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Todays Exhibitions

Today I was at four exhibitions. The first one was in Shibuya, Le Deco called Shiro Kuro Show (白黒ショー). This one was from several photographers, all black and white, and very interesting as you could see several styles.

One of the photographers was there and I had a nice talk with him. He showed me around and one of the photographers, who works at the Osaka Tax Office, always takes a shot of himself at the toilet. This was a really awesome idea. And of course all of those pictures hung in the toilet there.

The show runs until 5th (sun) of September.

The next show was in Nishi Azabu, in the Gallery Emon. The photographer is Koji Onaka and his photos were from his trip in Mexiko, and he used a X-PAN camera (not the Hasselblad, but the Fuji model) and his photos were just amazing. all color, amazing landscapes and moments there. The show runs until 10th of September. 100% worth the visit. Probably the best of the four shows I watched today.

Emon Photo Gallery in Nishi Azabu

Next stop was Shinjuku, Place M, where Kawaguchi Kazuyuki has a show. All his shots were done with Phase one backs and they look amazing. Probably the best digital prints I have seen in a long time and the first time I actually saw really large, about A2, prints of Phase One back pictures. He also used the back on a Horseman SW camera with a Schneider lens, and those are even better than the one taken with the Phase One (Mamiya 645) camera. 

Show runs until 5th of September.

Then, when I went back down, I saw that in M2 room was a great long endless picture from a street in India. Really awesome pictures. It is not one seamless, but several pictures put together to look like one. Very interesting.

India Street Scene in Place M, M2 Room

The last show I went to was in the Gallery Niépce, also in Shinjuku, called Castles made of sand (砂のお城) Vol.2 by Ohmura Shoichi. He is a very young photographer, but I liked some of his pictures, especially his portrait shots were really good. All in all quite interesting shots around Shinjuku. He shot everything with an old Rolleiflex, which he got from his teacher, sort of for free.

This show also runs until 5th of September.

Todays Exhibitions

Today I went to the show Umeppu from Ume Kayo in Omotesando Hills. Was a real awesome show. Very different style of pictures to all the other photo shows I have been to in the last days. Most lucky thing was that Ume Kayo was there too and I could talk to her. Very interesting girl.

Ume Kayo in the middle.

After that I went to Ribbon Gallery in Asagaya. Very nice little gallery in an old house. Very cool. There were two shows and one of the photographers was there, also had some nice talk. Today I got lucky :)

Lightroom vs Capture One Pro

So, I own both, and I use both. Most of the time I am much more happy with the results from Capture one Pro. But this time, and with this picture, I am at a loss. Basically the Lightroom version looks much more pleasing, but there are minor detail problems in Lightroom, that are not in Capture One. On the other hand, the noise

reduction is much better in Lightroom.

Left: Lightroom 3.0, Right: Capture One Pro 5.1.2

Camera: Epson R-D1s

Lens: Voigtländer Ultron 28/f2

Both have been processed with the following base settings. Very strong highlight and shadow recovery. Slight color boosting, default White balance.

What I first found out, that in this situation the white balance, which is automatically choosen by Lightroom, is much better and much pleasing than the one from Capture One. The second one is, that the Shadow recover in Lightroom is amazing, even thught I didn’t go 100%, I see more detail and there is no color shift.

One thing I see in the Lightroom version is that at the concrete borders I get a slight “golden” reflection, which I do not see in the Capture One version.

The highlight recovery is almost the same, but the Lightroom one gets a bit more of the blue which shouldn’t be there actually, this should be more gray.

Again, both RAW converters are awesome, but as we see here, none is the best. Most of the time Capture One gives me much better results, but in some situations and with some cameras Lightroom is better. For example anything I shoot with my Ricoh GR III is only usable with Lightroom. On the other hand with my Canon 5D MkII Capture One makes much better pictures.

More Exhibition stuff

Today I went to the Photography Museum in Ebisu (東京都写真美術館) and checked out 私を見て！「ヌードのポートレイト」and オノデラユキ. I went to the second one first and although not bad, it was not worth the 700 yen. The whole thing was a bit to artsy. I didn’t get the whole thing at all.

The other show was way more interesting. Although personally I have zero interest in nude photography, this show showed photos from around 1900 to now. A really interesting view into it. Of course there was a Man Ray and some Araki shots, but the other photographers I mostly don’t know (or as usual I don’t remember the names). And it was just 500 yen. Really worth the money.

