People

Actually, most of the shots are of Katrin since she has the patience for me to try all kinds of silly new techniques ;). I’m not the best photographer for people, but I hope to improve with the fast ISO of my new EOS 60D.

Landscapes

Now, landscapes is what I really like to photograph. Not because it’s easier than people which move around, but because capturing the impression of a clear blue sky above miles of open view is quite a challenge. Looking back at my photos of this year, I like the obvious progression of the seasons.

Cities

Similar to landscapes, but more variety on a small room. In cities I often feel like getting an imperfect shot because of wires running through the image, but that’s just me, and in the end some of my best shots of 2011 were from Berlin and Potsdam. Not surprisingly, I used my Polfilter on my 18-200 mm EF-S all the time, with varying but mostly great results.

Stock / Studio / Miscellaneous

I don’t “do” stock photography, but some of my images can be (and have been) used that way. Food could be a whole category by itself, but I’ll just group it here as well. Everything food-related can of course be found on Katrins Blog.

Mit dem Xperia Active habe ich jetzt ein Smartphone welches diese Anforderungen erfüllt. Ich kann das Handy bei Schnee und Regen am Rucksack aussen befestigt lassen, GPS bei Wanderungen und Radtouren mitloggen lassen und selbst mit nassen Fingern im Regen Schnappschüsse machen die ich, da es ein Smartphone ist, direkt auf den Internetdienst meiner Wahl übertragen kann. Falls ich mich tatsächlich verlaufe ist auch das Xperia Active nicht zu klein oder zu langsam und kann mit Google Maps und dem Kompass aushelfen. Die sehr sehr praktische Öse kann ich benutzen um das Handy garantiert bombenfest am Rucksack baumelnd zu befestigen, ein sehr wichtiges Feature. Die helle LED hilft Nachts. Beim Radfahren kann ich das mitgelieferte Sportarmband benutzen, falls ich sonst keine Taschen am Rad/Körper hab. Soweit zu meinem Nutzen für ein so ein rugged Smartphone.

Während der Arbeit liegt das Handy nur rum, und im Standby mit GPRS aktiviert (und GPS/WLAN deaktiviert) und Sync an (Google+, Twitter, GMail) hält es locker 48h, wenn nicht sogar länger. Gespräche kommen sauber und zuverlässig rüber, Bedienung ist wie bei Android gewohnt, die Kamera absolut OK. Als jemand der viel mit einer DSLR fotografiert weiss ich es zu schätzen dass man Weissabgleich, Metering Mode und Fokus unabhänging voneinander in mehreren Programmen einstellen kann. Besonders der feste unendlich-Fokus bedeutet dass ich in 90% aller Situationen perfekt fokussierte Fotos mit null Verzögerung machen kann. Das Rauschverhalten bei ISO 1600 ist natürlich nicht mehr schön, dafür geht das Xperia bei gutem Wetter gern auf ISO 64 und Verschlusszeiten von bis zu 1/1250s runter. Brennweite ist fest bei 3.5mm und Blende bei f2.6.

Negativpunkte
Eigentlich kann ich nur die Software von SE etwas kritisieren. Ein praktisches Migrations-App wie bei HTC fehlt leider, Kontakte muss man also per Bluetooth syncen und die alten SMS hab ich letzendlich gelöscht. Auch die HTC Sense UI gefällt mir etwas besser. Falls bei eurem Xperia Active die Handgelenksschlaufe fehlt ruft einfach beim SE-Support an, ist wohl bei ein paar wenigen der ersten Handies ausversehen vergessen worden. Ansonsten sollte man noch eine Rutsche Micro-USB Kabel mitbestellen, ich hatte ausser dem mitgelieferten keins, eine etwas größere Speicherkarte kann auch nicht schaden.

Sample Photos

Sony Ericsson Xperia Active Flickr Group here.

