It’s been a while since I last wrote some lines here in my blog. Meanwhile we spent our four weeks of summer vacation up in northern Scotland. We visited the Islands of Orkney and the Northwest of Scotland. Especially the Isle of Skye gave us lots of wonderfull impressions on some walks along the Trotternish ridge.

As always, there’s a new section in the Gallery where you can find all the photos. You’re welcome to view and comment the pictures.

I uploaded the GPS tracks of the two trails on Skye to GPSies.com:

It’s been a while since we paddled the river Mulde between Leisnig and Grimma. It’s amazing what quiet and peacefull places you can see from the water.

…or back to the Dimage A2?

This is a picture from my 2006 Brittany series. The boats where lying beautifull in the evening sun at low tide, right behind our appartment.

Ever since I was using the Nikon D80, I started using the RAW format. Finally with the appearance of Lightroom, I’m shooting RAW exclusively. Today I found some of these MRW files that I took with the Minolta Dimage A2. I wasn’t quite able to do something with them by that time. But now I was interested in the potential that’s in there. I’m quite impressed about the color correction of the APO lens. Also the 12bit color depth contains a lot of reserve for highlights and shades. Even noise is well controllable, at least with ISO 100. A different thing is resolution. I never really understood the discussions about the lens beeing not able to serve the new 8 MPixel chip; now I can see it.

After all, I do not regret to have switched to the D80. But it’s good to know that there would have been some potential with the Dimage A2 too.

For a better photo browsing experience, I recomend everybody using the new Firefox 3 to enable color management. And here’s how to do it:

- type ‘about:config’ into the adress bar
- filter for gfx.color
- change ‘gfx.color_management.enabled’ to true (just double click on the entry)
- restart Firefox

Enjoy viewing pictures now with there real colors. Don’t forget to calibrate your monitor!

There’s a landscape north of Dresden, where coal mining is the formative element. At the Findlingspark Nochten they’re trying to rebuilt some natural environment. But the eyecatcher for the photographer is still the big coal power plant nearby.
I did not use any filter for this exposure. The fancy polarizer effect is completely built up in Lightroom.