Having a little time under my hands this morning, I went to the shed, fired up the gas heating and built a flash mount from parts I already had — a L-bracket with Bowens S-mount, a grip, an aluminium-rail (left over from some other accessories), some screws and 45 minutes time.

This thing is primarily to be used with my beauty dish. This is my favourite lightformer anyway. So if you want to use your compact flash/speedlight — a Nissin DI-622 in my case — along with your deauty dish (or other stuio lightformer), you might be interested to read this little DIY-tutorial. Sorry for the crappy photos, which I took with my HTC…

So, these are the parts I had.

First I had to make the existing rail a little longer with another a piece I had. So I drilled a hole into it — with a gimlet that must be 100 years old (as the bench vise), but I love it!

After assembling the whole thing with nuts and bolts and mounting the L-bracket it looks like this. Nifty…

Later at the studio — the complete kit on my 5dmk2.

and the backside…

And this is what the outcome looks like — no editing at all. Raw. Gotta love it, no?

BTW: This is Sally, my light-model. She is a very patient person. And I love her.

My little dish is ~40 cm in diameter. It now sits a little left from and over the lens. Perfect. In my view it doubles the useability-factor of the speedlite by at least x2. And the dish can still be used on strobe-heads in studio AND with the speedlite. Dual use is always a good thing. I can think of many occasion where it makes sense to use this combination.

It is heavy, a bit clumsy, yes. But the light is worth the effort IMHO.

And light is, what photography is all about, right?

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask and I will gladly help if I can.

I think I finally found a way to create a gallery that is primarily meant to sell photos — either by email-order or instant download. I have spent days, literally, with my research, but all I found was either not functional, oversized or way too expensive.
The ingredients: WordPress as the general framework for the site, an iframe-plugin to display the respective gallery, generated by Fotoplayer, and paypal.
And here is why: WP is flexible, good looking and easy to customize. But the regular WP-galleries won’t do the job, as there is hardly a way to use them for e-commerce-purposes — at least not in Germany where you have to follow extremely rigid regulations.
This is where Fotoplayer comes in handy. Not only it is available also as a plugin for Lightroom — thus integrates flawlessly into my workflow -, it creates beautiful looking flash-galleries, has tons of options to tweak the look and extras and comes with a nifty shopping-cart, where clients can choose various image-sizes, order prints or download hi-res-files immediately after payment. It also can export the galleries directly via FTP to the site — into a folder that is not part of the WP-loop. But: You can use an iframe in an article or page of WP to display it. And bingo — all requirements met!
I got it working on my local Xampp and after some more testing I will use it on my business site ASAP.

I got my second strobe-set today. Hensel this time. And they offered it for a fair price. So I now can finally set up my second studio (with a turntable) for product-shots (also 360°) and don’t have to change setups all the time. Yay!

It has been hard work, but now it is done.

The website of my Start-Up ist online since last night.

Sorry, no english version though…

Any feedback is appreciated.

As I found out that I have a problem with color fidelity in my workflow I decided to do something about it without any further ado.

I spent way too much time fixing tints in my studio shots especially. The critical color is: red. As many others report this too I guess that part of the probem is that the Canons tend to be too red per se. Things get even worse since my strobes which claim to give me 5600K (+-200) are not reliable for that matter and add even more red or plain magenta.

As long I take single shots this is easy to deal with (and doesn’t matter much anyway), but I’ve been doing some portrait-series lately and when I look at several shots from the same shootings side by side I notice an inconsistency that is bad. Especially as these photos often also hang side by side on the wall at my clients’ places.

I managed to repair that though (shooting RAW is always helpful!), but it takes too much precious time. And it is not that professional either. Way too much guessing in the game for my taste. Even more so, as Adobe LR does not offer AdobeRGB (my prefered color space) in processing, but only ProPhoto. This is manageable as long as photos are exported in AdobeRGB to PS which is an option in LR, but I’d definitely prefer to stay in one color space all the way. As much as I like Lightroom, I am also testing Capture One now as RAW-processor and a possible alternative.

So here is what I’ll do: Manual WB for each shooting and sub-shooting with the help of the Colorchecker Passport. And I will also calibrate my monitors involved — studio-laptops (for tethered shooting), desktop-PCs (for editing) — with the Spyder 3 Pro. I ordered both the Colorchecker and the Spyder today for a total of 200 €. This seems a fair price for the time I hope to save in process. Besides I’ll tweak the camera settings and make some dedicated profiles for my use.