(Sorry, German review this time, use Chrome translate ;)

400plus – Firmware Hack for the Canon EOS 400D
The 400plus project is currently implementing a lot of additional features for the EOS 400D and distributing builds of hacked firmware which can be applied to the camera through a file which is loaded during camera startup, meaning they are easily reversible by simply deleting the firmware from the CF card. Recently, some really killer features where implemented, which even make some hardware additions redundant. This is an incomplete list, representing the most important features for me:

• Intervalometer: The 400D can be used to shoot at regular intervals by itself, without any additional controlling hardware. This is perhaps the coolest feature, and I’ve yet to put it to good use by creating a time-lapse movie.
• Intermediate ISO / Auto-ISO: Found in newer cameras, the 400D now supports intermediate ISO steps (seamlessly between ISO 100 and ISO 3200) as well as providing a basic Auto-ISO function with upper and lower limit. The ISO can also be adjusted while looking through the viewfinder.
• Handwave support: This is a mode where the camera takes a shot each time the proximity sensor above the display is triggered. Useful for macro shots where you don’t want to rock the camera rig.
• Timer: The camera simply fires after a certain amount of seconds has elapsed. It can also start the interval program instead.
• Manual Kelvin: Useful if you don’t want to shoot RAW to get spot-on white balance.
• Spot Metering: Metering light at a very small spot in the center.
• AF patterns: Found in more recent camera, AF patterns are a cool addition. External flash AF assist doesn’t work with it though.

For me, the Intervalometer/Timer/Handwave functions replace using an IR remote for self-portraits or macro shots. The Intervalometer replaces rather expensive external hardware triggers. The current version of the 400plus firmware seems very polished, providing simple menus and settings for its features, without any adverse side-effects. I expect more cool features to follow in the near future.

Tethered shooting using the command line
There are a number of solutions for tethered shooting with Canon DSLRs. Some of them even work on Linux. I wanted something simple to take and download shots from my 400D, so I used gphoto2. gphoto2 provides a lot of other features which I won’t cover here, and supports remote control for a wealth of cameras, so go check the compatibility of your own camera.

I wanted to use my EOS 400D as some sort of webcam, taking shots at intervals and directly transfering those shots to my PC. This is easy enough with gphoto:
gphoto2 --port=usb:005,048 --capture-image-and-download -I 30 --force-overwrite --filename=webcam.jpg --capture-previewThis takes a photo every 30 seconds and writes it to webcam.jpg. The port can be inferred by hooking up your camera and having a look at the output of lsusb. One small problem I encountered with my 2.6.39 kernel: The 400D did not work with ehci_hcd, so I had to disable it. If its modular, you can simply do modprobe -r ehci_hcd, but if, like me, its builtin, you can disable it by following this guide.

In conclusion, while I wouldn’t book a hotel room in Lüttich, it is well worth a visit. There are many interesting streets and squares, and just the view over the city itself is breathtaking. If you go on Sunday, you can also experience the large (flea) market along the river Maas and grab something fried to eat.

I also tried geotagging my photos for the first time yesterday. The process is really simple. Just activate your GPS tracking device, later transfer the GPX track to your PC and use software like “gpscorrelate” to match your photos to your track. A certain offset between the cameras clock and the GPS time can’t be avoided. To most easily discover this offset simply take a photo of the exact time on your GPS using your camera, and compare the content of the photo with the EXIF time tag before you start.

I completed my first long hike this year in February. It was part of our the vacation program of our fraternity to bridge the gap between the lecture periods of the winter- and summersemester. You can read about it here (in German) and also view the whole gallery on my photosite. Interesting hiking trails in and around Aachen can be found with the Grenzrouten, printable PDFs included.

