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HEIPEI

Jojo
 * Travel
 * About

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RADIO SI­LENCE

Jan­u­ary 6, 2020

My last post here was in Au­gust of 2016. What hap­pened since then? A lot has
hap­pened ac­tu­ally.

Our daugh­ter Anna Sophia was born in Au­gust 2016. That’s when our lives turned
around, ready or not. Gone were the days with end­less hours to kill. In­stead
we spent many sleep­less nights and hun­gover days with our newest fam­ily
mem­ber. But things turned around quickly, and what emerged from the haze of
those first crazy few weeks (or months) was a new-found clar­ity. Clar­ity about
what mat­ters in life, about which things were worth in­vest­ing time in and
which things we just did be­cause we had too much time to spare. I used to
strug­gle turn­ing down re­quests and favours asked of me. After our first child
was born, it be­came sec­ond na­ture. This break in our lives let us
re-eval­u­ate every­thing from scratch, like going through a box in stor­age and
ask­ing “Do we still need this?” for every sin­gle item within. In some cases
this even ap­plies to re­la­tion­ships, cruel as it may sound.

Our sec­ond daugh­ter was born in Jan­u­ary of 2018 and our third daugh­ter
joined us in Oc­to­ber of 2019. Yes, you could say we were ask­ing for trou­ble,
but even if every­day life got a lit­tle bit more ex­haust­ing with each
ad­di­tional child, noth­ing was as life-chang­ing as hav­ing our first child,
which is a good thing.

With the some­times hec­tic pace and oc­ca­sional doses of sleep-de­pri­va­tion
I dis­cov­ered some­thing truly amaz­ing: The less time you have, the more you
make of it. And funny enough, you end up with more to show for when you have
very lit­tle time to do it. At the same time as our first daugh­ter was born I
set out to start a soft­ware pro­ject of my own. Over the past three years this
grew into a web­site used by thou­sands of peo­ple daily, but those seeds were
planted in the first month of my parental leave. I learned to sit down and be
pro­duc­tive im­me­di­ately, I learned to plan ahead and be­come even more
ob­ses­sive with mak­ing lists of things to do when I ac­tu­ally had the odd
hour to con­tinue work­ing on some­thing. In that way, hav­ing less time is a
bless­ing as it re­sets you and lets you focus on the few things you truly enjoy
and will al­ways pri­ori­tise.

Be­tween our daugh­ters and any sem­blance of life after work, some things had
to give. I haven’t watched a sin­gle fea­ture film since Au­gust 2016 (ex­cept
on in­ter­na­tional flights), have rarely had time to go on a 2-3 hour bike ride
around the Nether­lands, haven’t played any video games and, most cru­cially,
have shot and edited very few pho­tos. I list these things as they used to
oc­cupy a lot of my free time. The times my wife and I went out by our­selves at
night in the past three years can be counted on two hands. Yet we rarely miss
any of these things as that’s sim­ply a part of our life that’s now be­hind us.

Some things I do miss how­ever, and I’m hop­ing to get back into some of them.
My work and my pro­jects still keep me busy most of the day, and our kids (now
three of them) oc­cupy the rest of our wak­ing hours and week­ends. Still, I
want to make room for get­ting back into the habit of cre­at­ing some­thing.
That in­cludes tak­ing more pho­tos, but more im­por­tantly, get­ting bet­ter at
writ­ing. Over the past years I’ve gained im­mense re­spect for peo­ple who can
ex­press them­selves with great clar­ity and pur­pose via the writ­ten word. For
my­self I’ve also dis­cov­ered that the only way to de­liver some­thing great
(be it a text, pho­tos, or a soft­ware prod­uct) is through it­er­a­tion. So
this is me tak­ing the first step to im­prove… Stay tuned!


RE­CENT TRIPS - DUBLIN AND WASH­ING­TON

Au­gust 4, 2016

I went on two work-re­lated trips to Wash­ing­ton and Dublin this sum­mer and
man­aged to bring back some pretty pho­tos. Trav­el­ing for work is not
some­thing that you can al­ways enjoy: You’re on a tight sched­ule, often
fly­ing by your­self, and you’ve got the pur­pose of your trip in the back of
your head the whole time you’re on the road. Still, some­times you man­age to
grab a few hours (or a whole day) with a good friend and/or col­league to
ven­ture into the city and do some sight­see­ing. In this re­gard, work-re­lated
trips ac­tu­ally pay off since they let you catch a short glimpse of a place
which you can use to de­cide whether it’s worth to come back on va­ca­tion.