Soon I’ll report if and how it worked.

Yesterday I started to build the fleet of my young enterprise. I guess some would have lent some money from the bank and get a fancy car — like a Mercedes or Porsche or something. Damn posers…

I prefered to buy a used Vespa Cosa 125 and pay it cash from my pocket. This iconic beauty is 18 years old, has 12.000 km on the speedo and still runs like a charm. I got the test certificate for another 2 years without any problems.

The color is almost exactly the same as in my corporate design This’ll make it easy to turn into a rolling advertising vehicle for my regular tours to town. Besides it is quite practical as I can park it virtually anywhere. And I am actually faster than by car.

Coming from a BMW R1100RS with 10x the capacity and HP it is something I need to get used to, but it is a fun to ride, yeah. I’ll sell the BMW now, as I cannot hope to ride it often anymore. No more time and also too much pain in my neck and back. On the Vespa Cosa I sit bolt upright. No problem at all.

I think I will also trade my Mini Cooper soon for a VW bus. I just need more transport capacity for my gear. And I can use it as a camper too.

Perhaps you guys are interested how I organize the (digital) workflow in my studio. So here you are…

We need:
– Camera(s)
– Laptop (or PC)
– NAS (Network Attached Storage)
– Desktop PC
– LAN (Gigabit in my case)

I’ll try to keep this concise. If you have any questions and/or need details, feel free to ask.

I shoot in RAW–mode. The camera is set to M (manual) and is connected to my laptop via a (long) USB-cable. I’m running Adobe Lightroom on the laptop with the Canon Tether-module activated.

Time to Rock’n Roll

I use the laptop for a quick check of the light-setup (shadows, reflections etc) and sort out the junk. The good ones are rated/marked. I also keep the secondary choices.

Then I export the folder holding the fresh photos as a catalogue from within LR to the NAS. There is a special folder for that which has been added to my laptop as a network drive. One could simply copy the files with explorer or whatever you use as filemanager too — but: In this case you’d loose all the markings/ratings! So do yourself a favor and export your stuff as catalogue…

I move my ass to Big Mama (the desktop PC), start Adobe LR and import the fresh catalogue from the NAS and — voilà — I have all my preselected photos where I need them. Ready to edit them in LR and/or PS, tag, print, email, ftp them — whatever…

My deskop-PC is backed up on a weekly basis to the NAS, so the data on both are in sync. This is mainly because a NAS (even with RAID, which I recommend) is not a backup per se! Never forget that. I use a nifty tool called dsynchronize for this purpose, but any NAS comes with a backup-tool, if you prefer that. Redundancy is your best friend

On a general note: Don’t store your LR-data on the NAS directly. It is possible, but slow. And LR does not allow the catalogue itself on a network-drive anyway.

As you can see on the frontpage, I am using Autofocus+ Pro for this blog.

This fantastic theme has just been updated to V 2.0. This is not a minor update, because AF II (Pro) does not rely on the Thematic-framework anymore. And it comes with a sample child-theme, which I highly recommend to use!!

Why? Because a the genious concept of child-themes lets you pimp, hack, enhance your theme, without losing all your customizations in case of an update. Also there are only a few files you have to take care of. Well, actually it can become many — depending on your creativity…

All you have to do is upload the child-theme to a separate folder along with the main theme of Autofocus  and activate it — yes, the child, not Big Mama!!

Anything you want to change goes into that folder: functions, css, templates… whatever.

Once the child-theme is activated, mother will always look what her child has to say about it before she feeds anything to the WordPress-loop.

When I first used AF Pro, I immediately stumbled into a problem. Fear not, it can be solved easily. The old hack for former versions, that I explained a year ago, does not work anymore, so here is the new way to do it.

The theme has a couple of options. One of them is that you can define a category and a template for a blog page. But: You can only pick just one category in the theme-options which is used for this special page. If you want to use the blog-template for another page which only holds articles with a different category — in my case the KnowHow-page — you are stuck.

So what to do?

You could ask the author of the theme for help. Pro or not Pro-version (paid or not paid), he will point you to — yes, right — google, in order to find solutions for creating your own templates. You can do that of course — or read on…

Yeah ‚theres tons of explanations for that.Try googling it.

— Allan Cole

I solved the problem myself the following way.

I copied the file blog-page.php from the theme. Best is to download it with a ftp-client (I use the client integrated in Totalcommander) to a folder on your HD. Then copy it twice (or more, depends on how many sub-sections you want to have blog-wise!) and give the files meaningful names. For example, if the blog-page you are going to use it for, is called “Design”, name it design-template.php.

