Music. Photography. Thoughts.
After putting an own photo as a blog header here yesterday, I now also added the usual site search plus a short overview about recent posts and comments back into this minmalist Twenty Seventeen theme. And that’s about it for the moment. Love it so far.
Thanks for reading.
Sunday afternoon I started upgrading our server, which until then was still running Debian 7.x “Wheezy”. And that will become obsolete soon – when Stretch will be released, the current 8.x “Jessie” will change its status to “oldstable”, and the current oldstable – Wheezy – will reach its end of (supported) life.
So we had to update sooner or later anyway, and a Sunday afternoon seemed like a good idea. Only that it took much longer than I thought; sometimes newer software (like Apache 2.4 instead of 2.2) does behave quite differently from what you’re used to, and new plugins and other server software also had to be learned.
But ok; we’re back, and even with a nice new layout – today, WordPress 4.7 “Vaughan” was released, and with it came what you see here: a brand new Twenty Seventeen theme which looks really pretty if you ask me. Of course you can customize it to your heart’s desires, which is what Zuleikha is doing right now. Me, I’m slower. I have to take in what I’m offered, and consider what’s good and what’s not, so I’ll leave it like that for the moment.
I still have to do some configuration jobs on the server before I can think about my site’s design. But that will be considered, too. For the moment, I’m happy with it as it is.
And as always (some things never change): thanks for reading.
Update, from 21:30h: Ok; i did go on and change the header image to one that I took. This is the Youth Hostel in Mittenwald, Bavaria, which lays beautifully on some hill between the Wetterstein and Karwendel mountains. I was out with my Olympus E-PL1 camera which had Mitchie’s Panasonic Lumix 20mm/1.7 lens mounted. Took this one on August 16th of 2013 during the sunset at f/8, and cropped and resized it here to 2000×1200 pixels which is the standard blog header image size for the WordPress Twenty Seventeen theme. Nothing else changed on the theme so far.
Thanks for viewing.
The guys from “The Camera Store” (in Canada) lately had an interesting video, where they asked several people’s opinions about their preferences of standard jpg outputs of different cameras. Interesting to see, and with a maybe not so much expected “winner”.
Standard jpgs from our Olympus cameras are very nice, tho a short comparison I did last weekend showed me that in certain situations, other colour engines than the one built in (or the similar Olympus Viewer 3 software) gave me a better starting point, especially for portraits under strong and contrasty studio lights – my “winner” for these situations is Darktable under Linux.
But anyhow, I’d like to show a few snapshots from today, and tell you what I did with these, using my standard procedure (“workflow”, except that for me this ain’t work): convert to a 16 bit .tif with Olympus Viewer 3 (on a virtualized Win7 machine), then add metadata using RawTherapee 4.2 on Linux.
For today’s first picture, I was in for a surprise:
Cat, with (rainbow) lens flare
I took three photos of Tuna at that place, and my rear display on the camera is normally turned off – no “chimping” and instant reviews. So when I sat down on our sofa to show one to Mitchie, I wondered why these had such a low contrast. Only later on my computer I saw the reason: strong lens flare in rainbow colours (I didn’t have the hood on my lens, that’s why). Interesting. Here I added lots of contrast from my usual in-camera settings of -1 for both contrast and saturation.
This one is much stronger:
The last remaining leaves
This was again taken with my custom picture setting, which is the same as natural but with both contrast and saturation on -1. The only thing I’ve changed here in Olympus Viewer 3 was to also reduce the sharpness to -2 to avoid halos on the small branches against the darker sky. This is – for my taste at least – a very nice standard output of an Olympus camera.
Then, a bit later:
Sometimes, there’s just good – in this case mirrored – light
I saw this mirrored light, partly on the bird feeder and also on the background, and took the photo with a -0.7EV compensation. To which I added -0.3EV in Olympus Viewer 3, and -0.05EV in RawTherapee, maikng it 1.05 stops darker than what my camera measured (on center-weighted, my standard setting). No other manipulations, and white balance was on auto.
Then I took the last day of light like this:
Restlicht (including a reflection of the photographer)
This was taken with -2.7 stops set in the camera, even before taking it. Which is one of the reasons I wouldn’t like to go back to optical viewfinders – they won’t show you any overexposure until after the shot. So these small mirrorless cameras let me “work” way faster than any big bad DSLR… 😉 No further manipulations to this as well.
But to this one:
Tuna the cat, in-camera black & white with simulated red filter
The title says it already, and I’ve done that conversion with Olympus Viewer 3, so the same could have been done in-camera (except of course to add a title like that, or any tags).
I don’t know about you, but I can live with outputs such as these. And I’m not alone – read Gordon Laing’s opinion about these cameras. Of the Mk2 successor of mine this is what he wrote:
“The Olympus OMD EM10 Mark II is in many ways the perfect mid-range camera.”
and/or:
“But for general day-to-day photography, the OMD EM10 Mark II is hard to beat.”
To which I have nothing to add, except maybe: see a video comparison of mine (the Mk1 version) against a Nikon D810 here…
Thanks for reading, as always. As a small reward for making it until here, here’s some music for you. And it contains a much nicer photo than my blog pictures here as well. Snowy White – Midnight Blues.
Wow; it’s a week already since I’ve posted some photos, and a rather busy and fast one it was. So I didn’t take and upload as many pictures as usual, and most of them (in fact all except one) are in black & white.
Like this one here, of Tuna our cat. Tried some Ilford HP5+ film emulation on her, but without the grain:
The only colour photo I took and actually uploaded to Flickr was taken during a short cigarette break on the company’s roof garden. I was there with my colleague Arno and saw some other colleague (never seen him before), reading a book in the already setting sun. Looked like this:
Then, two days ago, this:
Zuleikha was just finishing her homework in normal room light, and from a comparison of more or less standard outputs of different raw converters which I did last weekend, I decided that for black & white, Olympus Viewer 3 gave the best results.