After that I went to Shinjuku to Place M and looked at their current show. Was not so bad, but not really something that impressed me.

I didn’t go anywhere else after that, too rainy and so on. But not a too bad day.

Exhibitions in Japan in August

So in the last days I went to two awesome exhibitions currently showing in Japan. The first one is from William Eggleston named Paris-Kyoto in the Hara Museum near Shinagawa.

The show is running until the 22nd of August. I really recommend to see it, not only is the show impressive, the whole museum is very impressive. A lot of windows, white, bright and wonderful. The building design is pretty amazing and reminds me of some 60s building style in America.

The museum is 5min walk from Shinagawa station.

The other show I saw today was Man Ray: Unconcerned but not indifferent in the The National Art Center, Tokyo in Roppongi (国立新美術館). A very amazing show, a lot of work, and 150% worth the money. The other show オルセー美術館展2010「ポスト印象派」had a waiting time up to 70 min, but the Man Ray show was quite empty, so you could take your time watching everything and also had never to wait for someone else.

The show is running until 13th of September, the Museum is 5min walk from Roppongi station or a 1min walk from Nogizaka station. Access map is here.

IR Effect with Capture one

Some time ago I downloaded a pack with additional styles for Capture One. Today when I processed my shots I found one that is called “Dark Sky” which makes the sky look like it  was shot with an IR Film and IR Filter.

This is so amazing. This pictures looks almost creepy. So amazing.

Canon 5D MkII / Canon EF 35/f1.4L @f4

Roppongi Hills, Tokyo, Japan

processed with Capture One Pro 5

Good bye Linux on the Desktop

Today I switched my work boxes and my Linux box is not any longer the main work PC I use. I switched it with my Mac.

The reason for this are manyfold, but first lets look back and see how Linux evolved in the last 10 years. Yes, I use Linux as my main workstation for 10 years. Well, it didn’t evolve at all. It might got prettier, needed more CPU and memory, but at the basics, it stayed the same glued together software conglomerate it was 10 years ago.

For example, the sound system didn’t really much evolve. Yes there was the switch from OSS to ALSA, but still you had your own sound daemon running from whatever GUI you uses. As I am a KDE guy, there was kmixer. So my permanent questions was, why do I need two sound environments to get sound. And why does it still fail. How many times did the sound in Firefox fail, because the sound device was in use and failed to software mix.

I remember back in the old days, where you really had only two sound device interfaces (or even one) and if you didn’t get software mixing working, there was always problems.

Although hardware sound mixing is mostly default, it still faled in Linux to work properly.

And than we have the X (window) interface. Wheres on a server I really do not care if there is a GUI or not (or rather don’t want one) on a desktop machine this is just impossible to work without one. As I said before I am a KDE guy and I used KDE since their first release back in old old days. I went from 1.x, 2.x, 3.x to 4.x. Where until 3.x it was a constant improovement and speed up, 4.x, even in their latest release, looks more like a failure. A lot of the Software still doesn’t work properly. For example kate, the big text editor, still fails to save and remember property settings, for example the plugins that are enabled. Why? I did work in the older versions … Then the quick launcher just started to work again in their latest release, that means for more than a year this piece of software was borken.

The task monitor is still broken and I still can’t do the same settings like in 3.x, for example have monitors in my taskbar.

But the most horrible thing is the composite part. Although I have a quite decent NVidia card, that should seriously handle this kind of thing without any problem, it never worked for me. With composite enabled I had permanently 20% cpu usage from X for no real reason. And later it went even worse and made every slower and I had suddenly 30~40% cpu usage. So I tried to turn off all composite and effects and everything. Well, nothing changed.

I never had this kind of issue with any other OS (windows or OS X). Having a broken GUI, in this case so slow that it is impossible to work, it just a disgrace.

But not only this, with some of the newer versions of the NVidia binary driver, OpenOffice just crashed with horrible GUI problems, actually it crashed the whole X window interface.

I could just go on and on. But to keep it short, in the last months I was more and more pissed of with the Linux box I had. It is my work box, I want to work and not reasearch in google and try to fix it every day and hope it will work now.

The reason why I always used Linux was the Terminal, in this case Konsole, which was a perfect working environment. The other reason was the focus follows mouse, which made my work much easier. You could quickly change focus to a terminal without clicking into it. But what use does it have, if the delay is so slow you have to wait longer than if you would just have clicked lik ein eg OS X

Another reason for using Linux was the virtual desktops and the ability to pin a single window to all desktops.

