Das Prager Ensemble Cellegium 1704 auf YouTube

Die Videos

Händel Messias

Some CDs I heard on Spotify

Foobar2000 finally looking good – Thanks to the DarkOne v3.0 Theme

Foobar2000 finally looking good – ScreenHunter_10 Oct. 20 20.08, originally uploaded by Andreas Helke.

A few months after starting to use the powerful but difficult to master foobar music player I finally found a functional, good looking and actually working theme for this program.

The complete project is currently a bit of a mess with a lot of no longer maintained and often buggy or not at all working extra components.

The program is highly extensible. So a lot off people tried theie luck for a while with developing something for foobar and the eventually loosing interest or no longer having the time to maintain their creation.

High End Audio misinformation

High End Audio misinformation, originally uploaded by Andreas Helke.

My old suspicion that much what the high end journals and manufacturers claim has no basis in fact has now been confirmed again. theaudiocritic.com/back_issues/The_Audio_Critic_16_r.pdf

As soon as you start properly designed listening test the majority of differences dissapear and what you can still hear when testing electronics components is almost always caused by using faulty construction principles in high end audio devices. Before I finally figured this out I payed way too much for electronics that produce the same sound as well designed but much cheaper components would do.

Wasted money.

Image stabilizer hard at work., originally uploaded by Andreas Helke.

When I bought this device (the 2000€ Marantz CD-16) I was still gullible enough to believe the nonsense that almost all audio journalists write in their journals.

Most of the time they incorrectly asses the importance of the technical claims by the manufacturers.

And what they write as their hearing test is 100% fiction. If they did their hearing tests correctly they too would find out that all correctly designed CD players sound the same regardless of their price and construction efforts. This is still one of the most well kept secrets today despite the chance to figure out the truth by either looking for credible internet journalism or reading the technical papers of the professional audio societies.

I am checking out spotify

Not my favorite music. Just the default example Spotify offers.

Go game

20120619-IMG_6272, originally uploaded by Andreas Helke.

A game with very simple rules but complicated strategy and tactics if you play on a big board. The normal board is 19×19 but a 9×9 board is popular too.

Flickr sets

Angus Clyne Explore Top 10 set slideshow.

The meeting central.

I´d like to hear from old friends and associates again. During my almost life long depressive phase I was pretty much incapable to keep contacts long term or find new friends. I was very passive and if I sat in a group I spend my time listenening to the other peoples conversations and finding them quite uninteresting.

The depression is now in treatment and turned out to be a manic depressive disorder. The Citralopram caused my first full blown manic state.

I am now pretty good to correctly diagnose my mental state. I found a lot of objective indicators. Particularly my access patterns in the Stories Online Database, level of argumentativeness, my behaviour when playing tennis and my sleep patterns.

Tennis playing as diagnostic tool: If I am depressed I don´t care much about the ball. If I am in a manic or hypomanic state I am distracted and don´t even notice that I need to run. But tennis still works a bit better than in a depressive state. Tennis works as it should only when I am in a normal phase.

Now afer one manic and one hypomanic state I have a lot of ideas of procedures/processes

Redesign

I finally figured out blogging in general and the wordpress blogs in particular. So I am redesigning the structure of my blogging. This blog will likely transform into Andreas Helke blogging central and the flickr galleries that so far have been the most important content will have to move to a new page or an entirely new blog.

popular and dark

popular and dark, originally uploaded by Andreas Helke.

Today we have an unusual look for this popular image

Sunny Side Up

Sunny Side Up, originally uploaded by code poet.

The less helpful parts of the flickr user interface

flickr 75 tags limit screenshot, originally uploaded by Andreas Helke.

flickr 75 tags limit screenshot

I have started to document the flickr user interface quirks I encounter in screenshots. Not telling me which ones of my 12051 photos stayed untagged is not exactly helpful.

St. Petersburg – 28.0-135.0 mm _ 28 mm _ _ 1-320 Sek. bei f – 11 _ ISO 200 _ Canon EOS 350D DIGITAL _ 28. Juli 2006 _ IMG_6283.jpg

St. Petersburg – 28.0-135.0 mm _ 28 mm _ _ 1-320 Sek. bei f – 11 _ ISO 200 _ Canon EOS 350D DIGITAL _ 28. Juli 2006 _ IMG_6283.jpg, originally uploaded by Andreas Helke.

The performance of the Canon 28-135 IS lens is excellent at the 28mm used here but not really good at the longer focal lengths and best avoided at 35 mm for apertures wider than f11.

I needed an embeddable version of this image outside of the control of my lighroom library. My usual solution for this is to do a minor edit in picnik and save the result as a new file that hopefully never gets modified again.

Canon 35 f2 on crop cameras

Canon 35 f2 on crop cameras, a gallery on Flickr.

I consider buying the 35 f2 to replace my 50 f1.8 that broke into 2 parts during a bicycle accident.

