editing a raw file

Wow, what a long time! I started this post back in March 2015! 😳😲 Unbelievable!
Recently, I got again a question on my workflow, so I decided to finally finish this post. Hint: This post contains some links to software manufacturers. No one paid me anything for getting a link or had any influence on my opinion.

Besides creating jpg files directly in-camera many digital cameras are able to create raw files instead of the JPG or in addition. Raw file means saving the bare information captured by the sensor and not processing it in-camera. This has a couple of advantages. A few years ago, I already published a post on these advantages. Many years ago, I decided to capture only raw files and process them myself afterward to have more control over the process and the final look. No, don’t get me wrong, I don’t use any filters. In only do, what was necessary back in film days.

In the past, I already published some posts covering how I store my images and a bit about, why I’m doing the extra work for raw development. Some of the benefits of doing it this way are in this post. I really encourage you to click on the links and read a bit about the background. Although most recent digital cameras are really great in creating good-looking JPGs, you still have a lot more in raw.

I’m using dedicated raw-processing software and it’s not Lightroom, because this software needs so much unnecessary work which stands in the way where I’d have to work around. The workflow is complicated and not straightforward. And, you’re locked into the software when you want to keep access to your own work.

The DAM (Digital Asset Management) would be nice for the final images, but it’s absolutely the wrong way to import all undeveloped images only for deleting a huge portion right after the import. A database makes additional problems when being used that way and slows down the computer over time. You can google for these problems and find gazillions of people suffering from them. An often recommended solution of having a separate catalog for each job on the other hand leads the whole idea ad absurdum. (btw. the same is true for the recent versions of Luminar, and that’s the reason why I left their affiliate program). Not being able to save all your edits outside of a catalog also hinders you to get your image edited by someone else and get the edits back for learning from the outcome.

These are my steps after coming back from a job or a trip:

1. copy all images in a dedicated folder on my internal disk named with the date and a tiny description of the contents (i.e. 20210507 – garden birds)
2. create a first backup of the whole bunch of images, which will hopefully never be used
3. import the GPS data into the image files (only for trips)
4. normalize the file names when having used more than one camera body to get them in the right order again. My naming scheme is YYYYMMDD_hhmmss-XXX_xxx.NEF. I guess the first and second part of date and time is easily understandable. I take this information from the metadata of each file: the time of releasing the shutter. The XXX stands for a 3 digit code of the used camera body followed by 4 numbers. These third and fourth parts are given to the file by the camera at creation time. The metadata are pieces of information stored in the images by the camera at the time when the image is captured.
5. create a second backup on a second external disk. This one is my backup in case of an emergency.
6. open up a digital light table to check the images and select the ones to get processed.
7. create a sub-folder called “edit” and copy all selected images in this folder, direct the raw processor to the edit folder and process the images
8. the final steps are already in the post, I mentioned above.

In this post, I want to describe the actions I do in my raw processor. You know, I started photography more than 40 years ago and run my own lab in those days.  And the options I had in those days are still the steps I do in digital photography:

1. remove some blemishes and dust-spots
2. brighten the shadows and darken the lights to get a better balance in the image if necessary
3. balance the horizon if necessary
4. correct the with balance if necessary
5. boost the vibrance or increase the saturation if necessary
6. crop, if necessary
7. post-sharpening
8. export to jpg

You see, my workflow is quite easy and straightforward. It costs me a maximum of approximately 2 minutes per image. Some of the actions can be bundled and applied to a couple of images at the same time to speed up the work. But, in general, I’m not a big fan of such bundlings, besides the export to jpg.

You might ask, what kind of software you can use. There are a couple of commercial products around. All I know, offer trial versions for a couple of days/weeks: DxO Photolab, Capture One Pro (free versions for some Fuji and Sony cameras available), OnOne Photo Raw, NX Studio (free, Nikon only – afaik Canon has something similar), and some open-source products, which are also free of charge: Rawtherapee, Lightzone, ufraw, digikam, Darktable. Affinity Photo is more a replacement for Photoshop or Gimp, although it also has a good raw development module. Photoshop brings kind of a lite-version of Lightroom for raw development called Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) and Gimp incorporates either ufraw or Rawtherapee, depending on the operating system you’re using. There might be some more products in the market, which I didn’t mention here because I don’t know them. So, this list isn’t complete. Sorry!

Although the open-source products usually have a background in the Linux community, they are also available for Windows and macOS. I worked with all of them a bit and would recommend either Lightzone or Rawtherapee. ufraw is a bit like Adobe Camera Raw for Photoshop. Darktable has the same mechanisms as Lightroom. So, it’s unusable for me. I don’t want to import the raw files into a database and stick with this single database because all of my edits are in that database. A corrupt database could make me lose all ever-done edits. DigiKam is an all-in-one solution: fat but mighty. I like the organizing module very much: DAM = Digital Assets Management. For some time, I’m using Excire Foto for DAM. You see, the linked post is quite old. I have to write a new one. This product is amazing.