The last reason was the easy way to start Firefox multiple times with different profiles.

So in the last weeks I started to use OS X as my main os and tried to find out how I can cope with the OS X interface compared to the my usual X window interface.

Most were not a problem. OS X now has virtual desktops, called screens, the Terminal is not that bad and you can pin an application to all screens.

My main problems were, that you are unable to set the colors in the Terminal. The dark blue, often used in comments, is often almost unreadable. The other problem is that you cannot pin a single window, but only a complete application. This is a bit annoying, as I often just want one Firefox window on all screens, but not all. I solved this, by using Chrome for my pinned window and firefox for the rest.

Starting multiple firefox is also not that easy in OS X, but doable with a apple script. I wished that would be easier to do, but this solution is fine for me.

Most of the other things in OS X are anyway suprier. Exposee really works here and does not slow everything down like it often happend to me in X. The Terminal can be set to be focus follow, which is quite useful. With iTerm I found another terminal which I use for certain things were I need to set a different color scheme.

X forwarding also works with the built in X window server.

So after three weeks of testing, I just moved the displays around and I am now primary working on an OS X box. Good by, and thanks for all the fish Linux. Linux on the desktop is dead. Anyone trying to convince me otherwise will fail. Simply because I used it for 10 years as my primary working desktop. I work with Linux for even longer, have almost explicite only Linux servers, for innter office and web services.

Linux on the desktop just doesn’t work to me. Too many things are “broken”. For example the GUI which is never and never will be consitence. There are KDE apps, GTK apps, other applications based on other frameworks. It is a mess. You have Firefox which is GTK based, so the file dialog is GTK. Therefore you do not see the favorites you stored in the KDE dialog. OpenOffice has at least an interface library, so it can use the KDE open dialog.

But at the end, I rather give up the little freedom I had there, like playing whatever soundfile in Amarok, compared to the gazillions of problems I had while I actually tried to use it for work.

I will keep a Linux box around, because there are still some things which are way easier to do there. For example writing perl code for scripts, or installing special applications, but I won’t use it as my main work box anymore.

Lens upgrades

Since I got my 5D MkII I am mainly using this camera for my photography. I still love film, but that camera is kick-ass.

But, the sensor is just amazing, good, too good for some of the lenses I own.

Point is, when most of the normal lenses were designed, digital was in its infancy or not existent and the main medium was film. So if you out resolved film, it was good enough. Well not with these cameras anymore.

The top line full frame cameras have 20 megapixels or more, even the crop size ones have 12 or more. But while you might get away with center image from a lens on crop size cameras, full frame is different.

So until now I owned to L lenses. The 24-105/f4, just because there is no equal good long zoom one, unless you go with some EF-S, which was never a good option as I always wanted to go full frame. And the 35/f1.4L which is the price stallion in canons line up. The 35/f2, as good as it is, has still only a micro motor, and that just doesn’t bring it in my opinion.

So I still have some other non L glasses:

50/f1.4

85/f1.8

100/f2.8 Macro

So I tried to use each and all of them and see if I do need to upgrade.

First the 50/f1.4. This was the first lens I put on my 5D MkII, just because it is the lens I always wanted to use as it was constructed. I personally love 50mm in its way and in whatever it comes (75, 80, 95 for 6x6, 6x9 cameras). But, this lens just didn’t work well wide open. It was not bad, but it was not the same like on my old 30D. So I upgraded this on to the 50/f1.2L. Bigger, heavier (more expensive of course) but just amazing. This was worth the money.

The 100f/2.8 Macro I tried next. This one is just amazing, it looks better than on my 30D. Now problem to shoot wide open. Colors are great, bokeh is very nice. I doubt there is no need to upgrade to the new L version of this lens. My only problem is, that the AF really sucks with this one. If I am on infinity and I want to focus close up, my camera just doesn’t want to. I have manually focus to close and then AF works. Same the other way around. Somehow AF is really wonky with it. Probably need to check with the Canon guys and see if that can be fixed. Besides that upgrade not needed

Third is the 85/f1.8. Last week was the first time I used it and I am very pleasantly surprised by this lens. It looks stunning wide open. Of course the fact that it is f1.8 makes it not the killer night lens, even at ISO 3200 you might get some too slow shutter speeds. So I am a bit torn, there is no real need to upgrade, but on the other hand f1.2 is just very tempting. I will see, at the moment no need, but if I find a cheap good f1.2L II version I might buy it.

