I love this image from Richard Peters (UK), currently ranking highest in the visitor ranking over at their web site:

Seeing all these images and at the same time thinking about future travel plans, I remembered that slightly more than 2 years ago I made a statistical analysis of where the photographers came from, and more importantly, where the winning images were taken. You can find my old post right here.

Renewing the statistics with the winning images from 2012, the picture changed slightly: If we have a quick count of the home countries of the winning photographers, and summarize to continents or rather “areas”, we still have a certainly strong European flavor in this competition (but welcome to our Russian and Asian friends!):

But, again, where the photographers are from is not as relevant for our discussion as where the images were actually made. So, drilling down on the area the winning photos were made in, no surprise Africa comes up first *again*, but actually North America caught up.

Ok, never trust a statistical analysis you didn’t fake yourself – of course, looking at the area covered we probably should not subdivide Europe into 4 areas as I did – actually, European wildlife and landscapes scores first on the per continent analysis:

Even if the overall order stayed the same in the top position, there is a strong trend towards photos from the arctic regions of the planet. We could speculate if this is still attributed to the climate change message we cannot hear enough of, as we really need to change our attitude as humankind towards the planet. But my first reaction to the exhibition still was:

Too many polar bears!

I think we need to find new ways on how to convey the scope of the climate change problem to the audience. Just showing images of polar bears on melting ice doesn’t cut it anymore.

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Of the many many sunset photos made, I guess a large portion is fairly stereotypical, but if you would go over to Flickr right now and just type in “sunset” into the search box, I guess you will be surprised by the variety of moods and motifs presented. So yes, please keep on doing sunset photography!

Last Sunday I visited the Ismaninger Speichersee birding site close to Munich for a chance to photograph some unusual waterfowl, but was left with fairly no photo opportunity and only a glimpse though my binoculars of what was the largest flock of Great Egrets I have seen there so far (more than 20). While I was watching the Greylag Geese flying in at sunset, I did actually miss out what was happening behind me:

The sky was clear that winter day, and only a small cloud layer had crept up in the very west of the horizon. And a few minutes before sunset, the sun slipped behind that layer, illuminating only a tiny fraction of the horizon in the most glorious reds. By total coincidence, I had a view of Munich’s iconic Olympic Tower right next to the sun. Measuring the distance from my location with Google Earth shows me a distance to subject of 12.6 km – what a silhouette!

Now better be quick! I ran to the car, which was parked in a clear area with no trees blocking the view to the west, got out the telelens and camera in a hurry, grabbed the tripod, assembled the whole rig in a frenzy and went down on the ground because I didn’t even care to extract the tripod legs. By-passers probably would have thought me being completely out of my mind, but experience told me that I was already too late and rather had to be really fast to get at least a little piece of the great scene before me. The sun moves faster than you think, you better preplan or move fast as well, as I did then!

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I have a little black and white network laser printer, a Brother HL-2150N A4. I got it in 2009 for an unbelievable 106€ new from Amazon. Right, for a brand new machine.

Now, 3.5 years later the first toner cartridge ran out. I just replaced it, and printed the settings pages from the printer drivers box. And it lists the first toner to have lasted 1538 pages, and the only other error the machine had was a paper jam when printing page #1163. That’s it. Total paper jams in 3.5 years – two.

Seems laser printers have a become a really mature product, not compared to the hassles I have with my HP 8850 photo printer (which is out of production, no surprise).

The HL 2150N, highly recommended by me, seems to be no longer made, too,  but there is a very similar looking machine at Amazon called HL-2250DN, for 107€.

Thanks, Brother!

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With my “new” (well, not so new anymore, but still newer than the Adobe software I use) camera, the Olympus E-P1, I of course also shoot raw images to get most out of it’s capabilities. The Photoshop CS3 version I am using does however not support reading the raw files of the Olympus E-P1, as the camera was announced June 16, 2009, but CS3 was released in April 2007, so it certainly can not know about the new camera.

But that is what updates are for, right? So I went to the Adobe site to get the latest Adobe Camera Raw plugin so I could open my E-P1′s files. But what I found made me nervous – the latest version of Camera Raw that will run with my CS3 is ACR 4.6 dated October 2008, and right, no Pen support!

A quick google revealed a well known workaround for the problem – use the free RAW to DNG converter to convert the new raw file into a DNG, and CS3 will be able to open that DNG file in it’s raw converter. This is the solution I have chosen, but read on to find out why it is not that straightforward as it sounds!

