Today I made a test: I took both of the smart phones off of their chargers when I started work this morning, and placed them beside my workplace like this:
These are, from left to right: the Apple iPhone SE (2020 model) which belongs to my employer, and the Google Pixel 4a phone which I “bought for one shilling” from my wife.
The test was: I wanted to see how much battery power was left after a full day of work, without using both devices. My expectation was that the Apple device with its A13 chip would win by quite some degree against the Google device with its Snapdragon chip.
And of course, “not using them” wasn’t exactly true – while the Apple device was silent, I heard the Pixel phone’s “Pling!” sound several times when someone sent me an email via GMX – don’t know if the display went on because I haven’t seen it, but I guess so (usually it does). The GMX app is also installed and configured on the iPhone, but notifications weren’t allowed on it. Another (unfair) advantage for Apple? I have no idea…
So after work – and I shut down my notebook after a bit more than nine and a half hours uptime including lunch break – I looked at both. Result: 93% battery left on the Apple, 99% on the Google phone.
Interesting. Obviously, Google has learnt how to let its Pixel phones doze (can hardly say ‘sleep’ when all of the time they’re in fact waiting for something to happen). Power management seems to be perfect on these. Would be interesting to compare it with Apple’s new A14 chip in the newer iPhone 12 – that one is the first 5nm CPU just like the M1 chip in Apple’s new “Silicon” machines… but as you can see, it’s not all just hardware…
And as you can see, its official name is “Oberwaldberg”, tho everyone here just calls it “Müllberg”. It’s renaturated and surrounded by some nice lakes and fields, home of many birds again, so quite nice. Last time we went there it was kind of late and getting dark, so today I decided to walk around and on top of that hill again, taking my camera with the 25mm/1.4 “normal” lens. Here are some photos:
Our “Müllberg” from South-West, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2021
This is as close as you can get from an industrial area in the Southwest of the small hill, so this is where I parked and left the car. As you can see, I wasn’t alone but then again it wasn’t really crowded as well, I’ve met maybe half a dozen people during the whole walk around and on top of it.
Here I’m looking South from the way you saw on the first photo, into the general direction of Darmstadt (we’re as close to Darmstadt as we are to Frankfurt, both are about 15km away in almost exact opposite directions). This is where the sun was during my walk which was a bit chilly at times…
Home, airport, and Taunus as seen from our “Müllberg”, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2021
This is the view back home from our Müllberg. We live in one of these higher buildings behind the second line of trees in the front. Behind our home and another forest and all the way to the left is the airport, and behind that are some smaller villages and then the mountain line of the Taunus which is North of Frankfurt.
This is the view from a second and slightly lower lookout, with the general direction about 286 degrees West-Northwest. I called this “So near and so far” because that is what you see, especially when you see the airplanes leaving.
According to the step counter of my mobile phone, I walked some 2.5km and about 4,000 steps.
… from a new and respected pianist, Bach, via Schubert, to being kind…
Yesterday – just by chance – I saw a few minutes of a music program in ARD Mediathek, and it’s also on Youtube. It’s about a young pianist called Víkingur Ólafsson who explains and plays Bach like no other, very impressive. Maybe I’ll put his CD onto my wish list… (and that link has an affiliate reference back to Wikiloops again).
Through the German Wikipedia page about him, linked above (English one is here), I learnt that he also has a Soundcloud account – and there I heard him together with Kristinn Sigmundsson perform “Gute Nacht” from Schubert’s “Winterreise”:
Very cool, and probably one of the most well-known musical pieces about unrequited love, just like in literature this would be Goethe’s “Werther”, or H.C. Andersen’s “Under the willow tree” (German *and* English versions are here).
This might all sound or read nicely from a warm home, but it all ends tragic, and there’s nothing romantic about winter, and/or freezing to death. So my thoughts went further on to those who don’t have a home, no matter the reasons.
And that made me think of “The Doctor” (Doctor Who, best played so far by Peter Capaldi in my opinion), and his imperative of “being kind”. It’s all the same story which fits this Christmas time which just went past with so many people thinking about their own problems and grief – please also think of the others. Share if you can, and/or at least be kind, that costs you nothing.
Oh my. This sounds like me preaching. But sometimes this is how I think, and how my thoughts jump from one thing to another, so please don’t be too harsh with me 🙂
Wishing you all a good time, and don’t forget to stay safe, and to take care. As always, thanks for reading.
