I think next time I’ll try the plane which also departs from Merzbrück and explicitly mentions Aachen proper as one point of its route.

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.

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.

As I said I was pretty sure that a racing bike would be good investment beforehand, judging from the amount of cycling I did with my old mountainbike. Aachen and its surroundings are perfect for cycling: Lots of cute small villages connected by many small farm roads, an interesting landscape and three countries to explore. Driving east the landscape gets flat very soon, but to the west and south of the city, a mixture of farmland, forest and villages is distributed on gently sloping hills and in small valleys. After having familiarized myself with the bike in the last two weeks I decided to put it (and myself) to the test on some unknown terrain.
You can view my route below, click for Google Maps, downloadable GPX. Distance was about 47km, combined elevation about 850m, it took me two and a half hours. I visited villages like Lemiers, Holset, Mechelen, Epen, Sippenaeken, Plombieres, Moresnet and Vaals.
Me cycling without a tachometer means that I have a new use for my Garmin etrex H GPS. I had to build a connector cable though since I didn’t want to buy the totally overpriced serial cable from Garmin.
I hope to do more posts like this in the future, the amount of work transferring the GPX is negligible and I have a feeling that a lot of people are interested in GPS routes.

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.

For some reason I delved into the topic again about a month ago. I realized that my tiny and cheap Acer Aspire One 110L, with its Atheros NIC (AR242x, 802.11abg) does in fact possess the ability to inject packets. Out of curiosity I had to try it for myself. This is not meant as a tutorial for cracking WEP (there is a comprehensive guide for aircrack), but rather as an encouragement to try it yourself, or at least to think very hard if you’re still using WEP.

The most shocking thing I discovered was that the number of necessary packets to crack WEP had dramatically decreased with new attack methods. The aircrack-team talks about 20k / 40k packets (with the new PTW attack, origin and paper here) for cracking 64bit/128bit WEP, which is well below the 1000k packets I read about in the past. At a rate of 500 packets/s this amounts to less than 5 minutes of time needed. This is still a lot if you have to depend on legitimate network traffic and don’t have a few days of time. To speed things up, packet re-injection is the way to go today. It works like this: You wait and try to record an ARP-request (which should be no problem if someone is on the network), and then replay this request back to the network, meaning you simply re-inject the same packet you captured. For every ARP-request, the AP/router should respond with an ARP-reply, which in turn is a new data packet and the kind of packet you want to capture in order to get to 20k/40k unique IVs (initialization vectors). Now imagine doing this re-injection at a rate of 500 packets/s and you get the point.

A few caveats:

• If nobody’s on the network you won’t be able to capture an ARP-request. Tough luck ;)
• If someone is on the network but you missed their initial ARP you can try disassociating them
• I wasn’t able to do fake auth with the AP, which is why I had to replay the ARPs as long as the original client was still associated
• If you wan’t to make extra sure you capture all the interesting replies you can keep Kismac running along airodump-ng
• I suppose this is illegal in Germany. Oh well, I did it while on vacation ;)

The nice thing about this attack:

• Really fast (think ‘car’ and ‘battery slowly discharging’)
• Not much storage needed to capture packets
• Cracking efficiently possible, even on a laptop
• If used for malicious purposes, the kind of people still using WEP will be the last to notice a few thousands extra 802.11 packets over a 5-minute span

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!