Yeah!! I'm on Wuala now, apparently the safest way possible to store your data in a Cloud. Learned from a friend about it, it uses AES-256, the same I'm using for my mobile 2TB drive, it's an encryption standard the NSA itself uses for it's data :-) People at Wuala are unable to decode your data neither your password, so they wouldn't even be able to hand it out to any government, just in case. Your data doesn't leave your computer unencrypted either and servers are based in Germany, Switzerland and France, live backing up your data to multiple locations. Not too shabby! I've put all sensible data into the Wuala Cloud now, a bit spooky, so what! Photos (1,4TB), music and system not included, those are still stored and backed up locally. I'm giving up some of the iCloud ease but that's probably the price you got to pay for safety. If you wanna use Wuala as well, use the link below and we're both getting 1GB of extra storage. Happy storing ...

https://www.wuala.com/de/referral/6BFJ6664NGA6FANNM675

Last week I was talking about cameras and which camera to use. Before I tell you what gear you need to post process images I will first give you some more recommendations on cameras and round it all up. I will also post links to my favorite sites to read in depth reviews and compare sample images if you feel like.

If you just want a camera better than the one in your cellphone I recommend taking Canon‘s point & shoots, they are great. My most favorite ones are from the S-line like the S100 or S110, if you want the newest. I still have an S95 and it takes really good images and is super small. You may as well take any of the less expensive models, but you will get an even smaller sensor which means more noise in most any light. And you won‘t get an as bright lens as on the S-line, means even more noise when shooting in dim situations and longer shutter speeds resulting in possibly blurry images.

If you want better than a point & shoot my first recommendation is to get a DSLR, there are more stylish options, but DSLRs have everything you need and the entry level models are much cheaper than fancier cameras like a Fuji X100 or X100s for example. What a DSLR can do much better than a point & shoot is: first, you see a real life image through the finder via a mirror, means there is no lag time between what‘s really happening and what you see in the finder, like on a display of point & shoots. Second, DSLRs have much bigger sensors means you get cleaner images with much less noise, especially in dim situations. A bigger sensor also means you‘re able to separate the subject you‘re taking a photo of and the background, you‘re actually able to make use of different depths of field. Fourth, DSLRs have a super fast autofocus, means you can chase your kids and the focus keeps up with their speed, something you wouldn‘t get from a point & shoot. Fifth, you can change lenses for different styles of photos or types of photography. You may for example buy a super long tele lens to shoot animals in the zoo up close and in the evening change to a fast prime lens to shoot on your friend's birthday party without flash. Sixth, DSLRs are classics and with them you‘re able to make all possible settings to aperture or shutter speed manually to give the image the exact look you want. That's important to understand and learn about the camera techniques and photography in general. What DSLR to buy? Pick a Canon or Nikon, they are the best and always come up with the newest inventions first and they have the largest selection of lenses available by a good margin. If you pick Canon my top pick is an EOS 550D, which is discontinued already, but it‘s got all you need in a little smaller package than the newer 600D-700Ds. Of course the super new 100D is even smaller, but it‘s also more expensive. If you want Nikon take a D3200 or D5200. More expensive DSLRs are even faster but also heavier and don‘t give better image quality, at least if you don‘t take a fullframe one like the Canon 6D or Nikon D600 for example. They start at 1.700 €, though, for the body alone.

If you want stylish you may also take a Fuji X100 or X100s. They also take wonderful images but operate generally slower than a DSLR and you‘re not able to change lenses for different shooting situations.

I happen to shoot for Olympus and they gave me their best camera, an OM-D, to take pictures with it. It‘s an amazing little camera but a little on the pricy side. It‘s autofocus is incredible, it‘s faster than the one in my 5D Canons. And I think the OM-D looks fantastic.

My most favorite site for extensive reviews are Ken Rockwell and imaging resource, check them out. I will show you some more and tell you how to use them in the future.

Alright, that‘s it about cameras for now, let‘s talk about what other gear you need to create great looking images.

Actually you don‘t need any more than your camera to take amazing looking images. Modern cameras have enough settings to let the images look great and to tweak them to your personal taste. If you want them to look even better, though, and to use some helpful software you need a computer with some programs I am going to talk about now.

What computer do you need? The great thing about digital cameras is that you can set them to record so called RAWs, imagine this format compared to ready jpgs as like the negatives in old film cameras. You‘re able to develop those files on the computer like you did with the negatives in the dark room. You can adjust exposure, white balance, lens corrections, noise reduction, sharpness, contrast and much more. You may even apply special filters or preset looks to make them look like film for example.