WASH­ING­TON

I had been to Wash­ing­ton two years ago, dur­ing a trip that was a mix­ture of
work and leisure. This time around, me and a buddy of mine only had a few short
hours to ac­tu­ally spend down­town, so we tried to make the most of it. Our
first stop was the Smith­son­ian Air and Space Mu­seum (what else!), a mu­seum
that I’ll prob­a­bly never get tired of vis­it­ing. After that we walked across
the Na­tional Mall where they were al­ready busy set­ting up stands for the
In­de­pen­dence Day cel­e­bra­tions. Un­for­tu­nately it was boil­ing hot that
day, and the mall does not offer a lot of shade. So we walked straight into the
Na­tional Archives to get a first-hand look at the De­c­la­ra­tion of
In­de­pen­dence, the Con­sti­tu­tion and the Bill of Rights. In gen­eral, this
build­ing was a lit­tle un­der­whelm­ing, and see­ing the doc­u­ments up close
is a bit of a let-down since they’re very crowded, hid­den deep down be­hind
glass and barely leg­i­ble. Also I wasn’t al­lowed to take pho­tos, you can
imag­ine my opin­ion on that pol­icy. That was al­ready the ex­tent of our dash
into Wash­ing­ton. While it does not sound like a lot, Wash­ing­ton will eat up
your day thanks to it’s gen­er­ously spaced build­ings and parks, so make sure
you bring plenty of time and com­fort­able footwear.




IRE­LAND

In mid-July I flew to Dublin to at­tend SRE­Con Eu­rope. I flew in a day early
to have some time to ex­plore the city with a friend of mine. My mem­ory of
Ire­land was pretty spotty, my last visit to the green is­land was more than 15
years ago when I went there as part of a stu­dent ex­change with our school.
Back then we lived in the coun­try­side (which is pretty much all of Ire­land
ex­cept Dublin). I only saw small parts of Dublin when we drove to Croke Park on
one oc­ca­sion.



Ire­land is an in­ter­est­ing coun­try to visit, es­pe­cially if you’ve seen
some other major Eu­ro­pean coun­tries. At first sight it looks like Great
Britain, or maybe even any other Eu­ro­pean coun­try. But then you start
notic­ing the sub­tle unique as­pects of Ire­land. It starts on the way from
air­port, when you re­al­ize that peo­ple are dri­ving on the left. Sure,
there’s other coun­tries which have that, but the next thing you no­tice is that
all of­fi­cial signs and street signs are writ­ten in both Eng­lish and Gaelic,
which might as well be Klin­gon as far as you’re con­cerned. So once it sinks in
that you’re in Ire­land, you start look­ing for other things typ­i­cally
con­sid­ered to be “Irish”: Plenty of red­heads (check!), lots of pubs (check!),
first names you have nei­ther heard of nor know how to pro­nounce (check!) and
in gen­eral a very proud dis­play of Irish her­itage wher­ever you look.



Which leads us to the kind of sports the Irish seem to enjoy. En­ter­ing a pub,
you’d be fool­ish to think that the TV is most likely show­ing a local soc­cer
game: Green pitch, two teams, a round play­ing ball and a large au­di­ence. That
is until a player picks up the ball, tucks it under his arm and starts crash­ing
through lines of op­pos­ing play­ers. Cou­ple that with no body-ar­mor
what­so­ever and you’ve got Gaelic Foot­ball. That’s when you re­al­ize that
Ire­land is a proper is­land. An is­land where they know how to pre­serve their
cul­ture, sports being one of the most vis­i­ble dif­fer­en­tia­tors in a world
which has be­come fo­cused around a few major sport events. Sim­i­lar to Gaelic
Foot­ball, Hurl­ing is a sport which ap­pears fa­mil­iar at first sight (“oh,
this is like field hockey”) right up until the mo­ment some­body lifts the ball
waist-high and smashes it in a base­ball-like fash­ion with­out re­gard for the
twenty peo­ple around him on the field. If it looks too tough to be played
any­where else then it’s right up the alley of Irish sport-fans. The biggest
sta­dium in Ire­land (and one of the biggest in Eu­rope) is Croke Park, and they
use it only for Gaelic sports, which gives you an idea of the im­por­tance that
the Irish place in their own sports.




