That was a PARTY!

Click on the photos to see the party gallery (56 photos) 🙂

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More photos HERE!

BTW: A proof, that one shall sleep more is: I put a roll of HP5+ into a freshly made microphen solution without even checking its temperature. It was 28 deg. Celsius!!! Aaaargh, after 5 minute development the negative is… funny. Well, the picture is there, but shall it really have this greenish cast? Well whatever 🙂
It’s just party photos anyway.
Ah, well: I really like the fine grain of microphen+TMZ @ 1600…

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Snow, snow, snow…

Hey, it’s March! M-A-R-C-H! I know it’s not yet official time for spring to come, but this time last year there were flowers in the park already in full blossom!!! And now?

On Friday I arrive in Reutlingen, it rains. So far so good, rain is ok in spring, but seeing 25cm of snow the very next morning the hell isn’t!

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2006-03-05 13-33-11 5300.jpg

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It’s snowing again…

Well, i know, it’s still winter, at least according to the calendar.
but then, how come the spring managed to come round this time last year? hmpfff.
anyway it snows again…
grrrrrrr….
Snow in Durlach #1

Snow at Durlach Bhf

ah, well, if you look for the Hippo, he’s one post below…

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I think I saw a pu^H^H^H… hippo :)

I played with Lissajous figures today…
and out of sudden, I saw a
Lissajous-hippo
HIPPO!
😀
Enjoy!

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Friday – bowling…

They say, bowling is a sport immitation for beer drinkers, chatters and mums with kids 🙂 Well, I won’t risk saying things like that, but in case of a casual freindly meeting the sport part is definitely not the most important thing 😛

On Friday Xinyi and her colleagues went bowling — taking me along. As I have injured my right hand that day, I played the deadweight and enjoyed shooting photos only. I took my new toy — the 20mm Flektogon on a Praktica and two rolls of Tmax 3200 film. I exposed it at ISO800 and 1600 resp. then flash-scanned it using my 300D. I screwed the flash backlight and didn’t notice it till I had the scans loaded in my PC, so the quality stinks a good bit, I’ll redo it if I find some free time.

So, this is the bunch `playing’ (notice the importance of social relations in sport):
2006-02-27 00-10-09 8709.jpg

Some actual bowling shots:
bowling #1

one can’t be always perfect:
bowling #2 - not always succesful

Let it roll!
bowling #3

and a well deserved cocktail-bar evening afterwards 🙂
bowling - after
One photo directly from 300D — Xinyi’s portrait
Xinyi

More photos will come – keep an eye on my party-photos gallery (right now only a full set of b/w photos, color shots yet to come)

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,,Modern reading” series update…

…pending.
Does this qualify?
Haven’t decided yet, but before I update my gallery I have to clean the mess there up a bit, there are waaaaaay to many photos and way too many bad among them 🙂
The modern.reading series can be found here:

and here’s the last shot:
Modern.reading

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I burnt myself badly today…

Not really a photo topic, but still, I’m angry at myself for such a foolishness…
I switched off the wrong cooking pane and grabbed at boiling hot oil :/
don’t ask for details…

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Scan your slides/negative film using a dSLR!

So you have a nifty nice looking dSLR and a closet full of slides, old b/w films and you’d like to enjoy the advantages of digital in full?
Sure, you might just get yourself a good film scanner and go for it, but…
Why don’t you use your dSLR?

You’ll need:

  1. a DSLR (digital single lens reflection camera). Just forget compact cams, yes, I know they would possibly do, but it’s not worth it unless you have a REALLY good one, but even then I expect a lot of hassle with pincushion/barrel distortion etc.
  2. either of the following:
    • a macro lens providing a magnification ratio of at least 1:1.5, better 1:1. Preferably about 50-60mm focal length. One fiting your camera system would be advisable 🙂
    • a general purpose (or a macro) 50mm Tessar lens (most of those f:2.8 lenses will do) with M42 mount, a set of extension rings (preferably including a remote cable aperture control ring) and an M42-yourcamerasystem adapter. This is the cheap and good way out.
    • the above, substitute Tessar 2.8 with a good Gauss 50mm lens (e.g. Zeiss Pancolar proved sufficient on a 6MP camera).
  3. a slide copying adapter – e.g. that from Pentax. Important: it has to be one with a standalone mounting rail, not a tube thing with bulit-in lens. Cheap dSLR have smaller sensors than 35mm film so you will need to alter the magnification ratio, usually typical slide-copying adapter provides magnification from 1.0 to 1.5 or 2.0, while to get a full-frame scan you need about 0.6x magnification on an APS-C dSLR. Adapters with a built-in lens, apart from their poor quality, will give you a headache with their constant mag. ratio.
  4. a flash gun and a remote release cable. A flash gun with manually adjustable output power is preferable, flashguns providing only automatic mode are useless (I guess Sony made such a curiosity once).

