Analog charm in digital times: With the new M-Series camera, Leica omits the display. Through this reduction, the user of the Leica M-D should only focus on their subject
Source: Ohne Display: Leica M-D ist eine analoge Digitalkamera - Golem.de - the joke is, I would actually like that. I ignore the screen on my M8 anyway and if my camera offers it (like the GH1), then I fold away the display. But for 6000 Euros? Nope.
After considerable reflection and discussion, we've decided the time has come for us to step aside and seek new owners for Koken. As much as we'd like to stay, all of us have decided to pursue new professional opportunities that will prevent us from…
Quelle: Koken is for sale and looking for a new home - Koken blog
I have uploaded new pictures to Google+ and/or Flickr. Here they are - unsorted and uncommented. There are a bit more this time because I haven't run the script for a while ...
Update on OS Support for Next Version of Lightroom. Hmm, I think this is where I'm out of the Lightroom update cycle for now. I'm absolutely not sure that upgrading to 10.8 on my MacBook Air is a good idea, and I don't feel like messing up my system with updates. Frankly, I don't quite see the point in absolutely needing 10.8. And no, system updates are never "free". Maybe free of charge, but the time you invest has value. And the loss of performance and potential new hardware purchase are also factors to consider. I don't even think I need more than what LR5 already offers me right now.
COLOR AND LIGHT IN NATURE Homepage: Rainbows, haloes, mirages, colors in the sky & water and more!. Sounds very interesting, I already have Color and Light in the Outdoors, which also deals a lot with the physical basics of effects, but this one seems to focus even more on the actual visual aspects.
I have uploaded new pictures to Google+ and/or Flickr. Here they are - unsorted and uncommented. And yes, there is some really old stuff in there.
We spent the New Year's change in 2014 on Gran Canaria and of course produced a lot of vacation photos again.
Those who have wondered why it has been so quiet here in the blog (quieter than usual anyway), here is the answer: Roadtrip through Slovenia. Vacation. With lots of photos. Simply click on the changing images to go to the respective album, click on a picture there and a comfortable slideshow will start.
Photos from four days of short vacation in Leiden. Yes, just vacation photos. Hey, I'm just a snapper, you can't expect more. Just click on the link and scroll through, or click on a photo for a large view. And yes, I revived Koken. At the moment it seems to be working quite well.
I have uploaded new pictures to Google+ and/or Flickr. Here they are - unsorted and uncommented.
OpenCamera. Blogged about it because a) it's cool and b) it might interest me to build. 3D printer is coming eventually and Arduino is already here and photography is just so much on my line.
Visiting friends in Bavaria. Yep, just boring vacation photos again! We're turning into total tourists!
print("Hello, World!")
Plug-ins for Adobe Photoshop Lightroom | Adobe Labs. I should check this out, there are a few situations where this would probably be very helpful (e.g. with Sony and Leica lenses).
We wanted some more sun and warmth - and landscape. Lots of it. Well, we got the landscape, the rain was warm too, but the sun was a bit of a letdown. Well, here are the results, just thrown together and presented in a very unceremonious manner (thanks to the smoking of the Koken publishing service, as written in the previous rant). Enjoy!
It seems to be the motto of Koken, which I once praised quite a bit here. It is still one of the best-looking gallery systems with a really sleek admin interface. But all that sleekness cannot hide the fact that the code underneath is probably not as sleek as the layout after some problems that were almost not debuggable. To this day, the login form has problems with Chrome and Safari - and they haven't solved the problem. From the reactions, it's not even clear if they care at all. How stupid is it when a login form doesn't work because of some JavaScript hacks under Chrome? It's a simple form with username and password, what's so big about JavaScript there?
The crown was the Lightroom plugin again today. I used Koken because my old blog workflow - thanks to the stupid decision of the WP programmers to scrap the entire Atom publishing and let it rot instead of fixing it - went down the drain. I don't want anything complicated - just a simple way to upload a stack of pictures online with one click directly from Lightroom. It also works if the target is Flickr or Picasa or one of the other supported online services. But I want to control my pictures myself - and host them myself. Well, if a plugin just creates an empty album but doesn't upload a single picture (even though it fiddles around for hours and pretends to be active), then it's all just for the worse. If there are no logs or debugging possibilities or messages anywhere that help in the analysis, then it's all just for the trash.
