We passed a few days in northern Germany at the coast between Bremerhaven and Emden. We had a great time, good weather, beautiful sunsets and I took a lot of photos. Well, too much. As so often, I was disappointed with my photos afterwards when looking at them on my computer at home. Anyway, I took some not really bad ones and a very few nice ones. I set up a little Gallery. Nevertheless I gained some experience while sorting so many of the photos out of my collection.

Wide angle distortions

Keep in mind that using a very wide angle focal length the horizontal lines above or below the middle of the photo will be distorted in a way that they look tilted. I am using this type of classic composition a lot: Using any object in the lower right third of the photo which leading lines to the center or to the left. As you can see, it looks quite odd. Use a longer focal length in this case. Or maybe you have wide angle lens which does not distort the lines so much.

The mist and wide angle captures

Misty weather with morning or evening sun often looks spectacular: The landscape disappearing in the distance and the reflecting light illumating the scene. Just beautiful. I really like photos with this ambience. Although I want to shoot wide angle in those cases, mostly it is not a great idea. The problem is that you will get about the half of the photo of space which won’t have almost no visible effect caused by the mist. Use longer focal lengths, this will avoid dead space and help you to layer the landscape in front of you with help of the mist.

The mist and the colors

Mist kills colors. Shoot RAW to be able to recover at least some of the colors. Try to “expose to the right”, this means that as much colors as possible should appear on the right side of your histogram (without clipping). You will recover most of the colors stretching the histogram this way and you won’t get noise.

The sea horizon is horizontal

This is obvious and actually not worth to mention, but I do it anyway. Sometimes it is not as easy as it seems to be. This is even more difficult if you shoot wide angle and you don’t put the horizon in the middle of the photo as the line will be distorted. So don’t compare the middle with one of the sides, compare the very left and the very right border to check if the camera is really even.

This is especially important if the sea, or, as in northern germany, the watt is completely flat.

Sea sunsets

Keep an eye on your histogram. Especially on the red channel. You will get easily very overblown red values because of the reflecting sun and it will be almost impossible to recover decent colors, even if you shoot RAW as you will get more noise. Adjust the exposure or, if you have one, use a color filter.

Blurriness

On sunny days, especially after noon when the sun has warmed up the earth, the air just above the sea will blurry your photos. You can observe this using binoculars. You’ll see the damp ascending. There is no workaround, you won’t be able to freeze the world for the time of your exposure. So just keep this in mind. This may not be an issue in very cold regions.

This photo is a 100% crop. The unsharpness is partly due to the bad quality of the cheap Sigma 70-300 lens I used and partly because of the moving humidity in the air as explained above.

Exposure time

Another issue not worth to mention. But again, yes, I do it. Keep an eye on your exposure time. Normally you will get along with 1/125 or 1/250, absolutely no problem. But birds can move very quickly, especially fighting pheasants. You’ll need a bit more to freeze them.

Calm

If you want to take photos which should give an impression of calmness, leave much more space for the sky and less for the ground. The more ground and less sky you include, the more compact and terse the photo will look. The more sky you include, the more space will be there for the phantasies of the contemplators.

We got Microsoft Office 2007 installed on our office computers now. My first impression: “Oh my god… blue! How do I change the color?” I searched half an hour in the MS Office menus and in the help… no way. I tried the MS Office live support… no way. Finally I found it somewhere (especially for Outlook, as this is the application I am used to have opened):

Open a message or create a new one
-> Click on the fancy colorful MS Office button at the upper left
-> Click on the “Editor Properties” button which is on the lower right of the MS Office button dialog
-> Go to “Popular”
-> Change the color scheme.

Purely intuitive. Ah, and be disappointed that there is no “standard style”, just blue, gray or black fancy color schemes.

The MS Outlook option dialogs did not change — the same unusable stuff for about 10 years now. Disappointing. The Signature dialog is still modal and not resizable, although they made it bigger. The task window is also still not resizable. Why? Any reason?

Another issue: How the hell do I turn off antialiasing? My whole system is not antialiased, why MS Office needs to turn it on? I don’t want it. It seems that turning it off is impossible…

What a mess. Really disappointing.

But, to be honest, there are improvements: The search field in Outlook (finally!) for example. And the so called “Ribbon” really makes it easier to find stuff — I didn’t expect this –, but it kills room on your screen.

Update: Incredible, there is a “Copy Hyperlink” entry in the context menu of Outlook!

I had a Holux M-241 (I link the german website as the holux.com website uses too much Flash and is slow) GPS Logger which is a nice device but stopped working in January.

Last week I returned it and buyed a new one: Holux GPSport 245. I got it last week, but the USB chip didn’t work. So I returned the device again and I am waiting for a new, working one.

Today I got a parcel from the GPS vendor. Content: Trousers. United Colors Of Benetton. “At least not completely useless”, a collegue said. Not sure if she meant this in comparison with the GPS…

As I would like to do more with C++ I had a look at Nokia’s Qt Creator. I tried the Qt Designer plugin for eclipse a few months ago yet and I liked the design approach, better than the Netbeans GUI creator (Mantisse). This time I didn’t build a GUI, I just wrote a little testing program in C++.

It is usable, but not comparable with the developing comfort that comes with eclipse. The auto completion of fields and methods is great and quick. But I wondered why the Qt classes do not appear in the auto completion list. And, it is damn slow compiling and running or debugging. And there is no built in output console as I am used to have with eclipse. Starting a console application on Windows launches the Windows CMD.

Summarizing my concerns:

• No built in command line (at least not on Windows)
• No tabbed window/editor switching. There are drop down lists which need at least one click more
• Very slow on building and running the application being developed.
• The Qt classes does not seem to appear in the autocompletion.

I think I still prefer the Eclipse CDT.