For modern lenses, it is extremely important to have software being able to adjust and correct lens failures: barrel or cushion distortion and achromatic abbreviations. Back in the film days, the good lenses were designed for not having them. Nowadays it’s easier (and cheaper for the manufacturer) to create a piece of software to correct the failures. All the software I mentioned above is IMHO able to work that way. On the other hand, I have a lot of old lenses, which don’t need such corrections.

In case, you want to start developing your photos, I’d recommend either DigiKam, because it is an all-in-one solution, or Lightzone / Rawthereapee. In case, you need some image manipulation tools, try gimp. You can find tutorials on the relevant homepage I mentioned above or on YouTube. Although there are rumors of Gimp would be complicated, that’s not completely true. Also, Photoshop is very complicated, but there are more talkative called-by-themselves experts telling it otherwise because they are kind of experienced because of extensive usage. Each software is complicated on the first try. But, open-source software usually has a very active community willing to help when you’re investing at least a bit of time reading or watching (YouTube) tutorials. The other option is, to give one of the commercial software a try and download the trial version. Also, commercial software needs you to learn how to handle them. So, giving open-source a try first, won’t cost you any money. When talking about commercial software, I like DxO Photolab the most followed by Capture One Pro. When it comes to image manipulation software, I’m using Gimp and Affinity Photo. In the past, I used Photoshop CS6, but it’s not necessary anymore. First, I need such software only for approximately 10-20 images a year, on the other hand, Gimp has everything, I need. A few weeks ago, I published an article on one of my use cases for image manipulation software on NikonRumors and here in my blog.

I tried all the products I mentioned above last year when I had to investigate a replacement for my raw development software. Although the last update was in 2012 it run well and gave me the flexibility, quality, and tools I needed. Unfortunately, the developer decided to retire the software. For some years I was unable to re-install it if there were a reason to do so, but the recent updates of the operating software of my computer made the tool even completely unusable. So, I needed to find a replacement and I did. Recommending software to someone else is not easy because everyone has her own workflow, her own requirements, and her own wishes. So, you have to try on your own and find the software fulfilling all of your requirements to the best.

Below, you can see two screenshots from while developing a raw image in LightZone. The final image is on the top of this post.

browsing a folder with raw files with the folder structure on the left and the metadata of the selected image to the right

 

a couple of presets on the left, first developing step on the right and seeing the distribution of light in the image (Zone Model of Anselm Adams) in the upper right corner

 

Read the steps on the right from bottom to top. The last step is missing: sharpening

In this image, it was necessary to darken the highlights to recover the fine structures in the petals. In-camera development would have left only completely white spaces. From the raw file, I was able to recover the fine lines in the petals as well as the stamens. The erected twig was removed afterward with image manipulation software (Gimp) as well as the cropping.

Take care and happy snapping 😊

Throwback Thursday: huge machines

A few weeks ago, I was on the road quite early for capturing flowers right after sunrise. Unfortunately, they were not blooming when I arrived, because of the too cold temperature we had during the last couple of weeks.

On my way back, I stopped at this huge machine, standing in a vast hole in the ground. I’m standing at the edge of the hole. In the back, you can spot another of these machines right above the edge of the excavation. Also, compare it with the white car. This car is a pickup. So, it’s not that small. I’ve never before been so close to such a huge machine. It’s used as a stacker to put the unusable earth back in the hole because they only want to have the brown coal.

I already published images from that digging pit a couple of times. In this post, published about 10 years ago, you can get a bit of an overview. Or, here, you can see, how it looks at night. While you can here find an image of the hole taken with a fisheye lens.

Although I hate how they treat the earth so badly by grabbing brown coal from the ground for using it inefficiently to burn it for producing electricity power, I find these huge machines really fascinating. Nevertheless, I’m looking forward to the day they are not needed anymore.

Take care!

 

Throwback Thursday: analyzing my archive

cranes during sunrise – APS-C + 800mm ≈ 1200mm full-frame (or 36mm film)

Recently, I started analyzing my images a bit. You know, nearly all cameras are writing some metadata in the image files in addition to the image you’re capturing. I dug all this information out of my developed images but left the undeveloped raw data alone. In this analysis, I’ve included only landscape, macro, Astro, and wildlife images, but no people photography like portraits, models, weddings, or similar things.

I installed the open-source software DigiKam on my computer and configured an image directory. All of my developed images are stored in that directory, but in different folders for each trip. You can find out a bit more about my storage principles in one of my past articles.

