Category Archives: Photography

Posts about photography in an amateur or semi-professional matter

Time to waste

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Changes, man, changes! I’ve got two days left at work and then I’ll enter a longer period of free time. Almost the whole August is free. I’ve got a job offer that I finally couldn’t resist in a company that captured my entire sympathy within a couple of moments and that looks very promising. My new life starts on 1st September. In the meantime I’ll try to use my free time to get a little bit more time with photography and learn my new lenses. On the other hand I plan to get back to sports. As mentioned before, I’ve got a lot of free time and want to use it as useful as I possibly can.

I gained several pounds during the last few weeks and I want to get rid of them as soon as I can. The answer is simple, lots of sports is the solution. I’m really excited about this, because I never had a training period like this before. It’s just me and my free time without getting distracted by work issues or everything else that might bother you in daily life. Right now, my weight is something around 108kg and I want to push it down to at least 100kg. I personally think that this is possible within four weeks and a half.

Besides this stands my second ego, the gamer. I’ve got so many games that I haven’t already that deserve a play through that I’ll jump on these, too. My fave at the moment is the absolutely brilliant “DiRT 3”. One of the best racing games for years and as addictive as the all time classic “Colin McRae Rally 2.0”

“Colin McRae Rally 2.0” sucked hours and hours of my weekends and free time and there wasn’t a single moment where I got bored. “DiRT 3” is actually the same, very motivating and entertaining for every single moment. The only thing that bothers me a little are the DLCs. I bought Monte Carlo and Japan, but they could have made into the final retail game, too. These two DLCs cost me around 15 Euros and you have to keep in your mind, that you can get a great budget title for that money, too. Hopefully, this rip off will have an end in the near future.

Finally, and I hope the weather god is good to me. I’ll go out in my town and probably Berlin and do some photos. I’ve got this new fish eye lens that deserves a little more attention. Anyhow, I wanted to go out for pictures for such a long time, but I felt really exhausted and stressed by nearly everything over the last few weeks that I actually haven’t found the time and intention to do so.

Whatever the case, a new job starts on September and I’ve got a lot of free time in the meantime. I’ll try to use it to recharge and to get back into shape. I’ll keep you informed.

The mystical cat report

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Hello out there, it’s been a while since my last update on what’s going so far. First of all, fitness is still existing and starts kicking ass again. I cannot deny that I had some serious difficulty to get back on the track, but with this week, everything seems to be on a satisfying level. My stamina feels like it was the day I let the whole fitness thing fade away, for say, it’s still on a high level. For my circumstances. Actually, I still have like 15kg of weight too much on my bones, but like I said, I’m not facing any serious trouble during training. I’m running solid 30 minutes on the treadmill followed by 30-40 minutes on the cross-trainer.

I decided to take no prisoners and I also increased the weight on many exercise machines. I’m doing very well with this and I’m making a lot of progress in this particular area of my training. Besides losing weight is gaining muscles one of my main goals for now. I know, it sounds weird, losing weight and gaining muscle mass on the other side but according to the serious amount of overweight at the moment a goal that can be reached. Like losing at least 15kg of fat and getting like 5-6kg of muscle mass.

What else happened? Well, I got a little bit more into photo editing and developing of RAW pictures. I’m not making great progress but it finally is some progress to be found. I also joined a couple of new groups on deviant Art to get a little bit more feedback on my works. And of course a few eyes more watching my stuff. I’m also looking for a new camera, not for now but for the end of this year. I’m thinking about buying a Canon 7D, this camera got all the features I want and is not that expensive as the Canon 5D MarkII. At least, it would be a total waste of money according to the fact that photography is just a hobby mine. It’s like 1,500 bucks that ring on the bill, but I’m sure it’s totally worth it.

Gaming, another passion of mine. If the days has like 36 hours I would definitely play some games, but currently I don’t really have time to play some more story based games. I play a lot of “Bad Company 2” these days, for like one hour a day. There are still some games in queue that I need to play. There are plenty of games, as there are “Medal of Honor”, it can’t be more worth than “Homefront”. The “Dead Space” games, I started “Dead Space 1” several times, but never managed to finish or do any larger progress. Several LEGO games are waiting and so on. Most importantly, “Portal 2” is hopefully in my mailbox these days and I’ll definitely play this game as soon as possible.