Installation of the right versions of DNG converter and Camera Raw

First of all, just to be on the safe side I updated Photoshop CS3 with the latest version of Adobe Camera Raw that was made by Adobe for it – that would be version 4.6. You can download it from Adobe here. It does not support the Olympus E-P1, or any camera newer than mid-2008, for that matter.

Do not think about downloading any of the other RAW converters, I wasted a whole evening trying to figure out which plugin to use for the Adobe DNG converter installed – just the fact that the plugin is located near the DNG converter doesn’t mean anything, conversion capability is actually built into the DNG converter EXE.

This is the link to the DNG converter:

http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/extend.html

You can install the latest one if you like, I used version 6.2.

And here is the gotcha that cost me another half hour to figure out:

The DNG converter can produce files that can not be read by Adobe Camera Raw 4.6.

Why? We thought DNG was a future proof format, right? But it is not history proof.

I do not believe any of the DNG claims: Adobe itself proofed that there can be DNG files that cannot be read even by their own DNG applications. And that without the future actually having arrived yet.

Workflow with PhotoMechanic and Photoshop

I defined the DNG converter as the edit program for Photo Mechanic for all my .ORF files. Use the Edit… Preferences… Launching… Assign specific editing application for each file type function, like this:

So a CTRL-E on the .ORF file will fire up the DNG converter, and all I need to do is to press Convert. Remeber to switch PhotoMechanic to not collate raw and JPG files by pressing CTRL-J first. I patiently wait… and after the image has been converted (I leave it on the Save in Same Location setting), I click Exit and close the DNG converter again. Notice the Compatibility Setting set to still support Camera Raw 4.6 (do this using the Change Preferences… button):

Photo Mechanic of course has already picked up the new file and shows it right next to it’s .ORF and .JPG counterparts, and another CTRL-E on the DNG opens Photoshop CS3, with the ACR 4.6 offering raw conversion of my Olympus E-P1 file. Kind of nice!

And more importantly so simple that I would never ever spend the $$$ Adobe wants for the upgrade to CS4 or CS6 just for the direct support of my Pen. If Adobe product management would realize this, they could just keep providing their customers (who have paid $$$$ dollars for the CS3 version of Photoshop as well!) with updates for camera raw, like you would expect if you buy a high price “professional” product with “professional” support. I am sure they know this, and let’s wait and see when they will remove support for Camera Raw 4.6 from their DNG converters…

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Take for example this picture taken on a cold winter day of a flock of rooks. They are coming each winter into the Maximiliansanlagen park on the banks of the Isar river right inside Munich, actually just next to the Friedensengel tourist spot. You can witness a spectactular fly in every evening in winter time just before the sun sets.

I deliberately dragged the shutter to 1/30 second to get some nice blur in the birds, and have the sharp branches of the trees in the foreground (well, bottom of the image at least).

Now to the curious question – how many birds are this? I really didn’t want to start counting myself, so being a computer scientist by profession… there is software to help. The problem presented itself just like one of this biology research problems to count things in microscope images, so I started googling… and found the solution.

The freely available software ImageJ, developed by Wayne Rasband at the National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, Maryland, and put into the public domain, is a real scientific image processing toolkit suited for our purpose. Don’t be scared, it even runs on Macs and has a nice and simple installer.

So firing up the software and loading the image above, it actually takes only some tiny processing steps to get the answer to our question:

1. First I converted the image to a greyscale image, using the Image… Type… 8 bit menu item (yes, it’s exactly like your photoshop!)
2. Then I set up a threshold using the Image… Adjust…. Threshold function. I now made sure each bird keeps at least some “red pixels” (under the threshold), but not too much to have birds touching each other. 130 worked fine for me, here is how the mask looked like:
3. Pressed apply to convert the image into an image of pure black and white, with the birds being black and the sky being white:
4. Now for beginners – the trees would give me trouble in the final step, so I used the freehand selection tool from the icon toolbar of ImageJ to circle the area of the birds which have only the sky as a background. I omitted the birds behind the trees, which for an estimate is probably ok. The selection is automatically active for the next and last step, I did not need to do anything to activate it. And sorry, no marching ant display, just a tiny yellow line. But hey, thanks to Wayne for the great software!
5. I then used the Analyze… Analyze Particles dialog. Here is a screenshot of the options I set for this demo:
6. Clicked on Ok… and… woah! That was fast counting After finishing, ImageJ shows the overlay with little numbers on each bird. This is great to check that only birds were counted, and the trees didn’t do any damage to our census. For me it looked good:

The window labelled “Results” showed a table style list of all birds found – and scrolling down shows the total number: 535. Had you asked me to estimate before… I know I was surprised when I saw the result, I probably would have guessed only half that number!

