Heipei

It’s really tough to get back to blogging after a long absence. But I spend so much time (pointlessly) consuming on the Internet that I miss the days when my main focus was actually creating stuff, be it text, photos or code. I’ll try to improve! I’ve started another (static) blog over on heipei.github.io which will focus exclusively on my more nerdy endeavors.

The big one …

Well the biggest piece of news is probably that Katrin and I tied the knot and got married this summer. After a lot of stress and time-consuming organizations we were happy to celebrate our wedding with a lot of our dear friends and family. The photos from the epic parties are still not quite there yet, but the samples we already saw were simply amazing (we can only recommend our photographer Christina which did an excellent job). We had a huge party after our civil marriage and a smaller party with only close friends and family after our catholic wedding in Aachen. The weather played along just fine, more than can be said for the rest of this summer. The help and encouragement we received from our friends, family and our fraternity brothers / sorority sisters gave us a lot of strength.

… and two small ones

The other thing that managed to sneak in amidst all of the stress we had this spring/summer were two lively and insubordinate little cats by the names of “Buffy” and “Telefonmann”. It is certainly a lot more demanding to take care of someone other than yourself, especially in the case of these two cats which always seem to be hungry. But the joy these two little creatures give us more than makes up for any additional effort. Pro-tip for cat-owners: Get a roomba!

Photography

I talked a lot about the difference between my EOS 60D and my Fujifilm X100 and have spent countless hours editing shots and contemplating on selling the 60D for an X-Pro1 or X-E1. In the end I came to the conclusion that the only thing most of my average shots are missing is and interesting composition and the necessary amount of post-processing (more for the 60D than for the X100), both of which are faults of the photographer rather than his gear.

By now I have moved to shooting RAW almost exclusively for my 60D and just spent an eternity editing some 550 shots from our honeymoon in Tuscany. In the end the effort was worth it, even more so because I learned a lot about sane defaults when developing from RAW and which kind of look I want to achieve. I will do a separate photo post once I selected a few good shots, stay tuned.