Last game I played through was “Homefront” which was a kind of disappointing. Weird performance issues. Weird story and pace of the game. I can’t say that I didn’t like it, but, well, I don’t know. They whole concept was promising but the presentation was a big and epic fail on the whole line. I instantly switched back to my beloved “Borderlands” after finishing the four hour campaign. I barely had any interest in the multi player mode.

New gallery available

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After giving several web gallery applications a try, like Gallery2, Coppermine and Piwigo, I finally switched to ZenPhoto. While writing these words, the gallery is actually getting filled with content. You’ll find the old pictures from the previous gallery installations and soon and a couple of new sets, like HDR and some collections of my latest journeys. I hope you’ll like and enjoy it a bit. I’ve also got some special plans with this new application that I’ll soon announce here in this blog. Enjoy the weekend.

Passions regained

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This is the announcement, that I’m back on track. Well, actually, it’s just an announcement that I’m finally back to a fixed, regular schedule for my gym sessions. It’s three days a week in the morning and one day in the afternoon. I’m totally happy and completely satisfied with this new schedule, it doesn’t burn me out too much, leaves enough room to rest and I don’t have the feeling to lose to much free time. Apparently, I’ve to go to bed pretty early because the alarm clock rings at 4:00am but like I said, it’s easy to handle when you have only three days per week to get up that early. I’m also making good progress when it comes to dexterity and pure muscle strength. The dexterity is good so far and much, much better as it was in times where I was a smoker, even with my massive overweight. Even though I’m at the beginning of training my strength is as good as it was the time I let the training fade away. I was also able to increase weight on some stations in the gym. Right now, I’m focussing on chest and neck. I guess it’s pretty obvious and I don’t have to mention it explicitely that I always train belly and back. Nothing’s more important than a well trained centre. Within the next couple of weeks I will also start a protein diet to get a little boost to muscle growth and lose some fat.

Pike's place

Secondly, I’m once again a little bit more into photography. During my trip to London, I haven’t even used a whole SD card for my pics. Compared to previous trips it’s an improvement, because I used like two or three cards within one or two days. A lot of crappy pictures came up these days. Just let us say I reached a border where quality took over quantity. Whatever the case, I personally see me making progress in photography and my picture are getting better. There are still some issues with incorrect focusing and a weird usage of depth of field, but this okay for the moment. I do no longer have these completely wrong exposures. It’s natural to get a couple of pics that too bright or too dark, but you don’t have to forget that some pics are snapshot style and I’m not always rethink light and stuff before a shoot the pic. This happens from time to time.

My besty gifted me on X-mas with a nice book about Lightroom and Photoshop. I’m currently working myself through the Lightroom book and it’s giving me a blast in knowledge about digital photo development. Until a short time ago, I was using Lightroom for collecting and organizing my picture only. The whole editing always happened in Photoshop and it happened a couple of times where the final product was worse than the original picture. Lightroom is fun and it’s so awe-inspiring to see how my pictures can still develop, even those that I already abandoned.

Finally, shame on me, I still owe you an article about XBMC and a couple of nice add-ons I don’t wanna miss anymore. It’s coming. Just be patient.

Slightly getting back to basics

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There’s something wrong in the state of Denmark… not that I know, but I just wanted to start the post with a sentence that does not start with “I was blabla…”

Actually, I’m a little pissed by myself because I simply don’t feel like I should. No, I’m sick in any kinda way, but it’s my whole condition that bothers me. I’ve got a hell too much weight hanging on my bones, I’m once again unsatisfied with my job and I haven’t found the time to actually follow up some of my hobbies. But first things first. The whole weight thing is going to change, definately. I just ordered new tires and flexible tubes for my bicycle to get mobile again, because I’m so nerved of walking. Getting me back on the road also means that I personally will get a little bit more “sportish”. I just love to cruise around with my bike around the city without any specific destination. Most importantly, I’m going to grab my photo camera to catch some fine moments while being on the road. I miss shooting with my and even though I don’t have the real talent to be a great photographer I’ll keep on doing this, because this is giving the relaxation I actually need in my daily life.

