.com Domain

I'm thinking about making this page available through a .com URL. Something that sounds a bit more flashy and international than fluck.de - something like RogerWhittaker.com - but that's taken :)

If you have any good suggestions for me, let me know.
Yesterday I came up with LostInUrbanity.com, probably not a genius name, but I decided to register it. I have this web hosting package with Strato which is totally over the top for my needs. I just figured out I can register a certain number of domains without additional costs.

Don’t let them fool ya!

The dates on my blog magically disappeared after the last template switch, but you can trust me, people will try to fool you today!

I just remembered a picture that kind of fits:

Probably my very first photography experiment. Taken in 2001 with a 2MP camera from Olympus. My dad bought this thing a couple of years earlier for 2,000 Deutsche Mark.

Wait a second...did you just read this? I think I'm old now. Once someone is a witness of totally outdated technology, bought for ridiculous prices in currencies that don't exist anymore, this person is officially old. That's how the word "old" should be defined in dictionaries.

About the image: I copied my picture into the image of an Adam Sandler movie poster using some funky software which probably doesn't exist anymore either.

Back in the days people used to tell me I look like Sandler, so I thought this is funny. Now I know it's not really funny at all. That's another great thing about getting older: you start noticing more things. When I'm two minutes older from now, I will probably notice how useless this post was :)

What's happening?

Hello visitors, If you come here on a daily basis, you have probably looked at the same old post since a couple of days. I won't leave you alone here, but daily posting just doesn't always work out in such a one-man-show.

In-Camera HDR

This is an interesting camera feature that I was wondering if it would come up soon. After all, HDR is supposed to make up for properties of the image sensor that are considered limitations when compared to the human eye. OK, in people's minds the term HDR is also associated with "over-processed images", but I'm sure that's not what a camera vendor would strive for. So far it involved some special software and/or tedious post processing.

Now it seems like the time has come where cameras start to make the HDR photographer's life easier. From what I read so far, the Pentax k20 and K200 are the first two digital SLR cameras that can compute under- and over-exposed images out of a picture and combine them with a built-in HDR algorithm.
The little Ricoh CX1 (which is supposed to come out in March) is the first compact camera with such a feature. It actually has two different ways to create HDR images: Either from one shot, or from an exposure series.

I'm curious what these first-generation built-in HDR features will be able to produce. The Ricoh has a huge zoom range (28-300mm), and interesting sounding things that I have never heard of, such as "Multi-Pattern Auto White Balance" and "Multi-Target Auto Focus". I'll keep an eye on this one.

Here are my sources:
About the Pentax SLRs.
About the Ricoh CX1.

HDR Max Contest

Sent an image to an HDR photo contest. Not sure what to think about the concept of photo contests from a photographer's perspective. The company which is organizing it has a clear motivation, though. They want people to try and fall in love with their HDR software. My first impression: the program works nicely.

What I found most interesting about it is the fact that it can load RAW images. You can find more about it follwing this link.
If you are thinking about entering the contest: the deadline is today. I'm last minute...as usual.

Have a nice Saturday!...and maybe Sunday as well!

Featured on T-Online.de

T-Oline is Germany's biggest Internet Service Provider. Their website t-online.de has a section dedicated to photography. It can be found at augenblicke.t-online.de. I'm happy to tell you that T-Online contacted me. I'm featured as a serious photography newcomer.

The newcomer-section just started off and shows the work of ten international talents, when I looked at everybody's excellent work I got seriously nervous to be part of this.

The other artists are:
- JanLeonardo Wöllert und Jörg Miedza
- Florian Schüppel
- Emmanuel Decouard
- Fabrizio Cestari
- Jakob Wagner
- Juha Arvid Helminen
- Li Wei
- Martin Preissner
- Michael Schlegel

Here is a link to the newcomer section.
And here is a link to my part.

Some text on my images needs to be corrected. Also the images appear a bit funny. I will try to resolve this with T-Online.