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Not just Nikon photographers should find one of the largest Nikon user websites, nikonians.org, interesting. It contains a huge amount of information, such as workshops, reviews, user forums and so on. I particularly like the podcasts, and of those especially the “Behind The Lens” series. These are interviews with professional photographers who have been awarded the “Legends Behind The Lens” title by Nikon and tell interesting anecdotes from their lives as photographers. I wish there were more of those interviews.

One of them (MP3) was done with sports photographer Dave Black who became a photographer after taking side roads and due to the encouragement of a university teacher (who was incidentally named Bob White). On his website, he writes two mmonthly columns where he comments on his current work including all the gear he used and so shares his experience:

Workshop at the Ranch On The Road

I also recommend the older entries which are linked to on the lower part of the pages. Interestingly, Dave Black is a Christian, which I found out when I read this quote and one of his articles:

No man is an island. I owe a debt I can never repay to God for granting me life, grace, mercy and wisdom, thank you.

“The Thorn” at New Life Church in Colorado Springs

For quite some time now, I have been thinking more and more about what we as Christians and especially the rather charismatic “stream” believe and do, and how much this corresponds to the Biblical standard. I will write much more about this in the future. Today, for example, I again tripped over the way a lot of people formulate certain prayers: “Thank you, God, that you will do such and such.” This can be interpreted in two ways:

1. The person thanks God for something that God has already announced and promised in His Word.
2. The person thanks God for something that the person hopes to receive from God but has not received yet.

I take issue with the second case. Although it sounds grateful and seemingly expresses dependency on God, and probably is meant this way in most cases, I feel it is a manipulation of God. Just imagine this on a human level: A child tells his father, “Thank you, Daddy, that you will give me a piece of cake!” Something is wrong here – in a certain way, the child puts himself above his father and orders him to do the child’s will. Add thanks to it and it becomes manipulative, sounding so very courteous. The sequence of events and the authority structure have simply been messed up, a violation of protocol if you will.

The child should rather say, “Daddy, would you give me a piece of cake, please?” Now, the father is free to decide about the request. If he says yes, he will be happy to fulfill the child’s request and the child can express his genuine gratitude. However, if the father says no, he should explain to the child why he could or would not fulfill his request. This is part of his parental responsibility.

Of course, God sees our heart when we pray to Him, but our words do express our attitude. Should our relationship to God not be much more reverential than that to our natural fathers? God wants us to ask Him, but He has established conditions. Here are some scripture references (emphasis added; please read them in context!):

“Yet you do not have because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask amiss, that you may spend it on your pleasures.” (James 4:2b–3)

Jesus says: “If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, you will ask what you desire, and it shall be done for you.” (John 15,7)

Jesus says: “You did not choose Me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit, and that your fruit should remain, that whatever you ask the Father in My name He may give you.” (John 15,16)

I was given a good movie on DVD as a gift: “JFK”. I did not expect that it had been filmed already back in 1991. Kevin Costner plays a lawyer who tries to investigate the case. The movie is actually based on facts and real people. I was particularly impressed by the depiction of subjects such as power and politics as well as justice and personal responsibility. The lawyer finds himself in the conflict between his incredibly important work to reveal the truth, which could change the course of the nation and even the world (remember the Cuba Crisis), and his marriage and family who suffer because of this work. He feels the urgency to stand up for the truth.

Although the subject John F. Kennedy is good stock for conspiracy theories, this movie does not deal with it in a tabloid manner, yet offers plenty of suspense. It is a movie with exceptional length that I can very much recommend. By the way, I think I have found a slight continuity problem in the courtroom scene (at approximately 2h 45min): A former colleague of the lawyer wears different suits from shot to shot.

As mentioned before, digital photos in RAW format enable you to change the white balance or color temperature after the fact. What does this actually mean? Well, every light source has a specific spectrum that affects the perception of colors which are exposed to this light source. In order to be able to describe this effect, a color temperature scale in degrees Kelvin was introduced. It corresponds to the color a so-called “black-body radiator” emits that is heated to this temperature. For example, daylight has a color temperature of 5,500 degrees Kelvin and incandescent light one of about 3,000 degrees Kelvin.

Photographers should ensure that their recording medium is appropriate for the current lighting in order to avoid color shifts. Formerly, one would have to buy different kinds of film and perhaps carry several cameras, although color filters could be used as well. Today, white balance can be adjusted on camera for each individual picture and changed again later. To give you a sense of the kinds of improvements this can yield, here is an example from the inside of the Frauenkirche which I captured two days ago:

The Gospel, the message of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, is “foolishness” to the natural mind, even an offense. This is exactly why I am against the numerous attempts to make this message attractive by human means instead of trusting in the power of God’s Word. Still, Christian public relations do not need to be extra ugly. I have been able to gain some experience in this field myself. A website dedicated to this topic is churchmarketingsucks.com. Its provocative name hints at the controversial nature of the subject. On the top left are several articles which should be read first; they include the following juxtaposition that says a lot: people-pleasers vs. gospel-preachers, persuasion vs. proclamation.

Although I am a walking typeface encyclopedia, to which many of my former colleagues can testify, I too sometimes have to look something up. These are two very helpful websites:

At myfonts.com/whatthefont you can upload a scanned or photographed image file that contains a sample of the font you are looking for. You can then have it analyzed by assigning letters to the recognized shapes. A few years ago, you had to resort to expensive programs and regularly update them.

identifont.com chose a different approach: You are asked a couple of questions concerning typical letterforms and are then presented with a list of possible matches. There might be too many results, but the right pick is often among them.