Anyway, you need a computer for all that, a tablet won‘t cut it. Any modern computer is fast enough for most all files, but you need more computing power when you‘re working on a lot of files, like for a wedding or when you use cameras with really a lot of Megapixels, like 22 or 36. It‘s possible with an older computer as well but it takes much longer. If you have 600 images to process a couple of minutes per image adds up to a lot of time. I was processing a wedding at the beginning of 2011 for example with a 2007 MacBook Pro with a 2,2 GHz Core 2 Duo and only 4GB of RAM. This wedding nearly took me two weeks to post process. When you‘re working with file management programs like Adobe Lightroom you also want the most RAM you can get. In my case I am using a 2011 QuadCore MacBook Pro with 16GB of RAM. This amount of memory makes processing much more fluent with less stuttering and least time waiting. I am also using SSDs instead of traditional hard drives as internal storage in my laptops. SSDs consist of chips like in an SD card, there is no moving parts and they are super snappy. Programs open instantly and you don‘t have to wait for files to be read from a hard drive any longer than necessary. When you‘re working with programs like Adobe Photoshop the computer‘s processor becomes the bottle neck. When you‘re working with single files, though, it‘s not a problem at all, it becomes important when you‘re doing projects with hundreds or thousands of images, then seconds or minutes add up to hours or days.

Why do I use Mac? I have a lot of problems with my Macs but it‘s still less than I had with my Windows computers and to be honest, software wise the Mac just gets my work done well. I am also heavily invested in Mac software by this time.

What Mac should you buy? Actually every new Mac is good enough for everything but the biggest jobs. I am considering getting a new MacBook Air soon as my day to day writing machine and image processor on the go. They are just gorgeous and super light. I need 256GB of storage, I have all my images on separate hard drives. 8GB of RAM is a must have and not enough for big jobs but fine for everything else.

What software to use? I am using Lightroom 4 (130 €) to import files from the cameras and to make basic adjustments like exposure, white balance, noise reduction, lens corrections, highlight and shadow correction and very important, to apply film emulsions from VSCO.

Those are plug-ins available for Lightroom or Photoshop separately (look left on the image above). I chose the Lightroom version becasue this way you can apply the looks to a lot of images at once before sending them to Photoshop. I bought all three available Film Packs 01, 02 and 03, they cost around 100 dollars each. After applying all those settings to the RAWs I send them to Photoshop CS6 (800 € regularly and 200-300 € for students or teachers). Photoshop is my most used program but you actually don‘t need it necessarily, Lightroom is sufficient, too, Photoshop just has one million more options. When you prepare images for different purposes and resize to different sizes Photoshop actually becomes your time saver. I use Photoshop to apply special curves to the images, desaturate, resize most of the time. In contrast to most other photographers I pass on using layers mostly. Somehow I just found I don‘t need them, I work on the files directly. Sounds totally weird to some, but maybe it fits my style of photography. I don‘t manipulate images too much, instead I rely on getting a great shot first and then apply “minimal“ post processing.

When I‘m finished with Photoshop I am finished with the job ;-)

Update: Adobe today announced Lightroom 5. I will tell you about the advantages and disadvantage of Adobe's new Cloud solution soon. There's a big problem with working on files offline, when you're not subscribed to the Creative Cloud anymore. So Adobe literally forces you to subscribe for the rest of your life. Lightroom 4 is still offline, anyway, so you may buy it instead as long as you can.

Update: Apple released new Haswell MacBook Airs today. Battery life is supposed to be nothing short of amazing with my top recommended 13" MacBook Air lasting 12 hours! That's so cool and fits right with my plans to add a new Air to my setup for mobile computing. Actually I need a new computer soon as my second machine just broke entirely last week. I also need one for my two and a half month trip from October through Russia, Central Asia, China and Southeast Asia. It's also cool that Apple lowered prices by 100 € making a 128GB 13" available for 1.099 € already, pretty good ...

Alright, more next time ...

