Category: other photographers

A photographer friend from Florida, William Beebe, recently wrote in a series of articles titled “Use what you have” (part 1 and 2) about some cameras and phones, and that he’s tired of RAW processing and mostly uses what comes out of the devices. And since we both have a Google Pixel 4a phone, I took a photo with that one today. I set the phone cam to “portrait mode”, but later also edited the picture in-camera (or rather, in-phone) with the “Eiffel” black & white preset which I really like. That almost gets you a film-like look:

Reminds me a bit of photos I took with using Kodak’s Tri-X (TX400) film stock, and really – a counter-shot from my camera with simulating that film in RawTherapee gives you this:

I sent myself the phone image with Signal, and that cropped it to 2048×1536 or around 3 Megapixels – very nice for using it on web pages. So I did the same using Gimp with the photo out of my camera.

But really, that “Eiffel” look in Google’s software isn’t half bad…

Like always, thanks for viewing, and for reading.

Edit: after searching and reading a bit about it I decided to just try and uploaded my photo taken with the Olympus camera into the Pixel 4a phone, then treated it like the first one in this article: opened it with the camera app, selected “portrait” mode (which blurred the background quite a bit more), and then applied the “Eiffel” black & white preset to it. Then I sent it to myself with Signal again, so here’s the result:

Quite a bit more “dramatic”, isn’t it? But even this can be set with a slider – here I had “Eiffel” at the max (100%).

Interesting. Who needs Photoshop or Lightroom with that (and lots more options and presets) in our cameras?

Again, thanks for reading/viewing and so on…

Edit2: I wanted to examine this a bit further, so I took an image of myself holding a Color Checker, and converted it using the Olympus built-in black & white setting (simulated in OM System’s Workspace RAW processor), and then I used Nik’s Silver Efex (on Windows) and RawTherapee (on Linux) with simulating Kodak’s Tri-X film. Plus I put the image into the Google phone to apply their “Eiffel” preset to it. With the resulting images I made a collage in The Gimp, which I then cropped to 2048×1536 pixels for web use, and uploaded that to Flickr. So here it is:

You can click the image or this link to view it bigger in Flickr if you like.

Again, thanks for viewing.

This one is for the gear heads, or for those who want to see some photos from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Matti Sulanto is a photographer from Finland and as it seems he’s currently on a trip to Malaysia where he lent a camera and lens from Robin Wong, another photographer who lives in KL. So he’s talking about the gear mostly, but you can see some photos of the area – I think in one traffic directions sign I saw “Jalan Bukit Bintang” or so? Enjoy, if that is of any interest for you:

Oh, and about that lens – it’s really a lovely one, I have it as well. Like always, thanks for reading and/or viewing. Found these videos via 43rumors.

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.