare both outputs.
And they were pretty much the same, really. Same file sizes, no real differences between these two. So I took the one made with Olympus Workspace (again, same as in-camera), and used RawTherapee 5.5 with my stored midtone procedure which shifts the midtones (not the blacks or the whites) from a neutral grey to a more brownish tone (which I „stole“ from a photo of a horse by Laura Wilson Cunningham (Owen Wilson’s mum who is a really great photographer)). Then I straightened the picture about -4.25 degrees and added 3.5% of a border (using one of the colour tones from within the image) with Darktable 2.6.0 – all on my Debian 10 “Buster” operating system which is out since Saturday, July 6th, 2019.
For a colour version, the process was more or less the same, minus the black and white conversion in Olympus Workspace, and minus the midtoning with RawTherapee of course. But the straightening, framing, and adding of GPS data was more or less the same.
Then I uploaded both versions to Flickr so that I can show them here without using too much space on our own server, and added them to some folders and groups in Flickr. And here they are:
and the colour version:
I like them both. Even without the framing, the aditional controls for rotating, or that GPS data functionality are very nice features to have. Other things are a bit more complicated in Darktable when compared to RawTherapee, but then again I’m just doing my first baby-steps here with this program after ignoring it for a long time…
Anyway, it’s nice to have some great tools, and it’s even nicer when they’re free.
And again and like always, thanks for reading, and for viewing.
Here’s another photo I took in London, this time ‘developed’ with Olympus Workspace (on Windows 10), followed by Darktable (on Linux) – you simply can’t get those skin tones without Olympus’ special treatment, at least I can’t beat it:
It shows the London Subway station Hyde Park Corner, and on the display you see that people are waiting for a train to Arnos Grove (see Wikipedia, or a map).
This has nothing to do with my colleague Arno of course, but I still thought that he might like the news that there are “Arnos House”, Arnos Park”, and even “Arnos Station” (and “Arnos Pool”!) around there. Maybe one day he’ll move there, or at least visit the place? Bon voyage… 🙂
It pays by the way to get a Travelcard. Here’s mine which was for 3 zones, and for 7 days:
As always, thanks for viewing, and for reading.
Here’s another photo I just ‘developed’ using Darktable. One more from Sea Life in London:
Interesting program; could get used to it I think. But I’d still have to find out how to store some presets I have in RawTherapee in this one, like for instance my mid-toning for black & white images…
Anyway, as always, thanks for viewing, and for reading.
While walking out of Sea Life and across the “London Eye”, I saw this map:
And indeed, when searching for it I find it here.
But this wasn’t the real reason for showing this image here, it was rather a change in my workflow. The ‘postr’ app (also called ‘Flickr Uploadr’ in Gnome) doesn’t work anymore since the new owners of Flickr (SmugMug) changed the authentication to an OAuth model, so I used another newer app called ‘frogr’ here. And for ‘developing’ that photo from the raw .orf file into a .jpg which can be shown I used Darktable instead of my usual combination of OV3 (on Windows) and RawTherapee (on Linux), just to see the state of development.
And well, yes, all these apps and programs are getting better. frogr isn’t as good yet as postr was, but Darktable is quite nice already. Not perfect but usable. And I can even geotag images with it, and these geotags are shown in Flickr which is nice (that never worked with RawTherapee).
Don’t know if I can/should get used to it, but it’s always good to have options, no?
As always, thanks for reading, and for viewing.
There weren’t any plans (from my family) for Friday, so I suggested to visit the Bike Shed in Old Street. It’s partly store, partly restaurant, partly motorcycle repair and club, and you can even get a haircut there if you like.
But on the way there, I first saw this strange architecture:
Looks like its maker fell in a whiskey jar before the first drawings… anyway, here is a nice custom Duc:
The shop also had some very nice Belstaff jackets for slightly less than 500 quid, and even a normal T-Shirt was 35 pounds (kids’ shirts far smaller than for Zuleikha were 15 pounds), so we passed on buying something.
Instead, we first went to Baker Street, but only took photos from outside the Sherlock Holmes museum – my next idea & suggestion was Harrods, so from Baker Street we hopped on the 74 bus to head there – via Hyde Park again, and this time I took a photo of the traffic around Hyde Park Corner:
We didn’t stay in Harrods for too long – it may well be “all things for all men” – as long as you can afford it. Coming out and going around the corner, you see their clientele’s car’s parked:
These two had licenses from Kuwait – maybe my colleague Nabil was in for a short (and fast) trip as well? 😉
Back in the tube, I asked a local (very friendly officer) for a restaurant tip again – it was our last day in London, and both Mitchie and Zuleikha have never tried the famous fish & chips. He sent us to the Rocks and Sole Plaice near Covent Garden which again was a very good tip – thanks so much, sir!
The best of the day was yet to come: Mitchie had contact to a friend with whom she studied in Wisconsin, and who lives about an hour from London – so both Salma and her husband came in via train at Waterloo station. And after some coffee they took us to a pub and then to another (this time Indian) restaurant, so we had very good food again, and in wonderful company. They’re now off to Malaysia but promised to visit us around here as soon as they can.
So we were ‘home’ (at our hotel) a bit later than planned – we had to pack and leave early, so that was our Friday then.