Yesterday evening I met with derbaum to “steal” a viewpoint of konomu. This is my result:

Have a look at the original and derbaum's version as well. BTW, this is definitely another Cyanotype candidate…

As there's still winter here, I was out to get some nice photographs yesterday. Unfortunately the inspiration didn't hit too well :-(. Yesterday I've been in the forest (Dresdner Heide). Here's at least one nice shot:

The day before I was in town. But the weather was quite grey (would have been more interesting with some snowing). But at least the archer is nice with all the snow.

The Stallhof picture is already a Cyanotype, I “just” have to post it. This may still take some time as I'm currently redesigning my main homepage (for presenting my Cyanotypes). I hope to finish this soon…

I did take this picture yesterday in the afternoon. The sun was almost hidden by other buildings and this colonnade was lighted just partially.

I'm still working on a panorama I took yesterday. But this still needs some work…

EDIT: I did add this as a “Best of 2005” on Photo Friday.

This one comes out of my archive:

The seven pictures were taken on 2004-11-21 early morning (a Sunday). I used my Canon EOS 300 with Fuji Superia 400 film (I didn't have a digital camera then). That means I had to scan all the negatives, which didn't improve quality. Originally I did plan to make a Cyanotype of this, but this panorama triggers some problems in gutenprint, so I wasn't able to get a good negative (yet).

But I think the panorama itself is worth being published…

I posted the firt panorama to flickr.

The images were taken on the upper station of Dresden's suspension railway on Tuesday afternoon. Original these are 11 images shot at a focal length of 35 mm. For stitching I used hugin, but instead of the nona engine, I used PTStitcher for colour and exposure correction. The multiple TIFFs created by PTStitcher were assembled using enblend.

I'm quite fond of the result, but the originals are not perfect (I should have taken more time when shooting them). Esp. the ledge in the foreground is problematic due to perspective. Additionally the exposure was too long for some pictures and you can see motion blur. Luckily the final resolution of the panorama is that big (13489 × 3283) that you almost won't see this in normal sizes…

Does this realy work like I want to?

Alfons informed me, that this Blog threw some error messages on posting comments. This is now resolved (I hope at least).

This was caused by a plugin to stop spam (or by a combination of some plugins). Actually I don't have a problem with comment spam as I use Captcha (I know that this is a bit inconvenient but very effective). Unfortunately some blokes spam the trackbacks currently massively. They don't get through as I have to accept every one of them, but my list of trackbacks grows with spam and grows on. So I installed some plugins. NP_Blacklist, I use a more recent Japanese version, is quite effective, even though the blacklist itself is not updated any more. But it checks some online ressources as well.

But some spam still is not blocked and is added to the trackback table waiting for approval. So I just changed NP_Trackback not to add any trackback item to the tables which is marked as spam. So if you try to ping this blog and the trackback isn't added (it may take some time to be approved ;-), contact me. Now any trackback ping which is recognized as spam (and not blocked anyway) is just dropped without noticing me…

Today it snowed “quite a bit”. So I decided to take my camera out and go to the cemetery (Innerer Neustädter Friedhof) just opposite of my home. As it got a bit dark, I decided to use the Canon 50 f1.8 II (as it did still snow exchanging the lens wasn't an option). Unfortunately the temperature was just above 0 °C, so I wrapped it in a plastic bag. This makes the usage a bit more difficult, but the basics are quite easy to do (here I was glad again to have the thumb wheel, as a wheel is quite easy to operate with it distinct size and structure). I used a very thin bag for the bin, but these are frosted so you almost cannot see anything clear through them, which basically means no usage of the monitor :-(. The quality of the pictures is quite good, but the white balance is off on some of them.

But first two shots of the balustrade of my balcony. Left before I went to the cemetery and on the right after I returned. It did snow a bit while I've been away shooting showing the white balance problem (I have got the RAW of the second one but it's almost monochrome anyway)…

Some pictures from the cemetery. There are more on flickr. One I like best are the benches in the snow:

This might be a Cyanotype sometime.

Yesterday there was a big winter storm. I assume that this tree and the bench were overthrown then.

Even angels have to carry quite a bit…

As the snow was quite wet, the trees were laden with it. With the 50 mm lens just a few nice shots succeeded.

Coming back home, the bike chained to the bicycle stand of the cinema “Casablanca” in the house were I live looked quite impressive:

Some more “cemetery like” impressions:

Just some technical note: for many of the pictures I used an exposure correction of +1/3 up to +1 EV. Actually this worked quite nice even without the direct checking on the monitor. Just the white balance is a bit of a problem and in such a situation with limited control of the camera I don't know how to avoid it but to use RAW and to do a better white balance on the PC—which I don't want to do for every picture as it is too much work.

If it would have been just a bit colder (lower than -1 °C), then I would have tried to use the camera without a bag around it hoping the snow would just roll off without melting…

I updated the Life Line Cyanotype on flickr with a bigger version. I plan to do this for all my Cyanotypes, but I'd like to integrate this into my homepage as well. Maybe it'll hapen this weekend even…

I think I'll use this chance to use my camera for these (not the scanner) to get better colours (just need a standard gray card or an ExpoDisc(?) .

Here are the promised Cyanotypes. Two trees found on our walk throught the city.

The first one still need some work. Another version with a better coating is drying currently…

This time I didn't scan these two but used my camera. It's a bit easier to get decent colours, but esp. on the second one you see, that even lightning is a problem (using indirect flash). Further you have some distortion because the censor wasn't parallel to the Cyanotype, but that's very easy to correct using hugin (a stitching program).

As usual these (will) have been posted to flickr as well.

Yesterday I strolled through the city together with a friend who bougth an EOS 350D recently. Overall we both are pleased with our cameras. This time we just exchanged the cameras for a short time. The 350D is quite a bit smaller than the 20D but good to work with. The 200 g lower weight is nice, but I got used to the heavier body of the 20D now. There are at least three reasons I'm glad I chose the 20D:

• The indication of the active AF point(s); the indication on the 350D is much darker and much smaller so that I don't see this very clear. I can't imagine how bad this will get in sunshine and this is an very important information for me.
• The thumb dial, this is such an easy and fast way to change settings.
• The better positioning of the buttons for ISO, Drive, Exposure mode and the small LCD on top; the settings LCD on the back of the 350D is not bad either, but I don't like the use of the main monitor to change ISO and so on

The quality is pretty similar. We plan to test this further some day (doing a series of tests with all our lenses on both bodies using a tripod and so on).

I'm just preparing some Cyanotypes, but they still have to dry. Here are three other nice shots (maybe I'll make Cyanotypes out of these too):

Since I got a digital camera now I'd like to take a shot of our Carcassonne boards from now. It's interesting to see the results every time again:

This time the result is pretty compact. But with all the extensions it takes now about two and a half hours to complete one game!

Currently this blog receives a huge amount of attempted trackback spam. As I have to aprove each entry, the list gets longer and longer. You won't say anything, but if there's some “good” trackback ping currently, I might miss it…