Over the last couple of days and weeks I had to struggle with lots of system and hardware crashes at home (that’s the curse of having so many PCs) that I had to fix that I had a massive lack of free time actually. First it was my gaming system that died while upgrading to Windows 7 SP1. I fixed this issue to about 90 per cent. After having solved this particular problem, the raid system in my HTPC started having issues as well and one hard drive wasn’t running as stable as I would like it to be. I replaced the hard drives, cloned the whole system, rescued the data and installed a fresh, new system which isn’t finished yet already. I’m not in a hurry with that one and I’m not going to stress me with that one. As long as the XBMC is running, everything is fine.

Bicyclet

There’s a trip to London coming up within the next two weeks and right after that I’ll restart doing early sessions at the gym again. I’m stressed and nerved and bothered with the packed gym right after work and I’m sure to gain much more when I’ll go to gym pretty early. I’ll also change my nutrition as well and get back to the healthy way of life. To get the facts straight, I’m going back the roots of my personal straight edge project. It’s clear for me, that I don’t want to live the way how I live at the moment because it’s simply not good for me. I’m doing fine when it comes to points like stamina but I completely fail meanwhile due to things like pure strength.

Anyhow, it’s curious to see how everything goes down the drain when my bike’s broke. It’s always the same, the tires burst and I gain pounds and pounds and pounds. There seems to be some kind of an invisible band between me and my bike. Like it was between Elliot and E.T. in the movie of the same title. If my bike’s doing well, I’m doing well. If my bike’s getting sick, I’m doing sick.

Till my short vacation I’ll keep my gym schedule as it is now and I’ll do some slight changes to my nutrition. The tough break is going to be right after the vacation which leads me back to no sweets and candy. I’ll also reduce the amount of coffee per day, which is now at an average of four to five huge cups a day. I’ll also reduce the consumption of Diet Coke for one simple reason, Diet Coke causes hunger and hunger finally leads me to eating and eating causes weight. Well, there are tons of things that will change all with this one particular goal to get back to a healthier nutrition, but one the other hand I’m not going to live like monk in a monastery. I still want to get a little bit of fun out of life.

PS: If you want to ask about the pic in this post, well, I just thought “Sex Sells”

For the rare time being

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The last couple of days has been very busy for me, not that I had too many “private projects” but some too intense of time. First things first, my gaming system got crashed during the Windows 7 Service Pack 1 update process and I wasn’t able to revive it any way. I had to reinstall everthing, had to setup a lot of applications and so on. Good thing about this, the system can now be rebooted again without getting a raid failure, which was one big issue with the previous setup. I’m nearly finished with the system, like 90 per cent, and I only have to restore most of my games profiles. Actually, this whole thing wasted a lot of time on my last weekend and is also responsible for missing, once again, the game of the week feature here in this blog.

Besides all this were I still in modifying and hacking my Motorola Backflip cellphone. I now managed to install Android 2.2 aka Froyo including multitouch, which isn’t a stock feature of the phone, and I also installed an unlocked kernel that I’m able to overclock and also underclock it. The phone now runs with a stock Android, without any Motorola software features, and it’s, compared to the default Android 1.5, as fast as hell. I’m testing the battery at the moment to see, if my also also increased the lifetime of this particular part of the phone. It’s such a hilarious feel to finally have features on my cellphone that aren’t supposed to be there actually. And most importantly, for my subjective estimation, the phone has now a status, where I would say, that one can use it instead of just getting angry about it.