Edit the renamed file with an editor of your choice (I recommend notepad++) and change the name of the template in line 3 to Design Template (or whatever you want it to be).

Example:
/**
* Template Name: AF+ Blog Template - pimped by mic
*
* A custom page template without sidebar.
*
* The "Template Name:" bit above allows this to be selectable
* from a dropdown menu on the edit page screen.
*
* @package WordPress
* @subpackage AutoFocus_Two
* @since AutoFocus 2.0
*/

get_header(); ?>

!! If you miss this step, the template will never appear in the dropdown-menu for templates on the right when you create a new page or change the properties of an existing one.
It is a merely internal thing though. This has nothing to do with the name of the blog-page or –category and will not appear anywhere on the public part of your blog.

Next we look for a line that looks like this:

$af_blog_catid = of_get_option( $shortname . '_blog_cat' );

and change it to (for example):

$af_blog_catid = 19;

!! whereas 19 is the ID of the category I use for the given page (KnowHow).
For you the number may and will differ! This means that you have to create this category first — or, if it already exists, find out its ID.
You can see the ID (the number) in the bottom left corner of your browser, when you hover the category in the category-menu (BTW: This is useful for many purposes!).

So in my case the complete block (here with comments for easier understanding & documentaion) looks like this:

// Start the loop for the Blog Category
global $paged, $more, $shortname;
$more = 0;
/* the original line with parsing cat_id from theme-options - hack below */
/* $af_blog_catid = of_get_option( $shortname . '_blog_cat' ); */
$af_blog_catid = 1; /*this is the "General" category on my blog*/

Wipe the sweat from your forehead, get a drink. Your’re almost done

Upload the new template(s) to the child-theme-directory on your webspace.

Then you create the new page called Design (or whatever) and attach the appropriate template (e.g. design-template) to it by using Edit/Quickedit from the property-section of “Pages”.

On the page you’ve now created and married with the hacked template from above, only articles with the defined category-ID (19 in this example) will appear.

Nifty

And in case you want to create another page for another category of articles simply repeat the same steps (download, copy, rename, find out the category-ID, edit, upload, assign template to new page …) and you’re done.

Oh, and this should work as well for the free version of the autofocus+-theme. I guess. Did not check though. But I can’t see why it shouldn’t

If have any questions, feel free to ask.

After seven years I closed down my account on DeviantArt.

Well, I did not close it altogether yet, because I want some recent journals to be accessible as they explain my reasons.

The short version is:
DeviantART tolerates theft of photos and/or use of stolen material on their site.
They tolerate plain porn disguised as “artistic nude”.
And they tolerate the infiltration at large scale by Nazis.

Hmm, my journals seem to be still accessible, although I do not know why. So you can read, judge and hopefully understand, why I finally gave up on deviant“ART”.

If you want to get more info on this I suggest you hop over and read my last 3 or 4 journals and the attached discussions.

This also means that the role of this blog will change. It used to be a side-project. From now on it’ll be my main organ. The portfolio will soon start to fill up. So stay tuned if you wish.

This morning I closed the account completely, after someone whom I considered a friend, called my argumentation “political bullshit”, proposed that I should rather have “left  in dignity” and written a letter to the admins instead of making such a fuss publicly, and expressed that I obviously believed that with my measly member-fee I had also  “bought the right to whine”…

And that was only the personal part.

I was and still am speechless.

Of course I know how volatile and questionable these “virtual friendships” are. But coming from someone whom I actively supported for a long time, whom I fought for in his dogfights with other deviants — I must say, that hurts.

I would not expect any gratitude, not even loyal support or blind sharing of my views. No, but I do expect not be kicked in the face by such a person like that.

This is sad.

Yes, Richard, Mr. Trippy4U, I know what you think: He’s whining again…

But at least I don’t have to pay for it.

I hope they’ll at least give you some extra months for free for being such a loyal deviant.

Personally I wish Steve Jobs all the best.

But I will certainly not contribute to his his economic success.

I never had an iPhone nor an iPad nor an iPod — and I most probably never will.

I am pretty pissed off how many media, online-media namely, dance around the golden apple.

I am not a fan of data-mining. And/or of backdoors that manufacturers build into electronic devices. I like it transparent.

And now that I read that iPads and iPhones track and save the movement of users — why am I not surprised??

Curious?