DUBLIN

In Dublin, we stayed just south of the city cen­tre, in a nice neigh­bor­hood
called “Balls­bridge”. This al­lowed us to walk into the city and, even more
im­por­tantly, to walk back home at night from wher­ever we ended up. On our
first day in Dublin walk­ing was all we did, and Dublin re­ally lends it­self to
be ex­plored on foot. It is a lit­tle con­fus­ing since the city does not have a
lot of vis­i­ble land­marks and some of neigh­bor­hoods look pretty sim­i­lar.
Even the parks can leave you dis­ori­ented since a few of them are
rec­tan­gu­lar, of sim­i­lar size and ap­pear­ance. At least that’s how I felt.



A def­i­nite high­light is Trin­ity Col­lege which sits in the mid­dle of the
city in a beau­ti­ful and quiet cam­pus. As soon as you step through its gates
you leave be­hind the busy streets around its perime­ter, which re­minded me of
the Har­vard cam­pus with its gates. Apart from that you can visit Dublin
cas­tle and some of the many churches and cathe­drals. For night-owls, Dublin is
a per­fect des­ti­na­tion since it boasts a very dense net­works of pubs and
other restau­rants and bars. The pubs are way more friendly than what passes as
a bar here in Ger­many in my opin­ion: Often you’ll have live music and most
peo­ple will eat there too, cre­at­ing a dif­fer­ent at­mos­phere than in a
place just built for get­ting drunk.



On the evenings of the con­fer­ence we’d usu­ally pick a nice spot to eat with a
few peo­ple, and then af­ter­wards some­body with some local knowl­edge would
lead us into one of the many fancy cock­tail bars that Dublin of­fers. In this
re­gard I was pos­i­tively sur­prised: There’s a good amount of re­ally nice
restau­rants and the night-life was nei­ther too shrill nor too tame. The
neigh­bor­hood of Tem­ple Bar re­ally stands out in this re­gard, and is a
must-see at night.



On our last day we had a few hours to kill be­fore our flight.
Un­sur­pris­ingly, we both were pretty beat from the past three days of
at­tend­ing the con­fer­ence, not keen on re­peat­ing our ad­ven­ture on foot
from day one. So we did as tourists do and hopped on one of the many
dou­ble-decker buses criss-cross­ing the city. This one took us through
down­town Dublin and out to some re­mote lo­ca­tions we wouldn’t have ex­plored
by foot: Guin­ness Brew­ery and Phoenix Park. I took me a while to admit it, but
I’ve come to ap­pre­ci­ate these buses as way to quickly get a sense of a city,
it’s neigh­bor­hoods and the dis­tances in gen­eral. Tak­ing a bus is some­thing
that you should prob­a­bly do on day one rather than at the end. Now I’m back
and glad not to have any­thing on my sched­ule for the next few months, but like
with every trip I fondly look back at the time spent on the road, ex­haust­ing
as it might have been.




SUM­MER 2016 (SO FAR)

May 27, 2016

It’s rain­ing right now, so what bet­ter time to write a small post about this
year’s sum­mer (so far). To be hon­est, this is mainly meant as a shame­less way
to show off some of my pho­tos.



Gren­zroute 2, near Kelmis, Bel­gium

We went hik­ing al­ready a cou­ple of times, mostly over well-known routes. I
played it safe and brought my EOS 60D and the Canon EFs 18-200 plus
po­lar­iz­ing fil­ter which have never let me down. I tend to shoot less pho­tos
than I did a few years ago. Maybe this is be­cause I have so many pho­tos of
land­scapes sit­ting on my hard drive, or maybe it’s be­cause I know that
tak­ing too many pic­tures will greatly de­crease my mo­ti­va­tion for edit­ing
them af­ter­wards. Still, I like to think that I am still im­prov­ing my skill
ever so slightly each time I pick up my cam­era. A while back I even de­vised a
Light­room pre­set which ap­prox­i­mates a Fuji-like color ren­di­tion for my
Canon RAW files which I have been using ever since.