Other stuff, 10-22, no need to even think about getting anything L wise. I haven’t touched that lens in almost 2 years. I think my need for ultra wide are over. 24mm on the 24-105 is more than enough in my opinion. I do not shoot anything that needs this wide anymore. I personally prefer to shoot either 35mm or 50mm.

And other things I might want to get? The 135/f2 now becomes interesting again. I always wanted to get it for my 30D, but as the 85 was already like a 135 there was no real need. Nowadays I am thinking again of getting one. Second hand prices are not too shocking either. Might become a spontaneous buy.

Sometimes I am thinking about the 24L version. But I haven’t had much need for a more wider version than the 35mm.

Also I am thinking about getting a manual focus lens. Zeiss, or preferable a Leica R if I can find one that is not too expensive. But I want to try one of my Olympus lenses first, if it is worth to get a manual lens for some more interesting photos. Manual is slower focus, more thinking, better photos. But you would still have the digital quick develop aspect and the good internal metering.

Never thought I would be so much back into the digital came, not since my Epson R-D1s …

Canon 5D MkII

I am not the primary digital shooter. I like film, I really like it, even thought it is troublesome in this digital age. But I was not always a film shooter. I didn’t even really start photography until I got a digital camera. I never owned a film camera when I was young. But since I started shooting film my main problem with digital was, that it looked, well, digital. Especially the colors never came out like I wanted them to.

Then I got the Epson R-D1s and this was the first camera where I had the feeling it didn’t look too much digital. But it is not the camera I would use at parties, or other situation where you need to quickly focus in dark light and shot tons of stuff.
So I always used my 30D, tried to make the colors as nice as possible and suppress the not so nice digital noise.

And then Canon announced and released the 5D MkII. A lot of my friends got one, the shot looked awesome and I wanted one too, but still I couldn’t convince myself of paying so much money for something I might only use for some party shots here and there.

But one day I was shooting with a friend who used a 5D MkII some party for a friend of mine and we later compared shots and his looked so much better in color and noise that there was no reason left not to buy the 5D MkII.

No regrets whatsoever. This is, hands down, the best digital camera I owned up to now. Besides the fact that full frame 35mm versus APS-C sized sensor, the quality enhanced that where done since the 30D are just amazing. I have never seen so good colors directly out of the camera and so much possibilities to make my photos look like the slide film colors I am used to.

Especially at night or when shooting in dark places the 5D MkII outshines my old 30D. Where the 30D maxed out at ISO 1600 and ISO 3200 was just an emergency with really ugly files, the 5D MkII created unbelievable beautiful colorful wonderful pictures at ISO 3200.

But with all the praise there are also some downsides. For one, the on/off button is still at the most stupid location ever thought off. At least it feels more stiff, but several times in my short ownership it turned itself off because the button is located at this horrible place.

There are still no buttons that can be free assigned with settings, like, mirror lockup. At least there is a quick menu where I can directly jump to the settings part, I do not need mirror lockup that often, still I wished I could do that with one button press (like on all my pro SLR cameras).

The movie part seems a bit an add on, but probably I need to get used to that. I have never shot any movie and I still have no idea what I could shoot. Shooting one frame or a video is something very very different.

But my biggest grief is that the autofocus system is unchanged and still very low class for such a high end camera. I know that Canon wants to keep the 1D line with their super AF system separated, but look at Nikon, they have a much better AF in their middle class line. Canon 7D has a better newer AF system. There was no way to do that in the 5D MkII? I somehow cannot believe that. In dark bad lit areas the AF can hunt. If everything else is really awesome, this is one thing that kind of bothers me a bit. I can live with it, but I know how different the AF on 1D bodies is. At least something better than the normal 50D series would have been nice.

So what is my verdict? An almost perfect camera. Picture quality alone is so stunning, that you can overlook the small problems like the bad placement of the on/off switch or the already senile AF system. The best proof for how nice this camera is the fact that I haven’t shot with almost any other camera since I own this one. Yeah, it is that good, makes me think about the film stuff. But that is until I hold some nice 6x6 or 6x9 slides in my hand and I still know why I love film.

My Canon 5D MkII shots are here on my flickr account