Doomshammer's Weblog - Photography

Lebenszeichen

nospam@example.com (Doomshammer) — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 15:23:35 +0200

Ja, ich leben noch Ich bin einfach viel zu Blogfaul geworden. Schuld daran sind vermutlich unter anderem auch Twitter und Facebook, die man durch den Micro-Blogging Scheiss perfekt als Blogersatz benutzen kann (geht halt schneller 'n paar Saetze dort abzusetzen, als 'nen kompletten Blogeintrag zu schreiben).

Dennoch will ich hier zumindest mal wieder schreiben was so passiert bei mir. Beruflich alles im Lot, einiges zu tun. Ich hab in letzter Zeit auch mal wieder Zeit gefunden ein paar interessante Artikel auf der.ftgrf.net zu veroeffentlichen. Musikalisch hab' ich mich auch in letzter Zeit wieder viel mit der Gitarre beschaeftigt. Ich hab' auch ein paar mehr oder weniger gute Videos von dem Kram gedreht Wer interessiert in meine Anfaengerhaften Gitarrenkuenste ist, braucht nur hier zu klicken.

Ich hab' auch total verpennt den 5. Geburtstag dieses Blogs im Feb. dieses Jahres zu zelebrieren.. daher "Alles Gute nachtraeglich" liebes Blog

Happy new year!

nospam@example.com (Doomshammer) — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0100

Allen Lesern ein frohes neues Jahr 2010!

Frohe Weihnachten!

nospam@example.com (Doomshammer) — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 15:44:24 +0100

[der.ftgrf] Firmware Updates fuer Canon DSLRs

nospam@example.com (Doomshammer) — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 21:46:38 +0100

Liest Du hier: http://nop.li/ftgrf091217fw

[der.ftgrf] Warum ich auf dem 2. Verschlussvorhang blitze

nospam@example.com (Doomshammer) — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 12:46:19 +0100

Neuer Artikel bei der.ftgrf: Blitzen auf dem 2. Verschlussvorhang

Canon EF 20mm f/2.8 USM zu verkaufen

nospam@example.com (Doomshammer) — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 21:07:40 +0100

Guckst Du hier: http://tr.im/DPF9

Canon EF 70-200mm Zoom-Objektiv Objektivtest

nospam@example.com (Doomshammer) — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 14:01:18 +0100

Neuer Artikel bei der.ftgrf.net: Canon EF 70-200mm Zoom-Objektiv

der.ftgrf - yet another Photography-Blog

nospam@example.com (Doomshammer) — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 19:05:14 +0100

Lange hab' ich dran gesessen das Blog so zu gestalten, dass es mir wirklich gefaellt. Jetzt ist es endlich fertig - der.ftgrf.net ... Mein neues Blogprojekt in dem ich Anfaengern/Einsteigern/Interessierten das Thema Fotografie etwas naeher bringen moechte. Ihr seid herzlich Willkommen den RSS-Feed zu abonnieren und reichlich Themenvorschlaege beizusteuern

New photoblog (once again)

nospam@example.com (Doomshammer) — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 20:54:00 +0200

Yes, it's true... I've redesigned my photoblog once again. Though I should have known it better, I used Wordpress as backend for the "old" photoblog. The template/theme was actually pretty fancy, but managing a photoblog with Wordpress is hell!

So I searched for a better solution. One requirement was the possibility to fetch photos from my flickr account. After some investigation I found a plugin for Pixelpost (which I used as photoblog already some time ago) which is able to import photos from flickr into it's local installation. So I gave it a try.

After some tweaking (the documentation of that plugin is horrible) I got it running and it actually worked pretty well. Anyways I was missing some stuff- e. g. the script did not import the exif information of my photos into the local database. Also geolocation data from flickr would be nice to display in the photoblog. So I sat down and added some functions to the addon, which "fixed" these issues. The script is now able to import and translate exif information from flickr, as well as it is able to grab geolocation data from flickr (if available).

As template I used "Pixelfy". I was very pleased with the basic layout. Some tweaks and adjustments to match my needs were done in very less time. I only had to do a couple of CSS changes, layout adjustments and also add the new parameters which I introduced with the flickr-import stuff.

To make the story short... my new photoblog is ready and I _really like it (I think I can stay with this at least a couple of month now ). Have a look at it and let me know if you like it or not: http://foto.grafie.net

Neue Firmware fuer Canon EOS 5D Mk II angekuendigt

nospam@example.com (Doomshammer) — Wed, 27 May 2009 09:11:15 +0200

Yay! Lt. dpreview.com (auf der Canon Homepage ist das "Press Release" leider nicht klickbar) soll am 2. Juni ein neues Firmware Update fuer die Canon EOS 5D Mk II veroeffentlicht werden. Das Firmware Update bringt ein langersehntes Feature... mit der neuen Version soll man im Video Modus endlich saemtliche Faktoren manuell kontrollieren koennen. D. h. man hat die volle Kontrolle ueber ISO, Belichtungszeit und Blende.

