The whole thing is really just a millimeter - more precisely, the centers of the two upper lines are one millimeter apart. The lower line is on the half millimeter. The blur is completely normal with the shallow depth of field that you have at such extreme magnification scales - 12x magnification relative to the camera chip of the EOS 10D.
The Tuckesburg was the retirement home of Professor Landois. In the Middle Ages, it was the workplace of the executioner, where, among others, wealthy citizens and nobles were executed.
There were some of these today when I looked out the window. But it wasn't just that - after I had looked out for a bit, there were whole swarms of them to be seen. It looked pretty cool.
The pictures aren't particularly good, they were quick shots without much planning - even though balloons aren't really fast, when you see them in a herd like that, you realize that they do change position quite quickly.
And yes, there really were a few bottles of Potts, a cola bottle, and an ice cream cone flying around in the sky ...
Today I spent my lunch break with my camera and macro lens at the Botanical Garden. There are a few more photos to see at hugoesk.de. And the glorious rest on viele-bunte-bilder.de (no longer online). (And yes, my lunch breaks happen at strange times and in strange forms - at least when I work from home)
More pictures from the Stadthafen Münster can be found on one of my many (too many?) gallery pages.
In memory of the liberation of the concentration camps 60 years ago.
The first ladybug of the year. There are a few more pictures in my new photoblog (not active since 2007). By the way, it also works with WordPress, but with a few self-knitted plugins for photo management and the strip calendar (I'll put that together someday and make it downloadable). I'm already quite satisfied with the state over there. In the long run, I will probably create a mechanism that allows the photos to wander into this site here as thumbnails and then post pictures here rather rarely (at most the usual snapshots).
Why did I build something myself at all? Well, I find a number of features of Flickr quite nice, but I have a massive aversion to entrusting my content to foreign servers where I have no say in the operation or software design. Therefore, I have stolen some of the ideas from Flickr and also helped myself generously from other projects (for example, I copied the idea for the strip calendar from PixelPost) and integrated everything into WordPress. The layout was once Kubrick, but I hope it has become sufficiently different from it even for Kubrick allergics.
I had also looked at a whole range of content management systems beforehand to see how suitable they would be for something like this (you could read about the fallout from this partly here). And even toyed with the idea of doing the whole thing directly with PixelPost for a while. But the clearly superior comment features in WordPress (especially all the anti-spam techniques) eventually led me to stay with WordPress.
A few things are still on the to-do list, but in principle it is already quite usable and is therefore officially announced herewith.
On Tuesday, I spent a day in Cologne taking photos. Some of them are now online - but since I shut down the corresponding site in 2007, they are no longer available.
A very crooked dog, the tower. Somehow, you can photograph it however you want, it always looks crooked. This is because the base of the tower is an oval and the windows are not always the same on the floors. Somehow it always looks like a spiral, but they are just normal floors. Many partition walls probably don't have offices ...
The Skaters Palace is sprayed with graffiti and is a beautiful splash of color in an otherwise bleak area. If you continue from there to Agravis, you walk along a wall full of graffiti.
Here too, the colors are a wonderful contrast to the rather bleak industrial area. Even the plants in the area seem rather depressed - only the colors of the wall stand out. If you walk further to the canal and look at the Agravis silo, you will then be presented with the art.
Somehow I have the impression that the company would rather have spent the money on a decent, safe scaffolding and colors for the sprayers - the result would interest me far more than the colorful rags that were nailed to the silo ...
No idea who has settled there and for what purpose - it is a small hut made of garbage, fenced and with a small area. Everything is equipped with garbage bags and right in the bushes - normally not visible. Only through the preparations for the canal expansion did it become visible. Somehow reminds me of these beachcombers on the beach of Amrum.
Terragen is a landscape generator for Windows and Mac (Classic and OS X). Very interesting piece with a bunch of parameters that you can adjust. And as it seems quite fast. I have to play with it a bit.
Yes, it really works very simply. Ok, generating a sample landscape is of course rather randomly controlled - to generate exactly what you have in mind requires much more work. But the whole thing actually gives the impression that you could understand it. The colors come across a bit cool, so I did a slight white balance adjustment towards warmer colors in Photoshop. It also looks a bit harsh and the sharpness between water and land is a bit too blurry for me, but I guess one or the other can certainly still be adjusted with parameters.
What I noticed with the first experiments: you should stick closely to the physical model. So if the camera position is set to 30 meters above the ground, it also looks that way - you should first think about where the viewer is in your scene. In real situations, you rarely hang 30 meters in the air. You should also play a bit with the 3D preview, as it offers a simple way to optimize the viewing angle.
Unfortunately, there are hardly any plugins for OS X - a plugin that simulates a camera lens both in terms of the angle of view and depth of field would be great. But there is only one for Windows.
What is also not so nice - the vegetation is only simulated by colored spots. Just like snow and sand. Some of the people in the gallery images seem to use their own textures or better presets than those provided. So far I have only used the pre-made surface textures. I need to research further how to get better presets that look more realistic - the ones provided always look a bit thin.
Of course, the presets for extraterrestrial scenes are cool - e.g. the atmosphere presets and the surface textures for Mars. You just have to paint a robot in and you have your own NASA mission.
Ein Reposting eines alten Bildes aus 2002 - in der Nähe von Husum. Ich spiele gerade mit meinem neuen Photo-Plugin für WordPress rum und brauchte Testmaterial.
Ich hab mir eine neue Polaroid 600 SE gekönnt. Meine alte ist ja sehr lädiert - halt vom Grabbeltisch, defekter Drahtauslöser, Macken, Dellen etc. Die neue ist wie aus dem Ei gepellt. Und es war sogar noch das 127er dabei, das mir ja bisher fehlte. Nette Optik, vor allem eine wesentlich sinnvollere Nahgrenze als beim 150er. Und das Ergebnis kann sich auch sehen lassen - ich mag einfach Polaroids. Allerdings war mein Scanner nach langer Nicht-Benutzung ziemlich verstaubt und natürlich war der Staub nicht plötzlich von ein paar mal wischen weg. Im Ergebnis waren also haufenweise Staubfädchen zu sehen. Naja, Photoshop und das Polaroid Dust&Scratch Removal Plugin haben das Bild weitestgehend gerettet. Allerdings mache ich mir die Polaroids sowieso normalerweise nicht zum Scannen, sondern fürs Fotoalbum. So richtig altmodisch, mit Pappblättern, Pergament-Deckblättern und so …
Heute Mittag war mal Gelegenheit die kleine Digiknipse spazieren zu führen. Übrigens kann man sich mit "View Image" auf dem grösseren Bild das Bild auch in Originalgrösse anzeigen lassen - bei neueren Bildern gibts die dann in 800x600.