DigiKam now read in all the metadata from the jpg files and stored them in an SQLite database. After terminating DigiKam, I was able to open the SQLite database with an SQLBrowser and select all the information I want. I first duplicated the database and started then normalizing the information. Over time, I used different software products for developing my images and not all of them used the exact same writing style for naming the different cameras and lenses.

I was very interested in getting to know my most favorite focal length over time. So, this was the first step: selecting the different camera bodies. Here they are listed with their sensor size and resolution in Mega-Pixel.

	sensor size	MP	used from .. to	shutter count
1	entry-level APS-C	10	2008 – 2009	3,700
2	adv. level APS-C	12	2009 – 2017	63,800
3	pro-level APS-C	24	2017 –	54,500
4	Full-Frame	24	2012 – 2014	35,000
5	Full-Frame	24	2015 – 2020	61,000
6	Full-Frame	24	2020 –	2,300

Hint: body 2 was used a lot for wildlife in addition to the common jobs like landscape, portrait, model, event, and weddings until it was replaced by body 4. From that point in time, I used it only for wildlife until it was replaced by body 3, which is nearly solely used for wildlife. That’s the reason for the very high shutter count of body 3. Body 1 and 2 are already sold and body 4 was replaced because of a product recall. I still own body 5 but only using it for portraits or weddings because of the remote flash capabilities. The shutter has a proposed lifetime of 150,000 exposures (5 + 6) respectively 200,000 (3). So, no need to worry.

In the next table, we have the overall usage of a certain lens in combination with one of the camera bodies. The totals are as interesting as the number of images per camera body.

		1	2	3	4	5	6	Total Result
10.5mm f2.8 fisheye	APS-C		106		28			134
35mm f1.8	APS-C		2					2
10-20mm f4-5.6	APS-C		240					240
18-55mm f3.5-5.6	APS-C	3	5					8
18-105mm f3.5-5.6	APS-C	192	2758					2950
16mm f2.8 fisheye	full frame				39	82		121
12-24mm f4.5-5.6	full frame				1			1
14-24mm f2.8	full frame				188	319		507
24-120mm f4	full frame		2	13	3647	6863	361	10886
70-200mm f2.8	full frame				4	1		5
70-300mm f4.5-5.6	full frame	4	860		438	142		1444
80-400mm f4.5-5.6	full frame		102	4073	239	1111	6	5531
150-500 f5-6.3	full frame		227		46			273
150-600mm f5-6.3	full frame			2564			38	2602
200-500mm f5.6	full frame					34		34
800mm f5.6	full frame			154				154
90mm f2.8 macro	full frame					15		15
100mm f2.8 macro	full frame		102					102
105mm f2.8 macro	full frame		53	117	60	556	73	859
20mm f1.8	full frame					165	17	182
35mm f2.0	full-frame					51	2	53
50mm f1.8	full-frame		11		2	3		16
85mm f1.8	full-frame		2		23	9	3	37
28-70mm f3.5-4.5	full-frame			4			9	13
12mm full manual lens	full frame					7		7
		199	4470	6925	4715	9358	509	26176

Hint: I don’t own all of the used lenses. I owned some of them at a certain time and sold them already, while I got borrowed others. But, the cameras I got borrowed for testing purposes are not included in these statistics.

Hint 2: the totals per camera in table 2 don’t correspond to the number of shutter releases from table 1.  In table 1 I have the total number of shutter releases from the counter inside the camera. The total per camera in table 2 is the number of developed images. Sometimes, I’m taking security shots and develop only one or doing HDR images, where 3 or more different exposed raw files are merged into one final image to benefit from the expanded dynamic range. Astro images are quite similar to HDRs, but here are tens up to hundreds of raw files merged. In wildlife, portrait, and wedding photography, you also take more images as you need for different purposes.

Hint 3: I left out all portrait, wedding, event, model, and engagement photos because I know the most favorite lens for this purpose: the 85mm prime, the 50mm prime as runner up, followed by the 35mm prime. These lenses are quite old. They were made for film cameras (pre-digital). They are perfectly sharp and don’t have distortions, as all modern lenses have (you usually don’t notice this fact, because of the firmware of the lens and the camera, where the distortion is automatically corrected more or less well. But the corrections have an influence on the sharpness. Therefore I’m preferring the prime lenses.

Next, I will see my most favorite focal lengths (shown as 35mm equivalent), aperture, and ISO values.

The last step will be a script, correcting the wrongly labeled images.

Take care!

Lens-Artists Photo Challange 118: “communication”

LAPC is hosted this week by a guest host again: Biasini. She asks for our understanding of “communication”.

