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Photo Exhibition "Streets and Trails" — 23rd Exhibition of "Blende 1"

sascha@losko.de — 2012-02-26T07:48:51+01:00

The annual Photo Exhibition of the Munich photo club „Blende 1“ this year runs from May, 5th until May, 12th. It all starts with the vernissage on May, 4th at 7:00 p.m. Like every year, its location will be the Ritter-Hilprand-Hof in Taufkirchen.

Unlike many photo exhibitions, „Blende 1“ chooses a specific theme every year, e.g., „Naked“ (2008), „Light“ (2011), „Black and White“ (2009). This years exhibition is all about „Streets and Trails“. The flyer below shows the exhibitions signature photo created by Bernhard Rauscher, a terrific photographer. Every other photo is previously unpublished work, so come to the vernissage or the exhibit itself and see the original artwork.

It’s my first year with „Blende 1“, and I made it into the exhibition with two of my photos. To my surprise and satisfaction, the jury actually selected those two photos which I struggled with most to get frame and composition right and aligned with my original idea. That’s the way it should be, shouldn’t it…

Nikon D4 announced!

sascha@losko.de — 2012-01-06T09:12:41+01:00

Nikon has officially announced its new professional DSLR, the Nikon D4. A competitor to the Canon 1Dx (which presumably will hit the market about a month later than the Nikon D4), the biggest change here if compared to Nikon’s old D3 line of cameras are its new video capabilities. However, there are quite a number of new and improved features to drool about:

Nikon FX-format CMOS sensor with 16.2 effective megapixels
91K-pixel RGB sensor for metering, white balance, flash exposure, face detection and active d-lighting
ISO Range 100-12,800 (50 – 204,800 with boost)
Multi-area mode Full HD D-Movie 1080p(24/25/30 fps), 720p (up to 60 fps)
Improved high-speed image-processing engine EXPEED 3
51-point AF system with better performance in low-light situations and with smaller apertures (f8)
Dual card slots for CF card compatible with UDMA 7 and the new XQD memory card (just announced by Sony).
High-speed continuous shooting at approx. 11 fps in FX format without AE/AF and approx. 10 fps with AE/AF
Glass pentaprism viewfinder with approx. 100% frame coverage (FX format) and approx. 0.7x magnification
Approx. 921k-dot, wide-viewing angle, 8-cm (3.2-in.) LCD monitor with reinforced glass
"Sub-selector" for horizontal shooting and "Multi selector for vertical shooting" joysticks/buttons
Button illumination for better handling in low-light situations
Virtual horizon that detects both "pitching" and "rolling" directions.
New shutter unit tested for 400,000 cycles; shutter speed up to 1/8,000 s and flash synchronization up to 1/250 s
Build-in Ethernet port allow to hook up to your network
New optional Wireless Transmitter with a/b/g/n Wi-Fi support
HTTP mode to remotely control the camera with any Internet enabled device (iPhone/iPad optimized)

Joe McNally has hands-on experience already, visit his blog for more!

The announced price is about U.S. $6000. Now, let's wait what the still unannounced Nikon D800 is going to offer…

Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines — New Gallery

sascha@losko.de — 2011-10-22T07:33:00+02:00

Recently, I joined a local photo club „Blende 1“ here in Munich (have a look at their members galleries). What I really enjoy are the excursions this club organizes on a regular basis. A few weeks ago, we went to an oldtimer air show near Stuttgart in Sothern Germany. The biennial „Hahnweide Oldtimer-Fliegertreffen“ is one of the largest oldtimer meetings in Europe, and a great event to dust off your long lenses. I added a new gallery to my collection, just click on the photo below.

Greetings from Hahnweide!

Thinking differently — Steve Jobs, 1955-2011

sascha@losko.de — 2011-10-08T10:03:55+02:00

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes.

The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them.

About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward.

And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

Apple, Inc.

St. Jacob ("Scots Monastery"), Regensburg

sascha@losko.de — 2011-09-07T22:19:35+02:00

We visited the UNESCO World Heritage Site Regensburg, one of the most well-maintained medieval cities in Germany. I particularly liked the church St. Jacob, which goes under the name „Schottenkirche“ (Scots Monastery). St. Jacob is quite famous because of the northern portal with its mysterious images. We were lucky, light flooded the church and I got some nice shots…

Steve Jobs resigns as CEO of Apple

sascha@losko.de — 2011-08-25T05:15:04+02:00

The man who pioneered the idea of a personal microcomputer in the late 70th, refining it by introducing the graphical user interface to "… the rest of us" in the early 80th — who these days, ironically, works quite successfully on making the very same concept of the PC obsolete — has resigned his post as CEO of Apple.

Jobs in 1996, the year he returned to Apple:

"The desktop computer industry is dead. Innovation has virtually ceased. Microsoft dominates with very little innovation. That’s over. Apple lost. The desktop market has entered the dark ages, and it’s going to be in the dark ages for the next 10 years, or certainly for the rest of this decade."

In 2007, Apple introduces the iPhone, in 2010 the iPad. These days, we certainly live in interesting times again. Steve Jobs hands over the now most valuable company in the world in terms of market capitalization to his successor, Tim Cook. Steve Jobs remains at Apple, taking the position of Chairman of the Board.

