I was really waiting for someone to do it and it finally happened. I am using Gimp myself on Mac for postprocessing my photoblog images. It is pretty unconfortable because it needs an x server.
Now there is an effort to port GTK to Mac OS X cocoa framework. There is also a screenshot of Gimp running on the ported GTK.
I hope the project continues and ends in success! Thank you guys!
I finally have the first Images developed that I took with Praktica. They are really good, better then I expected. I posted the first sample in my photoblog, there are more to come. Sadly the scans are not as good as they could be so you can not see the real quality of the shots 🙁 but I think you will still get an impression.
I developed the images at PhotoPorst. The guys cut the negatives not correctly so some images have cut off corners. The scanned images are also not the quality I would expect. The next time I will try another photo shop. Hopefully they will do it better. We have 5 photo shops here in Rosenheim so I have something to choose from. 😉
After another session tweaking around my site I finally added Creative Commons licensing notes to all pages (hopefully). The photoblog site is also pretty finished contentwise. The thing that still remains is matching the themes of the blog, gallery and the photoblog. That means a lot of work.
I also added Twisted view of Esden photoblog to photoblogs.org. If you like photoblogs go there and you will surely find tons of very nice blogs. I also would be very happy when you add me to your favorites there. 😉 You can see my list of favorites here.
As you already know I have installed a photoblog on my site. I use Pixelpost for that. It is a pretty nice and simple system having nearly everything you need.
The problem is that this software is very crappy written. I installed it and tried to upload an image. Everything went ok only that the thumbnail has not been created for the image. I spent one hour debugging only to find out that it is failing because I have no jpeg support in gd2 php plugin. I do really not understand why people are not doing right error handling. At least the install script could have checked that! The calls to these functions are muted (not yelding anything on an error). I really could kill someone for that.
Spending another two hours on bugfixing the code I finally acheved that I do not get 20 error entries in my apache logs on a link click. I will try to collect all my fixes and post them to the pixelpost developers in the next days. But for that I have to spend another evening getting the code really clean because my fixes are pretty hacky for now. I really wanted that thing running.
I also added another WordPress plugin to integrate the latest and one random thumbnail image on my blog site. You find the plugin here. It worked without any hacks or tweaks. That is how I like a software to be. 😉
Yesterday I was at home in Ingolstadt visiting my parents. My mother was so nice to borrow me her SLR camera. It is a pretty old Praktica super TL. 
It is a Eastgerman production and even has a fan community. You can find the documentation of that camera here. More info can also be found here.
The camera has a Carl Zeiss Jena, Tessar 2,8/50 lens. It is a very good lens. The design is 100 years old but it was remade many times. Zeiss is producing the lens till today. Even if the lens is pretty dark 2,8f. The positive side of the lens is that it draws very sharp and is very light. It as also called Eagle Eye of your camera. You can read more about it here.
As you can imagine it is not a digital camera so it takes some time till there will be sample images. I took today 18 images and in the next days I should finish the film. Taking that images the camera got stuck three times and messed up three images. That happens when you use old mechanics that are not used often. But nevertheless it is a lot of fun taking images with it. It is loud like hell and heavy. Just like firing some kind of weapon.
I am really asking myself if there is a photoblog somewhere where someone is shooting photos with such an “ancient” technology.
After two months of traveling and visiting three countries I am back in germany. As you may know I was in Holland and Poland what you may not know is that I also was in Bulgaria for two weeks. I had a very nice time with some friends from Rosenheim there.
I really miss the warmth of the climate there. It is really cold and unfriendly in Germany now when you compare 12 degrees here with 24 degrees that we had there.
But everything that is nice has to end some time.
Tomorrow semester begins and I have to go back to university. Somehow I am sad about vacation ending but otherwise I am very happy to see my friends here and that I had such nice time the last two months.
Being back home means also that I will restart regular posting in my blog and coding. Hopefully I will find enough time between lectures to do that. I whish everyone who goes back to University in the next days a good semester and lots of interesting stuff to learn.
I added a Photoblog to my site. You can find it here. I hope you will like the images I will post there. Currently there is only one image that I already posted here in the blog. Tomorrow when I got some sleep I will add first really fresh image. Uwe outrun me with adding a photoblog just by a day. I started setting it up on friday but had some technical problems. More about them tomorrow.
Hi folks. A strange thing happened. Since some minutes I am wearing glasses for computer work as you can see here. I hoped that tests will show that I do not need them.
The doctor said that in fact I do not need them because my eyes are good enough to compensate my ~ +1.5 on both sides. But she also said that glasses would not be bad.
Now I near myself to the cliche of a geek 😉
I installed the wp gallery plugin, to integrate my gallery with the blog, today. I want to post some images I like in my blog entries little bit in the style of photoblogs.
Today and here is the first image I would like to share with you. I hope that it in some way proofs that also with a very cheep digicam one can make pretty nice shots that on one hand could be better but on other hand look very nice the way they are. Bit fuzzy and cloudy 😉
Ok I am so far! I am buying a camera.
I spent many hours surfing the net reading reviews and comparisons. That was a hard work that showed me what camera I want. Finally I found that there are three cameras that come in closer selection:
Canon EOS (Digital Rebel) 300D
Canon EOS (Digital Rebel) 350D
Nikon D50
Most probably the camera I will buy is the Nikon because of the price. Nikon costs about 450Eur the canon 300D about 500Eur and Canon 350D about 700Eur.
I really want a SLR camera because something small that I can have always with me I already have namely my Trust 910Z.
Now I have to raise money from somewhere. Magic would be nice here 😉
