Car stils

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I have been playing around again, trying some new things. I have always been impressed by those nice clean and arty pictures in car manufacturers brochures. This time I wanted to do the same.

I went outside with my battery powered strobes (Elinchrom Ranger Quadra), a light stand, a strip-light softbox and my camera.

10 min job, but I’m quite happy with the result:

Audi V6 TFSI Engine

Audi V6 TFSI Engine

Audi V6 TFSI Engine

Audi V6 TFSI Engine

 

 

Any comments ?

My new Canon G1 X

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In order to complete my set of cameras, I was looking for a “small”, more “under the radar” camera. Still, I want to have sufficient image quality – even though it’s a “Point and Shoot” camera.

A couple of weeks ago, Canon has released its update to the G12 model: the new G1 X.

I have read lots of reviews on this new camera. You’ll find countless of them on the internet. As said before: The most important point for me is the image quality. And in this respect, I have to say that I am impressed.

Have a look at this untreated image (only converted from RAW to JPG in Lightroom 4, and cropped (not re-sized!) to reduce image size), taken handheld at 800ISO:

Canon G1 X - ISO 800 (JPG from RAW in Lightroom4)

I’ll have more time to play around with my new toy next week. I’ll post a more detailed review in the next days!

Termintipp: The Beetle Kitesurf World Cup St. Peter-Ording

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Termintipp: The Beetle Kitesurf World Cup St. Peter-Ording

Datum: 06. – 15.07.2012

(Hamburg 13.03.2012). Der Beetle Kitesurf World Cup in St. Peter-Ording lockte in der Vergangenheit Hunderttausende an den Nordseestrand, begeisterten die Besucher mit Top-Sport, legendären Partys und Livekonzerten. Auch in diesem Jahr steht das Wassersport-Highlight bei den Fans ganz oben auf der Liste. Vom 6. bis zum 15. Juli treffen die besten Drachenlenker des Planeten aufeinander und tragen neun Tage lang atemberaubende Luftduelle über der Nordsee aus.

Beim Beetle Kitesurf World Cup 2011 machten 135.000 Zuschauer den Ordinger Strand zu einer Sport- und Partyarena. Die Fans jubelten 130 Startern aus 22 Nation zu und feierten mit den Siegern Youri Zoon aus den Niederlanden und der Spanierin Gisela Pulido die neuen PKRA-Weltmeister im Freestyle, die ihre Titel in diesem Jahr verteidigen wollen. Der Rendsburger Freestyle-Vizeeuropameister Mario Rodwald und Jung-Profi Nils Wesch aus Langballig peilen bei ihrem Heim World Cup in St. Peter-Ording einen Rang unter den Top Ten an. Die neunfache Weltmeisterin Kristin Boese aus Potsdam und die Hamburgerin Sabrina Lutz haben in der Damenkonkurrenz die besten Chancen auf vordere Platzierungen.

Aber nicht nur die spektakulären Wettkämpfe sorgen beim Beetle Kitesurf World Cup für Nervenkitzel. Auch die Side Events mit BMX- und Skateboard-Shows auf dem Veranstaltungsgelände am Strand halten die Besucher in Atem. Im Kitelife Village, einer der weltweit größten Herstellermessen, wird das neueste Material und Equipment testbereit präsentiert. Jeder Tag endet mit N-JOY the Beach, der großen Beach-Party, auf der Livebands vor der untergehenden Sonne spielen und Top-DJs die Tänzer auf dem Dancefloor am Strand bis zum Morgen mit den neuesten und coolsten Sounds verwöhnen.

Alle Infos zum The Beetle Kitesurf World Cup finden Sie unter: http://www.kitesurfworldcup.de

Car shooting (with camera rig)

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Today I tried some new things. Car shots. In order to bring some dynamics in, I shot the images while moving. To keep the main subject sharp, I had to fix the camera to the car. So taking the photo, the car is sharp (beside moving parts like the wheels) and the background gets that “speedy” blur.

First I attached the camera with a rig to the car. The rig is nothing else than two Manfrotto suction cups, an aluminum bar and the camera fixed at the end with a Manfrotto “Magic Arm”.

The initial setup brings this image:

The shooting took place in my front yard – so fast driving was not an option. To get the “fast” feeling and still have a crisp main subject, I chose a long exposure (around 1 sec.) and let the car roll a very low speed (even without engine). Approx. 1 kph (less than 1 mph) got this result:

Now it was time for Photoshop to remove the rig and to do some color tweaking.

Here is the final result:

I am pretty happy with that :-)

Let me know what you think!

 

 

Intermittent system freezes on MacBook Pro i7 – Crucial M4 SSD – solved

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Quite some time ago I had updated my MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo with a 512 GB Crucial SSD Drive. The performance improvement, as reported at that time, is quite significant.
A couple of weeks ago I have changed my 3 years old MacBook Pro to a brand new 2011 i7 model. I just swapped the SSD drive to the new one and of we go. Right as of the startup of the new machine everything was working fine… almost. Though the new machine is 3 times faster (my old Core2 Duo had achieved a max. benchmark result of 442 points in Novabench (Intel Core 2 Duo running at 2800MHz
Mac OS X 10.7.0, GPU: NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT, RAM: 8192 MB) – my new on is scoring 1116 Points (Intel Core i7 running at 2200MHz, Mac OS X 10.7.2, GPU: AMD Radeon HD 6750M, RAM: 16384 MB), I had system freezes several times a day. OSX was no longer reacting for 5-15 seconds and then just continuing as if nothing had happened. My fist suspicion was the swap of the drive and I decided to reinstall OSX Lion from scratch. This did not improve the situation.
So the situation was annoying me some weeks. Only yesterday I finally found the root cause: my Crucial M4 SSD drive needs a firmware update.
If you are experiencing similar system freezes and you are using a Crucial M4 SSD go to the following page and do the update. It took me less than 10 minutes – and I am enjoying non-interrupted high performance since:

http://www.crucial.com/support/firmware.aspx

Please let me know if you have made similar experiences and/or if you have any question!