We have been liv­ing in Aachen for al­most eleven years now. One the one hand
this feels like an eter­nity, but on the other hand it’s a nice feel­ing to be
that fa­mil­iar with the sur­round­ing coun­try side, vil­lages, cities,
peo­ple. Only last week I dis­cov­ered some cool map­ping web­sites which will
come in handy for hik­ing and bik­ing around here. I’ve come to ap­pre­ci­ate
the topo­graph­i­cal fea­tures of these maps when plan­ning some­what longer
bik­ing trips. It pays off to pay at­ten­tion to el­e­va­tion, oth­er­wise the
ride might end up shorter and more painful than an­tic­i­pated.



Ors­bach, Mullek­lenkes, Aachen

The Hike & Bike Map is an Open­StreetMap over­lay that in­cludes hik­ing and
bik­ing routes, and, more im­por­tantly, has topo­graph­i­cal data and ter­rain
shad­ing. The Open­TopoMap has a dif­fer­ent base layer, bet­ter con­trast and
more ac­cu­rate ren­der­ing. I guess it’s up to you which of those you pre­fer.
The map on Way­marked Trails also in­cludes the Lon­via routes, but has a
re­ally nice popout leg­end where you can hover over the routes in the view and
quickly see their out­line. This is a cool fea­ture since the hik­ing routes
around here are some­times densely packed which makes it hard to fol­low an
in­di­vid­ual route.




FU­JI­FILM - X100, X-E1, X-T1

Feb­ru­ary 24, 2016

Early in 2015 I was ready for some­thing new cam­era-wise, so I started look­ing
at Fu­ji­film X-se­ries in­ter­change­able lens cam­eras. The aim was not to
re­place my X100 (no cam­era could ever do that), but merely to see whether a
Fuji could po­ten­tially re­place my EOS 60D for trav­el­ling and na­ture
pho­tog­ra­phy.



Fu­ji­film X-E1, Fu­ji­film XF 35 1.4 | 1/150sec, f/2.0, ISO 400

After a long pe­riod of re­search and de­lib­er­a­tion, I started look­ing for
used cam­eras and quickly found a good offer: A sil­ver X-E1 with the great
Fu­ji­film XF 35mm f1.4. I de­cided on the X-E1 be­cause of price and some
neg­a­tive feed­back I had read about the X-Trans II sen­sor in later mod­els
(X-E2, X-T1). Later in 2015, I got a Fu­ji­film X-T1 on loan for a few months,
al­low­ing me to di­rectly com­pare the X-E1, X-T1, and X100. I don’t want to
talk too much about tech­ni­cal dif­fer­ences be­tween these sys­tems, just the
ones that I no­ticed and that im­pacted me.


X-E1: OVF, SHUT­TER, FOCUS, BUT­TONS

The first thing that im­me­di­ately struck me was the size of the X-E1: No
mat­ter which lens, it would never be as com­pact as the X100. The X100 fits
into my pocket for some of my jack­ets, the X-E1 al­most never does.

In terms of but­tons and menus, the X-E1 is a wel­come evo­lu­tion of the
some­what awk­ward UI that the X100 started out with. The X-T1 re­tains the same
menu lay­out. As far as but­tons and us­abil­ity is con­cerned, Fu­ji­film has
stayed true to its of­ten-praised lay­out, with ded­i­cated hard­ware but­tons
for im­por­tant things like shut­ter time, aper­ture, and ex­po­sure
com­pen­sa­tion. No suprises here, all of these cam­eras han­dle amaz­ing which
makes you want to take them with you wher­ever you go. My only gripe with the
X-T1 is that it does not have a threaded re­lease but­ton.



Fu­ji­film X-E1, Fu­ji­film XF 35 1.4 | 1/100sec, f/1.4, ISO 200

Nei­ther the X-E1 nor the X-T1 has the same hy­brid viewfinder of the X100, and
for me that’s OK. While the OVF might be nice for hard­core street
pho­tog­ra­phers, I’ve rarely used it on the X100, usu­ally pre­fer­ring the
ex­po­sure pre­view of the EVF. The EVF in the X-E1 is OK, but not re­ally any
bet­ter than the X100. This is dif­fer­ent with the X-T1: Its viewfinder will
knock your pants off! It’s huge, it’s bright, it ro­tates the dis­play, and it
ac­tu­ally al­lows you to man­ual-fo­cus stuff with­out guess­ing (also thanks
to var­i­ous fo­cus-as­sist fea­tures). This is the way I want to be using my
cam­eras going for­ward.