On February 13, 1945, the allied bomb raid on Dresden took place. I used the occasion of the memorial evening to make a night-time city tour. I also took a couple of pictures on the go, of which I want to show a selection here (clicking on a picture opens a larger version in new window):

The fate of this city has been moving me for years. For two years now, I have been living in an old house unscathed by the war, and sometimes I just wonder how it must have been like in those other houses when the bombs dropped. I am very glad that the rebuilt Frauenkirche (“Church of the Lady”) has become a symbol of reconciliation and forgiveness between Germany and England, but also America. Personally, I have good friends in both of those countries from where the bomber pilots came. The dome cross, for example, whose twisted predecessor is shown on one of my pictures, was made by an English goldsmith whose father had been involved in the attack on Dresden.

Forgiveness and reconciliation are so essential and find their climax in the death of Jesus at the Cross, which provides us the opportunity of reconciliation with God. Directly after the Lord’s Prayer follows an often overlooked scripture which speaks quite clearly on this subject:

For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. (Matthew 6:14–15)

However, this is only possible by the love of God which must live inside of us before we are able to do such a thing. I cannot do this by my own strength; at least not if it is going to have a lasting effect. An extreme event like the destruction of Dresden is much harder to forgive, of course – one must not forget, however, that we Germans started the war and had bombed cities like London and Coventry first. We reaped what we sowed. I am so thankful that Germany is still so blessed by God, despite our great historic guilt and current godlessness.

In times of 30-inch displays, 2-megapixel camera cell phones and smoothed text, this 18 by 18 pixels small website reminds us of the early days of computer graphics: guimp.com. The Flash version even offers classic computer games that can actually be played. Just thinking that my old C64 had only 320 by 200 pixels resolution in black and white … In color mode, two adjacent pixels were combined to one color pixel having one of 16 (!) colors. Well, I am really somewhat glad that technology has advanced since then.

Today I have two photographic topics again. OpenRAW is an initiative that lobbies for open documentation of so-called RAW file formats for digital photos. In a nutshell, RAW is different from other formats such as JPEG or TIFF which represent fully “developed” pictures, so to speak, and which can be processed only minimally after taking the picture. RAW files, on the other hand, merely store the “raw” image information seen by the camera sensor and allow for post-processing modification of all parameters which can be changed in the camera (and sometimes even more than those). For instance, this lets you change the so-called color temperature of the lighting without sacrificing image quality. Also, RAW files offer a higher dynamic range, that is, more tonal values, which equates to more headroom for brightness and contrast changes. Two examples (the left half of each image is uncorrected, the right half corrected):

This is why I now shoot exclusively in RAW. The problem with RAW is that there is no standard as with JPEG or TIFF. Every camera manufacturer has their own, sometimes partially secret format, which may even differ across camera models. In a sense, photographers lose their power over and ownership in their pictures since they are dependent on software from specific vendors in order to view and edit their images. In the long term, looking at several decades, this is a dangerous dependency and limitation. Classic negatives, slides and paper prints do have their advantages …

The following story made me think, completely transcending all those technical discussions we may have. Bill Biggart was a photo journalist who stepped into the events around the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001. When the second tower crumbled, he lost his life in the rubble, but his camera was found and his last pictures survived. More about this on the good but sometimes shocking website digitaljournalist.org.

No panic, I am doing just fine. I simply happened to stumble upon two quite contrary stories during my daily internet news reading. First, the “bad news”:

It should not be news that you better not switch off your brains when bidding on eBay auctions. Not all offers are truly credible or cheaper than elsewhere. There are even people who form seller organizations in order to push their prices higher, which borders on illegal activities. Most shocking are statements such as “It’s no fraud because there is no law against it in Germany.” Still, such companies have their headquarters in countries like the Dominican Republic. One German example can be found at xxlsell.com. I will definitely continue to look for good deals on eBay, but I will also be more cautious.

Now for the “good news”:

This little ball contains a camera which can shoot unusual pictures in mid-flight. The concept is called satuGO – See Aim Throw captUre & GO. It was dreamt up by two young Danish designers who are still looking for a company which will actually produce this. satuGO is nothing you really need, but here are two young people who try to build a company with creativity, skill, and humor. And one which is not based on questionable methods such as mentioned above. The quality of the product photos alone speaks volumes. One can only wish them success!

A couple of days ago, I noticed a so-called Hot Pixel on some of my pictures. This is a faulty pixel in the camera sensor. In the magnification you can cleary see that there is something wrong, especially in the blue channel (from left: RGB composite, Red, Blue, and Green channels). It is also obvious that the final image is produced by way of interpolation from the sensor data, which means that the color values of each sensor pixel are partially spread to the surrounding pixels. This is rooted in the way the commonly used Bayer sensor is constructed, which I will not explain here (see, for example, Wikipedia).

At any rate, this is not a big problem since there is a Nikon Service Center here in Dresden which can solve the problem by re-programming the camera’s firmware. The hot pixel is “put out,” so to speak, and the missing information will from then on be gathered from the surrounding pixels. It is perfectly normal for a brand new sensor to have dead pixels, they are just programmed out right there in the factory.