The first thing coming to my mind is the famous statement by the was an Austrian-American family therapist, psychologist, communication theorist, and philosopher Paul Watzlawick. He said, “you can not not communicate”. It’s not a typo doubling the word “not”.  It’s simple. Whenever people come together they communicate. They communicate by their clothing, posture, mimic, and gesture – the body language.

Besides direct (oral or body language) communication between humans, we also have signs, i.e. traffic signs, lighthouses, writings, and so on.

Take care!

Lens-Artists Photo Challange 117: “A Photo Walk”

LAPC is hosted this week by Amy and she asks for images of a photowalk.

At least, once a month I go on a photowalk. That our monthly photographer’s roundtable. It’s always fun: walk, talk, take photos, and discuss the results afterward online.

These images are taking during my last photowalk two weeks ago. I had to take care of my grand-son that day and took him to the hills above the town. Our goal was a visit to the deer enclosure, a round trip of about 3 km or so. From the parking ground, our path first led us through the fields where we saw corn, apples, horses, and cows. Next, we entered the forest to reach the enclosure, soon. We also passed an area, where the lumbermen cut many trees and prepared them for transport. Many things for such a young guy to discover. Finally, we reached the enclosure. Unfortunately, only one deer was visible. The enclosure is big enough to offer a lot of hides to the animals. So, we only saw one. Fortunately, the little guy wasn’t disappointed and walked back with me willingly. Btw. yesterday, he turned 4!

Take care!

Lens-Artists Photo Challange 116: “symmetry”

This week, Patti is the host for Lens-Artists Photo Challenge and she asks for symmetric images.

You can find symmetry in nature, but more often you can find it in architecture or man-made gardens (i.e. around renaissance chateaus). In nature, the petals of blossoms are very often symmetric and the leaves of many plants. Also, legs, arms, eyes, ears, wings, and many inner organs of animals and humans.

 

inside a Venetian castle

on top of a mine’s winding tower

The public library in Tromsœ, Norway

a great tit with her mirror image

a modern bus stop at night

the Menai suspension bridge connecting Anglesey to the mainland in Wales, UK

Kochelsee, Allgäu, Germany

 

tram station in Oberhausen, Germany

A view inside the outside walls of Harpa in Reykjavik, Iceland

Inside the garden of Claude Monet in Giverny, France

 

The working platform around a chimney in a steel plant

the colonnade of an old castle

The lighthouse in Pilsum, Germany

water lily blossom

Take care!

Lens-Artists Photo Challange 115: “Inspiration”

It’s Tina‘s turn, this week. She picked “Inspiration” as the subject for this week’s challenge. Challenge accepted 🙂

I’m always inspired by nature. Mother nature (or the God behind) found so many different ways to solve problems of life. Where i.e. one species of insect-eating bird would be enough we find thousands. Where one kind of plant would be enough to keep the soil in place, we find thousands. Gazillions of different kinds of living creatures inhabit this wonderful planet: mammals, birds, saurians, amphibians, fishes, trees, bushes, plants, and so on. And all these different kinds of landscapes. Our wonderful planet is so rich. Or, like Sam Cook once sang: Its a wonderful world.

Now, I could simply add nearly all of my images here in a gallery. But, I only pick some to demonstrate the beauty of this planet.

the blue forest

first hot-air balloon flight

European carder wool bee

pasqueflower

Take care!

Lens-Artists Photo Challange 114: “Negative Space”

Negative space isn’t something negative as you might assumed when reading the subject of this blog post. It’s a kind of emphasizing your main subject in photography by having quite a lot ’empty’ room around your main subject. You can find many examples here in my blog or on my Instagram account.

This week Lens-Artists Photo Challenge is hosted by Amy and she picked “Negative space” to challenge us.

 

Take care!

Lens-Artists Challenge #113 – “Labors of love”

Today, we have a guest host for Lens-Artists Challenge: it’s Rusha Sams from “Oh, the places we see”

So, I picked several images from my archive showing people at work. Enjoy!

 

 

Take care!

Lens-Artists Challenge #112 – “Pick a Word…”

Ok, Leya, I picked my word from your list. I’ve chosen simply the first one “comfortable”.

Although it’s still summer (according to the calendar), it feels much more like a fall. The apples in our garden are ripe and we picked already some of them to eat them, make juice, and apple purée. Also, the blackberries are ripe to make juice, jam, crumbles, and liqueur.

Much of rain, cold winds even the first November storm (I know, it’s still August) rushed over the land. When the sun comes through, the air stays cold. Soon, the t-shirts have to make room for the thick pullovers.

But, that’s the time for cozy evenings at the fireplace, if your house has one (ours has not). Otherwise, you could put a DVD with a movie of a fireplace in your DVD player. Enlight some candles and some joss sticks. Take a cup of coffee or tee and take a seat. Watch how the wind plays with the fallen leaves.