It’s probably safe to say that most of the time the shutter on my trusty EOS 400D was released, something delicious was right in front of it. Yes, this year has been ripe with a lot of delicious meals and the accompanying recipes, thanks to Katrin. She recently introduced her recipes in the PDF format on her foodblog, so there is no excuse not to try any of them. Head on over to her foodblog and leave comments, if you haven’t already subscribed to it via RSS. As far as photography goes, most of the shots for her blog are pretty much the same setup: TTL-flash, on camera, towards ceiling, dialed up to correct for the white plate, 1/200s exposure, 50mm 1.4 @ 4.0 or something like that. Most of the time the timeframe to take the shot is limited to about 60 seconds, a bloggers gotta eat too. I did try some new tricks though: Used my second flash and part of the Hama mini photostudio to light the food from behind and front. Center image below. An even simpler trick I recently started using when trying to add some depth to the shot is to point the camera straight downward and the flash towards a (white) wall at a right angle. This should give more defined shadows than using the ceiling, as can be seen in the other two shots.

Then there were the usual amount of parties and social events, only a fraction of those made it into my flickr account. One noteworthy day was the first of May, were we traditionally hike to our tree behind the Aachen golf club. The weather on that event was stunning, and the photos reflect that fact. Katrins headshot was an attempt to produce a photo suitable for a job application. I know that the green background might be distracting, but I think it’s pretty nevertheless. Interestingly enough, this photo was shot inside our living room, in front of the open balcony door, using both my flashes to correctly balance subject and background. I think it came out great, but then again, I tend to favor overly colorful and bright shots ;)

Yesterday Katrin and I spent some time in nearby Maastricht, NL to enjoy the city, the weather and some positively coronary-inducing pancakes. Yummy! All the shots (with Polfilter the whole time) can be found on my photosite.

Accessoires
In January I decided to get myself an external flash, a Canon EX 430 II. I didn’t regret this decision a single day since then. No matter how fast your ISO and how wide your aperture, at some point you will most certainly need a flash. If used correctly, flash images look more natural to the casual observer, the fact that a flash was used only becomes apparent after studying the image more closely. Off-camera flash is even more fun, which is why I quickly got myself simple and cheap Tetra Phottix remote triggers.The next logical and easy step was to play around with so-called “gels” (color filter for artificial lights), which can shift the 5500K light emitted by the flash to different temperatures. The gel I most commonly use is the Roscosun 1/2 CTO (color-to-orange) which shifts 5500K to 3800K, close to most of the artificial light sources you discover. I only used gels exclusively in the latter half of 2010 and the photos turned out much more balanced than before. A key aspect is to allow enough ambient light, otherwise I won’t matter how you shift your flash since it will be the only visible light source. The ‘Av’ or ‘Tv’ (or even ‘M’) modes can be used for that, while ‘P’ will most certainly overpower any background lighting.Once you get started with off-camera flash photography there is a whole new world of additional gadgets to be bought and tricks to be learned, just have a look at the Strobist website. Needless to say, driving a single flash can get old really fast. A second flash was the logical next step. Since I knew I was only going to use this second flash in setup situations and off-camera (without a TTL-capable remote triggering system), I went for one of the cheapest and yet most reliable solutions and bought a Yongnuo YN-460 II. This flash only does manual (even on-camera), but it can trigger by itself on flash and even TTL-flash, without the need for any additional trigger mechanism. So I can use this with my EX 430 on-camera, with the EX 430 off-camera (using the Tetra trigger), and even with my builtin flash. I’m happy with the build quality and reliability of the Yongnuo and can only recommend it to any aspiring strobist on a budget.
I got myself a pol filter for my 18-200mm but have yet to really use it :(.Lens-wise my repertoire grew by another prime lens: The Sigma EX 30mm 1.4. This lens combined the huge aperture of my 50mm with the standard focal width corresponding to 50mm (1.6 * 30mm = 48mm) on full-frame sensors. So far this lens has not let me down quality-wise. The focus works fast, quiet and reliably, the color reproduction is great and the build quality of this lens is solid. Sharpness (even at f1.4) lags in no way behind my 50mm 1.4. I have shot four events exclusively with this lens and was never restricted by the focal length. The typical shot of a couple across the table now becomes natural, while my 50mm always gave me the feeling of having to single out people in order to shot them. Another nice thing about Sigma lenses is that the lens hood is included for all of their lenses. Obviously this lens can’t be used on full-frame, but given the current lineup of crop SLRs, I don’t feel the need to go there anytime soon.
Finally I took a leap of faith and used an alternative “hacked” firmware on my EOS 400D which unlocks some nice features. For me, the most important features were intermediate ISO steps and manual white balance. While the EOS 400D only presents ISO 100-200-400-800-1600, the hacked firmware allows steps in between, like 400-500-640 etc. While quality at 400 is still OK, it can be a little coarse at 800, so going to 500 and 640 first is a nice option. Manual whitebalance means being able to set the temperature, and not use the WB-shift feature or the white-balance on exisiting photo. This feature has taught me a lot about judging lighting conditions and choosing the right gel for my flash. On a side note, I discovered two EXIF tags I had not noticed before: Remaining flash voltage and camera temperature (only Canon).