Android

Far from all this nerdish stuff did I come back to a more healthier living style without all this unhealthy, calory rich and fat food. I also visit the gym from time to time and as expected, it’s giving me a boost in many ways. Say whatever you want, after a fine session in the gym, you feel refreshed and the essence of life creeps back to your bones and you feel recharged. I mentioned it in one of my previous posts, I don’t want to exaggerate anything at the moment and I want to keep it on a level where I still have fun with all this too. Getting into a boot camp like training plan as I had it once before is not my intention, even though I can say, that this was fun too. Anyhow, I’m losing weight, I start feeling better now and hopefully my cardio will increase once again. There’s no particular muscle training on the schedule right now, I just want to sustain my back and belly muscles at the moment to get a strong centre for future training plans.

Unfortunately, I haven’t found any time for photography or any creative stuff in that kind of way. I also haven’t managed to get a little bit more into the whole Photoshop/Lightroom thing that was actually on my schedule for this year’s beginning. Saying that there was no time is not totally correct, I actually wasn’t in the mood to do anything like this. Maybe later, when my bike is fixed and I’ll be able to get out a little bit more often and most importantly further away.

50mm love

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No, God damn it, not what you think, this post is about one of my new lenses for my photo camera, horny, naughty bastards ( ^^ ). I bought my first lens with a fixed focal length, the Canon EF 50mm/1,8 II. As you can see in the name, the focal length is 50mm and I can get up to aperture 1,8, which is absolutely fantastic for shooting very close objects. Additionally did I buy a set of extension tubes, which work very well in conjunction with the Canon lens and the increased focus and newly gained macro abilities are awesome. I’ve done some test shots, yes of course, and the final results were as sharp as the razor blade of Stone Cold Steve Austin. I’m very, very… I mean, VERY amused by the depth of field that you can get with such a lens and this apterture. As far as I know does this lens only use five fins to actually open/close for the exposure but the bokeh it actually builds in the area of the depth of field looks very smooth and soft and not too edgy.

Finally, this lens is apparently awesome and totally fulfils all my needs and requirements. I’m really looking forward to do the first macro shots with this lens in combination with the extension and I’m also really, really excited about doing the first portrait shots with this lens. A nice toy for just 100,- EUR and of course something to fall in love with.

What was and what will be

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A year’s gone and a new decades arrived. So what’s my resume for the decade that has just passed in the 21st century on this ball called Earth (“How peaceful it looks…”)? Great Scott, I don’t know and it’s barely possible to capture a whole decade in one single blog entry so I simply don’t resume the past decade. But what are my plans for the next decade? Guess what, I just don’t know but I can tell you some of my plans for this year. 2011 will hopefully be the year were I’ll go back to more creative oriented activities. I’ll definately do some more photography and will try to switch to some portrait shots or let us say, I’ll switch from landscape photography to something more human related because for me is the portrait photography something that looks like hard to handle and I want this challenge, because challenges simply makes you better and let you improve yourself.

One thing that’s still unfinished and I simply haven’t found the time for, were the bunch of music plans I had for 2010. I missed to remaster Narcosis’ “Super Satan Terror Demon 665.5” mini CD and to upload it. I also missed to get the original tracks for the CDs so I have to do some more complex re-editing to tracks that I got. It’s such a pain in the ass that the studio were we once recorded this master piece of modern black- and death-metal is no more (/irony off).

The second music project hasn’t been touched since I first announced it here in this blog because of… well… urm… issues? Some might remember, it was this electro, industrial thing called “Degraduated to be machine” which includes till now two barely finished tracks. The problem is, that I was working on the studio software several times but it turned out that my plans are much more complex than they first seemed to be. I want this whole thing to get much better than the first solo CD of mine which was more a bunch tracks mixed together, this second one follows a concept and I want this as perfect as it can be. PERIOD! I guess, it won’t be finished by the end of this year so don’t expect anything.

Recording Studio

Something that I’m going to do pretty soon is to upgrade my PC. I decided not to buy me a new Android phone and to upgrade my PC instead. There were to many issues and failures that were bothering me that led me finally to this decision. It’s a kind of sad, because I really liked the black mainboard and the CPU watercooler with its red LEDs inside that made the whole system look so damn eeeeeviiiiiil. I’ll give some details on the upgrade in another blog entry.

