Today a played again with my new equipment. I've been to the Baroque Garden Großsedlitz today (weather was gorgeous, and a all blue sky is nice to see vignetting ;-). All photos shown down were shot using the Tamrom f3.5-4.5/19-35mm at 19mm using f5.6 and I'm pleased with the results. You see almost no vignetting—that's unexpected as when I used this lens with film, you often were able to see it.

I decided to use flickr as main storage site for the pictures I don't present in my gallery on the main site as well (the included space for my site is too low to host too many pictures). Too speed up the uploads I just decided not to upload full 8.2 MP versions, but to limit the bigger side length to 2000 pixels (it's 2000 × 1333 for uncropped images). I updated f-spot to the CVS version and now I'm able to upload more than one picture at a time to flickr—the renaming and sorting (taggin, sets) need some work still.

And what's really nice working digital: no longer scanning and cleaning up the scan! It's really incredible how fast I can get a Cyanotype negative out of a raw (or a jpeg) and it even looks much cleaner than a scanned negative (no grain after some sharpening). I hope you'll see some results soon…

To load the raws with Gimp, I replaced rawphoto (which was already installed) by ufraw. It just has much more features.

Finally I decided to switch to digital. As I had an Canon EOS 300 with some additional equipment (lenses, flash) I decided to go for an EOS 20D. As I like to shoot using wide angle, I got an Tokina AT-X Pro DX 12~24mm F4 as well. So the lenses I currently have, are

• Tokina f4/12-24mm (19-38mm with crop factor)
• Tamron f3.5-4.5/19-35mm (30-56mm)
• Tamron f3.8-5.6/28-200mm (45-320mm)
• Canon EF f1.8/50mm II (80mm)

The camera works really smooth. Turn it on, and it is on (like an analog one). The AF is really fast and the highlighting of the rectangle is much better visible than just the spot inside. All lenses behave well, but for the usual problems of wide angle lenses (esp. the distortion on the edges is seen at 12 mm). The body is a bit larger than the 300 (but IMO better than the small body of the 350D) and much heavier.

But what I'm not so satisfied with, are the many lenses I carry around now. The additional wide angle Tokina is definetly needed, but I'd rather have a good allround lens in the range of 18 mm to 100 mm or 150 mm at maximum. Only Sigma offers something in this range currently (18-125mm), but I don't remember seeing a test yet. I know that Tamron as well as Sigma have these allround 18-200mm (or even 300?), but actually I almost never need this and the performance tests were no too good…

I did some tests and as I suppose I will photograph more often now, I upgraded my flickr account as well (just three set in the free version :-(). So the first image is a shot with the Tokina at 12 mm and f6.3. If you look at the largest version on flickr, you'll the the distortion on the edges clearly, but overall it looks nice.

These other three were all shot in the “Rose Garden” of Dresden using the Tamron 28-200mm at 200mm (yeah, here I used it!).

The biggest problem with a digital camera is, that you take the pictures to your computer and look at them in 1:1 and sometimes you just wonder, where the hell the AF looked at. So to judge sharpness (and AF) in real world conditions I ordered some 11 cm ×17 cm prints to look at (it's nice to upload the pics to some online service and just wait for the prints to be send home to you; just the DSL line could be symmetric)…

But even serious magazines get it wrong…

In the current edition of the German magazine fine art printer (why don't they use a German title anyway?) is are two Cyanotypes of Allan Jenkins shown. While I'm glad that Cyanotypes get some attention, I don't like basic mistakes.

I don't know where they got from, that it is Turnball's blue (which is unstable) formin Cyanotypes, but as Mike Ware writes in his great book “Cyanotype”:

Because negative-working cyanotype are usually formed by the reaction of a ferrous salt […] with a ferricyanide, a common error in many older published accounts of the cyanotype process is to describe the pigment as ‘Turnbull's blue’ as ferrous ferricyanide. Modern chemical research has conclusively shown this to be wrong. When formed, ferrous ferricyanide rearrannges ‘instantly’ […] to give ferrocyanide, Prussian blue […] However, the early experimentalists may be forgiving[…]

This book is of 1999 and I don't remember reading other articles (on the net or in other books) claiming, Cyanotypes would be formed of Turnball's blue.

And FYI: it's Berliner Blau (Berlin blue) in German…

Yesterday I've been in a big electronic super market and looked what's there on the “New CDs” rack. And I saw there two versions of depeche mode's “playing the angel”. The normal CD and an special edition with an included DVD. The special edition was quite more expensive but what caught my eye was that on the special edition the big copy protection sign was missing. So I had a closer look and the unexpected result was, that the CD was an hybrid SACD in fact! So I couldn'd refrain from buying it. ;-)

The SACD mix is quite interesting. The additional channels are not too much pronounced. What's a bit unusual, though, is that the centre speaker isn't used for the vocals, but these are replayed using the left and right speaker almost completely. On almost all other SACD the vocals are replayed on the centre speaker almost completely (if the vocals are not supposed to emerge from the side), but I think that's OK for the type of pop music played by depeche mode—it sounds more “airy”. Instead they use the centre speaker for some pronounced ”special“ sounds. The playback on the rear speaker is pleasantly reserved, so you don't feel like someone is standing behind you ;-). I think it's worth to buy the SACD. I'm just listening to the CD rip on my PC and it just doesn't sound as interesting…

The music itself is very interesting itself. The songs are quite varying and if you've listened to “precious” most of the other songs sound quite different. I like “precious”, but I think this song was included to become a single. ;-)

The included DVD itself has an interesting “make of” video and the CD as PCM stereo, 5.1 dts, and 5.1 dolby digitial. So the only thing they missed, is to include a DVD-Audio layer. ;-)

But I should have waited with buying. This time it's cheaper at Amazon.de. :-(

Yesterday evenening I watched Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning together with a friend. This is a fan film of some Finnish Trekkies, so the film is still in Finnish with English subtitles (listening to Finnish is quite unusual though).

We found this film quite funny—it matches up to the professional German film “Starship Surprise” definitely. The difference is that ”Starship Surprise” was a bit of a disapppointment for me while ”Star Wrek” was a pleasant suprise (my all-time favourite of a Star Trek parody is still Galaxy Quest, though, and that will be hard to beat ;-)!

You definitely see that this is a fan project in many scenes, but esp. the rendering of the star ships and of the battle looks very professional (that must have taken much work).

BTW, while you can buy a DVD, this movie is available for download for free officially…

Now the election is over—finally and the politicians can return back to normality with less demeanour.

The outcome is pretty funny as the CDU seems to have managed their voters to the “correct” behaviour: voting with their first vote for the CDU man and with the second one for FDP. This way CDU even gets one additional excess mandate. The electors of SPD havn't voted for CDU with their second vote as much as required apparently (CDU did need more than 41000 votes not to get the additional excess mandate.

Still SPD is the largest party in the new parliament even if the fraction of CDU and CSU combined now has 4 seats more.

So they'll still keep their point of views whom to become (or remain) chancellor… Actually I don't care too much (OK, I don't want a chancellor who looks like starting to cry 75 % of the time very much) as long as they don't take too long with the negotiation and form a government which has a chance to hold for 4 years.