What’s next
In the never-ending circle of DSLR-upgrades, the next thing for me will most certainly be a new camera body. While I don’t use the maximal resolution, never photograph in RAW and don’t miss movies this much, the ISO speed of the EOS 400D is a serious limitation. I never shoot at 1600 (except for grainy BW photos), while friends of mine use their 550D on 1600 or 3200 in most indoor situations. Since all the new models possess basically the same superior chip, I might go for the 550D, the 60D or the 7D, depending on how much I use my old 400D in the time until then. A nice distraction before the new body will probably an umbrella and lightstand for one of my flashes.

As usual, complete galleries of my shots can be found on http://photos.heipei.net, while flickr only has a few selected shots.

Have a great 2011 ;)

Photography
You accidentally selected “Delete All” on your digital cameras and now your photos are gone? You even fear they might have been overwritten by photos taken after the accident? Fear not, the same thing happened to me, and I was able to restore all the photos from the event plus photos going back as far as three months from my CF card in my 400d using the PhotoRec software.

Cameras today often have an orientation sensor, so pictures taken in portrait mode will automatically be rotated. But this usually happens in the viewer, while the orientation is simply an EXIF tag. Of course this takes up precious computing time and not every viewer supports it. jhead can not only display EXIF information in a consistent manner but can also rotate pictures lossless and clear the orientation-tag afterwards. The call is jhead -autorot *.JPG
If you want to rename your images using EXIF-information, exiftool is the way to go. The command exiftool '-FileName<Party_ ${CreateDate}_${filename}' -d %Y%m%d *.jpg would prefix all the photos with “Party” and the create-date, while keeping the original filename as the suffix. exiftool can shift dates too, if you ever forget to adjust for daylight saving.

When uploading the images you’ll often want to resize them. The ImageMagick collection can do just that, and many other things (like sharpening etc.). If you mogrify -resize 1600x1600 your photos will be resized to 1600px maximum edge length, while keeping the ratio. But be careful, mogrify overwrites the pictures in place!

Music
Thanks to services like video2mp3.net/ you can download a lot of music from YouTube. But sometimes there is silence at the end or the beginning of a song, and a whole collection of songs might have differing levels of volume. To cut an mp3 you can use mp3splt like this to cut everything after 03:30 minutes:mp3splt file.mp3 00.00 03.30The sound levels can be normalized, losslessly, using mp3gain:mp3gain -rk *

Misc
When pretty-printing flat text files I use a2ps to format them nicely and get a PostScript-document. a2ps however does not support UTF-8, while the only characters I care about (German Umlauts) can be represented using Latin1 just fine. So, one can use iconv to convert them on the fly like this:iconv --from-code=UTF-8 --to-code=LATIN1 textfile.txt|a2ps --font 9 -E -B -r --column=1 > out.ps

To export images from a PDF-file I discovered pdfImages, which is part of the xpdf-suite. Use it like this:pdfimages -j foo.pdf bar

Believe it or not, this photo was taken about 2km from my parents home, from the dam of the Eschbachtalsperre, a dam for providing the region with drinking water. Usually I just jog around the lake in the morning, but last weekend Katrin and I discovered one of multiple hiking routes around it and the surrounding area. The trails all start at the parking lot and are clearly marked along the way.