Also in black & white, and taken yesterday during a concert at Zuleikha’s school, Herr Koch on his Flügelhorn (they played “Feels so good” from Chuck Mangione, and indeed that felt and sounded very nice!):
I also tried to take some of Zuleikha’s friend Yuma who was excellent like always, but my photos weren’t. Guess I’ll have to ask and to invite them for a photo session in good light and in a controlled environment.
And finally, a few moments ago I took another cat portrait of Tuna, this time with bounced flash and guessed exposure (which was a bit too high this time, but I could correct it in post):
I cropped this one, and set the aspect ratio to 3:2 to get closer to a 135 “small” film (Kleinbildfilm) look. My aperture was f/2 here, so it’s about the same as a picture taken on 135 film with an aperture of f/4, concerning the depth of field.
As always, thanks for reading.
Today, November 25th, but 11 years ago I wrote the first entry (welcome message aside) on a subdomain called “wolfgang” of the TLD “lonien.de”. I had registered and used “lonien.de” long before that, but then I decided to split it up so that each of us could write his/her own blog.
It’s lost and never made it to our current server, but it was archived, so in case you want to browse some older entries, here’s my “Here we go…” post on the Wayback Machine.
Thanks for reading.
I changed back my lighting modifiers, so I have a gridded white beauty dish over our dining table again. And with a silver reflector lying on the table, I profiled my setup:
Then I asked Zuleikha if she would sit for me for a short moment (danke nochmal, Schätzchen!). Zuleikha has dark brown hair which wouldn’t contrast enough with a black background, so I added another studio strobe on lowest setting from a bit further away, just for a tiny bit of hair light. With these lights, I took her portrait:
Zuleikha, November 2016
Thanks for viewing.
On Sunday, my colleague Gertrud invited us to a concert in which she performed. It was also the 90th anniversary of her band, the “Mandolinenorchester Winkel 1926“. Here are two photos I took:
It was a bit dark in the Brentanoscheune, so I took that first photo with my 40-150mm lens at ISO 6400. The light was a bit unforgiving for portraiture as well, so I converted it to black & white.
This next one was taken with my 25mm/1.4 lens at ISO 4000, while the Mayor held his speech:
This shows the whole band, and it was a nice concert they gave – so thanks again for the invitation, Gertrud! We enjoyed it very much.
This morning when I came to work, I read Ming Thein’s blog for a few minutes (this article in case you’re interested), and then I decided to take a photo of my work place:
But the real nice light was outside, so I opened my window to take this, hand-held at 1/6th of a second:
As always, thanks for reading.
I found this lateley on Michael Johnston’s “The Online Photographer”.
But see this series, also on the photographer’s page…
When I’m taking photographs, I’m normally kind of old-fashioned. My camera is set to take a single exposure, which I carefully try to frame in my viewfinder. I also try to think about the end result right away, and sometimes set the camera to show me the image in black & white, sometimes with contrast raised a bit, or even simulating some filter in front of my imaginary black & white film camera. Sometimes when I’m in a really kind of nostalgic mood, I even change the aspect ratio to 3:2, like normal 135 film rolls had, or even to 1:1 like square roll film.
Of course, when taking both a jpg and a raw image at the same time, you can still reverse everything from the raw later. But that’s another story, and I usually don’t do that.
With an approach like that, I took a photo of Tuna the cat yesterday evening, when she was sitting in front of our veranda door, looking out into the dark. I know that cats see much better in the dark than us humans, but still I sometimes wonder what she might see there. Anyway, I liked the reflection of the cat in our veranda door, where she had some kind of brighter background, so you can see her ears. This was composed with an in-camera 3:2 crop, contrast +1 and a simulated yellow filter:
In the company where we now look into the garden, we have an egret, also known as a great white heron. Sometimes it’s even two of these, but most of the time just one. That bird goes fishing in the 3 small ponds we have there, and I’ve tried to take its picture with my long zoom lens. That’s a 40-150mm/f4-5.6 lens, still from the Four Thirds system, which can be used with autofocus on Micro Four Thirds via an adapter. My attempts so far were not very good – that lens was optimized for phase autofocus from a DSLR, so focusing it with the mirrorless cameras’ contrast autofocus is kind of slow.
So today, looking at the birds outside which were eating sun flower seeds from our small bird house, I thought about that lens again. And I knew I could forget autofocus – much too slow for these. So I did what I normally never do: I took my tripod and mounted the camera onto it with that zoom lens set to 150mm, and set the camera to manual focus, and to high speed serial exposures. It can do 7 or 8 images per second that way; forgot (because I usually never do this). So with that kind of “spray & pray” approach, I shot through our window. Every time a bird was landing, eating, and flying away again, I pressed the shutter, and so I got 110 or so images of which I threw away 108 already.
Here are the remaining two, cropped to 1:1 in post:
Like I said, I usually never do this, but that could be an approach to get a good enough image of our heron, so maybe I’ll take that lens and tripod to the company again.
Thanks for reading and viewing.
Today was the last workday of one of our colleagues from Filenet. His name is Detlef, and he and his whole (now former) team are so-called “mobile workers”, which means that we see them only about once a week, but we do so since we’ve moved into the IBM Frankfurt offices over 7 years ago.
Heike (Detlef’s team lead) and her team set up a champagne breakfast and invited our team as well, so I offered to take a few photos. I cannot show all of them, but here are some from today’s event:
It was fun having Detlef around, and I certainly wish him a nice and well-deserved retirement time. We hope to hear from him once in a while…
… and as always, thanks for reading.