Steve Jobs on creating products:

"Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works. … To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it’s all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don’t take the time to do that."
"Focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple."
"People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully."
"There's an old Wayne Gretzky quote that I love: 'I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.' And we've always tried to do that at Apple. Since the very, very beginning. And we always will."

Lot’s of „obituaries“ are starting to show up on the internet. If you want to read one, read this one on Infoworld. Written by someone personally screwed over by Steve Jobs, I think the respect that article shows can’t be argued with by simply insinuating „fandom“.

Got my first Sigma lens

sascha@losko.de — 2011-06-12T17:04:13+02:00

I had been looking for a reasonably priced telephoto zoom lens for some time. After studying lots of reviews, I decided to get the Sigma EX 4.0/100-300 APO IF HSM. No optical stabilizer, but supposedly great image quality across the whole zoom range, even wide open. German photo magazine ColorFoto actually recommended this lens specifically for my Nikon D300 in a lab test early 2010.

Unfortunately, that lens has been around for about ten years, and I had to find out that Sigma officially discontinued it not that long ago. On Amazon, one can still find new ones with Canon or Sigma mount, but no Nikon mount… Fortunately, I found an unused display item on eBay offered by a well-known retailer.

The package arrived last Monday, but the weather was awful… today I finally got around to take a few test photos in the close-by Hirschgarten park. The photos below were all shot handheld at ISO 400. The RAW files were developed using Aperture 3, and no further image processing was done except a 100% crop where indicated.

ISO 400 f/5 1/1600 250mm

ISO 400 f/4 1/500 240mm (100% Crop)

ISO 400 f/4 1/320 300mm

ISO 400 f/4 1/320 300mm (100% Crop)

Pretty good.

Slowly getting back to normal life…

sascha@losko.de — 2011-04-20T07:43:04+02:00

Within Munich, we just moved from Schwabing/Maxvorstadt to Neuhausen/Nymphenburg, now living right at the northeastern edge of Munich’s „Hirschgarten“. Wikipedia about this park area: „Best known for the largest beer-garden in the town is the former royal Hirschgarten, founded in 1780 for deer which still live there.“

The Hirschgarten park is great for running, barbecue, drinking beer and for shooting deer… (photos, that is).

BMW Welt, Munich — New Photos

sascha@losko.de — 2011-02-02T22:07:33+01:00

Recently, I attended two weekend workshops about the principles of composition in photography. One location we visited was the BMW Welt (BMW World) here in Munich.

According to Wikipedia, BMW Welt is a „multi-functional customer experience and exhibition facility“ of the BMW AG. BMW Welt is a great location for photographers, with a quite remarkable architecture. However, during the workshop we stayed mostly inside. A got a few shots which are quite nice, I guess.

I just got the email with permission from BMW Welt to publish those photos on my website (limited to private, non-commercial use). Thank you!

I added a new collection to my gallery. Click here, or on the photo below, if you are interested.

Aperture 3 available on the new Mac App Store for just $80!

sascha@losko.de — 2011-01-06T17:17:33+01:00

Apple today introduced the Mac App Store. In addition to Apples iLife and iWork suites, Apple now sells Aperture 3 through the Mac App Store.

Most interesting, though, is its price. Instead of charging $199 for the boxed version, Aperture 3 is available for just $80 on the Mac App Store! At that price point, you get a worthy competitor to Adobes Lightroom for less than a third of its price.

Analog Photography — Last photos, shot with my Minolta 9xi

sascha@losko.de — 2010-11-13T08:00:31+01:00

In Mai/June 2007, we spent two weeks visiting the Seychelles (Indian Ocean). That vacation was the last time I used my old Minolta 9xi (Minolta Dynax 9xi in Europe, in the US it was called Minolta Maxxum 9xi). I bought that camera 17 years ago, and for the longest time I was reluctant to switch to any other systems, never mind digital…

Though introduced 1992, even today the Minolta 9xi remains an impressive camera when it comes to its technical features: A shutter speed of 1/12000th of a second, a 14-zone light metering system and a remarkably fast 4-sensor autofocus system capable of continuously tracking objects horizontally, vertically and diagonally — even objects approaching the camera — correctly focusing every single frame of 5 frames/second.

But, thousands of photos now have to be scanned — if I ever find the time to do that. Some photos I have digitized already, though… That trip to the Seychelles was one of the occasions where I had taken the effort. I took some of those photos and added a new collection to my online gallery — if you are interested, click here (or on the photo below). Note that one photo in that gallery was shot not with my 9xi, but with some simple digital snapshot camera... try to find that one!

La Digue Island, Seychelles

Apple adds RAW format compatibility for new cameras

sascha@losko.de — 2010-11-11T07:24:09+01:00

Apple just released updates to extend Mac OS X system-level support for digital camera RAW formats adding the following camera models:

Canon EOS 60D
Canon PowerShot S95
Hasselblad H4D-40
Nikon D3100
Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX5
Sony DSLR-A290
Sony DSLR-A560
Sony DSLR-A580
Sony SLT-A33
Sony SLT-A55

This update allows Aperture, iPhoto or any other application using Apples APIs, such as Pixelmator, etc., to open RAW files originating from those cameras — even within the Mac OS X finder you will now be able to use Quick Look on those newly supported RAW image files (select the file and hit the „Space“ bar).