 

I took this photo a couple of years ago when I was in Brittany with some friends. We had rented a former farmhouse with 6 rooms, a large kitchen, and a nice garden. But, we didn’t use the house that much, because we were a lot outside for discovering the country, taking photos and visiting the beaches. We were there pre-season in June and enjoyed the evenings with the fire.

Take care!

Lens-Artists Challenge #111 – “everyday objects”

This week it’s Patti’s turn to challenge us and she has chosen the topic “everyday objects” because she recently started unpacking stored things packaged about two years ago.

So, let’s try and have a look, what I found in my archive.

 

Children are eager to pick them, but adults usually don’t pay attention on chestnuts on the ground, especially when wet.

This is a carder wool bee. We don’t notice them while they are working. But, we’re happy when we get fruits as a result of their successful work.

We’re also happy when all of our machines work properly. We only pay attention, when something goes wrong.

 

Have you ever seen straws like this??

What do you see? It’s a toy for very small kids. The can learn to grasp.

Insects are annoying. But, did you ever saw their beauty?

When you’re going in the city, have a look up along the buildings. It’s often interesting how they are constructed.

 

 

Everyone is every now and then waiting at a bus stop. See, how the night can change the appearance. Light changes everything. Open up your eyes and see!

 

Guess, what I have here for you!

Five eggs in their box. Were you right?

A candle enlights a room. But, what happens when you blow out the flame?

 

 

You’re sitting in front of a computer, right? See, what’s inside of it!

Fall again. The hazelnuts are ripe. Without color, it looks unfamiliar, right?

 

Did your eyes follow the pipes? Do so. Look, where they will lead you!

Old buildings usually have beautiful staircases. Count the floors and wonder!

A straightened light works out the shape of the keys.

You can have so much fun when looking carefully at the surroundings. Change the way you look at them. Change the light and / or the position of your eyes.

A very special kind of seeing the world around you in a different kind is converting your camera to ‘see’ either infrared or ultra-violet.

Take care!

Lens-Artists Challenge #110 – “creativity in the time of COVID19”

Covid19 – a term, rising memories to the pest epidemics from the medieval ages, where town became nearly deserted.

The current pandemic is kind of worse. An epidemic is limited to a certain region. A pandemic, instead, is worldwide. Here in Europe, the pandemic started end of February, that’s more than half a year ago. In the beginning, our government ordered us to stay at home. Only the most necessary or essential leaves were allowed. We were ordered to go into lockdown.

You know, I’m meeting with other photographers once a month for our monthly roundtable. Certainly, this wasn’t allowed. So, we had to start something else. We needed to become creative for coping with the new situation. Tina Shell asks this week for the Lens-Artists Challenge to show such creative ideas. Here is our (my) answer.

Instead of meeting in a certain location and doing our photo-walk as usual (the location is always negotiated online in the week before the meeting), we met online in a conference call for talking about 2,5 hours. To have a relation to our normal main topic (photography) I had a special idea. I own a deck of inspiring cards. Each of these cards has a special idea and is meant to train creativity in photography. This time, I picked one card for each participant in advance of the meeting and sent a photo of the card to them. One week, each of us had to think about the content and find a solution for presenting up to 5 images during the meeting. It was a great success!

My topic was: backlit (others were: hot, cold, yellow, from below, from above, from behind, blue)

Here are my results:

 

moss, about to start blooming very soon equipped with some dew drops (macro)

oil drops (macro)

 

product image of a collectible bottle

 

star magnolia in the garden

 

amaryllis petals in our living room

 

white tulip blossom in a vase on our kitchen table

 

oil drops (macro)

 

All of these are photographs! During raw development, I only adjusted the lights and the darks slightly and did some post-sharping.

Take care

Lens-Artists Challenge #109 – “under the sun”

This week Amy invited us to share our thoughts on “under the sun”.

Look at my nick! It’s derived from our sun. We’re living on the planet earth which is circling around the sun. So, all that we have here, is under the sun.

Take care

Lens-Artists Challenge #108 – “sanctuary”

My pause lasted a bit longer than expected, but I’m back for the next Lens-Artists Challenge. This time, we have a guest host. It’s Xenia from tranature and she asks for our understanding of “sanctuary”. In her own post, she showed us a couple of images where nature is the main part. Preservation of nature and animal shelter came up time my mind right after the original meaning of a holy place, i.e. the sanctuarium in a medieval cloister.

 

Each harbor is a sanctuary for the ships. As soon as a ship leaves the port behind, the seamen are on their own to make the trip a success. Nature has such mighty forces to bring even huge modern supertankers, freighters or container ships to the edge of their possibilities and to jeopardize the success of their journey.

Take care

Lens-Artists Challenge #100 – “The Long and Winding Road”

Today, it’s Tina’s turn to challenge us and the asks for long and winding roads.

