This morning, at the pond…

April was really nice so far. The weather is more than friendly, and so is the light – especially in these mornings. Here are three photos which I took today, at my employers’:

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At the pond 1/2

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At the pond 2/2

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Screenshot 😉 (my start screen at work)

At home – as regular readers will probably know – I’m using Debian instead of Red Hat. But both are free and open source operating systems, based on the Linux kernel. Still with the Gnome 2 desktop at work, but with Gnome 3 at home.

Thanks for viewing.

One with flash again

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Verwelkt

Studio strobe with beauty dish left of object above the table, studio strobe with standard reflector right of camera, ca. 50cm lower than the other one. Measured and set aperture was 5.6 at 1/160th of a second.

Thanks for viewing.

Around a wooden bridge

Today was the first time in this year that I took a long(ish) Sunday morning photo walk, alone. Well morning isn’t quite right – I was late, and my walk lasted well past noon. So my solution for this (bad light at or around noon) is to go into the woods, which I also did today.

I wasn’t sure about which lens to take, so I took them all. Turned out that I left the M.Zuiko 45mm/1.8 on my E-M10 all the time, so I could as well have left everything else at home. The photos I’ll show here were all taken at or around one of the wooden bridges, except the last one which is still nearby. In case you want to find the place, I geo-tagged that last picture in Flickr, so you can look up its location.

All photos are as good as directly out of camera. I used exposure compensation on some, and apertures from 1.8 (fully open) to 4.5:

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It’s all close to the airport, where they plan to build a new terminal. So I’m afraid that we’ll lose quite a bit of that wood…

Thanks for viewing.

Looking up. And North.

Had to interrupt this because of too many passing cars in the foreground. That’s why I cropped it square:

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Spinning round… ‘n’ round…

It’s an in-camera composite again, slightly over 90 exposures of 30 seconds each. In case you search for it in your newer Olympus cameras: they call it “livecomp”, and you’ll find it when setting the camera to manual and increase exposure time. And set time time of the single exposures with the ‘menu’ button.

Thanks for viewing.

A few more photos from this weekend

Yesterday after shopping, we went to the new “Northwest” runway of our airport again, where I took two photos. Then later the same day, Tuna the cat jumped up Zuleikha’s seat just when we were about to have dinner. And today, I took one of some decoration, applied to a tree by Zuleikha:

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Swiss HB-IXV taxiing at Frankfurt 07L/25R (new Runway Northwest), Germany

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Touchdown of a “Condor” at Frankurt 07L/25R (new runway Northwest), Germany

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“What’s for dinner?”

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Plant deco

All taken with the Olympus OM-D E-M10 camera. The first three with the M.Zuiko 45mm/1.8 lens, the last one with the Four Thirds ZD 40-150mm/4-5.6 zoom of my DSLR, mounted via Mitchies MMF-2 adapter.

Update: The weekend isn’t over yet, and evening light is always beautiful. Here’s another one:

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One of my studio strobes in indirect and reflected sunlight

Another update: Now my weekend is over (I’m posting this short after midnight). But some half hour ago, I went on one of the building’s Northern balconies to let my camera find polaris. And I had it straight in front of me, but slightly above my frame:

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Another quick test (“with “quick” meaning 15 minutes)

So next time I won’t have to get up early, I’ll go for the full round (which will probably take some three hours or so).

Thanks for viewing.

Short trails

This is a composite of 900 pictures into one, which lasted exactly 15 minutes with a one-second exposure (times 900):

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Short trails

ISO 1600, no noise reduction.

Update, from short after midnight:

Here’s another one, with only 90 pictures composed into one. But now each picture had an exposure time of 20 seconds at ISO 200, which actually took double the time – half an hour:

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Star trails II

Thanks for viewing.

History lesson

This is a typical sunset as seen and painted by William Turner in 1838:

Flint Castle in Wales, 1838

During that time (which is called “Biedermeier”), paintings often had these intense colours. So what was different?

What was different was the climate. 200 years ago today, the Indonesian volcano Tambora (see Wikipedia in English, German, or in Malay) exploded with the force of approximately 170.000 Hiroshima bombs, cutting off its own peak from about 4300m (before) to around 2800m (after).

This lead to the “year without summer” in 1816 (English, German) pretty much around the world, as seen in Northern America or in Europe.

Follow these links to the Wikipedia pages in your preferred language if you want to know more. What happened was the coldest summer since the beginning of measurements, just some 25 years after Captain Bligh of the Bounty was dropped off his ship on Timor, which was nearby.

Thanks for reading.

From dawn till dusk

There are days when I really don’t take many photos. Today was such a day where I just took three, and one of them was for white balance measurement. So at dawn I took this one, of the sakura in our employers’ garden again:

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Sakura at dawn, with a moon

Then work, work, work for most of the day. And no, it was not a fight with Santanico Pandemonium (aka Salma Hayek) – work can kill as well, but it won’t be as pretty*.

No, I selected this title because I took the second (white balance) and third (found object) picture when the sun was sinking already. It was this:

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Porcelain cat at dusk, as found

I took both using the Olympus E-PL5 camera with its 14-42mm “kit zoom”, and cropped the first one into a 16:10 format.

Thanks for viewing.

* A colleague died lately, short before his 50th birthday. And tho he wasn’t of the same brand or division, he was still an IBMer, and will be missed.

Today, in our employers’ garden

Not as saturated as my “Happy Easter” pic, but that sakura tree in our employers’ garden is nonetheless impressive and beautiful:

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Another day in paradise

Thanks for viewing.

It’s almost impossible to give good advice

Recently a colleague asked me about which camera to buy (yes, I get questions like these as well). First, he had a bridge camera in mind, with a long super zoom. Then, a bit later, he asked about the newer Nikon DSLRs, like the D7200. And in between, of course I had shown him what I’m using (both the Olympus E-PL5 and the OM-D E-M10).

All of them are good, even the D5300 he came up with, because it’s the only one in this category with a built-in GPS. I told him about the differences between phase and contrast autofocus, and that only the higher-end D7xxx series offers the possiblity to fine-adjust the phase-detection AF for different lenses. His reply was: isn’t there one which can do it all? The Canon 6D came to my mind, but that one’s certainly a bit overkill.

So in that case it’s almost impossible to give a good advice – the camera he seems to want simply doesn’t exist at this point in time. Or does it?

Maybe he would like to consider the E-M10 again after reading Andy’s test of it? This little (and relatively inexpensive) gem has quite a few tricks up its sleeves, like in-camera star trails for instance. And the also in-camera HDR mode which Kirk Tuck found in his newer E-M5 Mk2. I’ve tried it with the E-M10, and it works quite well.

For me personally, there’s no other camera body in the 600€ price range which offers more than this little Olympus (except maybe the Sony A6000 which would be slightly better with high ISO results, but slightly worse because it doesn’t offer in-body stabilization). So that E-M10 really is some kind of “goldilocks” device to me if you don’t need the much better image quality from something like a so-called “full frame” camera (like the mentioned 6D, the Sony A7 series, or the three-digit Nikon family (plus the Df of course)).

If you count it all together, then for a friend and in the mentioned price range (of about 600€ for the body, 700€ with a normal kit zoom, or still under 1000€ with a “super zoom”), this is the one I’d recommend. As does Andy from Texas, like you can read in his review of the camera.

But we’re all different of course. So the only advice I could really give was to go and to visit a camera store, and to try them all before buying. With that, and with his personal planned use in mind, my colleague should be able to find a camera which suits him.