Music. Photography. Thoughts.
Bella isn’t allowed to roam around outside just yet, so at the moment it’s often eat, sleep, and I also try to play around with her a lot.
We’d ordered a cat tree for her, which is now also her viewing platform sometimes:
And today I took a photo of her while I was outside on the veranda, and Bella was in Zuleikha’s room:
Like always, thanks for viewing.
Still trying to figure out GrapheneOS on my late brother Willi’s old Pixel 3a phone. Turns out that with the sandboxed Google services activated, you can have the best of both worlds – one profile with free and open source apps, one with all the usual Google Android Apps in case you want these. With the same background picture of our late cat Tuna from 2020, that looks like this:
As you can see, you can even have the famous Google camera. What I have not found yet is the original Pixel launcher, guess you’d have to use a lookalike like Lawnchair2 or so to get the same look and functionality like on a Pixel with only the Google Android on it.
But this here is way more secure, as all of these apps are sandboxed and don’t have system-wide privileges, unlike with Google’s version of Android. I’m tempted to use it on my main cellphone as well…
Oh, and although installing GrapheneOS is easy especially with the web based installer, there are still some nice video howtos from people like Side Of Burritos, Cozy Living Machine, or Naomi Brockwell. Just in case you want more than just *my* opinions…
As always, thanks for reading.
When Cookie (or Samson) left us at around half past nine pm today, it was dusk already – and I had a zoom lens on my camera which couldn’t open up further than 1:4, so I had to crank up the ISO to 6400 to take his photo with 1/10th of a second at a focal length of 35mm (like 70mm on film):
I converted the raw photo to a .tif using the OM System raw converter, and then chose the preset 019 “Fine Art” in Silver Efex Pro2 which brought back a lot of detail. Final editing of the Exif data in RawTherapee in Linux.
Like always, thanks for viewing. And good night Cookie.
Went to the neighbours today and found out who the real family of “Cookie” is – the poor guy has problems with his left eye and should probably see a vet. So I took this photo of him and asked around:
Turns out that his real given name is “Samson”, and that the family is the same where Wilma and the small grey/white guy (we call him “Crunchy” so far) also live. Plus at least one dog.
Nice to meet them.
Today I took Mitchie’s camera – an Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark 2 which had her Panasonic Lumix 20mm f/1.7 lens mounted – to photograph my own E-M10 Mark 2 which has the Zuiko Digital 50mm 1:2 macro lens (from the Olympus 4/3rds system) mounted. Converted it to black & white, and cropped it into a 3:2 format:
The above image is stored on cupoftea.social which is a smaller server connected to Mastodon. And like always, thanks for viewing.
Two photos:
Took a cell phone as camera remote again, as you can see. Like always, thanks for viewing.
Not too long ago I took a photo with using the “grainy film 2” filter of my Olympus camera, directly in-camera, pre-“shot”. And I thought that it didn’t look too bad, so today I played around with a photo of myself which my former colleague Gunther took of me after I had set up lights to take/make portraits of some of these colleagues. So I re-“developed” the photo from the raw image using that filter, and afterwards I adjusted both the luminance and the contrast a bit, “to taste” as they say. And here’s the result of that photo from July 24th, 2018:
Thanks Gunther for taking my photo, thanks to the Fediverse for storing it ( on the small server where you can find me @wjl@cupoftea.social ) – and as always, thanks for reading and for viewing.
Congrats go out to Peter Hickman who won this year’s “Senior TT” race, and who also scored a new lap record (on a stock machine, not on his superbike!) of over 136mph on average on the Snaefell Mountain Course which is a bit over 60km for one lap. Congrats again to Michael Dunlop as well, who now has 25 TT wins if I counted correctly.
Thanks go out to the Debian girls & guys who at this time are still busy (in Cambridge, England, and all over the world) to release Debian 12 aka “Bookworm”. You can read about their progress in the Micronews site if you wish. Once they are ready, the download link on Debian’s main page will lead you to version 12, as long as it’s still 11.7 it’s still ongoing work. Thanks folks; you rock!
We were busy shopping and treated ourselves with some ice-cream afterwards. And like so often, we also brought some nice little bits for our neighbours’ cat whom we call “Cookie” – and who regularly falls asleep after eating:
I am by the way now also “microblogging”, but not on Twitter – I’ve never even tried that – but on Mastodon. The small server where you can find me hosts the picture above, since I cancelled my Flickr Pro account and therefore I’m now restricted to a maximum of 1,000 photos there. If you want you can also follow me there, but I don’t post that much and that often (yet) as this is all still very new for me. I’m an old school “blogger” as you can see here… 😉
And finally – in case you’d like to visit the Isle of Man for next year’s Tourist Trophy races (take two weeks off in case you want to see everything), here are some great tips from Frank, a Douglas Councillor who named his YT channel “amadeusiom“:
I thanked Frank for his very nice reports from besides the tracks, and for his helpful tips, and I asked him if I may embed them here, to which he kindly agreed. Thanks mate!