Viele Kunden haben oeffentlich an Canon appelliert, dieses Feature einzubauen und Canon hat auf seine Kunden gehoert- was ich sehr gut finde. Anfangs hiess es ja, dass Canon diese Features absichtlich nicht eingebaut hat, damit sie keine Verluste bei Ihren "nur" Video-Produkten haben. Doch das Press Release zeigt, dass Canon ihre Kunden doch wichtig sind. Ich freu mich auf jeden Fall sehr und kanns garnicht abwarten, am naechsten Dienstag das Update zu installieren

Nochmal neues Layout

nospam@example.com (Doomshammer) — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 16:16:13 +0100

Ich hab' mein Fotoblog nochmal komplett ueberarbeitet. Von mehreren Seiten sagte man mir, dass das Theme wie es vorher auf dem Fotoblog lief, nicht zu einem Fotoblog passe und meine Fotos nicht gut genug repraesentiere... daher erstrahlt es jetzt nochmal in 'nem komplett ueberarbeiteten Layout - schaut selbst und sagt mir ob es euch gefaellt -> Hier entlang!

My (new) point of view

nospam@example.com (Doomshammer) — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 12:16:43 +0100

Finally done! My new photoblog is ready for the go-live As I didn't had the time to do any further development to my self-written photoblogging software (pixlr), I decided to start a completely new photoblog. This time it is a mixture between a "usual" text-blog and a photoblog... though the main focus is still the photoblogging.

I'll keep the language in german only, as I noticed that most of the visitors of my old photoblog were from Germany... so why make things complicated?

Well... to make the story short... I'm proud to present my (new) point of view.

Geotagging with Adobe Lightroom

nospam@example.com (Doomshammer) — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 16:54:52 +0100

Today I noticed, that Lightroom doesn't work very well with the script I've written to geotag my photos. Though the GPS data is in the EXIF tags, Lightroom doesn't recognize them and (what's even worse) it's doesn't include them into an exported JPG. So you either have to re-run the script over the JPGs or life w/o GPS data in the JPGs.

This wasn't really satisfing for me, so I did a little reaseach on why LR doesn't handle my GPS data correctly. Instead of a real answer to that question, I found a plugin for Lightroom which basically does what my script does, but it's seamlessly integrated into Lightroom. The plugin works really great and has a couple of more features than my script could ever have. Therefor I won't do any further development on the script an use the plugin instead (the funny thing is, that in the background, the script is using perl as well ).

You can find the plugin here.

Simple photo geotagging with an iPhone

nospam@example.com (Doomshammer) — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 22:28:02 +0100

As you know, I recently received my new iPhone. One cool feature of the iPhone is the built-in GPS module (I know a bunch of other mobile phone do have this feature as well). As I was already searching for a simple solution to geotag my photos w/o much efforts (in terms of money and work), I looked for a way to track my photo trips via the iPhone and later syncronize the GPS data with my photos.

After some searching I found a pretty cool iPhone app. It's name is GeoLogTag (you can grab it for 4$ from the AppStore). The App is as simple as cool. Simply enable it and it'll track your trip and when you are back at home you just press the "GPX" button and the App will transform into a simple webserver where you can grab your GPX files via WLAN.

Now as I found a way to track my trips via iPhone I still needed a tool to get the GPS data into my photos. There are a bunch of tools out there in the internet which will let you sync your GPS geolocation date with your images, but most of them are limited to JPGs. As I am shooting exclusivly in Canon's RAW format with my EOS 5Ds (CR2-Format) these tools won't work. I also found some commercial tools which support CR2-Format, but they are very costly and are running on MS Windows only. So also not the solution I was searching for.

So finally I decided to develop such a tool on my own. My language of choice was (of course) Perl. The good thing is, that there are already modules to parse GPX data as well as a module to process EXIF information. To make the story short... I just finished the first version of the tool. It's pretty simple but effective. You can specify one or more image filenames and a GPX data filename. The script will read out the creation date of the images and will compare it to the dates of the GPX datapoints. If a datapoint doesn't differ more than $X seconds from the images timestamp, the script will tage the longitude and latitude and will write this information into the EXIF metadata of the image. If you specify the "-k" parameter, it'll also add these data as "geo:" keywords.

As the script is written in Perl, it should easily run on any UNIX, MacOS and Windows. It has been written and tested on MacOS X. In first place I wrote this script to support Canon's CR2-Format, but the good thing is that Image::Exiftool supports a bunch of other formats as well, so it may be useful for non-Canon users as well. Feel free to download it and give it a try and let me know how you find it.

Requirements
- Date::Manip
- Log::Log4perl
- Image::ExifTool
- Geo::Gpx

To see the script in action, click here.
Download it here.

Available Light Test

nospam@example.com (Doomshammer) — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 22:51:40 +0100

Testshoot with my EOS 5D Mk II at very low available light conditions. Only light source is a candle. I'm pretty amazed by the quality at such low light.

Red | Wine from Winfried Neessen on Vimeo.