Here are the first Cyanotypes of “The Smoke Series”. The results are fantastic. But let's have a look first:

There Was A Moment

There Always Is

Await More!

I'm really happy with the results (I didn't say that yet, did I)! But I'm not clear which version of “There Always Is” I like more. For this one I think both versions work very well as for “There Was A Moment” the blue on white one is much better (because of that I do not present the other one). So maybe in future I'll always have to try both…

BTW, the titles are shamelessly taken from The Cure's “Anniversary”. These just fit so well!

After taking about 300 images, I got at least one good smoke shot yesterday:

I still have to look over a few images and decide, which ones are good, but that will take some time. And I plan to try these as Cyanotypes as well (maybe inverted as this one, maybe not). I got the inspiration in hd connelly's smoke set.

Biggest challange with these shots is to get good lightning. I think I have found a set-up now. Then you just have to push the trigger in the right second…

Biggest problem with these shots is, that the joss sticks stink awfully (I can't stand incense normally)!

You always wanted to follow your comments to blogs, on flickr, etc.? Now the tool for this is here: coComment!

Some blogs can send you an email if some follow up is posted, but this can fill up your inbox pretty fast and many don't give this option (e.g. this one ;-). On some blogs you can get a feed, but this will clutter your feed reader and you'll have to look over many feeds after a while. So what do we need? A feed with all the comments on posts you commented to! Comment posting to older blog entries will cease with time anyway…

It's even more important for me, that coComment supports flickr now! This was always a feature I missed with flickr. There was just no easy way to follow comments on images you commented to.

The Implementation

coComment provides a bookmarklet you have to call. This bookmarklet attaches itself to a post form (if the used platform is supported) and if you press the submit button it will send the data to coComment as well (for more detail have a look at the coComment site).

So most important is to call the bookmarklet before posting!

Helper Script

I tend to forget calling a bookmarklet before posting a comment. So I started to look for a way to invoke this automatically. Greasemonkey is running anyway, so I had a look if someone had written a script to call the bookmarklet—and someone already had!

So I installed this coComment automatic invocation script and do not have to click on the bookmarklet any longer…

Besides meeting other Dresden flickrers I did some photographing as well and printed some Cyanotypes.

Sempergalerie

This is the passage way through the museum “Sempergalerie” in Dresden coming from the Zwinger going into direction of the opera. The b/w version looked already good, but I think this one works pretty well as Cyanotype as well (ok, else I wouldn't publish it ;-).

Rusting Away

This old lamp post stands on the route I walked quite often the last weeks (or at least very near by). It doesn't look like it could withstand the elements very long anymore…

As of now the random Cyanotype on the right top of this blog will show recent additions as well!

Finally I got to writing a new (very small) plugin for Nucleus to display a random cyanotype again. Until now it was based on a more general approach (NP_RandomImg. But as I did change my homepage to a scripted version it would have been too much trouble to use this still. So I created a small plugin that is tightly integrated into the structure of my main page for the Cyanotypes. The latest changes to the source code of my side made this pretty easy…

Yesterday it happened again: part of the Dresden flickr group met. This time we were in the Café Neustadt and had a separate room on the 2nd floor undisturbed by other customers—well, more important, not disturbing other customers. So only the personal of the cafe had contact with us…

But there the privacy ens, as all is documented on flickr somewhere.

We were really a bit crazy yesterday, lasting laughter anywhere. 8 flickrers with equipment—it just clicked all the time, lenses were switched, other equipment testet, but all went back to the right owner in the end (eventually).