Thanks to everyone for reading and viewing, like always.
Update from Sunday morning: here it is, as expected:
You can read all about it and how to get it at https://bits.debian.org/2023/06/bookworm-released.html
Again, thanks for reading.
Mike Johnston aka “The Online Photographer” has found his perfect lens for the APS-C sized sensor cameras, and wrote about it on his blog. Together with the new Nikkor DX 24/1.7 he recommends a Z-50 as the perfect camera to do about everything, or, as he wrote:
“You can do 85% of anything you’d ever want to do photographically with a Z50, and you can do 85% of anything you’d ever want to do with a Z50 with the 24mm ƒ/1.7 lens.“
Well yes he’s right. Kind of.
What brought me into the µ4/3rds camp was the Panasonic 20mm/1.7 lens which I had bought for my wife. She still has the first version of it which isn’t available anymore, but here’s the second one:
That would be *my* perfect angle of view in a lens if I could have only one; the one Michael recommends and favours is a bit wider, like this one which I also have:
This little Olympus lens focuses much faster (on Olympus cameras at least) than the Panny does, but the Panny is a bit sharper. Just one of them would be fine.
The point where he actually recommends the camera is a bit controversial. The Nikon Z-50 doesn’t have IBIS (in-body image stabilisation) which is why I would still prefer my own Olympus OM-D E-M10 Mk2 or its newest version, the Mk4. Controversial because Olympus sold its camera/lens business, which is now called “OM System” – and my E-M10 doesn’t have a successor yet. The E-M5 is a lot more expensive, like the E-M1 as well, so…
… yes, in a way and if you can live without in-body image stabilisation (I couldn’t, drink too much coffee for that), then the Nikon Z-50 would be a good recommendation. If not, you could go for an OM-D E-M10 Mk4 as long as they’re available. The Nikon APS-C sensor is slightly larger than the µ4/3rds one (crop factor 1:1.5 instead of 1:2), but both have 20 Megapixels, which is more than enough – and the Olympus one is even stabilised. My 2 (Euro-) Cents…
Like always, thanks for reading.
After Ricoh/Pentax announced a new monochrome-only DSLR camera a few weeks ago, and after the first reports, photos, and tests about it, I’ve been thinking about a camera which only has a black & white sensor – the only other readily available model being a Leica for almost 10,000$/€ without a lens.
That Pentax camera with a sensor of APS-C size seems to be very popular at least in Japan where it sold out immediately, twice in a row. Meaning that Ricoh/Pentax just can’t seem to make enough of them, and that people seem to like black & white – who would have thought?
Anyway – when I was shopping lately, I went into a local drugstore to look for film – and all they had left was a single brand and version of a black & white film. Looking online later at home, I saw the same. The only other film in their online store, a color negative one was marked as “not available”. So out of nostalgia, I bought one:
Of course, looking at price comparison sites, I’ve found some more, but way less than in the past, and at the same time more expensive than ever. Well, that answers one question as it seems:
And maybe that also saves me from this one:
That’s a joke of course. Like Michael Johnston wrote lately, I also won’t be “shooting” film anymore, so this roll is for “special occasions”, and I’ll treat it like the last one. The photo of the film in front of my camera above has been treated with Nik’s Silver Efex Pro 2, using an Agfa APX 100 film simulation just as a demo for what you can do with a normal mirrorless camera.
Would I buy that Pentax? No. Would I buy an Olympus Pen-F with a black & white only sensor? Probably, if it were under 1k€. Otherwise, I’m perfectly happy with what I have.
Like always, thanks for reading, and for viewing.
Edit, from two days later (Saturday, 27th of March 2023):
Found another one in a second drugstore chain, same brand but different ISO/ASA of 400 instead of 100. I’ve looked on their webpage but haven’t found it there, but in the store it was the only one available. So here’s a pic of both of them together:
Both films are made in UK, so I wonder who makes them – probably Ilford?
Oh, and the photo this time is straight out of camera, cropped in-camera to a 3:2 format, and with the contrast set to +2 (on a scale from -2…0…+2). No filters set, uploaded to Flickr as is.
Like always, thanks for reading/viewing.