What a cool place to hang out…

… because there’s always great music at Emmet’s Place:

Emmet Cohen w/ Mar Vilaseca | Chega de Saudade (No More Blues)
Emmet Cohen w/ Erena Terakubo & Yotam Silberstein | I’ll Remember April
Emmet Cohen w/ Lucy Yeghiazaryan | People Will Say We’re in Love

Also, this:

Live From Emmet’s Place Vol. 87 – Ukraine Benefit (Jazz4Ukraine)

Enjoy… 🙂

Qotd, from Feb 8th, 2022

And this quote of the day comes from Rick Beato:

“Before ProTools, there were Pros…”

Rick Beato
The WEIRDEST Pop Song Intro of All Time

As always, thanks for viewing.

Got a bit nostalgic…

I recently saw ‘The in Between‘, which is a nice movie by the way. And Joey King, the main actress is using an Olympus OM-1N camera and develops her own black & white images in a darkroom which was nice to see as well (tho with a few quirks, the image “seen” though the camera’s viewfinder for instance was *not* the one from an OM-1). Anyway, since at the moment I don’t have film in my OM-2N camera I went and replaced the Micro Zuiko 17mm/1.8 lens:

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Olympus 17mm 1.8 lens, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2022

with an old and manual Olympus Zuiko 50mm/1.8 one which I still have. Here’s how the camera looks with that, as “seen” from my phone (Google Pixel 4a):

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My camera with an old OM Zuiko lens, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2022

And here’s an image taken with that combination, from about a two meter distance, and with the lens wide open at f=1/1.8:

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Upright bass with pickup and a tuner, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2022

Very cool to have this 100mm equivalent look in a 3:2 format, and in black & white. And although this is still ‘instant’ imaging with using the digital sensor in my camera instead of film, the camera was set to ‘M’ (manual) mode, so you still have to work a bit for each image, and of course also set the focus yourself. Slow photography, so to say, and it can be as tasty as slow food 😉 I should probably try that combination for portraits instead of taking the very fast 45mm/1.8 or the very sharp 50mm/2 macro lenses. Working on and thinking about an image *before* you even take it can’t be bad… 😉

As always, thanks for reading, and for viewing.

Yoko Kanno and The Seatbelts

These are cool cats from Japan, playing the music from “Cowboy Bebop”:

TANK! Virtual Session 2020 by SEATBELTS Produced by Yoko Kanno

And here’s kind of an about from the late 2021 Netflix series:

Yoko Kanno + The Music of Cowboy Bebop | Netflix

A must see in my opinion. Pure beauty through and through. And nothing beats some cool, or rather hot hard bop. Enjoy.

More? Here you go… and here are some more… love the girl and the dog 😉 And these two were particularly amazing:

What a band. And what a composer. Chapeau!

For the original motion picture soundtrack, look and listen here.

In Time – Wikiloops track #168792 (but with some BBC images and footage)

Can’t make this public on YT due to negotiations with the BBC – but I can still use it on my private blog as they confirmed…

…so thanks go out to Dr.Whom for his awesome composition, to Shi for the lyrics and for her sweet vocals, and to the BBC Cymru for providing us with such great shows.

The video mainly shows my desktop with the free and open source Ardour DAW (digital audio workstation) running, but also provides some images and videos by the BBC:

In Time – Wikiloops track #168792 (but with some BBC images and footage)

Original audio is on Wikiloops. Enjoy, and thanks for reading, and for listening and viewing.

(Another four and a half billion years, as “Clara” says here, and I will still love this song. “Love is eternal”, as Shi sings…) 🙂 <3

Birds in our garden

I played around with my phone first, but later changed to my normal camera. Here’s a short cut from a longer video I made of the birds in our garden:

As always, thanks for watching…

Updates, cheap frame grabbers, selfies

Sometime last week I read about a vulnerability of the Chrome browser which most of my colleagues – and according to my statistics also most of the visitors of this site – are using. So I sent them a short notice about it, and also upgraded my own versions of the Chrome and Chromium browsers on both Linux and Windows (tho I rarely use them, mostly for debugging if someone reports about errors or so).

There were also news about Windows updates, and that these might be important, so I did that as well – I have a dual boot machine here so if I interrupt the boot up process I can also start Windows 10 instead of Linux. This one might be tricky in case you have your Windows machine connected via WiFi – one of their last updates corrupted that (and they have another update for that alone). Anyway, better be safe and update, I did…

What I do *not* have on my main machine is a webcam for video conferencing, but I have tried droidcam which works fine even with an iPhone, I also tried their Linux client on my employers’ notebook (Lenovo P50 with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8), and that works.

But I also remembered that I have a much better camera, so I ordered one of these cheap frame grabbers (mine was 14€, you find them even cheaper by now):

These are detected automatically, no drivers needed. Here’s a screenshot from Ubuntu Studio where it even shows its name as ‘MACROSILICON USB Video’, and the ID 534d:2109 (on my Debian and Red Hat machines both of which have older kernels it leaves away the name but is detected and works just fine):

Rob Trek has a video about this one, and how to use it with Olympus cameras like mine:

He also had another one on how to use these cameras for live streaming and online conferencing with Skype, Zoom, Meet, and so on:

Very nice, although until now I can’t really get rid of the focus rectangles with that long press on the ‘Info’ button¹. But then again, Olympus never claimed the E-M10 Mk2 to have a clean HDMI output, so this is what you should look out for when deciding onto a new camera with which you’d also like to live stream – the quality of all of these is *much* better than your typical webcam… (the one in the Lenovo P50 is horrible).

¹Edit: if I turn off face/eye detection, C-AF on, and then select not one focus point/box but all – pretty much the whole screen – then I get a clean HDMI out for streaming. Cool; works for me without having to get just another camera…

Speaking about cameras, I was using mine a bit more often lately, but since I can’t always photograph our cat, and since we’re still in the middle of a pandemic, I mostly pointed it onto myself – like here for instance:

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Me as “Lester the Nightfly”, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2021
Listen to the original
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Yet another self portrait, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2021

As you see I also went wider as usual – 50mm-equivalent in the first, and 28mm-equivalent in the second shot, and I used two of my studio strobes for better colour and definition. So if you don’t have a good looking model, you can at least use good lighting which is the second most important thing in photography 🙂 No reason to not be creative just because you can’t go out that much, is it?

As always, thanks for reading, viewing, and watching (or listening). Be well and stay safe everyone, and take care…