The shut­ter in the X-E1 is out­right loud when com­pared to the silent leaf
shut­ter of the X100. Hav­ing said that, it’s still not as loud as my DSLR. With
the X-T1, you can choose be­tween an equally-loud me­chan­i­cal shut­ter or a
com­pletely silent elec­tronic shut­ter. The elec­tronic shut­ter might cre­ate
some ghost­ing ef­fects and other ar­ti­facts under some cir­cum­stances, but in
gen­eral it works re­ally well. For me, being able to shoot in a church with not
sound at all is a great fea­ture in it­self. If you focus man­u­ally you won’t
even hear the chat­ter of the lens.



Both fotos: Fu­ji­film X-E1, Fu­ji­film XF 35 1.4

As far as auto-fo­cus is con­cerned there were no real sur­prises: I was
shoot­ing with the XF 35mm 1.4 most of the time, one of the slow­est AF lenses
from Fu­ji­film. Still, with the lat­est firmware up­grade, the X-T1 was able to
drive the focus with a sur­pris­ing pace. Cer­tainly quick enough for all my
needs. The X-E1 is no slouch ei­ther.


X-TRANS VS. BAYER

A lot has been said about all of these cam­eras be­fore, and es­pe­cially with
re­gards to very tech­ni­cal as­pects like AF speed, res­o­lu­tion, se­quen­tial
cap­ture speed, bat­tery life. For me, none of this mat­ters that much with
these kind of cam­eras, my EOS 60D is still able to beat the Fu­j­film cam­eras
in any of these as­pects (sadly). What the Fu­ji­film cam­eras have going for
them is the very nat­ural han­dling and their gor­geous color ren­di­tion.



Left: X-T1, Right: X-E1. Both: Fu­ji­film XF 35 1.4

What I didn’t re­ally re­al­ize until shoot­ing with the X-E1 and X-T1 was that
they were ac­tu­ally using the Fu­ji­film X-Trans sen­sors. Ba­si­cally, these
sen­sors are dif­fer­ent be­cause they have a dif­fer­ent color pat­tern than
tra­di­tional Bayer sen­sors, such as the one in the X100. Now, I re­ally don’t
care about the pat­tern of the sen­sor, even if it’s sup­posed to ren­der
col­ors even truer to what the human eye is able to per­ceive. I do care
how­ever if the sen­sor in­tro­duces prob­lems that haven’t been there be­fore.

There are a few things about the X-Trans sen­sors that I re­ally dis­like, and
it all comes down to con­scious de­ci­sions made by Fu­ji­film. First off, the
film em­u­la­tions ren­der dif­fer­ently, often with more con­trast and less
dy­namic range. The most ob­vi­ous dif­fer­ence to the X100 is that they no
longer ren­der as “warm” as my X100 did, which has ac­tu­ally been ob­served by
a num­ber of peo­ple who traded their brand-new X100S/T back in for an old X100.
But with some dif­fer­ent set­tings I can still work with the JPEGs that these
cam­eras drop.



Fu­ji­film X-T1, Fu­ji­film XF 18-55 | 1/210sec, f/5.6, ISO 400

The biggest flaw is cer­tainly the ren­der­ing of skin tones at high ISOs by
X-Trans II sen­sors. This is an issue that has been de­scribed in count­less
fo­rums threads as “waxy” or “plas­tic” skin tones. Sadly, pho­tograph­ing
peo­ple in dimly lit set­tings is some­thing I do quite often. The only rem­edy
here is to shoot RAW and de­velop in Light­room, which pre­sents the next
prob­lem: RAW sup­port for Fu­ji­film X-Trans files still sucks in Light­room.
The files often come out look­ing like an im­pres­sion­ist paint­ing (see:
“wa­ter­color ef­fect”), es­pe­cially with de­tails like fo­liage. Also I didn’t
want to start de­vel­op­ing RAW with these cam­eras when JPEG al­ways worked
fine for me. For now I shoot RAW+JPEG and usu­ally throw away the RAW files
until the ef­fect is re­ally no­tice­able.