Support for those cameras is added through the release of Mac OS X 10.6.5, go get it through „Software Update“ or download the Combo Updater.

The extended RAW image format support is available as separate download as well, though if you are going to install the Mac OS X 10.6.5 update you won’t need to install the RAW compatibility update separately (read „About the Mac OS X 10.6.5 Update“ ), it is part of the larger update.

How to access GPS 'heading' metadata with Aperture 3.1

sascha@losko.de — 2010-10-22T07:16:28+02:00

In my previous post I mentioned that Apple’s new version Aperture 3.1 adds support for GPS heading (direction) metadata. With my Nikon D300 I am using the Solmeta Geotagger N2, which features an electronic compass (unlike Nikon’s original geotagger, the Nikon GP-1). I had briefly reviewed the Solmeta Geotagger N2 in this blog before, and I remain happy with its performance. However, Aperture did not fully support all provided GPS metadata until its current version 3.1. Though Aperture 3 introduced the “Places” feature, GPS ‘heading’ was neither used for map presentation, nor did the heading information show up in the metadata inspector.

The release notes of Aperture 3.1 announced support for GPS ‘heading’. However, upon first inspection this missing piece of information still does not show up in the metadata inspector. In fact, there are a few steps you have to take to get to that info, specifically for photos you had imported before Aperture 3.1 was released! This may be clear for many advanced users, but I have encountered some confusion about this in various discussions since the release of Aperture 3.1. For those running into problems, I would like to walk you through the necessary steps…

The metadata inspector (shown above) allows for selection of a predefined metadata view. You can change those views, or create new ones. A metadata view consists of a set of fields reporting specific information. By updating Aperture to version 3.1, the existing metadata views are not changed though — which is good, you may have spent quite some time to customize them according to your needs.

To add the ‘heading’ field to you views, click on the views selector and go to the end of the selection list that pops up. There is an “Edit…” entry, which opens the “Metadata Views” dialog. This dialog lists all currently defined views in the left panel, with your current view already pre-selected. The right panel lists all available metadata fields, with those fields making up your current view checked. To add the GPS ‘heading’ to your view, find the “Direction” field in the “EXIF” section and check the corresponding check box.

Closing this dialog, go to the metadata inspector and find the “Direction” field for the view you have just edited.

As you can see, the Direction field shows up. However, there is no content.

What happened?

The photo selected was imported before the update of Aperture to version 3.1. The working copy of that photo contains all metadata information that was supported before the update, and the heading information was not part of that set of metadata!

You could create a new working copy from the original, but there is a way to update all your current working copies. Its quite simple, and this can be done in one step specifically for those photos in your library containing GPS information.

First, select the “Photos” section in your project view. Within all photos in your library, we are going to search explicitly for those we want to update: Open the “Filter” HUD and add the rules shown below. All other rules that may be shown in the filter dialog from previous searches should be removed or disabled.

The last rule restricts my personal search to only those photos shot with my Nikon. Only for those I expect heading information to be available — I do have photos in my library taken with my iPhone 4, but even though it features an electronic compass, photos taken with the iPhone do only include GPS position, not heading information (as of iOS 4.1). I hope Apple adds this feature with the next release of iOS. If you can’t wait, there is one App that supposedly does embed heading metadata as well — that would be ProCamera (since version 2.95, though I have not tested this feature myself).

Using the filter settings above, all photos in need of a metadata update will show up. Depending on your throughput, many thousands of them… Updating one photos metadata does not take long — it adds up, though. That’s why we searched explicitly for those photos that actually do have GPS information embedded.

Now, select all photos that have been found. From the main “Metadata” menu, select “Update from Master” and wait…

You can open the Activity Viewer (using the key combination Cmd-Shift-0, a new shortcut introduced with Aperture 3.1 as well) and watch Aperture process your request.

If you get bored, check for an already processed image. Hopefully, you will see correct heading information in the metadata inspector.

What you are not going to see will be any kind of visual indication of heading in the map view directly. I am still waiting for that one, I hope Apple is going to add this feature with one of the next updates!

Aperture 3.1 released

sascha@losko.de — 2010-10-21T06:41:31+02:00

Apple has just released a new version of Aperture. Aperture 3.1 adds compatibility with iLife ’11 and addresses a long list of performance issues and bugs.

Many small changes should improve ones every-day-workflow, such as “Metadata Inspector can now display GPS Direction if this data is available in geotagged photos” (taken directly from my personal wish list, though Apple still does not indicate heading in the map view directly… ).

Go get it through the “Software Update” entry in the Apple menu. Software Update will install a new version of “ProKit” first (the GUI toolkit for Aperture and other Apple Pro software). Once ProKit is updated, Aperture 3.1 will show up. Upon first running Aperture 3.1, it will briefly update your media libraries.

Tram- and Bus Shelter Münchner Freiheit, Munich

sascha@losko.de — 2010-09-22T06:00:57+02:00

The “Tram- and Bus Shelter Münchner Freiheit” is a rather controversial steel construction in the traffic center of Schwabing, Munich. Münchner Freiheit is one of the more important hot spots in Munich’s public transportation system, and gateway to Old Schwabing and the “Englischer Garten”.

