photography – Page 43 – Wolfgang Lonien

October 26, 2016

My free week is half over…

I have a week off of work, but since we don’t visit anybody and the weather isn’t that nice, I spend most of it at home.

So since our last Sunday walk, most of the photos I took so far were also from our home. At least I used all of my cameras, several different lenses, and even the polarizer filter which you still can’t emulate after taking your pictures. Here are some taken since Sunday, just for the reference:

You are next… (E-PL5 with the 14mm/2.5 lens)

While photographing a plant, I was watched… (E-M10 with the 25mm/1.4 lens and a polarizer)

Tuna the cat, looking out (E-M10 with the 25mm/1.4 lens and a polarizer)

Pegs (Clothespins) – “shooting” the DSLR (E-520 with the 40-150mm/4-5.6 lens at 150mm, 1/40th of a second, hand-held)

Occupation: box tester (E-M10 with the 25mm/1.4 lens)

I also filled the remaining few photos on an ISO200 colour negative film; a cheap one from the grocery, and I brought away that film for development already. With this I used my OM Zuiko 50mm/1.4 lens wide open for these last shots – I wanted to see its quality again. But as always when using film, that has to wait a bit. After I have these photos back, I’ll decide what to do with the three black & white Kodak 400TX (Tri-X) films which are still waiting to be used.

Anyway, thanks for reading/viewing, as always.

October 23, 2016

A short Sunday walk, and another self portrait

We’re using Google’s “Fit” on our smart phones, and today Zuleikha wanted to have a short walk to count her steps. So that is what we did, and while doing so, I took her picture using my Olympus E-PL5 camera with the 14-42mm “kit” lens:

In the end, both Zuleikha and Mitchie went a bit further than me, they both had around 7,000 steps. I had a few less as you can see:

And now that Zuleikha went to bed already, I took another “selfie” using the smart phone. As a trigger only, the E-M10 camera and the Panasonic 25mm/1.4 “Leica”-branded lens took the photo, with a little help of one of my studio strobes:

As you can see, the small LED reading light behind me was switched on, so without that flash I would have been a dark silhouette only.

Thanks for reading.

October 21, 2016

“Selfies”

This week I’ve got my first “smart” mobile phone ever. I’m still not sure if I need such a device (who would?), but since I have it, I could as well try to take some advantage of it.

The newer one of my two cameras has WLAN and can act as an access point for such a phone or tablet device, so you can share photos vie these mobile gadgets or use them the other way ’round to act as a remote control for the camera. Which is exactly what I did yesterday, first in the office:

and later at home:

These look a bit different than your usual “selfie”, because you don’t grab the imaging device itself, only the remote. Plus you can of course use all the controls of such a better camera, and like in the second photo, even studio strobes (camera-external flashes).

Such an “external viewfinder” – in my case with a 5″ screen diagonale – is fun, and much better than the infrared remote which I have for my DSLR. Like on the touchscreen of the camera itself, you just poke yourself in the eye (or tip onto any other point you want to have sharp) to select both the autofocus point, and to trigger the camera (and flash and whatever). This could also be used for shy animals, who would possibly approach a camera, but only if there’s no human behind it.

Real fun.

Thanks for reading.

October 16, 2016

Bright & dark

My plan was to use only one lens for a whole month – this time that would be the Zuiko Digital 50mm f/2 Macro lens from the Four Thirds system, usable on Micro Four Thirds with an adapter which also provides autofocus.

Or rather, it would have been. I decided today to stop this. Tho my recent portrait of Arno was one of the “most successful” photos I uploaded onto Flickr, the lens choice was just too restricting for me to keep it for another two weeks.

Anyway, here’s one more which I took using that lens today:

Herbstfarben – autumn colours

And now I’m back to two zoom lenses; the normal 14-42mm on my E-M10, and the 40-150mm on the E-PL5. With that latter combination I just took this:

Shadows on the wall

And since I liked the contrast between the day and night photos, I combined them for my header picture.

Thanks for reading.

October 16, 2016October 16, 2016

A very nice portrait

André Berlinck has posted a very nice portrait of Sebastião Salgado on photographylife. Read the story about that photo as well if you like.

Didn’t include the photo here because I haven’t asked his permission to do so. So please follow those links if you want to see it.