Fu­ji­film X-T1, Fu­ji­film XF 35 1.4 | 1/30sec, f/1.4, ISO 1250


MAN­UAL LENSES

The cool thing about a mir­ror­less in­ter­change­able lens cam­era is that you
can get all sorts of neat man­ual-fo­cus lenses from the days of full-frame SLR
film pho­tog­ra­phy. There are plenty of cheap adapters avail­able. As far as
the lenses go, you should do some re­search about good ones. These do not come
dirt-cheap since every­one has re­al­ized the value of these old gems by now.



Fu­ji­film X-E1 with Canon nFD 50mm 1.4

I got my­self a Canon nFD 50mm 1.4 and a Canon nFD 24mm 2.8 from eBay.
To­gether, these lenses cost me about €120, a lot less than any ex­per­i­ment
with used Fu­ji­film lenses would have run me. To be fair, the 24mm is not a
very sharp lens. It has to be stopped down be­fore you want to use the pic­tures
it pro­duces. The 50mm 1.4 is a lot bet­ter: It has some is­sues wide open
(slight CAs and gen­eral sharp­ness), but it pro­duces beau­ti­ful im­ages and
still has a creamy bokeh when stopped down just slightly. While these are not
the lenses I use every day, they are fun to shoot with as they force you to slow
down and fur­ther com­ple­ment the whole rangefinder-like hands-on ex­pe­ri­ence
with these cam­eras. When using man­ual focus lenses, the X-T1 is clearly
su­pe­rior to the X-E1 be­cause of its huge EVF.



Fu­ji­film X-T1, Canon nFD 50 1.4 | 1/40sec, f/1.4, ISO 640


VER­DICT

In the past few months I had some time to dwell on the dif­fer­ences of these
cam­eras. I’m now sure that nei­ther of these cam­eras can re­place one or the
other un­equiv­o­cally. The X100 is unique be­cause of its size and per­fect
sen­sor/lens combo. Fur­ther­more, the 23mm focal length of the X100 is per­fect
in my opin­ion. It made me get a 24mm pan­cake lens for my EOS 60D and I was
even con­sid­er­ing the XF 23mm 1.4 for the X-E1, stu­pid as that may sound. The
X-E1 is the com­pro­mise of an X100 with in­ter­change­able lenses. The X-T1 is
the ab­solutely bonkers work­horse in the line-up: fast, pro­fes­sional, solid.
Still, it is not able to re­place a rangefinder-like cam­era such as the X-E1
for every­one. The fact that nei­ther cam­era can be rec­om­mended over the
other is re­mark­able. With DSLRs, the “larger” mod­els are al­ways prefer­able
save for price and maybe size.



Fu­ji­film X-E1, Canon nFD 24 2.8 | 1/140sec, f/x.x, ISO 400

For me, hav­ing three cam­eras (plus my DSLR) did not make it any eas­ier to
find a ver­dict about which of these cam­eras might be my main cam­era. When I
was in doubt I just took my X100 (mainly due to size), and it never
dis­ap­pointed me. My ad­vice for some­one who wants to enter the Fuji X sys­tem
would be this: Start out with one of the older mod­els. They can be had for fair
prices and in terms of image qual­ity they are still on the same level (or even
above) the newest mod­els. If you like the sys­tem but need things like a quick
AF, you can al­ways keep your lenses and trade your body for a newer model.

While this re­view might sound slightly neg­a­tive, this is just me being
pedan­tic. All of these is­sues I men­tioned are minor and quickly for­got­ten
once you start using the cam­eras. The image qual­ity and color re­pro­duc­tion
are amaz­ing, the lenses are tack-sharp and the cam­eras are a joy to shoot
with. I’m not yet sell­ing my EOS 60D, but I find it in­creas­ingly hard to pick
it up. The EVF and the man­ual han­dling re­ally im­proved my pho­tog­ra­phy and
fre­quently make the dif­fer­ence be­tween mind­less snap­ping and con­scious
pho­tog­ra­phy.

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