Opened to the general public in winter 2009/10, the shelter for streetcars and busses is a 408 tons of steel roof carried by 18 pillars sitting on top of a subway station. Painted in green and white, its public perception with the locals is heavily divided.

It makes for a great location for photographers, though, and I have seen art students from Munich Universities here, sketching…

Lens Correction with Aperture 3

sascha@losko.de — 2010-09-11T10:35:03+02:00

With the release of new versions of Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom, both including Adobes 6th version of their RAW engine, automated and profile-based lens correction has become “mainstream”. This is a relatively old technique, though, with several commercial offerings specializing on this task (e.g., DxO Optics Pro).

The very fist application to automate this process was PTLens, released in 2002. Its developer Tom Niemann was searching for a tool analyzing a JPEGs EXIF data, matching the photographies properties to a database of lens profiles and automatically correct for distortions. There was none, so he developed one himself. PTLens became a shareware add-on for Panorama Tools — these days it is available as stand alone program, command-line utility and as plug-in for a variety of image editing applications. PTLens has received lots of very favorable reviews over the years, and has always kept pace with more expensive commercial products.

Its price is very reasonable, the PTLens database of lens profiles is huge, and it is available as 64-bit plugin for Aperture 3. The results one can achieve with PTLens are great, and smoothly integrated as it is with Aperture, it has become a vital part of my digital editing workflow. I mentioned PTLens before, and I got a few emails asking about my experience with this tool.

One should carefully consider the application of lens correction. It is always better, of course, to use a superior lens distorting a photography as little as possible, than to rely on “tricks” after the “damage” has been done. Unfortunately, one can spend a fortune on lenses and often you just want to travel light, not carrying a wide collection of lenses each optimized for a very narrow range of use cases.

That’s where lens correction can help. My travel lens is a Nikon AF-S DX VR Zoom-Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6G IF-ED. I am very happy with it, it has an extremely fast and silent autofocus and its VR system really works well. Image quality is very good overall — with such a wide zoom range you have to live with trade-offs, though. At its low end this lens is very sharp. However, there is noticeable distortion of the image at that range. At its long end, distortion is much better, but then this lens becomes somewhat soft. With this lens, distortion correction for images taken at its low end really improves things. The source image is sharp enough to “survive” the rather radical image transformation and the end result is still sufficiently sharp.

The following example illustrates the effects of lens correction with PTLens. Mouse over the thumbnails to view a larger image, moving back and forth between the thumbnails allows to compare the photo with and without lens correction. The left thumbnail represents the photo with lens correction. I have marked a few prominent lines in this example, taken from the distortion corrected image.

Figure 1: Mouse over to compare images

With PTLens available as plugin for Aperture, usage is as simple as one can hope for. Select one or multiple images to correct, and select the plugin menu entry from the main “Image” menu. The modal dialog of PTLens opens, already presenting a preview on the end result of the correction. Typically, your lens is automatically recognized, and the correction is applied taking into account the focal length the photo was shot at. Click-and-hold the preview image with your mouse pointer, and the image temporarily switches back to its unmodified state — so it is easy to compare the “before” and “after” images. PTLens has a number of parameters you can play around with, but I won’t go into the details…

One last word of caution on using PTLens — in fact, on using any plugin in Aperture 3… The great benefit of Aperture 3 is that any image modification in Aperture 3 does not actually alter the original image. Any change you make becomes an instruction how to change the image upon “publishing”. If you view images in Aperture 3, these change instructions are applied on the fly. If you export images, their change instructions are applied on the exported image, the original photography actually remains untouched. If you duplicate a working copy of an image, you just create a copy of the instructions set, which still refers to the unchanged original image.

However, once you process an image with any plugin, Aperture 3 writes a 16-bit TIFF with all currently existing change instructions applied. The plugin then modifies the 16-bit TIFF. You can continue to edit the image with build-in Aperture 3 tools, but they will become “change instructions” on the plugin-processed 16-bit TIFF, not on the original RAW file. Therefore, my recommendation is to apply plugins at the end of any image editing process. If you correct lens distortion, make sure to recover highlights and retouch the image before going into PTLens or other plugins. That way, you make sure the Aperture 3 tools have the biggest leverage — use them on the original RAW file, not on a 16-bit TIFF copy already missing some information otherwise available with the RAW file.

Remember the Smartbook?

sascha@losko.de — 2010-09-09T07:43:44+02:00

In June 2009, Qualcomm and Nvidia introduced a new category of laptop computers not based on Intel CPUs, but running on ARM-derived chip designs — the same hardware used with modern Smartphones. Thus, those Netbook-style devices were aptly named “Smartbooks”…

Smartbooks were supposed to solve the main issue of any ultra-mobile computer, including Netbooks: Short battery life caused by Intel’s relatively power hungry CPUs (to be fair, looking at general efficiency Intel’s current lineup is much better today than it was during the days when Intel got stuck with the NetBurst architecture). Based on the ARM-design, Smartbooks using e.g. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon CPU were supposed to fulfill on a promise made by virtually any vendor in this industry: Availability of an always-on, Internet-connected mobile device with all-day battery life, which doesn’t weigh much and is small enough to be carried around while still being more productive than a typical Smartphone.