The cure for boredom is curiosity.  There is no cure for curiosity. - Dorothy Parker

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By chance I met Chris Marquardt of Tips from the Top Floor and HappyShooting podcasts on Twitter, and he kindly provided me with a mini-workshop on fine art printing in 5 tweets. For your enjoyment, here is my translation to English:

1. Image Processing: Only do it using a properly color-profiled monitor.
2. Sharpening: Keep your hands off! [The printer driver will take care of it, usually]
3. Color casts: Profile the monitor, look at the prints at daylight, best in the shade
4. If your images have a red cast after import [and your prints have a green cast!], your profile is wrong
5. While profiling, avoid any extranous light [for example by covering the sensor with a blanket]

I love this guy. Honestly, #2 got me thinking, I think this is the best tip I heard for a while!

And I need to go back and try to check my monitor profile now.

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How nice it is to be able to reach the winter within an hour drive – yesterday, the Bavarian alps were still experiencing remnants of that winter storm Andrea that hit Germany on Thursday. A lot of fresh snow, allowing this intimate photo of a mountain hut near Unterammergau.

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As an example, here is a screenshot of my archive of July 2006, showing me at one glance the 2 week trip to the wonderful Lofot Islands, a premiere landscape photography destination:

This is a feature I really find useful, and prefer anytime over the regular technocratic “browse the calendar” approach other applications like Bridge and Lightroom follow.

Taking the idea to the next level – in nature photography we keep thinking in seasons, as the yearly cycle keeps repeating photographic opportunities. How helpful would be a calendar showing me by example in which week and which day of the year I have chosen which photo opportunity? When exactly was the best time to photograph foliage in the Karwendel mountains? When do we usually see the first snow? The hike to the christmas roses blossoming?

If I could only make a calendar showing me the best photo I have taken at that day in any of the last 7 years!

To exercise the plan – what do I need?

1. Obviously, the “image of the day” for all years in my photo archive, going back to June 2004.
2. A method to layout these images on to a calendar sheet for a high quality print.

Stay tuned for progress reports, and let me know if you like the idea of a seasons calendar or have any helpful tips in getting this done!

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I own an Xperia Neo which one of the posters before listed as one of the phones with the same sensor as the iPhone 4S. Do I use the camera? A lot!

But as always, if this “suffices” really depends on your requirements for a carry-everywhere camera. In the regard that you nearly always have it with you, the iPhone certainly wins. If you will be happy with the image quality largely depends on what you are planning to do with those images, and what the shooting situation is.

Real life example – this summer I stumbled into a staged “fox hunt”, and tried to capture some images as I would have with my DSLR / larger gear. Best photo (click to enlarge):

But, best action shot of the same event (again, click to enlarge):

Ok, I used the sports program of the camera, which didn’t (to my suprise) raise the ISO, but kept ISO at 100 and thus chose a 1/100s at f/2.4. But the wide angle lens (and no zoom) made it hard to get closer (without being trampled), and the shutter lag rendered many shots of jumping horses useless because they were not correctly framed.

Worst problem – using the camera a lot sucks up battery, and after a while of shooting I ran so low I couldn’t even phone my wife to tell her I would be late because I had met the fox hunters…

Do I use it as an everyday camera? Yes, but for, say, ambitous amateur level photography, I even disregarded all compacts for lack of image quality and chose an Olympus Pen with it’s micro four thirds sensor.  Different league in all respects of course. More on my findings with the Pen in my blog article about my solution to the carry everywhere camera problem.

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What is it?

The device is not a new invention – the idea to put an eyepiece on a photographic lens is old and has been done a couple of times before by different vendors, e.g. Nikon and Minolta.

Basically it justs consists of an eyepiece, a magnification lens, and a prism – the prism turns the upright-down image from a photographic lens back into the correct orientation, and the eyepiece lets you look through the lens just like through a telescope.