Come, follow me to the fantastic island located in the nothern Atlantic: Iceland

even this is a road for cars

I love this image very much. The tiny car crossing the river in the front part of the image isn’t a toy car. It’s a big offroad van instead.

 

Or do you prefer Scotland?

Now, we’re on the Isle of Skye:

 

 

 

You can also travel in Wales.

 

Maybe you like a railrod more than a paved or a gravel road

A short trip to the Czech Republic for visiting their nice capitol: Praque

In the Alpes, like here in Switzerland, you can find lots of winding roads .

Sometimes, roads don’t look like a road, but they are like here in the wonderful Valley de Viñales in the north of Cuba

 

Also, rivers are roads:

 

You can see the roads even better from above by getting in an hot-air ballon:

Now, lets sing together with Louis Armstrong “(What a) Wonderful World”!

 

btw. some guys really love winding roads:

 

Take care

Lens-Artists Challenge #99 – “old an new”

Today, it’s Amy’s turn to challenge us. And she did.  She was thinking of people wearing traditional clothes in a modern city or using modern machines. Another idea she told us, is a cityscape taken in a city with a history where new building standing beside old buildings or modern vehicles in front of historic buildings.

Here are my images for this challenge. As usual: click on the images to enlarge them.

I want to show you modern machine digging in the ground for coal, cerated eons ago.

Modern art in the middle of the king’s castle of an old kingdom?

Coal made the Ruhr area rich. Nowadays only the once dirty but now the remaining symbols are keeping the memory alive.

Some ancient traditions are kept alive by modern soldiers in traditional uniforms to keep the memory alive.

Once this was a dirty and busy harbor. Now startups, expensive restaurants, media agencies and hotels residing in the brick stone buildings as well as in the modern glass-and-steel buildings.

Even when visiting tiny greek islands you will stumble upon the achievements of modern society.

 

Have a nice weekend and

Take care

Lens-Artists Challenge #98 – “Delicate Colours”

this week the Lens-Artists photo challenge is organized by Leya

Spring is the season of colors. While some colors are very intense others are soft and delicate. Here in my region spring is nearly over. This week we even got the first day of summer. It was so hot, we were able to sit outside ’til 11 p.m.. Great! I love it!

Thus, I picked some images from my archive. The pasqueflower and the white-pink magnolia are from 2017 and the other images from March and April 2020.

Take care

Lens-Artists Challenge #97 – “past times”

this week the Lens-Artists photo challenge is organized by a guest-host: Sue from The Nature of Things.

She told us that she’s currently locked at home as many (if not most) of us. So, there’s plenty of time to think about things and the past. That’s why she asked “pasttimes”.

When I thought about the topic, an idea came up to my mind: let’s dig in your digital archive and pick the oldest images you have.

I switched from film to digital in the fall of 2008. The first time I was only playing around with the camera to get used to it. I started photography in the late 1970s and bought my first own SLR in 1984. Up to now, none of the films of those days is digitized. In January 2009 I stumbled upon a group of photo enthusiasts organizing photography trips over the internet and I joined them for the February trip. These images are the oldest digital images I still have on my disk.

The funny thing is, the photo trip in February 2009 was to a garage for classic automobiles. Here you can buy and sell such cars. You can also find craftsmen being able to repair these old cars. The main floor of the garage is used to be a showroom. I really love such old automobiles. Unfortunately, they use the available space very efficiently. So, it’s no fun to take photos. There nearly no room to get good images. 😢

The second important thing is, I met a group of people I’m still friends with. We still meet once a month for photography trips. I’m so glad to have been brave enough to ask if I’d be allowed to join.

Take care

Lens-Artists Challenge #96 – “crop”

To crop your image means cutting away unimportant or disturbing parts and giving the important part the best position in the frame. This is part of the so-called image composing. Patti challenges us this week for Lens-Artists photo challenge with this topic.

Because I started photography back in film days, nearly 100 % of my landscape and people images are (IMHO) well composed. But in wildlife photography, it’s a very often used technique.

Here you can see one of my raw images without any editing. Below, you can see the final image

You can see, I balanced the horizon and placed the cormorant on one of the golden ratios.

The image is taken with an 80-400mm lens attached to a APS-C camera body at 400mm.

Take care

How to recover lost files – a software review (ad because of naming a product)

Photographers nowadays need solid IT skills for their job. How to run a computer. How to install, update and uninstall software. How to do backups. Know your operating system (Windows, MacOS, Linux) and the relevant file-systems. Each photographer hoards huge piles of valuable data (the images) on his or her computer disks. They need a strategy to recover the images after a disaster i.e. computer theft, hard disk failures or SSD corruptions (you know, each cell in flash storage has a limited lifetime because the cells die after a certain number of write cycles).  Sometimes one is faced with an empty storage card because of an unintentional re-formatting. So, what can you do?