So now I have to try figure out if I can live with the bokeh of that lens,

Starting at f8 this lens works as well as the 35 f1.4L. From f2 to f4 the lens has quite extreme corner softness if used on full frame. At f2 and f2.8 I get the worst corners I rember to have seen on the the-digital-picture.com

Tags: AndreasHelkeFlickrGallery Canon equipment test lens example Canon35f2 finished

AnnaTheodora_MG_8755

AnnaTheodora_MG_8755, originally uploaded by Andreas Helke.

This is the poorly looking image that triggered the investigation described in my previous blog contribution. I noticed its a very small image. Just 89 kb for an 450 pixel image. Maybe the JPG quality setting was not good enough to preserve the image quality.

AnnaTheodora Londrina 500 pixel shown in 400 pixel size followed by a 400 pixel version downsized properly and in high quality by lightroom

AnnaTheodora Londrina 450 pixel, originally uploaded by Andreas Helke.

This is now the resizing test. I used size and width attributes to force the browser to show the 2nd of the 3 images I show smaller than it actually is.

This Photo I borrowed from Anna Theodoras blog where I noticed a poor image quality. Apparently she showed a 500 pixel image at 400 pixel size in her blog layout. Or was it a 450 pixel image? I really got confused about this for a while.

A few years ago some browsers like firefox still used incredibly primitive resizing algorithms that seriously degraded the image quality of images they had to show smaller than the actual image size. I thought this resizing was the reason for the poor look of the embeded image. But when I downloaded a copy and started to play around with it of flickr and my own blog and did resizing in lightroom too. I found that today there is no longer a visible quality difference between resizing in the browser and in lightroom.

Eventually I solved this baffling riddle. Anna uses a poor quality 450 pixel version of the image as the embedded image on her blog. If you click on the image it loads a high quality 500 pixel version of the same image and the image suddenly looks good.

And now the links:
Anna Theodoras blog

The original poor quality embedded image.

Update: I have the impression that the second image that is shown resized by the browser looks minimally worse than the one resized by lightroom. But I am not sure if this effect is real or if I am imagining things.

People with Canon EF 100mm f2.8L IS USM Macro

People with Canon EF 100mm f2.8L IS USM Macro, a gallery on Flickr.

The 100L is an excellent portrait lens too. And a full frame camera with the 100L behaves almost exactly the same as a crop camera with a 50 f.18 lens would.

You get almost the same framing and the DOF on full frame at f2.8 is very similar what you would get with crop camera at f1.8.

Objects with Canon EF 100mm f2.8L IS USM Macro

Objects with Canon EF 100mm f2.8L IS USM Macro, a gallery on Flickr.

I have been waiting forever for a prime lens with image stabilizer. The 100L is the first and only one except for Canons super tele lenses.

Tags: AndreasHelkeFlickrGallery flickr gallery Canon equipment testing lens CanonEF100mmf/2.8LISUSMMacro object macro Canon equipment test example blogged

Spiders and Insects with Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 L IS USM Macro

Spiders and Insects with Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 L IS USM Macro, a gallery on Flickr.

A showcase for the new Canon macro lens

Sepia toning created with the Picnik editor

Sepia toning created with the Picnik editor, a gallery on Flickr.

Now the gallery is finished.

The images in this gallery where all sepia toned by using the Sepia tool in Pinic with default color but faded 85% to get a very light sepia toning only.

I use the tag SepiaP85 to tag all images produced by this sepia toning method.

Tags: AndreasHelkeFlickrGallery sepia

Sepia toning created with the Picnik editor

Sepia toning created with the Picnik editor, a gallery on Flickr.

The images in this gallery where all sepia toned by using the Sepia tool in Pinic with default color but faded 85% to get a very light sepia toning only.

Tags: AndreasHelkeFlickrGallery sepia

A gallery created with my own photos in another flickr account.

Nature with Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 L IS USM Macro

Nature with Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 L IS USM Macro, a gallery on Flickr.

I have been waiting forever for a prime lens with image stabilizer. The 100L is the first and only one except for Canons super tele lenses.

I started this gallery when the lens was new and later replaced some of the original photos with more interesting newer ones

Tags: AndreasHelkeFlickrGallery flickr gallery Canon equipment testing lens CanonEF100mmf/2.8LISUSMMacro animal nature flower macro Canon equipment test example blogged

Thüringen: Eine Kirche in Suhl

Thüringen: Eine Kirche in Suhl, originally uploaded by Andreas Helke.

Notenblatt – musical notes girls and hearts combined into one special gallery

Notenblatt – musical notes girls and hearts combined into one special gallery, a gallery on Flickr.

It might be difficult to continue this gallery beyond the 3 images I already have. If you have or know of a suitable picture I´d love to hear about it.

Tags: AndreasHelkeFlickrGallery WorkInProgress unfinished people notes heart girl music blogged