The Lens2scope attached to my Sigma 100-300 f/4

Who needs it?

This device is obviously not for photography – it is for watching the action, not making pictures. A situation I find myself in rather more often than not is that I have reached a certain interesting place, but the action is going on really too far to take any photos that are for more than just IDing the birds. Instead of sitting there frustrated, I could switch the camera for the Lens2scope and watch the action instead.

I bought mine in May before my summer vacation, and had planned to use it during several birding trips in Britanny, Western France. My 100-300 mm f/4 Sigma lens would be turned into a 10x-30x magnification spotting scope, or even a 14x-42x using the 1.4x teleconverter.

Use and observations

Sweet and short: The device works as advertised. I found the picture to be clear and surprisingly bright. Lens errors were of no concern, certainly there was a slight chromatic aberration, but much less than with my standard 8×36 Nikon Monarch binoculars. The magnification could clearly be improved by using the 1.4x teleconverter, while adding the 2x converter didn’t seem to improve the situation – I wouldn’t recommend using it.

Focusing is actually quite sensitive, but still very easy with the excellent manual focusing ring of the 100-300. This will be much harder with a lens which cannot be precisely focused manually.

The device is sturdily built albeit a little plasticky, but the advantage is its light weight of just 185 g. More on the quality of the metal bayonet below…

Example – what to expect

As the device is not for photography, I cannot show any pictures of what you can see if you look through the scope. But I can give you an example of where I used it successfully.

Close to Cancale, in Eastern Brittany, Western France, there is a small bird colony of gulls, cormorants, some shags, and common shelduck on the Île des Landes. The island itself as a bird protection area is of course off-limits for humans, but the seabird colony can be watched from the nearby Pointe de Grouin.

The observation distance is actually not that bad, looking at Google maps it’s between 300-400 meters. But photographing the birds? Forget it, too far. With the 8x binoculars? Nice, but nothing really interesting to be seen. Just good enough to identify the birds.

Setting up the scope looking at the Île des Landes

With a dedicated spotting scope – or in this case the Sigma 100-300 mm with 1.4x tele converter and the Lens2scope? Wow! Suddenly you are able to see the gull’s chicks in their nests, and to clearly distinguish the European Shags there from their pretty similar looking relatives, the Cormorants, also present on the island. I enjoyed watching two Shags feed their chick which was hiding behind one of the boulders on top of the island – all you could see from the chick was the beak hungrily opening when one of the parents came back with more fish, and sometimes the near bald head if things weren’t moving quickly enough to its liking .

With my 8x binoculars: Which chick? Which boulder?

The Caveat

So far, so good. Mission accomplished – the device itself has no electrical or moving parts, and the optics are ok. What could go wrong? Well, the bayonet mechanics used to connect the Lens2scope to the lens were so sharp and tight that the use of it damaged my precious Sigma. During the vacation. With no repair service or replacement lens available. Argh.

What had happened was that obviously in one of the many times I exchanged the Lens2scope for the camera, mounting it with the bayonet I was too fast, or too slow, or didn’t hit the right connection spot (red dot to red dot) – and I turned the Lens2scope in the bayonet damaging the first of the electrical lens contacts.

The first pin of the telelens damaged by the Lens2scope

The camera would no longer speak to the lens giving me the infamous fEE error – I knew, the lens was toast. I suspect the Sigma lens to be more susceptible for that damage than an original Nikkor, as the Nikon electrical mounts are little metal balls, while the Sigma has a plastic tongue with an electrical contact, which additionally feels slightly spring loaded, intended to provide active closed contact.

So I warn anybody thinking about using the Lens2scope with Sigma lenses – I think this is a dangerous combination. I certainly will never attach it to my 1000€ lens again. The other brands I cannot judge, but after this experience I would recommend at least high caution when mounting and dismounting the adapter – and honestly, out in the field things sometimes have to happen fast, and I want my equipment to be robst and not have to think about fragile connections.

My vendor offered to take mine back, but of course refused to take over the bill for the Sigma repair. The German distributor I asked relayed my question to the manufacturer in Taiwan, but the disappointing answer roughly translates as “be more careful”.

I “survived” my vacation and many photo opportunities by taping the contacts preventing any electrical error to creep up, and instructed the camera I had attached a manual 300 mm lens. This gave me back the aperture priority mode, at least. No autofocus – I re-learned manual focus over a 3 week period, but that is another story…

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