Sound familiar? That definition, sure — but anyone still waiting for the first Smartbook to hit the market? (I think, HP has released one officially — have yet to see it in any store or on the streets, though). Even before that market was shaped, one vendor single-handedly killed it. Today, you can buy Internet-connected, small and light devices that last all day and provide reasonably good productivity (if you don’t want to tinker with the innards of your system). That would be the iPad.

The introduction of the iPad got the whole crowd of computer vendors hurrying to catch-up with Apple. Head over heels, Smartbook designs were canned, or refitted into a tablet form-factor. At least, that’s the impression one gets. And the CEO of the guys having introduced the term “Smartbook” in the first place admits as much.

But, Google’s Chrome OS was supposed to power Smartbooks — it is still due this year. Maybe we will see a revival of this comatose device category. More likely, though, Chrome OS will power tablets. But, what happens then to the soon-to-be-released Android-based bunch of tablets? If you bought one of those, will you be happy once Chrome OS has replaced those “temporary” devices?

Apple iOS 4.1 now available

sascha@losko.de — 2010-09-08T19:53:38+02:00

Apple iOS 4.1 is now available, you can download it from iTunes right away.

I just installed it on my iPhone 3G, and on a quick first assessment I can confirm that the performance of the user interface increased noticeably. Though I did not experience the severe slowdowns some blog writers reported after upgrading their iPhone 3G’s to iOS 4.0, my 3G does feel “snappier” after todays update nonetheless…

EISA Photo Awards 2010-2011 — Apple wins with Aperture 3

sascha@losko.de — 2010-08-31T11:38:15+02:00

I almost missed that one: Apple Aperture 3 wins the EISA Photo Awards 2010-2010 in the Photo Software category. The official statement of the European Imaging and Sound Association describing the “European Photo Software 2010-2011”:

Apple Aperture 3 is a winner when it comes to organising your pictures in a smart and effective way. Thanks to face detection and GPS tagging, this software package makes it very easy to index, sort and retrieve your photographs by searching for the people or the places in the pictures. The program is very easy to use, and offers many new additional features together with high-class album printing and multimedia slide shows set to music. The new edge-aware ‘Quick Brushes’ tool is particularly useful for precision retouching.

Important Reasons

Face detection tagging
Sort and search by location
New photobook integration
Easy to use brushes with edge awareness
Ready-made picture styles

Can’t really shorten that one… in fact, I could add various points to that praise myself.

On their site, the EISA features a nicely done visual citation of Apple Aperture 3. Other winners of the Photo Awards 2010-2011 are, e.g., the Canon EOS 7D as “European Advanced SLR 2010-2011” and the Nikon D3S as “European Professional Camera 2010-2011”.

EISA is an association of 50 special interest magazines from 19 European countries. Since 1982, each year the editors-in-chief from all EISA member magazines meet to decide which products deserve the internationally acclaimed EISA Award.

Lake Altmühl — Bird Island

sascha@losko.de — 2010-08-31T05:44:38+02:00

We started our trip to Altmühl Valley at the ‘Altmühlsee’, north of the border of the nature park. Lake Altmühl is a great destination for birding, and while my wife focused on the birds, I took some nice landscape photos… I really have to get a better lens for bird photography!

Lake Altmühl was created in the 1980s as part of the larger Franconian Lake District project to reduce flooding in the Altmühl Valley as well as redirecting water from the Danube basin to the north. The 450-ha/1,112-acre Altmühl lake is at most 2.5-m/8-ft deep.

Located within the northern part of Lake Altmühl, the 120-ha/300-acre “Bird Island” is hosting well over 200 species of birds. A circular, 1.5-km/one-mile long hiking route with observation tower is open to the general public.

The Google-view on Bird Island, the pins designate the location of the photos above:

Schmetterlingsschwarm … butterfliesworldwide (Eichstätt)

sascha@losko.de — 2010-08-30T08:57:59+02:00

Located right in the middle of the bavarian Altmühl Valley nature park, Eichstätt — a small town with a baroque old city center — has its own, slightly sleepy charm. In fact, Eichstätt hosts its own University — supposedly it is Europe’s smallest University Town.

This summer, Eichstätt hosts a culture festival exhibiting art from about 30 mostly regional artists. We visited Altmühl Valley and Eichstätt yesterday, and one particular piece captivated me.

This May, Marc Köschinger started exhibiting his installation ‘Schmetterlingsschwarm’ (butterfly swarm). Since then, his butterflies have been found in more and more places all over the world… I have taken the time to get a few photographies illustrating the origins.

Citing Marc Köschinger: “The butterfly is a baroque symbol for death and change, a memento mori implying hope for resurrection or an afterlife.”

In addition, this installation is supposedly inspired by early childhood experiences of Mr. Köschinger in South America, where huge swarms of similarly colored butterflies can be observed feeding on carcasses. Once satiated, they move on — soon looking out for the next dead animal to get nutrients and minerals.