September 26, 2016October 8, 2016

Arno

During today’s lunch break I was out with the camera, the normal (25mm) lens, and my circular polarizer in front of it. I wanted to get a bit more contrast into the half blue half cloudy day. And when I returned from my walk, my colleague Arno was in front of the building, speaking to someone on his mobile phone. So I walked right up to him and took his picture:

Arno, September 2016 (with circular polarizer)

He laughed and told whoever was on the other side that he just got photographed. And upstairs, later, he said “cool image” – he liked it because of the reflections which give the illusion that there’s lots of background, while in fact he was sitting right in front of a window.

Thanks for viewing.

Update, from October 8th:

Here’s another one which I took yesterday, and which just got “explored” in Flickr:

Arno, October 2016

The colour version of this one had a few elements which were too distracting, and it’s also taken with both natural *and* artificial light (the bad ones from the office ceiling), so I converted it to black & white using Silver Efex, simulating a Kodak Tri-X (400TX) film. But it was taken with my E-M10 and the Zuiko Digital 50mm/2 macro lens from the Four Thirds system, used wide open. Only the left eye is sharp, you can see the different sizes of this photo on Flickr (as always, when making prints, take the original size).

Thanks again for viewing. Or thanks for viewing again (and sorry about not posting that much lately).

September 26, 2016September 26, 2016

Flower(s)

Since we’re back from Malaysia – where I mostly took family photos – I’m much more selective with what I photograph. It’s either documentary, like in the previous computer-related posts, or it’s things (or people) I just *want to* photograph right in that moment. So I’m taking less photos than before, but hopefully better ones.

One of the subjects I liked was a plant which Mitchie has in a pot here, so I took a closeup with natural light:

Flower (50mm)

And later, I also photographed it using flash:

Flowers (45mm)

Flowers (25mm)

It’s near its end of life as it seems – doesn’t look that good anymore. That would also be something to document, but no – it *used to* look like this…

Thanks for viewing.

August 30, 2016August 30, 2016

A point release to the rescue…

As it turned out yesterday, I had spent more or less the whole weekend for nothing – the IBM ‘Open Client’ layers didn’t accept my preinstalled and preconfigured version 16.04 LTS of Ubuntu. Too new, not yet supported.

So what to do? I asked the few colleagues which run Linux on their older notebooks – at least older than mine. Andreas was/is using Red Hat 7, which comes with a Linux 3.10 kernel – even older than my Debian Jessie, which had/has 3.16, so I knew that some things wouldn’t work. Daniel has Ubuntu 14.04, and when I asked him which kernel that one brings, he told me: 4.4…

Hmmm, same like 16.04? How could that be? Turns out that Ubuntu has introduced something they call the “LTS Hardware Enablement Stack”, with so-called “point releases”. He has 14.04.5, and the official IBM Open Client Live image with which he started has 14.04.1. So his recommendation was to install that official Open Client, and upgrade it to 14.04.5 like he did.

Which I tried at home yesterday evening, and which failed miserably – 14.04.1 couldn’t even initialize the graphics, with no way out except a hard reset (cold boot). No terminal window(s), no nothing.

Slowly I got frustrated. Compiling a kernel myself? Bah; haven’t done that since years. But what if…

I downloaded 14.04.5 which has the same 4.4 Xenial kernel like 16.04, and that installed like a breeze. So from first try and frustration to a readily installed machine it took me less than an hour. Plus it’s “Trusty Tahr”, and today the Open Client scripts at work didn’t complain and installed mostly everything I need (I manually installed some things like conky and VirtualBox before that).

Read more about that point release here if you’re interested.

So starting tomorrow I’ll go on and install the not-so-common stuff which we need for work, like the ICSW frontend for IBM’s Retain system to handle our calls. That’s built on Eclipse, and integrated into Notes, which sometimes makes updates more complicated than necessary – integrated all-in-one tools and Linux are quite contrary in their whole philosophy, and in their design. But ok; these Java-based tools have to run on everything including Macs and Windows boxes, so I can’t really complain.

I also ordered a HDMI cable to connect the machine to the 24″ 16:9 monitor I have at work; should arrive soon. Guess I’ll have a working environment until the end of this week, and then my W520 goes to a colleague who’ll give it to his father.

So I’m looking forward to tomorrow, and to using that shiny new machine.