KIKI

Hey there! As I have have told you this blogsite will be focused on photography. I will host images from out of my life, work, travels and more. I will also be reviewing cameras and equipment, will write about what gear to use and why, which programs and plug-ins will get you the results you want faster and I will give a lot of tips regarding camera technics and what‘s important for a good picture. I will refer to my favorite sites of Ken Rockwell or imaging resource as well, that are specialized on testing cameras. My focus will be more from a photographers perspective. Some days of the week I will also write some articles about what‘s going on in the world regarding ethical and socio-political issues. I would also like to explain basic labour rights and Grundrechte (those articles will be in German) to you people that are not that familiar with law but as employees actually directly affected, maybe once a week and give some news on changes to labour laws and union developments and what that means for the normal employee ...

But today is a photo day and there‘s millions of things to be told when it comes to photography. But there‘s also some very simple things that you should always keep in mind. For example it‘s the photographer that takes the picture and not the camera. The most expensive camera will be totally wasted when you do not care about the most basic tasks that are necessary for a good photo. A great picture comes from a great vision and not a great camera. You can actually make winner shots even with a cellphone. So that‘s something to keep in mind.

More difficult things like „How to make a winner shot“ are to be discussed later on ;-). I will start with something basic that‘s also important to know when picking up a camera:

It‘s the focal length.

What does focal length mean? Focal length is indicated in millimeters on camera lenses, popular focal lengths are 50mm or 35mm, 24mm or 16mm for example. Those lenghts express the distance between the focus point (at which the beams of light come together in a single point and spread mirrored again from there on) and the recording medium, in digital cameras it‘s the sensor. The recording medium itself can have different sizes, the smaller it is, the smaller the focal length has to be accordingly to give the same field of view. Traditionally the focal lengths refer to the 35mm film format of classic cameras, the exposed part of the film was 35mm wide. Today 35mm equivalent cameras are those called fullframe, like Canon‘s or Nikon‘s Pro cameras for example. Their digital sensor is actually a tiny bit bigger, measuring 36mm.

If you now take a 50mm lens for example the focal length point is 50mm away from the image sensor. With a fullframe 36mm sensor you will get a so called normal field of view, pretty close to the human eye (actually I think the human eye field of view is somewhat wider, at least subjectively). The focal length point and both ends of the sensor shape a triangle. If you take a smaller sensor now, found in less expensive cameras or point&shoots, with the same focal length the angle in the triangle becomes smaller, resulting in a narrower field of view. You could actually draw the sensor on a paper as a line of say 36mm and draw the focal lenght point of your choice next to it with the according distance, in this case 50mm. If you extend the lines coming from both ends of the sensor beyond the focal length point you get the idea of what would actually be captured in the real world.

With a 24mm lens for example the distance between the focal length point and the sensor is roughly half of a 50mm lens, shaping a twice as wide angle in the triangle described above, thus you get a twice as wide field of view. Take an even smaller focal length and the field of view gets even wider.

To give you an idea of how different focal lengths look like I took a couple of photos from out of the window of our flat with various focal lengths, starting with an ultrawide 12mm, then 16mm and so on, have a look ...

The main cameras I use are Canon‘s 5D models which also have 36mm sensors. Lenses used with those bodys keep the same field of view they have originally been designed for. Apart from the technical aspects explained above the focal lengths or lenses you use have a very strong impact on the look of your images and it often depends what subject you are going to photograph which lens is best suited. If you shoot animals for example a very long zoom lens is needed to get very detailed shots.

On the other hand I once read a photographer say you get the best images with a wide lens and get as close as you can to the subject. Actually that‘s pretty much what I think everytime I look at really dramatic images. Because you get much more in the frame with a wide lens you can immediately see if a photo was taken with a long tele lens or a wideangle lens. To get people resonably sized into the frame you need to get very close bringing the recipient or viewer right into the scene. This makes photos with a wideangle lens so much more special and intimate or even spectacular. I always find images with long tele lenses a bit boring because it‘s obvious that the photographer has not been very close to the subject. When shooting a wedding for example for me it is very important to be as close as I can to the couple to bring back the most intimate and touching images of this special day.

Documentary often refers to 35mm lenses to be the best suited for this style of photography. I am using a 35mm lens a lot as well, also on weddings, my most used focal length, though, is probably 24mm. I love wide angles because it brings you right in the middle of the action. In very tight places I could imagine using 16mm or even 12mm more often, it happens, though, that a lot of my images are taken at 24mm. For artistic portraits I normally use a Canon 50 1.2, that gives you spectacular background blurs, but that‘s some topic for next time.

See, there‘s much to say about focal lengths ...

See ya later

KIKI