Wilma was already here and sleeping at that exact spot when I got up:
Couldn’t resist, had to capture that peaceful scene… and like always, thanks for viewing.
So peaceful…
First Wilma, then myself…
Today I took two photos, with the same camera and lens, but with slightly different settings, and also cropped differently.
The first one was of Wilma, in 3:2. She was very alert because of the always love-sick Cookie who was also around, so there was a lot of hissing and warning to keep him at a safe enough distance. Understandably, she had no eyes for me:
Later – long after the two cats were gone – I took a self portrait, with having my camera on a (microphone) table stand, remote-controlled by a mobile phone. I cropped this one into a 5:4 format and used a Kodak Tri-X film simulation in Silver Efex to achieve this:
The camera was my Olympus OM-D E-M10 Mk2, and the lens was the 17mm/1.8 from Olympus, with f/4 for the cat, and with f/1.8 for myself (it was getting dark already). And like always, thanks for watching.
Cookie & Wilma today (April 21st, 2023)
Both photos with Silver Efex Pro 2. Like always, thanks for viewing.
Sometimes, when I get a little nostalgic…
… then I set my digital camera to black & white, and sometimes also to the 3:2 format of the typical 24x36mm “Kleinbildfilm” which we used when we were young. And if I’m really in some kind of yesterday’s mood, I also use Silver Efex to simulate using Ilford HP5 Plus film which we used to use most of the time, self-developed and prints enlarged with my brother Willi’s Durst machine in our parents’ bathroom… except that we used Canon A-1 cameras at the time, not Olympus like now:
Within Silver Efex (Pro 2, in Windows 11) I used +20 percent brightness here. And I like that like with real film, the “grain” is more visible in the brighter areas, not like digital “noise” which would turn up in the darker ones. Very reminiscent of film and its behaviour indeed.
I could get a roll of Ilford film from time to time, but our darkroom equipment is gone since long.
Like always, thanks for viewing.
Cookie from today, ooc b&w image
As the headline says, I took this black & white photo of Cookie, one of the neighbours’ cats today. The camera was simply set to black and white, no editing whatsoever:
And like always, thanks for viewing.
Cookie, sleeping by my side
Took a snapshot of one of the male neighbours’ cats today, using my phone. Cookie was sleeping on the sofa right next to me, so I thought that would make a nice picture. Converted the photo in-“camera” (in the phone) using Google’s “Black & White Portrait” preset. And that looks like this:
Mörfelden-Walldorf 2023
in-“camera” black & white portrait
Like always, thanks for viewing.
Beautiful moments…
Sometimes we have some flowers on our table – and if they look like this then I can’t resist, have to take a photo:
Like always, thanks for viewing.
With DPReview, we’ll lose a good resource
Amazon is killing one of its best resources, 25 year old DPReview. Read their own announcement, and some of other tech sites and its peers.
That’s a loss for everyone interested in camera gear and how to use it. A sad day.
No “AI” needed…
This:
… is the same as my blog header photo, but heavily blurred with The Gimp‘s “Lens Blur”, using a radius of 200.
I took inspiration from the wonderful wallpapers (especially the “Sage” one) of the Google Pixel 6a mobile phone, which let you really concentrate on your foreground instead of the underlying background. See here as an example:
See how much the browser window and also the Conky system monitor stand out if the background just isn’t that sharp and detailed? What a simple but effective idea from Google’s artist crew; bravi! See 9to5google, and especially this image which would also be big enough to cover my desktop…
Like always, thanks for reading.
Cookie with “Eiffel” preset, and from raw file
When I got up today, my chair at the computer desk was occupied already. So I let the guy sleep and took some photos of him with my phone, first a black & white “portrait” which I changed to the built-in “Eiffel” preset, and which looks like this:
But I had set the phone’s camera to also save raw .dng files, so I took one of that format and converted it with RawTherapee 5.8 on Linux – looks like this:
Such photos have of course a much larger dynamic range in case you need that – but that takes some space as well… anyway, here you’ll have all the possibilities of your favourite raw converter(s) (I used nothing here, just a conversion without changing anything).
Just to compare, here’s a straight out of camera photo from my Olympus camera, with a Panasonic Leica 25mm/1.4 lens:
Like always, thanks for reading, and for viewing.