Music. Photography. Thoughts.
Here are two photos of the moon, both from this morning, both with the same camera and lens. One from home, short before I entered the garage, the other from after arriving at work:
Moon over Mörfelden-Walldorf, 2016
Moon over Frankfurt Sossenheim, 2016
Thanks for viewing.
Normally I don’t take many photos of vehicles. But my colleague Gunther likes old cars, and this one’s older than me:
VW Käfer (Beetle) from 1953
Converted from raw using Olympus Viewer 3, Fuji Neopan Acros 100 film simulation, b&w conversion, and white border with Google Nik Silver Efex Pro2, title and tags with RawTherapee.
Thanks for viewing.
Here are two photos which I took yesterday:
Zuleikha, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2016
Tuna the cat, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2016
Thanks for viewing.
Today at work, we’ve had a short get together to demonstrate against massive job cuts which are planned for IBM Germany. I took some photos with my camera, and also with the one of Bert Stach, chief negotiator of ver.di (our labour union who were the organizers, together with our workers’ council). Here are some taken with my own camera:
IBMers in Germany protest against planned job cuts, Frankfurt 2016
IBMers in Germany protest against planned job cuts, Frankfurt 2016
IBMers in Germany protest against planned job cuts, Frankfurt 2016
IBMers in Germany protest against planned job cuts, Frankfurt 2016
IBMers in Germany protest against planned job cuts, Frankfurt 2016
Thanks for viewing.
P.S.: Tho I converted these photos from the raw .orf files of my camera, I haven’t made any changes to them, except adding meta data like titles, exif tags, and so on, which makes them a bit easier to find for interested parties. So you have to excuse if some lines aren’t as straight as usual – this is documentary photography with its own set of ethic rules and such. Also, the light at “5 to 12” (which was the title of this happening) isn’t perfect for photography as we all know.
On my computer desk there were still two developed films, one Agfa Precisa CT100 colour slide film, the other was an Agfa APX100 black & white negative one. Here are some “scans” I’ve made Sunday evening, again using my Olmypus E-M10, a ZD 50mm/2 macro lens (from the Four Thirds system, with adapter), and a slide copier (plus flash and a white background):
Olympus OM-1, on film (with OM-2)
Employers’ garden, on film, early 2015
Lufthansa airplane, on film, early 2015
Card playing figures, on film, Darmstadt 2015
I converted the colour photos from the .orf raw files using Darktable on Linux, the black & white one using my conventional method, which is first Olympus Viewer 3 on a virtualized Windows, then RawTherapee on Linux for tagging etc.
Thanks for viewing.
Here’s a photo of our cat, in really low light. EV1 means 1/15th of a second at ISO 3200 when using f/2; she was only lit by the distant dining room light and the TV set:
Tuna the cat, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2016
Converted using Darktable 2.0.1 on Linux. Profiled noise reduction.
Thanks for viewing.
We have road works at Frankfurt Sossenheim, where I work. This will last at least two weeks and will delay us all, especially in the evenings when we try to get home (in the mornings I’m early enough to avoid the main traffic). This is how it looked today:
Baustelle – Road works
On another note, I’ve tried and converted this image using Darktable 2.01 on Linux, no Olympus Viewer – so no starting of a virtualized Windows instance – and no RawTherapee. Tagging etc. works as expected, and I’ve done no fancy stuff, just basic conversion mostly like the program recommended by itself. Oh, what’s really cool is that you can add geotags quite easily, with searching on a map if your camera doesn’t have built-in GPS already. So this one – on Flickr – will show you where I took it, without anything done in Flickr at all.
Cool stuff. I knew that Darktable is powerful, but never got around to getting used to it. I like this idea of Open Source Photography, done with free (as in speech) tools.
Thanks for viewing.
P.S.: Here’s another one which I took yesterday, and which I “developed” using Darktable (instead of my usual “workflow” with first using OV3 on Windows, and then RawTherapee on Linux):
IBM Frankfurt Sossenheim, 2016
What I like so far about this program, except from the really easy and convenient GPS tagging is that it approximates colours close enough to the Olympus “original” in-camera colours which aren’t super accurate, but very nice. Haven’t played around with own ICC profiles etc. yet; I’m still discovering the many things you can do with this. Darktable even has layers which makes it even more powerful than Lightroom, and you can do selective edits with either brushes and/or these layers, which I didn’t try until now.
What I also like is the very good dynamic range. Ok, we’ve had some dramatic clouds yesterday, and it started to rain short after I was in again, but OV3 (or the in-camera jpgs of Olympus) is a bit more contrasty out of the box, while RawTherapee doesn’t get these colours. So here it gives you some additional headroom, reminds me of photos taken with Nikon cameras which are very good in that regard.
Plus they have a nice manual, so you could go and have a look if you like. No Windows version tho… 😉
What I don’t like is that the program really takes some resources. It makes use of GPU acceleration if you have a compatible card (Nvidia or ATI only, doesn’t work with my onboard Intel graphics). I wouldn’t try this on a machine with less than 8GB of RAM (I have 16GB), and with a quad core processor like mine. And read the manual and save the (very good profiled) denoising until the end – some steps slow down the machine more than others (didn’t do any denoising here).
Again, thanks for reading / viewing.
I was out for a short walk earlier, and just like Kirk Tuck would do it, I took only one camera and lens with me.
Back at home, I played around with Google’s Nik Collection again, mostly with Silver Efex Pro 2. I made this with it:
End of track, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2016
That’s a combination of a film simulation (Kodak Tri-X 400), a white border and a few other things I’ve tried when using that program. And I don’t know what you think, but for me this looks a bit like one of these photos of old, when we still had them printed in small sizes, and stored away in shoe cartons. Nice. I’ll try some prints soon.
The program seems to take some resources; it runs far better on my bare metal Windows 10 installation than in virtual machines, even if I allow them to take 8GB of RAM (the whole “bare metal” machine has 16GB). So if you want to try it, make sure your hardware fits, or it’ll make you wait during each step. But the results would be still worth it, so I can only recommend to at least try these now free (as in beer) gifts from Google.
Thanks for viewing.
My colleague Basti mentioned that you could run some of the Nik Collection programs “standalone”, without having to use the programs as plugins for Adobe’s Lightroom or Photoshop, both of which I don’t have and use. But since we couldn’t find any hint in the howtos on Google’s pages, I haven’t tried. Until today.
And indeed, all of the “Efex” titled programs of the collection run just fine on either Windows 7 or 10, so I started to look at some of their film simulations. They look like this:
Trying the Nik Collection film simulations
top left: original out-of-camera jpg (with Olympus Viewer 3)
top right: Fuji Acros 100
middle left: Kodak Portra 160 VC
middle right: Ilford HP5 400
bottom left: Fuji Provia 100 F
bottom right: Kodak Tri-X 400TX
You can download this collage as a 96MP jpg image (6x16MP mounted together in The Gimp) on Flickr to have a closer 100% view if you like. And in case you want to try the programs yourself, they are here. One big download of approximately 480MB or so, for the Windows version (also available for Mac which I haven’t tried).
Very cool. Next I’ll have to try real Tri-X against this simulated one. And interesting how different all these simulated films look, almost like in real life.
Thanks for viewing.
Here are some photos from a time when I was around age 4 to 7 (or so) – which is now more than 50 years ago. Obviously these were *not* taken by me… 😉
Brüder
Leutasch
Ulla, Hildegard, Willi & Wolfgang
Einschulung
Thanks for viewing.