Category: photography

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Self portrait

Haven’t done a “selfie” since a while. But today I reinstalled one of the studio strobes into a corner of our dining area, attached a gridded beauty dish to it, set the camera to share its display and settings via WiFi, and used my phone as a remote controller. Then, with a black background attached to the kitchen door, I took a photo of myself. Looks like this:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/wjlonien/52625308160/
Self portrait, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2023

I set the white balance to 4800k and cropped the photo into a 4×5 format, otherwise it’s unaltered and like “out of the camera”.

Getting grey, am I not? Well I guess for an almost retiree that’s quite normal perhaps? Anyway, took the same photo into Silver Efex, and used the ‘Dark Sepia’ preset to get this out of it:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/wjlonien/52675587686
Self portrait in dark sepia, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2023

Thanks for viewing.

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Last and first pictures

Here’s the last sunset of 2022 as I saw it:

The last sunset of 2022, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2022

And here’s one of the first photos made this year. From today:

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Crunchy dreaming, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2023

The cat photo is also on Flickr where you can have a larger version (more pixels). Like always, thanks for viewing.

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You might see images vanish from this blog

I’m just deleting a lot of stuff from Flickr, where I just cancelled my rare but unlimited) pro subscription. That got more and more expensive over the years, and starting next month they wanted to charge me >70$ per year (when I started, it was about <45$ per 2 years). And since non-pro members are now restricted to a maximum of 1,000 photos I decided to delete everything except those from Tuna (RIP), and now our neighbours’ cats.

And that might affect images here, especially those on older blog posts, or even the ones showing my albums as widgets and links to Wikiloops. Wouldn’t matter much, I can still replace them with the album images from the ‘loops.

With my official retirement starting end of January, I’ll have to cut some expenses, so everything not really necessary will have to go. Thanks for your understanding.

Edit: [x] done replacing the flick album cover images with local ones. And this is what I will lose (or in fact have lost already): unlimited space…

I had one of the old unlimited pro accounts – now it’s gone…
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Season’s Greetings

Also from one of our small visitors:

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Meowrry Christmas!

Merry Christmas for those who celebrate that, and have a happy and healthy new year as well 🙂

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Will Ricoh/Pentax bring back film cameras?

This sounds truly promising:

PENTAX Film Project Story #1

Another one:

PENTAX “Film Project” Start #01

How fitting to have a piano as the background music for this – what a great analogy. A piano is a mechanical masterpiece as well, just ask my daughter after she tried some upright pianos… 🙂

Time to dust off my OM-2N, and to get some film into it again 🙂

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My current screen background…

… is Wilma on my chair, from January of this year. That’s a low light picture, taken with ISO 6400:

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Wilma in low light, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2022

On my screen this is of course cropped into the 16:10 format of my monitor.

Like always, thanks for viewing.

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Recorda Me – Lars Bernsmann (Guitar) & Hervé Jeanne (Bass)

What a great duo they make – just listened to three songs they’d played together, and here’s the one with the least amount of thumbs ups of them:

Recorda Me – Lars Bernsmann (Guitar) & Hervé Jeanne (Bass)

Hervé Jeanne is a fabulous bass player from Luxemburg, best known here in Germany probably because of his work with Roger Cicero, but also well-known about bass players because of his Stringmatrix Youtube channel, where he tests and compares strings, microphones etc., so we don’t have to 🙂

The bass he’s playing here is his 1960 Rubner with Aquila Gold and 22 strings, picked up by his Audio Technica ATM35 microphone mounted on a mic stand instead of the bass itself.

And as you can probably see, Lars plays his Höfner guitar directly into the amp and cabinet, no pedal boards or anything – that’s how a good guitar should sound 😉

The two other videos I’ve heard are “On a Clear Day“, and “My Shining Hour“.

Thanks Hervé and Lars for your wonderful session, and thanks to you for reading and watching, like always.

P.S.: if you want to read more about Hervé, here’s an interview with him from Bass Professor, and in case you want to hear him with the late Roger Cicero (RIP), here’s Roger’s “Zieh die Schuh aus”, with English subtitles:

Roger Cicero – Zieh die Schuh aus (Offizielles Video)
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Remembering Tuna…

Today, only Crunchy came for some shorter visits – maybe at currently -2°C, cats like to stay home (where I hope they have it nice & warm).

Zuleikha decided years ago that December 5th should/would be Tuna’s birthday, so during this time of the year we often think of her. So at the moment, this is my current screen background again:

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Tuna the cat, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2020

I miss my furry friend and favourite “model”…

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Crunchy under my chair

From this evening in very low light:

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Crunchy under my chair, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2022

I had the camera set to colour, and after exporting the .orf file to a .tif using OM Systems’ Workspace I used Silver Efex, and in it the preset 016, I think its name is something like “Full Dynamic Range” or so. The colour image wasn’t bad, but in the end I liked this one more.

Crunchy is gone by now, into the night with 1°C. I hope he’s fine.

Like always, thanks for viewing.