P.S.: here’s a song which I just recommended to some of my colleagues. It’s from 2013, but in my opinion it also fits the time. Have to remember to tag it with “matteredToMe2020” in the ‘loops this evening:
Michael Johnston from The Online Photographer is not only an expert and a must read on photography, he’s a very interesting and friendly guy to follow on a lot of topics. So now he wrote about food again, here and here. And he put links to videos of some doctors in there as well, listen for instance to Dr. Gemma Newman:
WHY I QUIT LOW CARB & WENT VEGAN – Dr. Newman
Or to her colleague Dr. Barnard, and others:
WHAT I EAT IN A DAY: Dr Barnard & Other Plant Based Doctors
What Michael describes quite nicely is that you can eat as much as you want, and some if not most of these doctors confirm that – as long as it’s healthy food, which means fibers, and plant-based. In that last video you also saw Dr. Greger, and I have both his original “How Not To Die” plus the accompanying “How Not To Die Cookbook“, and I can recommend both of them.
By the way: these last two links to the German Amazon contain affiliate links back to Wikiloops, so in case you’d use these links to buy something there, Wikiloops would get a bit of support as well. Normally I never do this, but for that page I make an exception – it’s like supporting oneself if you’re using that great site as a musician during these times of Covid-19.
Yesterday after work I couldn’t make music – some neighbours were using power tools, so it was too loud for that. And so all I could do was to sit on the sofa, and lay my feet high on one of its armrests, and since I had my camera in my hand, set to black & white, I took a photo:
So today I took the car and went to Aberystwyth, which greeted me with a friendly “Croeso!“. And that lovely little university town is also the home of the TV series “Hinterland“, which we Germans of course had to translate, because nobody here would understand a German word I guess – so here that series was called “Inspector Mathias – Mord in Wales“, followed by the names of the respective episodes which made the whole construct just ridiculously long…
No, I went to Kronberg im Taunus, and one of its partner cities is Aberystwyth:
I took a short walk there but then decided to drive a bit further to Königstein im Taunus, where I left the car again. It’s a wealthy area, with some nice architecture, so first I took a few photos of houses, like these:
Some signpost in town said: walk 800m further and turn left, then take the way past the Catholic Church – and this is the church when coming back down from the castle…
Interesting side note: the step counters on Android and iOS count differently – I had these phones in the same pocket:
I took today’s photos using the 14-42mm “kit zoom” lens mounted onto my Olympus E-M10 Mk2 camera. No music today – not until now, that is. Not even in my head…
I filled a roll of black & white film, so by now I’m back to taking colour photos using my digital camera(s) (both Olympus mirrorless, and iPhone). During today’s short Sunday walk I decided to leave the 45mm/1.8 M.Zuiko lens on the camera, which has an angle of view like a 90mm lens on 24x36mm film (what they now call “full frame”, for me it’s still “Kleinbildfilm”) 🙂 The reason to keep this short “portrait” tele on the camera was that with also carrying an iPhone SE I also have what compares to 28mm on film…
I walked in the direction of the airport, the infamous “Startbahn West”, and if you extend that route from our place then you’re heading pretty much into the direction of Wales and Ireland – turn slightly right, and it would be Scotland instead. So this is what I call ‘The route of the Celts’, it’s where they went. Some stayed in France (think Asterix for the general direction), but cross the channel and you’ll end up there after a couple of a million steps…
And because the light was nice and the sun was low I saw some pretty colours as well, so have a look:
Oh wow. I complained too fast, before doing all necessary tests (which hadn’t made a difference with my old camera, but with this one it did):
removing the SD card let me switch the camera on and off as usual, it also reacted on keystrokes and showed a display as usual plus it reset the lens when switching off
doing the same with the SD card in again, and still everything worked
I took some photos, back in business as if nothing had happened.