There is a short movie on youtube introducing Mr. Köschingers butterflies project:

What is iPad? — The iPad is for Photographers…

sascha@losko.de — 2010-09-14T20:30:49+02:00

Note: This is one part of a multipart installment about my personal experiences with the iPad. If you are interested and haven’t read the previous parts, start here:

What is iPad? — Introduction

The iPad is for Photographers…

Using the iPad for photography is a mixed bag. Let me start with the positive aspects. If you use the iPad you start to see where digital imaging is heading eventually. It just feels natural to “touch” your photographs and manipulate them by direct interaction with the image itself, not having to use some device “in the middle” such as a mouse or a pen tablet. I can imagine that professional solutions such as the Wacom Cintiq pen displays may offer an experience similar or even superior in respect to direct interaction with the image, but those solutions are expensive and require a more complex setup (inherent to any “multiple devices” solution). And, though I haven’t used such a pen display myself, I have a hard time to believe that, e.g., running Photoshop on a classical desktop computer with such a pen display feels nearly as fast as the interaction with the iPads user interface.

The iPad allows to import JPEG as well as RAW images from your camera or SD cards using the Camera Connection Kit. The workflow is a no brainer, just connect everything and turn on your camera. Ether all photographs or a selection will be imported, with reasonable speed. iPad offers you to automatically skip images you may have imported before. The iPad’s iOS comes with a variant of the Mac OS X RAW converter creating JPEG previews, and you can browse your images as natural as it gets, with swiping gestures for switching to the next image or pinching gestures for zooming in or out. The experience of these interactions are unrivaled by any user interface I have experienced. Performance is incredibly fast, there are no delays or “hiccups”.

Apple has brilliantly designed a system that feels much faster than more powerful hardware. Many aspects of the systems design come together in the creation of this perceived performance, and it is not all UI design. One design decision obviously was to remove virtual memory management from the Mac OS X core to create iOS. That means, any application running gets to use only the amount of RAM that remains after iOS itself gets its share. With only 256 MB of RAM, that is not too much.

Though this clearly contributes to the creation of the incredible user experience, it is a trade-off that currently limits the iPads use for digital imaging. There are many Apps available that provide a rich environment for your image processing needs. However, any App can only keep a certain image size in memory. For most Apps, that’s an image size of roughly 4 megapixels. Larger images will be scaled down automatically, but don’t start to sweat — you will always work on a copy of the original file. In fact, Apps cannot directly access the original files of the images imported, they get access only through an API that makes available the image data and not the actual image file.

Though this “sandbox” approach greatly increases security (something that cannot be underestimated for a system that handles your precious photographs), it further restricts possible use cases. Any photographers workflow that involves on-set retouching of images and/or submission of the high quality, full size images via the internet to clients or stock photography agencies are currently left out in the rain. What works, though, is quick retouching and upload of web-ready images to Facebook, flickr, etc., depending on the image processing App you use. My personal recommendation would be Photogene, but there are many more good ones. Once you sync your iPad with your desktop computer, iPhoto or Aperture will import the originals as if you had connected your camera or a card reader.

That said, recently a very interesting article has been published by Rob Galbraith on his blog, that explains how to overcome many of the restrictions of Apple’s Photo app “vault” approach. Rob Galbraith is a digital pro photographer that came to my attention in 2007, while a heated public discussion about the autofocus system of Canon’s flagship DSLR EOS-1D Mark III was going on. Essentially, he started the whole discussion with an article he wrote…

In his recent article, he discusses his wireless workflow during photo shoots, which involves the iPad as an essential component. Running the app ShutterSnitch, he uses the iPad as wirelessly connected FTP server collecting — and at the same time presenting — the photos taken right during his photo sessions. Key strengths of the iPad he points out are, among others, its display quality that “…offers a degree of colour accuracy that isn't far off the best laptop screens we've tested…”, and the iPad’s battery that “…just won't quit…”.

There’s much more to his elaborate setup, I recommend to work through his eight (!) pages going deep into the details of wireless transmitters, routers, and the correct configuration of the whole setup. The bottom line of his approach is not to go directly into Apple’s Photo app through the camera connector, but to intercept the photo stream with a 3rd part app by using an alternative transmission method.

Conclusion: For me, the iPad is the perfect vault to keep an immutable copy of my photographs while traveling. The originals are kept safe, and in addition you have the possibility to review your days work and send out emails or publish on the web for quick communication. For more demanding usage scenarios, there are ways how to meet those requirements as well.

Next installment coming soon: The iPad is for Readers…

What is iPad? — Introduction

sascha@losko.de — 2010-09-14T19:15:27+02:00

The public discussion about the iPad has been marred by hype, hyperbole, hate and hope — opinions ranging from ‘epic fail’ to ‘savior of the publishing industry’ could be found next to each other even in the same print or web publication. For the informed reader however, more often than not it became apparent that the respective authors had never “touched” an iPad to begin with. Lately, the discussion about iPad became more tamed — public vigilance concerning Apple first found its new target in Antennagate and nowadays seems to subside further with people expecting Apple to crumble under the advent of a flurry of iPad knock-offs powered by Android (though Google itself thinks using the current version of Android for tablets is a bit premature).

The one thing no one can deny any more: The iPad is a runaway success. Why is that?

Three months have passed since my dear wife got me an iPad. Enough time for the iPad to find its niche within my daily routine. Novelty has worn off but still I find myself using the iPad on a daily basis in areas where once my laptop has been indispensable. Reflecting on my usage patterns, I would like to try for myself to solve that enigma puzzling people since the beginning of 2010: What is iPad?

