Category Archives: Photography

Apollo in Sync

The Apollo space flight program is long history, even the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 was already celebrated more than a year ago. Todays headlines in spaceflight are either written by a psychologically conspicuous president building a Space Force or a pot smoking business magnate launching electric cars in space and polluting the night sky (and earth orbit) with his up to 42,000 Internet satellites.

In contrast Ben Feist (Homepage | Twitter) has done phenomenal work in reviving the Apollo fever. Or how else can you call it when you are able to replay some of the original missions in real time – second by second from start to end – whilst having the ability to switch interactively between all mission control audio channels, public commentaries, and various video streams. In addition the multimedia content has been enriched with photographs, transcripts, and many more details. All available sources have been carefully restored, synchronized, and packed into an intuitive and original user interface.

Its seems that all of this fabulous work has taken years. Ben Feist’s first blog post describing the idea is of 2012. The first public release was announced three years later, adding additional features in 2016. Oh and that was only about Apollo 17, not to mention Apollo 11 and Apollo 13. In the end it seems to have brought him a job with NASA and collaborators like Stephen Slater, David Charney, Chris Bennett, Arnfinn Holderer, and Robin Wheeler.

Reading the statistics of the included real-time elements for e.g. Apollo 11 is just stunning: All mission control film footage, all TV transmissions and onboard film footage, 2,000 photographs, 11,000 hours of Mission Control audio, 240 hours of space-to-ground audio, all onboard recorder audio, 15,000 searchable utterances, …

Pro tip: Make sure that you do not have any further plans for the day, before you click on https://apolloinrealtime.org/.

Aquanaute extraordinaire

Wer kennt nicht Jacques-Yves Cousteau und zumindest einen seiner legendären Film wie “Die schweigende Welt”? Der tauchende Biologe und Naturphotograph Laurent Ballesta, Jahrgang 1974 aus Montpellier, war mir dagegen bisher unbekannt. Vor einiger Zeit hatte ich bereits, aber unbewusst, einen Film von ihm gesehen, der mich bleibend fasziniert hat: “Antarktis – Die Reise der Pinguine”. Seine weiteren Expeditionen in die Unterwasserwelt stehen diesem Werk in nichts nach und es würde schwer fallen, sich für eines als das Beste zu entscheiden. Allesamt zeigen atemberaubende Bilder, schildern fesselnde Erlebnisse und liefern detaillierte Einblicke in die besuchten Lebensräume und Ökosysteme. Am Ende jeden Abenteuers hat man das Gefühl, als müsste man selbst erst den ein oder anderen Deko-Stopp einlegen, um überhaupt wieder in die reale Welt zurück zu finden. Mit anderen Worten – nicht nur in der aktuellen Zeit – Prädikat besonders wertvoll und schwerstens zu empfehlen!

Zur Zeit hat ARTE in der Sendereihe “Die Tiefen der Ozeane” einige Filme von bzw. mit Laurent Ballesta im Angebot, die bis zu ihrer Depublikation nachfolgend verlinkt sind:

aus “Planète Méditerranée” (c) Laurent Ballesta

Homepage: https://laurentballesta.com/
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Switching from Lightroom to Darktable on macOS

I started my digital photography life with a Nikon D80 and Lightroom 1.0 quite a while ago (2007). When Adobe stopped selling copies and only provided subscription options was one of the moments it became very clear that an alternative is needed. Let’s not talk about Lightroom CC, its unstable desktop app, and a recent user nightmare.

To be independent from the business needs of a company, the only option is to go for an alternative that is licensed under an Open Source license. With that preference in mind and if it is about RAW processing, you have the choice between digiKam, RawTherapee, and darktable.

I was following darktable since a few years. The 2.x versions have not really been working for me. In contrast the releases of 3.0 and 3.2 have been milestones in growing darktable into a serious and easy to use – not to say even more mature – alternative to Lightroom and it is time to do the final switch. Now or never.

To share it upfront: I did not get disappointed nor frustrated by this decision. I am just wondering, why the hell did I not switch earlier?

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HowTo: Bulk exporting all of your image collections from Lightroom to a folder-based structure

Do you plan to switch from Adobe Lightroom to a different image management and raw editor, like its free alternatives darktable or RawTherapee? One of the main challenges is to preserve your carefully created collections’ structure whilst migrating. Ideally via the file system represented by a hierarchical folder structure to be independent from whatever software you choose.

As I am currently abandoning Lightroom, I have written a Bash-script to accomplish this task:

https://github.com/apfelkraut/ExportLRCatalog

For details please refer to the README.

HowTo: My journey through self-hosted photo gallery approaches

Quite soon after creating this blog I found that it is also the perfect place to present selections of my photographs.

During that time I was already using Adobe Lightroom. If I remember correctly it was still version 1.X, but it already had a convenient one-click solution to create web-based galleries out of a collection of photos. So I could easily create one and upload the resulting folder to my webserver. I even was able to customize the generated configuration file in order to modify the title and description of the Flash-based gallery player. And here comes the downside. It was based on Shockwave/Macromedia/Adobe Flash, a nightmare regarding security and stability. Aside from this, mobile devices have become more and more popular that did not support Flash and introduced a completely different way on how to interact with a website. Remember the first time when you were using a swipe gesture to browse through images? An this Responsive web design that allowed you to view webpages and its elements in a size that fit well the screen of your device and not vice versa?

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Sơn Đoòng Cave

The Sơn Đoòng Cave (“Hang Sơn Đoòng” means “Mountain River Cave” in Vietnamese) appears to be one of the largest known caves on earth. It is situated within the Phong Nha-Kẻ Bàng National Park in the heart of Vietnam and was just discovered in 1991. The succeeding footage by Ryan Deboodt is breathtaking and should be enjoyed without any further introductory words:

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