 

The basics

First of all, be prepared! Here you can find information on how to recover such lost files. Get the necessary software now and practice with test data to know the steps when it comes to such a disaster.

In the past, Microsoft brought us FAT as the filesystem. In 1977 it appeared first in MS-DOS. Since then it was developed further and got more features. Because of the ease of organizing data (especially when it comes to sequential writes), it’s still popular for storage cards used by smartphones and cameras.

The computers itself use usually more sophisticated filesystems like NTFS, HPFS, HFS, HFS+, APFS, ext2, ext3, ext4, xfs, btrfs and more. Unfortunately, these modern filesystems are organizing data very differently to FAT and its ascendants like vFAT, exFAT or FAT32. So, recovery data from disks using one of the modern filesystems looks like a game of hazard or spinning a huge wheel of fortune where only one winning chance is set randomly. When using data recovery software you might have luck recovering recently deleted files. On FAT the chance is much higher because of the different principles the data is organized.

Now you might remember having read some reports of found data on thrown-away disks. Yes, that’s true. Forensics are able to recover the blocks of destroyed disks and scratch tiny pieces of data from the disk and reassemble it. Data is organized in blocks. The size of each block is about 512 or 2048 byte, depending on the used filesystem. For getting information like names, account data, credit card information or so, that’s enough. But, look at your images. Each image uses several MB on the disk. To recover your image, it’s a necessity to have ALL blocks and they must be in the right order. A single corrupt byte is tolerable but a couple of bytes can result in a complete loss.

In more than 20 years of handling digital photos, I never lost a complete card. But, 2 or 3 times I deleted a couple of files from the cards unintentionally. In the past, photorec was the tool of my choice. It’s an open-source tool. You can download and use it for free. But, you have to understand, how it works.

First, you have to avoid any further writings on the disk from where you want to recover data. That’s essential for successfully recover files.

 

Photorec (part of the open-source product testdisk)

The installation of photorec is easy. Linux users can install it usually by using their packet manager, while Windows users need to download it from the developer’s homepage and unpack the zip-file. MacOS users can install it via brew

$ brew install testdisk

Now you open a console (Terminal on Mac or Linux, and CMD on Windows). Next, you start photorec by telling it, where to search

MacOS / OS X

$ photorec /Volume/SD-card (or whatever name the card has)

Linux

# photorec /media/SD-card (or whatever name the card has; mountpoint also might vary i.e. /mnt/)

Windows

C:\> photorec d: (or whatever drivename the device has, where you want to recover files. Check it with the Windows Exporer)

If photorec recognizes an already started recovery, it asks you if you want to continue the session or start a new one. Next, it tries to read the directory and offers you to browse where the lost data was stored. Photorec can recover several types of data, not only jpg images. It can also recover lost partitions, if necessary. But that’s beyond the subject of this post.

When you’re fine with the position, photorec needs a location on a different disk to copy the recovered data to. After that, it only needs time.

FAT filesystems don’t delete the data on the disk when files are deleted. Instead, only the first letter of the filename in the directory is replaced by a ‘?’ which makes the file invisible and marks the occupied space as reusable. So, the magic is, photorec reads the directory and scans for filenames starting with ‘?’. Then it looks up each filename and checks based on the location information (block numbers) stored along with the filename if the relevant file is completely available (all blocks from the chain of blocks ’til the end-of-file mark). If so, the blocks are copied to the chosen target destination. But, the filename is lost. Instead, the name of the first data block, where the file was stored, is used to keep filenames unique.

As photorec runs in the console, not everyone feels skilled enough to use it.

 

Disk Drill by Cleverfiles

Recently, I got a review version of a newer data recovery software: Disk Drill by CleverFiles. It’s available for Windows and for MacOS and has a visual GUI to be handled with the mouse. On MacOS the current version needs at least the latest version of Mavericks. But older versions are also available for download, in case your MacOS is still running an older version of OS X for whatever reason. Disk Drill comes as an app to be pulled in the Applications folder only, to get installed.

I installed Disk Drill on my Macbook, which I’m also using for developing my images.

So, I have a lot of images on my disk (raw data), which I process and delete after processing them. Thus, I should have a lot of files potentially being recoverable on my disk. It’s a 512 GB SSD formated with APFS. The deep scan has run for about 40 minutes. But, as expected, Disk Drill found nearly nothing! No raw-file, no jpgs, no text documents or spreadsheets. The only files Disk Drill found were a couple of files I have had in my trash bin, which was emptied just before installing Disk Drill.

My other tests were on a disk formatted with Windows NTFS and an SDcard from my camera formatted with FAT.

