My living room taken with the Sigma 17-70 mm at 17 mm focal length

My living room again but this time with the 10-20 mm Sigma with 10 mm focal length.

rediscovery of photography

For some years now I am into photography. Though I love old film and camera's I am despite of my age in favour of progression. That's why I like digital camera's much more. The computer is my darkroom, and the digital camera my tool for getting the images. In 2003 I bought the 8 megapixel DSC F828 from Sony, before that I used the F505 since 99. The F505 was housing 3.2 megapixels. Before the F505 I used a Kodak, one of the first camera's. Now you could compare the resolution of the Kodak to an ordinairy webcam today. In between I bought an EOS 30 analog camera that made me familair with Canon. I used it a lot on my trips to Romania, and still have hundreds of pictures stuffed in a drawer. Still wishing to buy myself a film scanner. Anyway, this month I found the oppertunity to invest in a Canon 40D. Why the Canon? Because first of all, I still had a very good 28-300 AF Sigma lens that would be fitting the new camera. Secondly I am kind of fond of Canon. I don't feel much attraction to other brands. Why the 40D? Because I simply wanted a camera that had some good features and though it may sound weird, I have a weakness for big clumsy heavy camera's. They feel more balanced. There is totally nothing wrong about the 400D and 450D and I think they really trigger creativity and playfull picturing, but it's just not my cup of tea. For me the EOS 30 was already a good feeling big camera. The 40D is even bigger and heavier, with a Sigma lens it weights about 1,8 kg. 

Anyway I spent my money on this camera, and the first days were really adventurous. Most stuff is found very quickly, but it's more the hidden features and custom possibilities that I like to figure out. The 28-300 mm from Sigma mentioned before was doing a fine job, but because the 40D is not a fullframe DSLR or like others call it a cropping camera, I have to multiply the focuspoint with 1.6. Though this is not directly visible in the viewfinder, it becomes clear in the end result. For some reason the viewfinder crops the image a lot, and the endresult shows always more picture information. 

So I decided to buy a special Digital lens from Sigma. My choice for Sigma is simple; the lenses are good, solid build with metal and mucho cheaper then Canon. I wish I had the money to spent on original lenses, but it's fairly not possible to find good Canon lenses for good money. My first lens that I bought was the Sigma Macro 17-70 mm. This would give me back some wide angle that I lost with the 28 multiplied with 1.6. The lens is a great lens for multiple usage. Wether it's portraits or landscape, architectural or anything else that comes to mind, it perfomance very well. Especially portrait with a low depth of field is a great feature of this lens. It's also very compact and maybe not as quickly responding with the Auto Focus as an USM or HSM driven lens but I won't complain.

My second lens that I bought is the 10-20 mm from Sigma, this time in HSM. It's the first time that I ever bought this kind of wide angle lens. With 102 degrees at 10 mm it's more then I expected. It's nice to read the catalog or other comments, but finally using this lens convinced me totally to have this little darling. So far so good, I will post some pics to show the benefits. What else is very appealing to me is the 1600 or even the 3200 iso of the Canon. I was never able to make pictures in poor light conditions with almost no noise. The Sony would already give up at anthing more then 400 ISO. My end conclusion is that I feel very inspired and I have the feeling I can move on for the next 5 years or more. This baby is going to stay for a while.

Amazing Kate

it's hard to resist you I love your talents and beauty. You truly inspire me and enchant me with your ways, little Pipa! I love what you made for me....

Renovating my website

After the transfer to a Mac, I lost a lot of the original design of my website in Flash. The problem occured because of the font tables that are after years of computer use extended thru installation of all kinds of programs. But when a new install happens of like in this case the transfer to a total different environment, the problems start big. I used overall the Vrinda typefont. But on the Mac it was missing. And paying 99 dollars for the typefont was a bit to much. Then I rather like to put myself in the hassle of changing the fonts. My advice, when designing, make sure you own the typefont, and have backups, or use the standard fontsets that come with most computers like Arial or Sans Serif. Ok, it's rather boring but it won't give much trouble later on. I choosed a total new color scheme, dark grey in this case for an overall quiet image, and the fact that pictures look much better on grey. Furthermore I lost some weight in the SWF file from 5,6 MB to 2,1. This is done by loading the homepage pictures from external SWF files. It gave me also the oppertunity to make it happen randomly so people have the feeling something changes at the site. The rest was some finetuning too, like the external txt file for the news section and update section. Like this I only have to change the txt and not create a new SWF. This same technique I also used for the galleries. The pictures are downsized with the batch function of Photoshop, that also helps me creating a XML file. The pictures and XML are then put in predefined folders on the server. My Flash reads the pictures automatically into the flash gallery. Very convenient. I had to create also a new guestbook, this time with the use of PHP, there are some great feebies on the net, ready for rebuilding. I would say, check it out and enjoy the 2 new addes galleries: here