I uploaded this shot along with other shots to flickr, but then decided to go back and give it a little more depth in Gimp (using Contrast/Saturation, Sharpen, a Tone-Mapping plugin and a gradient for the sky).

The shot on the left was done after Katrin asked me for some photos to illustrate a blogpost related to medicine over on her blog. Some other site apparently had the same idea, and now this photo can be found here, here, here and here. This was not only rewarding for me but also interesting since I discovered (from this and other shots) that websites not only seem to search flickr but rather other related articles on related websites and simply use the same photos. When the photo is used in the right context and the website itself looks professional, one might even forget the small “CC by heipei” link at the bottom and the fact that I’m an amateur spending little time or effort (much less creativity ;) on these shots. This can only lead to the conclusion that photography is as least as much simple engineering as creativity, or that I have some hidden sense for compositing an image resulting from years of experimentation, browsing flickr and doing CG where you spend a lot of time making your rendered images look like photographs.

In general I’m still happy with my EF-S 18-200mm 3.5-5.6 and my EF 50mm 1.4, and the decision to buy a Speedlite was absolutely right (in fact, reviewing old shots, I’ve been kicking myself about not having bought one earlier). Apart from some crazy experiments and time-consuming handicrafted tools, my usual approach is to use the flash pointed toward the ceiling, increase it 1/3 to 1 with TTL and just fire away. If possible, a natural balance with available light will make laymen forget a flash was even used. You can go fully manual or simply use the ‘P’-mode with an appropriate aperture. A nice result can be seen on the right, though Katrin is slightly underexposed in this one. What I did was take the photo indoors (where you have your trusty white ceiling) in front of an open window at dusk. The backlight was provided by the setting sun, which adds a lot the shot and usually is done with a dedicated flash. I will be trying more of these in the future.

A little photostream-recap below, so no one can complain that I’m not blogging for the average reader anymore. Enjoy!

A few weeks ago I decided to finally buy a flash. I didn’t hesitate long and bought the Canon 430EX II. Before that (and while waiting for DHL) I read a lot of strobist.com, so that I hit the ground running when the flash did arrive. The nice thing about buying flashes is that you don’t have to worry so much about capabilities/size, because you can buy a bigger one which can act as master at some point in the future should you feel the need to. Along with the flash I ordered some small utilities, like the Phottix Tetra radio-triggers for off-camera flash, the Roscoe Strobist Gel collection (gel from “gelatine”. It’s called “Effektfolien” in german) and a small diffuser (just for fun). The Phottix Tetra have been great as well, especially considering the price-tag of about 30€, which is next to nil compared to other wireless triggers which quickly add up to ten times that much. However the Phottix triggers don’t support TTL, which is a measuring-system so the camera knows how to adjust for the flash. Well, what better time to really get acquainted with the M mode ;)

Aachen Open 2010, which just ended today, was the only real event I looked forward to, photography-wise, and it turned out really nice. Not only was the event itself a smashing success (no other way to put it, the organisation was flawless, the attendance was record-breaking and the venue perfect for our needs), but also meant many diverse personalities to photograph. You can see my complete photos of the event here: photos.heipei.net/Aachen_Open_2010/ and photos by other people will be collected here: http://cube.hackvalue.de/ao10/media-de.

Tonight I salvaged an old (and broken) Umbrella and simply covered the inside with white xerox paper. I sawed of the round part of the handle and now it fits into the grip of my tripod. The Phottix has a mount option for standard tripods. The results are amazing, and as usual I now feel much better when I buy an umbrella (I’m not quite sure whether I want reflective or shoot-through or both ;)