Music. Photography. Thoughts.
Just finished upgrading our server here @lonien.de to the current stable version of Debian, plus installing free certificates from Let’s Encrypt for most (Sub-) Domains we run here.
Which is cool, and opens up lots of new possibilities. As an example, I’m posting this from my phone right now, from which I also took a screenshot. Note the green lock symbol on its Chrome browser:
As always, thanks for reading.
Looking down my own blog entries, and finding the one about Laura Wilson (mother of Owen and his brothers), I wondered how that horse photo of hers was made. So I checked, and the values for RGB in the midtones of this black & white image were decimal 150, 145, and 141, or hex 96, 91, and 8d. Which explains why it looks brownish rather than grey. But the whites are white, and the blacks are black – so I tried that myself. On this 16:9 selfie one:
Interesting. I made a preset in RawTherapee for it, so I don’t have to perform that many mouse-clicks to (re) produce these mid-toned black & white images.
So here’s one from the colleagues photo session from last month. Same treatment as above:
And here’s my ColorChecker with that same treatment:
Finally, a direct comparison between neutral grey and the treatment from above, as thumbnails from my nautilus file browser:
So that’s the reason I’m doing this.
Thanks for viewing, as always.
Update/Edit from August 16th, 2018:
Sorry – totally forgot to show you where to find this in RawTherapee. Well at home I have version 5.x, but even version 4.2 at work has the possibility to do this, under the ‘Color’ tab, and then under ‘Color Toning’. Just select the right method of Shadows/Midtones/Highlights, then adjust those midtones as you see in my example of Sarah:
Thanks again for reading.
I’ve read some remarkable articles in the German (online-version) magazine “Die Zeit” recently. One of them was “Das rote Sommermärchen”, and it’s about Sahra Wagenknecht’s new “Aufstehen” movement, which is some kind of a think tank for us lefties if you so wish. Interesting, and if you understand German, it’s a recommended reading.
Another article, also in German and in the same publication, is called “In einer Welt der Verbote”, and it’s about freedom in art, which seems to be in danger from the sides of some (even left) mobsters who are loud enough to get others scared enough to think about public displaying of “difficult” stuff.
And that got me thinking about an image I made myself a few days ago. That was a photo of a colleague who changed from smoking tobacco to inhaling fumes from one of these new pocket steam devices, into which you fill some kind of oil to inhale the fumes of it. That gives a whole lot more clouds than tobacco smoking ever did, and it’s also not yet clear if that is any less dangerous than inhaling burnt tobacco leaves.
Anyway, I had asked that colleague to wait with his next inhalation, got ready with my camera, and took a photo of him exhaling.
And he looked like a monster in that photo. Steam coming out of his mouth, his nostrils, totally unreal. Which reminded me of Freak shows, and led me to the question to myself if I would want to participate in something like it (which I don’t, obviously).
So like always, there’s a fine line between what *can* be done, and what *should* be done, and judgements never come easy – at least they shouldn’t. To question yourself is always a good beginning in my opinion, and should you be interested in a bit of self-reflection, it makes all of the articles mentioned above recommended readings.
As always, thanks for reading.
I’ve had a track on my Wikiloops watchlist since weeks, again from Shi and Ray. I absolutely love this one, so I took my time before finally taking out my bass today. And together with my addition, it sounds like this:
List of musicians (so far):
Thanks for listening.
Update from August 14th:
An awesome update from Pewi on this song! Listen:
So the new list of musicians is as follows:
Thanks Peter, this is really really great! Love it!
Second update from August 14th:
Another great add and remix from David:
List of musicians in this case was:
So cool – thanks David! Just chatting with some of the musicians in the Wikiloops’ ‘Shoutbox’…
Thanks for listening!
I was reminded of some great (and famous) photographers lately, who used square format cameras and films, like the twin-eyed Rolleiflex to name a famous piece of gear. The difference in composition? These cameras were mostly held at breast height, and viewed from above. On their ground glass – with or without a magnifying loupe – you saw a square image, half mirror-inverted. Meaning that when/if you moved the camera right, the picture on the ground glass would move left, and vice versa.
I’ve seen so many good photos from that time that I started to wonder how it would be to use my small Micro Four Thirds camera that way (because that’s all I have, folks). Luckily I have the E-M10 which has a tilting screen, and if I move it 90 degrees upwards then I can use this as a fake ground glass, with or without magnification, but not mirror-reversed (would be funny to have that implemented in firmware I guess). If I switch the camera to black & white I can already see the photo in black and white before I even take it – definitely an advantage compared to the film days when you had to wait for development to see anything.
Just playing around with my camera set up that way, today I took this:
Sleepy cat, Moerfelden-Walldorf 2018
Yes, it’s square. And yes, it’s black & white (both in camera and in “post production” which was to first reduce contrast with Olympus Viewer 3, then to apply the 019 “Fine Art” preset in Silver Efex Pro2, and with RawTherapee (on Linux) to add some title and Exif information).
Yes, it’s a sleepy cat. And yes, this is fun, really. Modern day Rolleiflex or Mamiya 330.
Thanks for viewing.
P.S.: here’s another one. Same cat, same day, a few hours later…
Looking at my camera strap, Moerfelden-Walldorf 2018
Thanks again for viewing.
Yesterday I took a picture in the atrium. I had set the camera to square format, and later at home I used both Olympus Viewer 3 (to make a slightly desaturated .tif), and Nik Color Efex Pro to simulate Fuji Astia slide film. I called the result “Nature wins”, and it looks like this:
What I hadn’t noticed until I took that picture was that my colleague Arno caught me photographing, using his new Huawei P20 Pro phone (with a couple of Leica branded lenses, same as I used on my Olympus camera). So here am I taking the above picture, from Arno’s phone:
He took some more photos. Interesting what you can do with a phone these days…
So much for our lunch break. Thanks for viewing.
Last week I took pictures of some colleagues, on white, black, and grey backgrounds. I haven’t asked the colleagues if I could show their photos here (or in Flickr where these are hosted) – except Arno, who agreed. So here are two of the photos I took of him:
As always, thanks for viewing.
I was more than impressed by Ted Forbes’ interview with Laura Wilson:
See also here, about one of her books:
If you want to know more about her, see Wikipedia, or her own web page. I think she’s absolutely worth your attention, and she definitely has mine.
I’m included in this collage of photos (taken out of videos which we’ve made ourselves):
You can hear all the songs and watch all those videos in this playlist on the Wikiloops Youtube channel.
Thanks to Richard, founder of Wikiloops who has cut all these together, and thanks also to all participants. It was great to be a part of all of this fun jamming, and I hope to see some of you soon in real life.
What an interesting article, comparing several camera/lens combinations, a small compact, and a smartphone, all for under $1k, with the $5.5k combination of a Nikon D850 and a 105mm/1.4 lens for portraits and background blur. Recommended reading if you want to take photos of people.