Oh, and before I forget it: Mathias, one of my colleagues today asked me to take a few photos of him, which he needed for some forum or so. And when I asked him if I could use and show one of these here, he said sure. So here’s Mathias from today:

As always, thanks for reading.

August 27, 2016August 28, 2016

A new machine for work

Three days ago at work, I received an email with the ‘final approval’ for a new notebook/laptop computer (everyone around here calls them ‘laptops’, but they’re sometimes too hot and/or too heavy to keep them on your lap for long). And yesterday, I got another mail telling me that the item was ‘shipped’, plus one from our local post office in Frankfurt – it had arrived.

Of course it didn’t arrive with what I had ordered – the IBM Open Client, based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.3. Instead, it had an image based on Windows 7 on it – which I wiped, and until the end of our office hours I had Debian GNU/Linux (the stable version 8, codename “Jessie”) running on it. But nevertheless, I wasn’t finished trying out the hardware, so I took it home. Here are some detail shots of it:

It’s a Lenovo Thinkpad P50, and I had to wait for it – all the colleagues who wanted a new machine right away got an older one. But my W520 was and is still doing a great job, so I had the time anyway.

It’s good tho that I took it home – newer hardware and Linux is still something which could cause you headaches. Turned out that the 3.16 kernel in the stable Debian wouldn’t recognize and detect a few items which are much younger than itself, such as the wireless card, or the sound. Some of the installed hardware required a kernel 4.x or higher, so instead of upgrading Debian to “testing” or “unstable”, I decided to put Ubuntu onto it – which is also Debian “unstable”, together with a bit of polish. With that – it has a kernel 4.4 – everything worked out of the proverbial box. Here’s a screenshot I made for my brother yesterday, while typing an email for him on that new machine:

The machine has HDMI, Mini-Display-Port, and Thunderbolt outputs, so today I tried it on our 42″ Panasonic TV, which also worked. Good; my monitor at work has VGA and HDMI inputs, so I only need to order a cable for HDMI. And after adding the IBM ‘Open Client’ layer and copying some files from the old machine to this new one, I’ll be done.

This is a nice one. Should be fun to use it.

Thanks for reading and for viewing, as always.

Update, from Sunday morning:

I finished pre-configuring that new machine. At work, I will have to install the Open Client layer on top of it all, but for now I have 3 operating systems running on it: Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, and virtualized Windows 7 and 10 environments (both using 2 CPU cores and 8GB of RAM; this machine is powerful enough to even run them all at once – it has 8 cores and 32GB of RAM). Here are a few screenshots plus one I made using my camera:

Ubuntu 16.04 LTS running on Lenovo Thinkpad P50

Windows 7 (on Oracle VirtualBox 5) running on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS running on Lenovo Thinkpad P50

Windows 10 (on Oracle VirtualBox 5) running on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS running on Lenovo Thinkpad P50

Lenovo Thinkpad P50 (running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS) in front of my 24″ monitor (showing Debian 8 “Jessie”)

Again, thanks for viewing/reading.

August 18, 2016

Malaysia, the last half week

After returning to paklong and maklong (my brother-in-law and his family) on Wednesday, the first thing I noticed was how fast these workers outside were building that new “Elmina Valley” – the first of the roofs were about to get ready:

Our adik and family also joined us again, and together we visited iCity:

Aqilah and her mum Zu on a train carousel:

On Saturday, Mitchie was invited to visit some of her former classmates and alumni and friends/husbands, but I didn’t take the camera there. It was nonetheless very interesting, and for the second time in my life I also ate Durian, this time in form of a cake. Nice, but not that easy to digest.

In the evening, both our families brought us back to KLIA – the header image is from a short stop on the motorway, not too far off the airport. At 2am on Sunday morning, our plane was to leave, so we had to say goodbye and terima kasih (= thanks) at around 1 o’clock. It was great to see them all again, and 6 years in between was way too long – so we hope to meet them again soon. My joke from yesterday: for my next birthday I said I’d wish for nothing special – just a cake, like the one maklong had. Available at Secret Recipe (in Malaysia only) 😉

Other things to try, should you visit Malaysia: Nasi Lemak and/or Roti Canai for breakfast, and Laksa, like Zu made it. Delicious like the whole Malaysian cuisine. One request of my brother was to write down the recipe of my favourite dish there – we bought him a book instead…

Thanks for reading, and for viewing.