So, for the time being, pictures will probably end up here again, currently with Dossier de Presse, a plugin for Lightroom that publishes via XMLRPC to WordPress. Which is not optimal, but the only thing currently available that works with current WordPress, current Lightroom, and at all. Since no metadata is transferred via XMLRPC in WordPress, such as image titles, I will probably have to remove this from my gallery layout somehow, otherwise only strange technical image names will appear there. Titling pictures is stupid anyway.
Computers could be so much more fun if software wasn't programmed by amateurs and blockheads 90% of the time ...
Sony A7R Hands-On. Sounds very good. Only the price ... (and the fact that it's another new system for which you need new optics, which are then made by Zeiss ...)
I have uploaded new pictures to Google+ and/or Flickr. Here they are - unsorted and uncommented. And correction of the last message: that was summer 2012. Oops!
I have uploaded new pictures to Google+ and/or Flickr. Here they are - unsorted and uncommented. This is the black and white version. And ouch, there are old things in there. Apparently not updated since summer.
Here's what I found worth reading this week, collected and uncommented:
I have uploaded new pictures to Google+ and/or Flickr. Here they are - unsorted and uncommented. This is the black and white version.
I have uploaded new pictures to Google+ and/or Flickr. Here they are - unsorted and uncommented.
Visiting Santorini - Hugos House of Photo Horror. Yep, vacation photos. In case anyone wondered why it was even quieter here in the last 3 weeks than it usually is in my blog. And yes, again uploaded to Koken, and not directly into the blog. It's really much simpler and faster in terms of workflow.
Review: The 2013 Ricoh GR digital V – Ming Thein | Photographer. Sounds very promising. Right now, the Coolpix A is the star, but this one also sounds pretty good. I'm still considering whether I should get a real compact camera instead of the MFT with the 14mm lens - just because it's smaller. A Ricoh would suit me well, especially since I still use the GRD II and am familiar with the user interface.
What I considered worth reading during the week and did not want to link separately, collected here and uncommented.
Black and White - Hugos House of Photo Horror. I've been playing around with Koken again and I still like it quite a bit. I have housed my black and white collection there as a test album first and now as a permanent fixture, because updates are much easier there than in my main blog. At the moment I'm still thinking about how to cleverly integrate this into my main blog, but for now it will happen via links.
I have uploaded new pictures to Google+ and/or Flickr. Here they are - unsorted and uncommented. This is the black and white version.
I have uploaded new pictures to Google+ and/or Flickr. Here they are - unsorted and uncommented.
This time only as a link to my photo site (built with Koken), instead of directly here: Vienna Calling. At the moment, I'm still undecided, it could be that I also select a few pictures and upload them here, so that it stays a bit more colorful here. There are still a few questions that I have with the Koken themes and a few inconsistencies. Maybe I will deal with the themes myself and adapt them more to my requirements, but for now it works quite well - the workflow of Lightroom is hardly to be surpassed.
Since I was just talking about Koken, I switched my photo test site and uploaded some pictures: Hugos House of Photo Horror. I must say, I'm impressed. The included themes are really good and the backend is light years ahead of what Wordpress has to offer in media management. And the Lightroom integration works perfectly. This could really be something for the long term, let's see how it behaves in operation.
Koken - Creative website publishing. Already tweeted about this yesterday, find this quite interesting - looks good and the Lightroom Publish Plugin sounds very interesting as well. I'm considering whether I might need a photo-centric system instead of WordPress, at least for all my pictures. And a usable integration with Lightroom would make a lot of things easier. Especially since the last WordPress update destroyed my photo workflow.
Arduino Camera Shield | Arduino Based Camera. And more on a DIY Arduino camera. Here is a controller with LCD display to control various camera modules.
Craft Camera by Coralie Gourguechon | mocovote.com. Ok, I want to build this. Definitely. Even if it's only VGA resolution. Just because it's cool. Yes, the camera is more expensive through the individual parts than a finished camera. Still cool!
I have uploaded new pictures to Google+ and/or Flickr. Here they are - unsorted and uncommented. This is the black and white edition.
Juliana's friend Natascha was visiting from Russia in Berlin, so we went there too so that the two could meet again. We visited Potsdamer Platz (and the area where the Berlinale takes place), the Reichstag and the Holocaust Memorial, the East Side Gallery and the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church and the Kurfürstendamm. And in between, we spent a nice evening at El Burriquito. Cold, but beautiful. The fact that the titles are a mess is due to these stupid WordPress programmers, who have once again designed the media interface in such a confusing way that it now takes a bunch of individual edits to enter all the titles - and the idiots are also too good to use the titles from the images. And the RPC upload nonsense is also completely irrelevant. WordPress is slowly becoming no fun anymore.