Back to music and the whole life thing. I still have this plan to move to Berlin, maybe it’s going to happen this year if I can make it to find a job there. If I can make it I’ll free my guitars from the dust and try to find some guys/girls to start a new band, I still feel like a stoner band would be nice, with a girl drummer.

Some might ask, what happened to straight edge? Well, straight edge will be back as sooner as you think. It might start on January 16th, maybe later. It all depends on the big thing called time and I never have enough time for anything. It’s going to be the “Straight Edge 3.0 Project” with customized rules and a new training plan that does not only inlcude a plan for gym, it will also include some other activities. I currently drink some alcohol from time to time but only small lashings and no hard liqueur. I’m so NOT satisfied with the fact that I started with this bad habit again and it will stop because I simply can’t stand the dizzyness while drinking something.

Any traveling plans for this year? Yes, but nothing totally fixed. I was wondering if I can make it to Asia this year, countries like Japan, Indonesia and South Korea has always been in my focus, but unfortunately is it so massively expensive that I don’t know how to pay for this. For the opposite direction, well, there might be a trip to New York, I always wanted to go to New York, a huge, big, crowded, dirty city that always fascinated me. I also have to mention that I have these itchy feet for Seattle, I can’t help it but Seattle is beside Berlin a city where I can go to at any time. To make a long story short, there’ll be definately a trip to the U.S. but no exact plans for the rest of the world. Hmmm, the orient could be nice, too.

Hadouken

Concert plans. There’s only ONE concert by now I have a  ticket for and that is the rocking, mind blowing, beloved FU MANCHU. Yes, I got a Fu Manchu ticket for Christmas again and I will see them in March. Damn it, I fucking love this band. If there’s a Misfits concert somewhere here around Germany I would go there too, no matter what it costs. Till now I am very unsure if I should go to the Roger Waters concert in Berlin and see The Wall for a second time. It would be nice to see the show in Berlin, because for me it’s something special because this very one album influenced my musical taste so much, but once again, the tickets are expensive and the seats you can get at the moment are totally crap. We will see.

Last but not least, gaming plans for this year. First of all, I’m thinking about canceling my ‘World of Warcraft’ subscription because I don’t like the new add-on. The balance between casual gaming and going back to the roots of ‘World of Warcraft’ totally failed, in my opinion. Maybe I’ll switch back to ‘Champions Online’ as soon as you can play it for free or I will give ‘DC Universe’ a try. I’m following TotalBiscuit on YouTube and he’s playing the beta at the moment and it looked nice and auspicious to me. Non-MMO games I’m definately going to play are ‘Crysis’ and ‘F.3.A.R. 3’ in March. ‘Duke Nukem Forever’ sometime by the beginning of this year and hopefully id softwares’ ‘Rage’ in September.

There will be some minor changes to this blog, too. One thing is, that there will be a “Game of the week” post every week with a kind of a review and I will do the same stuff with music, movies and photography. Anyhow, the “Game of the week” thing is for sure and the rest will come up soon and simply follows within the next weeks and month. …hmmm… longest blog post ever… yeah!!!

Problemiwigo

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Unfortunately did I mess up the bloodreaver gallery application here on this website. I did a simple auto-update and after this simple update was I standing there with a much more complex problem. The Piwigo gallery application needed MySQL 5.x as a minimum requirement and at the moment the whole webserver has got a MySQL database version 4.1.2. I also did not find a solution to do a downgrade or better said, I haven’t found the nerve or the time to fix it. I finally switched over to Coppermine, which will hopefully serve me well, and re-uploaded most of the pictures that were content of the old gallery. A few pictures are still missing, mainly in the photography category, but they’ll be uploaded later.

Girls with guitars

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If there’s one thing, beside a lot of other things, that I hate then it’s female models posing on pictures with guitars and you can see, it nearly bites your eye, that they cannot even play. Man, this is so disgusting. Young, nude and beautiful women raping guitars on pictures with chords that can never exist and if they will be played they will sounds like the worst noise ever. The imagination is horrible…