The Canon domination is almos bone-crushing (EOS 300D, EOS 350D, EOS 10D, EOS 20D, Powershot 3). The three others I don't know. So maybe Canon would agree to Uli's suggestion sponsering our equipment? I'm sure we're all willing to put a Canon sticker on and hang a Canon flag out of the window of the next meeting location. ;-) As the strap of my camera has a big has a big logo printed on it, I'm walking promotion for Canon anyway…

And as luck would have it, flickr had it's second birthday yesterday. So we had to take a happy birthday shot (courtasy of Christoph):

I did take some (funny) pictures as well, as you can see in this set. And I did take my best two portrait shots yet:

This is Sylke/Curlgirl1. I think I like the second one most…

So the next time (2006-02-22) we'll meet near our favorite comunity shooting place in the Cuchi Lounge, a Sushi restaurant. I assume we have to be a bit more quiet there… ;-)

Uli outran me posting his (very good written) views of the event, though…

Edit (2006-02-14): And yet another blog entry regarding this evening…

Today I've been out taking photos again. I did take many pictures again, but I don't know yet how many are usuable. Just selected 3 drop images and uploaded them to flickr. To get these 3 acceptable shots I did take over 50 in a few batches in continuous drive mode! For all these images I use the Canon f1.8/50 II at f1.8. Unfortunately due to the shallow DOF the drops are slightly out of focus. I did enhance the contrast a bit which enhanced the colours as well.

I did upload a new Cyanotype: “Fragile?”

The picture was taken on the banks of the river Elbe (which is running right through Dresden) on January, 28th. The ice was definitely a little fragile. Not because it was very thin, but as the river leavel seems to have varied while freezing.

Actually this Cyanotype is a bit unusual for me, because I just did a single coating (normally I do coat twice). But the lower contrast and not so deep blue in the shadows fits this motive perfectly.

In general I think this motive fits a Cyanotype very well and I'll have to look for more abstact motives like that.

I did again update my main site. The layout is the same (with some minor tweaks), but what changed?

• Now there are feeds for my gallery available, so you can easily follow updates:
  • English RSS 2.0
  • English ATOM
  • RSS 2.0 auf Deutsch
  • ATOM auf Deutsch
  For this I used an enhanced version of the FeedCreator class (with ATOM 1.0 support). After changing my PHP layout (see below) it was quite easy to add these feeds…
• There's a new, much better favicon for this site:
  
• There's a similar, distinct, icon used for the RSS feeds now:
  
• I changed the internals pretty heavily, even though the output should be almost the same. For the first version I didn't use any classes at all, it was just straight scripting with some functions. But this made some thing pretty complicated, e.g. writing a plugin for Nucleus which will show a random image (the current version is just a left over of the old site and doesn't get updated any longer). So I did refactor the code… It's not perfect yet, but much easier to maintain. It wouldn't be too difficult to move my image date to a database now (and maybe even the text) for instance. I think that's a task for the near future after I did the plugin.

I have to do some catching up I didn't have time to last week because it was filled with work. I did start-up a test rig and that takes almost 3 long work days (you could stretch this, but IMO it's better to do all the test runs as quickly as possible). So I did upload some pictures to flickr, but even this took awhile until I finished.

On last weeks saturday I walked around taking photos at the river. There was quite some ice as it was quite cold (down to about -18 °C). Overall I did take 170 images! This is one of the biggest advantages using a digital camera: you just can take images and throw away (or store away) later, what you don't like. I would never have strolled around taking so many images using an analog camera (and this would have cost about 75 €!).

I almost did my “usual” round and started at the bridge(s) near my home. This time I did take some images for a panorama. The stitch is not perfect, but quite good nevertheless ;-)

From there I walked upstream and took pictures here and there trying to avoid all the people walking around! You can see some more in my flickr photostream.

This is an ice abstract which will be a Cyanotype…

Further up the river I turned towards the small creek Prießnitz which runs on the edge of the quarter I live in. It was frozen so well you could walk on it (but in some places ;-)! This gave an opportunity of pretty unusual sights.

Going back I passed a park (Alaunpark) which in warm times is crouded with people lying on the grass, playing football, etc. Now it was almost covered with ice! On some of the paths you could have iceskated…

On Sunday evening I did a night stroll (well, early evening as did try to catch some nice images inblue hour, which I didn't succeed). I started at the bridge(s) (as ususal ;) and I'm very surprised, that for the next image with all these artifical light the automatic white balance did work quite well.

The last shot (I'm showing here) is one of my best of this weekend (or even ever). This is a passage way of a museum in Dresden and I esp. like the light and shadows (look on the floor!). For this shot I used my Tokina 12-24 at 12 mm. This one will be a Cyanotype as well (it's just in print ;-).