My junk:
Flash scanning (20D)

The 20D isn’t mine, I own a 300D, but it was in for a repair at that time. Anyway, I gave up on the camera mounted rail assembly you can see in the photo, it was too unstable. Now I put the camera on a tripod and fix the slide copying frame on a rod clamp mounted to my workbench. It’s much more stable that way.

Most slide copiers have a ground glass plate behind the slide. The idea was to copy slides in daylight, as camers don’t have built-in flash meters. Since in digital world shooting a few test frames doesn’t cost a dime, throw this glass away. Dust and stains on it do come out on scans, so better just get rid of it. Instead, put a white sheet of rough paper (I use paper towels) some 0.5 meter away from the slideholder and direct your flashgun at it. Put sume film in the holder, focus (this is gonna be tricky) and try to ge the exposure right.

I use the Pancolar (told you, it’s not optimal here, so don’t run to buy just the same lens) at f:11 – f:16, Metz at 1/4..1/32 power, camera set to manual at 1/125s, MLU on, wire release. Focus, close the aperture (i have a cable release for that), shoot RAW (!!!!!!!!!!), make sure you expose to the right (light become shadows in negative, shadows will be lights, and shadows have little tonal resolution in dSLR, so put them as high up as you can without killing the lights). for small frame-to-frame adjustments change the aperture, for larger – adjust flash power. If you shoot color negative film, remember to take a shot of an empty film to get the mask color. Set WB to flash, or – in B/W or slide film – to an empty frame to avoid color cast.

Postprocess starts with dcraw
for %i in (*.crw) dcraw -3 -w -k 0 -m "%i"
then you need to load each psd in PS and do (at least, B/W process)

  • autolevels (no clipping, enhance each channel)
  • desat
  • invert
  • flip horizontally & rotate & crop
  • autolevels, then levels & set gamma to your liking
  • apply slight S-curve to liking
  • sharpen

YMMV, the above is roughly what I do, but I don’t write cookbooks…

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Kodak BW400: Reutlingen winter shots…

It’s time for a big RANT. In Karlsruhe, at the Marktplatz, PHotoPorst offers general photo service, including negative film development.
NEVER EVEN THINK ABOUT IT
Twice I gave them a chance, twice was I failed.

  • Once, long ago, they promised to get me my negative film scanned at 6MPixel total per frame (it was their way of stating resolution, but I’m not as dumb as not to figue 6MP means ca. 2000DPI scan resulting in 2000×3000 pixel per frame). They promised TIFFs. I paid, and to my surprise I got a SINGLE CD. It was JPEGs at q=70 and at barely 1000DPI. It’s what I get from my flatbed at home. Complained, sent it back in, again got a CD, but I saw already n the lab, that it has very little data on it (you can actually guess it just looking at the CD, the recorded area looks different from a blank cd-r). Suspecting the worst I put the CD in the drive: yes, these are just repackaged JPEGs. Exactly what I got before, just contained in TIFF container witha ll the JPEG compression. Complained again, heard: `you expected 6MPIX at that price? How stupid of you, 6MPIX costs much more than that.’ EXCUSE ME?
  • Well, I gave up on them and warned people, yesterday I was put in a hopeless situation though: I needed a roll developed and I needed it badly, and it was 7pm, so only 1-hour lab could do it. I didn’t need prints, I didn’t need scans, I just needed a bath of developer. I risked. They DID develop the film. They also managed to get a gret bunch of scratches, dust, water stains and… HAIR? Whatever, looks like beard shaves anyway. I scanned the film rightaway, but after an hour of dustpicking I just bathed the whole roll in distilled water with conditioner and let it dry, it was hopeless.

But if you like such treatment, go on, use PHOTO PORST KARLSRUHE.

Whatever.
Anyway, here are few shots from this roll, mainly winter photos:
Reutlingen - winter mist

Reutlingen - small bridge in the park at Carl Diem Strasse

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steps

and one snapshot portrait of Xinyi:
Xinyi - mirror shot

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Fixed the RSS issue… finally (?)

I hope the RSS feed works now. Before, whatever you did, you got always the comment feed linked. I have hacked a hard-wired code, it’s a bad hack but it works…

Please, report any problems in comments, ok?… This RSS is giving me a good headache…

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