LightZone | Open-source digital darkroom software for Windows/Mac/Linux. Just remembered, it's now free. And because it's Java, it's available on multiple platforms. During my experiments back then, it was quite a cool alternative for Linux. Specifically, the contrast control through a digital zone system is quite cool, and the program saves JPEG previews and the editing steps directly in the previews, so you can easily exchange them between computers. Attention: currently, Lightzone still requires a license key. The whole licensing stuff still needs to be removed, but the source is already on Github, it's just a matter of time.
I have uploaded new pictures to Google+ and/or Flickr. Here they are - unsorted and uncommented. This is the black and white version.
I have uploaded new pictures to Google+ and/or Flickr. Here they are - unsorted and uncommented. And presumably mostly from last year.
Juliana and I took a day trip to Koblenz by train. There we mainly visited Schloss Stolzenfels and of course the German Corner. And otherwise just felt like tourists. It was nice, a bit cold, but lots of sun.
Metabones announces Speed Booster lens adapter for mirrorless cameras: Digital Photography Review. The idea sounds compelling - simply use optics to compress the large full-frame image circle down to an APS-C image circle (approximately) and turn the 1.5x into a 1.1x with higher light intensity. But does it actually work as well in practice as described? I'm curious to see the test results.
Polaroids interchangeable lens camera is awful hands-on | The Verge. Well, that's probably it then. The first prototypes and images are definitely different from what actually appears at CES, and that doesn't sound good at all. Sure, things could still balance out by the release, but I wouldn't bet my money on it. There are other, better cameras at comparable prices (e.g., the V1 sale, which is currently floating around for 310 euros with the 10-30 on Amazon). Update: this is probably a different camera; Polaroid seems to have released two different models with interchangeable lenses, only one of which has Android. But that the other one is actually good, well, my hopes are rather low there ...
[[[CES 2013]] Bring On The Influx Of Android-Powered Photography Machines: Polaroid Announces The iM1836 Mirrorless Camera With Jelly Bean](http://www.androidpolice.com/2013/01/07/ces-2013-bring-on-the-influx-of-android-powered-photography-machines-polaroid-announces-the-im1836-mirrorless-camera-with-jelly-bean/). Could be interesting to hack. And the system really looks suspiciously like the Nikon J1 as the basis - which would be even more interesting because you could also get other lenses (and in the long run other bodies). Of course, the question remains whether Android is messed up or quite open and if it is open, whether you can also easily put your own apps on it.
Spontaneously decided while dropping off my mother-in-law at the airport, if we had already driven half the way to Aachen, we might as well go all the way there and finally take a look at Aachen. Took pictures of Aachen Cathedral. Wow. It's really quite different from what we usually see in Münster (perhaps with the exception of the Klemenskirche).
I have uploaded new pictures to Google+ and/or Flickr. Here they are - unsorted and uncommented. This is the black and white edition.
I have uploaded new pictures to Google+ and/or Flickr. Here they are - unsorted and uncommented.
Today, Juliana and I took the train to Coesfeld and then hiked to Billerbeck, and then took the train back home. A very beautiful autumn hike, with many colorful impressions. We stopped at Kloster Gerleve for coffee and cake. We planned the tour using Komoot - created it there and then used the voice navigation. Amazingly practical, such a pedestrian navigation. And it really led us on hiking trails, field paths, and side roads, only the last stretch to Billerbeck was along a country road, but at least one with a footpath. If you want to check out the tour, I made it public on Komoot. The colors - it really had something of an Indian Summer.
Plug-ins for Adobe Photoshop Lightroom | Adobe Labs. If you use manual lenses on Sony NEX cameras and rely on ultra-wide-angle or similar, you might know the phenomenon: asymmetric darkening and an asymmetric color cast in the edge areas. Can this be corrected in Lightroom now using a reference image and this plugin.
MS Optical Sonnetar 50mm f/1.1 Test pictures | Japan Camera Hunter. It's simply interesting that there is a lone wolf in Japa (where else?) who produces handcrafted lenses with M-mount in single production.
On the occasion of our first wedding anniversary, Juliana and I went to Leipzig and, among other things, visited the zoo there (and also the Museum of Musical Instruments and the Ethnographic Museum, but there are no pictures of that).