Strange. But I’m glad that the camera still works, don’t really need a newer and/or better one…
Edit, from the same evening:
I just took another photo first of my ColorChecker (for the room light white balance), then of Tuna. Here are two versions of the same photo I took of her:
Two years ago, on November 11th, 2018 my first Olympus camera died. I wrote about that, and since my second (or “backup”) camera together with my best and most expensive lens (E-PL5 and M.Zuiko 75mm/1.8) got stolen in Paris short before that, I was without a camera for a while. To recap, here’s the last photo I took with my old 1st generation E-M10:
Zuleikha with Tuna the cat, 21st of October 2018, Mörfelden-Walldorf the very last (and “out of camera”) picture taken with my Olympus OM-D E-M10 (Mk1) before it died
At least it was taken with another one of my favourite lenses, Mitchie’s wonderful Panasonic Lumix 20mm/1.7…
Today the weather was so nice, and I thought that I really should go out and catch some late October autumn colours as long as it lasts – even from my chair and through our veranda windows I could see green, yellow, and red leaves, so I decided to mount my Zuiko Macro 50mm/2 (from the old “Four Thirds” system) onto my E-M10 Mk2 and to take a walk with that combination. But when I tried to take a first picture of those exact leaves on our own veranda – my camera was dead. Same symptoms as the 1st gen camera had, I couldn’t “properly” turn it on (or off) anymore, and no battery or lens change could cure that – so again a system failure of the mainboard I suppose…
And the last picture taken with that camera was – the one of me with the upright bass, taken by Mitchie, which I had shown in my last blog article. Ok…
Now I still have that old and half mechanical SLR also from Olympus, the wonderful OM-2n – but for that I currently have only a black & white film laying around, so not exactly the right gear to take for autumn colours 😉 – and since I don’t have any other real camera, I was left with the iPhone which was given to me (and to all colleagues of mine) by our employers lately. Also a nice camera in that one, tho of course this isn’t a 100mm-comparable macro lens (100mm like on 24x36mm film). Still I wanted to walk, so I took this camera phone which doesn’t even belong to me…
… and here are some impressions from my walk, without further explanations:
Or maybe I should write a few words? It was a really nice day as you probably can see, and the sun and the people were smiling, and I was smiling back, almost like in Shi’s wonderful “Le maloya d’une enfant”, so if you want you could listen to that while viewing the rest of these photos, because that was in my head as well during that walk:
As you can see, I did try to take some close-up photos of some leaves, but what you also can see is that a mobile phone with a focal length which compares to 28mm on film will never be a match for a 100mm-comparable macro lens, it doesn’t even have a remote chance against that…
But still, iPhone photos aren’t that bad, so thinking about what to do now, hmmm… of course I could (and probably should) have that camera sent back to Olympus for a possible repair job again and see what happens. But would/should I buy another one? Good question…
There were times when I wanted to be a portrait photographer, and I wasn’t that bad really, learned everything about light, how to pose people, and so on – but there was one thing lacking in my person and in myself which you can see in some if not most of the photos I took of people: I was missing some proper communication skills.
What I want to say is that it’s not enough to just admire beauty when you see it, and then smile at a beautiful person – you have to get her or him really comfortable, especially in front of a camera to get their real self as the saying goes. You have to have them forget that there’s someone pointing a camera at them, and maybe thinking about how they will look, all that. So when I for instance took photos of Mitchie, they were ok, beautifully lit, well posed maybe – but when Zuleikha took photos of her mum, she always had the better ones. Portrait photography is interaction between two people, and just pointing your camera on beauty isn’t enough.
What else? Oh, landscapes, yes, everyone including me loves landscapes. Or even nightly shots of the starry sky, with or without telescopes and all that stuff, right?
Well I’ve tried that as well – but now I can’t walk that good and that far anymore because of my atherosclerosis, and I never could stand the cold for too long, so I never got that precise sky tracking motorised system for the telescope, and never walked the alps with my camera so far (and believe me, if you can’t properly walk anymore but used to love it, then you just dream about walking the Camino de Santiago or the Via Francigena or for Muslims, the Hajj (and on that latter, cameras aren’t even allowed)).
So for that I also don’t really need a camera anymore, at least nothing I couldn’t also do with a phone camera. Plus taking portraits is really kind of difficult since the outbreak of covid-19, isn’t it?
So sitting on a bench at a bus stop today, I had some other song in my mind, again from Shi, but I haven’t played on that one so far. The song is still wonderful like most of what she does, and its title is “Low tides”, and the lines I had in my head were:
“… nothing lasts forever only time still marches on”
Hear it here if you want to know what was in my head, thinking about photography, art, and myself:
Today my very first Wikiloops album ever is the “Album of the day” – and for the cover photo of that one I also used my first E-M10 camera, and the cutest “model” I had around (that one was taken with daylight through the veranda door by the way):
That album doesn’t have any contributions of my own, which is why I never included it into the list of “My albums”. But it contains really cool collaborations of others whom I wanted to promote and to celebrate a bit with that album, so here is the link to what I called “The cool cats from the loops – Hit singles” – hope you enjoy it as much as their music impressed me.
So while I’m still thinking, I’m without a camera again for the moment.
As always, thanks to my musician friends and to Richard from Wikiloops for the music (which is an important lifeline for me, much more so than photography) – and thanks to you for reading, viewing, listening, and/or even commenting.