Surprising to me, I don’t use my MacBook Pro that often any more. At home, that is — at work, I still need that truck. With my personal computing requirements, however, I find only few tasks that remain predestined for running them on my laptop.

Those would be more or less the following: my digital RAW image processing workflow, re-encoding video, and writing this blog… The critical prerequisite for the first two tasks is just processing power: fast CPUs crunching numbers, and large amounts of RAM. However, writing this blog only depends on the web design software I had chosen initially, and that does not run on iPad yet. Wouldn’t that be nice, though? RapidWeaver is written using Cocoa, after all… There have been good examples of complex Mac OS X software that quickly found its way on to the iPad.

For now leaving behind the stuff iPad can’t help with yet, I would like to take a closer look at typical use cases in everyday personal computing. Surfing the web, reading, occasional gaming, writing emails and much more of the tasks I used to do on my laptop computer I now do solely with the iPad. Sometimes it took some re-thinking the ways I used to do stuff, but with a bit of flexibility you may find the benefits of iPad clearly outweigh “old school” computing.

When I started to summarize my experiences with the iPad, I thought that I might be able to write a short, comprehensive overview and be done with it. Turns out there is much to tell, even though I promised myself to keep it short. So, I decided to publish a number of short installments, each focussing on a particular usage scenario. The first one will focus on using the iPad as a tool for digital photography and will be published right after this blog entry:

What is iPad? — The iPad is for Photographers…

Sylt Photos

sascha@losko.de — 2010-06-18T12:49:12+02:00

A new gallery with photos taken during our trip to Sylt is now online. I may add more photos in future updates…

Lighthouse

sascha@losko.de — 2010-06-17T09:59:11+02:00

We just came back from a 10 days trip to the North Sea. More specifically, we traveled to Sylt — the northernmost island of Germany, one of the North Frisian Islands. While I just got started digging through the massive pile of photos taken during that trip, I wanted to post the landscape below right now. The image shows the lighthouse in Hörnum, a small village in the southern part of Sylt. The landscape there is beautiful, large stretches of dunes and beaches are the home for a variety of birds. Seals live close to the shores, and with a bit of luck you can see a Harbour Porpoise (Phocoena phocoena) on the western side of the island.

This picture is a HDR image, using a series of five hand held, exposure auto-bracketed images (-1.33 ev to +1.33 ev). I quickly threw together this image with the help of the Photomatix Pro tone mapping plugin for Aperture 3. The second and last step was lens correction using the PTLens Aperture plugin — my primary lens for traveling needs a bit of help.

More images are coming soon…

Thinking Machines

sascha@losko.de — 2010-06-03T16:36:09+02:00

“Today, modern information processing machines resemble easily manageable living room sets or massive cabinets.”

Knaurs Buch der Denkmaschinen (1968)
a.k.a. Cybernetics for the modern mind (1971)

Progress. Now on iPad.

Works quite nicely — Nikon D300 NEF raw images imported into the iPad, using the iPad Camera Connection Kit. The actual import speed is not blazingly fast, but the quality of the image presented on the iPad is quite good. The iPad is nice for traveling, e.g., to show around the photos shot during the day. Without external storage, it may not be the best solution to actually store all your images while traveling (depends on your iPads amount of RAM). Just get more CF cards…

The image above is a page shot from the following book:

Knaurs Buch der Denkmaschinen
Informationstheorie und Kybernetik
Walter R. Fuchs. Geleitwort von Prof. Dr. Yehoshua Bar-Hillel
Verlag Knaur, Lizenzausgabe für die Buchgemeinschaft Donauland Kremayr & Scheriau, Wien (1968)

a.k.a.

Cybernetics for the modern mind
Walter R. Fuchs. With a foreword by Yehoshua Bar-Hillel. Translated from the German by K. Kellner
New York, Macmillan Co. (1971)
Translation of "Knaurs Buch der Denkmaschinen"

Newton, Palm, iPhone and the iPad — Very Personal Computing

sascha@losko.de — 2010-05-13T09:10:58+02:00

I still remember a review of both the Newton MessagePad from Apple and the Palm Pilot in a then popular german TV show, WDR Computerclub. Technologically, the Newton won — but their recommendation in the end was the Palm Pilot. It was affordable and almost as good as the Newton. But, I wanted a Newton. That was 1997, if I remember correctly… Steve Jobs axed the Newton a year later, and in the year 2000 I got my first Palm-like device, the Handspring Visor Deluxe. Actually, I owned two — my first Visor got stolen, and the second died because its batteries leaked. Until Apple released the iPhone, I stopped using PDAs and their descendants, the smartphones. Those “merged” devices, combining a stylus-driven PDA with a phone, always seemed clumsy to me. The iPhone was a revelation, at last.

Now the iPad is here. I pre-ordered mine on Monday, a gift from my wife. Apple sold its first shipment pretty fast here in Germany, those who pre-ordered yesterday will have to wait for another week until their iPad will ship.

Looking at the iPad, a lot reminds of the Newton. Apple sees that as well, just compare the old Newton ad below with the new iPad ad from Apple (thanks to Arnold Kim for discovering the resemblance of both ads).