Recovering files (raw data written by my digital camera) from the SDcard was very successful, just like expected. A 256 GB drive was scanned in a couple of minutes and offered tons of recoverable files.

I also run Disk Drill on a 1 TB NTFS hard disc formatted by Windows. The scan lasted nearly 3 hours while the well-equipped computer got a lot of stress and the fans run at a high level for certain times. But, I was able to work with it as usual for the whole time. In the end, the so-called deep scan found a reasonable number of recoverable files of different types. Unfortunately, all of them lost their names and were offered to me for recovery grouped by file type. Hard to find the file you accidentally deleted 😦

So, the result is not much different from the outcome of photorec.

Similar to photorec, Disk Drill also works with sessions. But, differently to photorec I was unable to make Disk Drill forget the saved session and do a re-scan after i.e. running a cleanup (I tried to wipe out some files I don’t want to be able to get recovered and check if they are unable to be recovered)

Further functions:

Disk Drill has a couple of further functions.

You can open a backup of an iOS device (as long as you know the recovery passcode) stored on your computer and recover files from iOS backup (iTunes). Works great. You can get contacts, appointments, reminders, photos, and even files.

There’s also a cleanup function. It seems it is to wipe out unused space. But, in fact, I was unable to find any result. So, I can’t say, what this function is doing.

Next, there is a function suggesting it could duplicate the boot disk, but instead it only creates a boot media similar to the recovery boot mechanism you always have on your mac. So, I have to stay with Carbon Copy Cloner for this feature.

After finishing my tests I uninstalled Disk Drill. Unfortunately, a not-quitable tool survived in the menubar. I had to dig through my applications folder and my Library folders to find where this tool resides to delete the files. After a reboot, it was finally gone!

Resume

Now it’s up to you to decide, how often you have to recover lost files and on which filesystems they are stored. I was very interested if a professional tool is better than the open-source tool. The lack of a GUI is a point against photorec. But, in my opinion (as an IT pro for more than 30 years), that’s not so dramatic. I even found the text interface much more straight forward and clearer than the GUI of Disk Drill. On the other hand, I guess, Disk Drill is even more complicated than photorec.

Nevertheless, I repeat my statement from above: be prepared for the disaster because the disaster situation isn’t a good time for such a complicated topic. Get a tool and make yourself familiar with it to avoid making a disaster situation worse.

 

 

I’m back …

… from the Dutch coast.

While I was in Wales, my wife changed the destination for our summer holiday. Instead of heading south to the Bavarian Alpes for staying two weeks near the National Park “Berchdesgardener Land”, we were heading north to the Dutch province Groningen. Beach instead of mountains. Fair change in my eyes 🙂

But, what a surprise. No beach 🙂 Only a harbor for ferries and fishing boats. But, a huge lake with no tide and lots of birds was nearby. So, from a wildlife photographers point of view fantastic opportunities. But, this wasn’t her intention. So, she was quite disappointed with her choice although the area was very nice and offered many options for walking, hiking or biking, but no town nearby. The next shops were about 15 km away.

I also was a bit disappointed, because I left the lens, I usually use for wildlife, at home. I didn’t expect these conditions. So, I have to return 🙂 Is anybody out there willing to accompany me?

So, now tons of images are waiting on my hard-disk to get developed. Most of them are birds, but I also have many landscape images. Some of them are a mixture of both kinds, just like the one above: a flock of seagulls is chasing a spoonbill at sunset. In one of the next frames, you can see them attacking the spoonbill. But, I like this one more because of the light conditions.

When taking wildlife images, I use a technique called panning. The camera settings are continuous shutter speed, a fixed shutter speed depending on the kind of animal and expected action, fixed aperture (wide open), continuous auto-focus spreading over a couple AF fields and Auto-ISO with spot metering. The camera has an APS-C sized sensor and a tele-focus lens sitting on a monopod. These settings help me to get pretty sharp images even of flying birds. I start taking photographs in a certain moment and following the movement of the birds with my camera. That’s quite easy because it’s mounted on top of the monopod and follows my turns. So, I’m able to follow the movements of my main subject. Back at home, I have to view lots of images and many of them get deleted. But, this technique gives me the opportunity to not miss a shot.

The exact settings for the above image are: APS-C sensor, 1/1000, f5.6, 80-400mm lens at 280mm (~420mm equivalent for a 35mm camera or full-frame), ISO 500

Some images taken during the trip are already on my Instagram account. Check them out over there and consider following me on Instagram, too.

Take care!

 

 

 

Monochrome Monday 6-05

 

Take care!

Monochrome Monday 6-04

Take care!

Monochrome Monday 6-03

Take care!

Monochrome Monday 5-45

Take care!