One thing neither Newton, Palm Pilot, nor the iPhone, was particularly good at was to provide an interactive canvas for photo editing. Though the iPhone has its fair share of image editing apps, its screen size just isn’t sufficient. The iPad changes this. At least, the iPad comes with Apples raw converter infrastructure known from the Mac. How this translates into something a photographer can use remains to be seen… Apple may never release an Aperture “touch” version (who knows?), but there are others that have experience in leveraging Apples raw converter. The iPad hardware may not be powerful enough yet, but eventually this will change with future versions.

Geotagging

sascha@losko.de — 2010-05-07T21:49:54+02:00

Visiting Siena was the first real opportunity for me to put my new geotagger to the test. In the past, I have used my iPhone’s GPS using the Trails App to record my location during day trips. For the subsequent photo tagging, I was initially using HoudahGeo, then later I switched to the nicely integrated Aperture plugin Maperture Pro. This was with Aperture 2, with Aperture 3 no additional software is needed any more... However, I got tired of the hassle of importing and synchronizing tracks, so I decided to get a GPS receiver for the hot shoe of my camera.

Though the Nikon GP-1 unit looked quite promising at first, I decided to go for the Solmeta Geotagger N2 — even though I had to import the unit from China. Almost half the price of the Nikon product (considering the exchange rate at that time, not including import duty), the Geotagger N2 has the additional benefit of an electronic compass recording the heading of the camera. The Nikon D300 supports GPS heading data and the Solmeta GPS unit comes with all the right cables for the D300. In addition, the Geotagger N2 has a build-in rechargeable battery, delaying depletion of the cameras battery-pack quite a bit. If you want to use a flash, you can clip the geotagger to your camera strap. Then, of course, the heading will be off…

The Geotagger N2 is a rather plain plastic box, as you can see in the photo above. In the hot shoe, it is a very tight fit. But, because it’s all plastic, I am confident that gets less and less of a problem over time… The unit has a socket for a cable remote and Solmeta adds a reasonably functional one. The 10-pin socket of the Nikon D300 itself is occupied by the Geotagger N2 wiring.

Using the geotagger is simple. Turn it on — or put it on “auto” and turn your camera on — and wait for a more or less short time for the unit to acquire its position. The chip used for the Geotagger N3 is a SiRF Star III, and the time it needs to get a lock is comparable to other systems using this chip. It takes longer, if you haven’t used the unit for a while or if you have traveled a great distance with the geotagger turned off. Personally, once I use the tagger I actually leave it on the whole time I carry the camera. I don’t use its “auto” position. With the build-in rechargeable battery of the Geotagger N2, a fully charged Nikon EN EL3e and an Eneloop-loaded MB-D10 battery grip you keep on shooting for at least one, two days or more…

The accuracy of the tagger seems OK. I have done a few tests comparing the location of the geotagger with the one reported by my iPhone. Those two match quite well. In addition, the location reported on the same geographical spot at different times and different weather conditions are pretty close and match my actual location pretty good. Unfortunately, I have not yet tested the recorded heading with any supporting software - Aperture 3 does not visualize heading (that would be a feature request for Apple...), and I had not time yet to test any other software.

Overall, I am quite happy with the Solmeta Geotagger N2. Its price is reasonable and the feature/function set is superior if you compare it with the Nikon GP-1. There are few negative points: its design is plain and the plastic material feels a bit cheap. Though where it matters most, actually recording an accurate geographical location, this gadget performs admirably.

Siena

sascha@losko.de — 2010-04-24T16:45:44+02:00

We have been visiting Siena, Tuscany, for a few days. I have been there before, many years ago. Though that was a great vacation, last time it was August and all of Tuscany was brown and dry — it was exciting to now experience a lush springtime landscape. I have posted a couple of photos here…

My first blog post

sascha@losko.de — 2010-03-14T11:17:01+01:00

This is it. My first blog post!

I want to keep it simple, and short… Though my first website went online in 1998, I have not used it for any other purpose as some sort of electronic CV or “business card”. Well, I want to change that…

Photography is a long-time hobby of mine. Shooting film for 25+ years, I finally went all digital just last year. Actually, a long time ago I started to postpone any further investment into my now 17 years old analog Minolta Dynax/Maxxum 9xi-based system. That was in 2001, when I bought my first digital snapshot camera. I quickly realized it wasn’t just a toy, but “the future”. In 2009, I finally bought a Nikon D300. The time in between was essentially waiting for digital getting mature, and waiting for the heirs of Minolta Photography getting their act together. Reluctantly, I realized I don’t trust Sony with anything going beyond “consumer” — eventually I switched to Nikon (maybe I underestimated Sony, their current DSLR lineup doesn’t look too bad).

I read a number of blogs. I regularly read, e.g., John Grubers “Daring Fireball” (I am an Apple enthusiast, you guessed correctly), a number of photography-related blogs and, of course, those blogs put online by friends. In general, I quite enjoy blogs voicing an opinion, engaging in some kind of discussion. In addition, blogs sharing tips & tricks, tutorials and problem solutions have become an important resource I turn to for first level support if I need help with, e.g., specific software.

So, that’s what I want my blog to become. Mostly, I want to share my photos — those I deem worthy, anyway — and, sometimes, my opinion on more or less relevant topics. Maybe I can contribute help every once in a while by providing tips and trick on software and IT related issues.

That is it. Enjoy!