Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Zurich Crane


(click to enlarge)

Zurich over lunch time with a 10 stop natural density filter and the Olympus OM 50mm f/2.0 Macro and Sony A7. This one is with 30 sec exposure time. I also made one with 1 and 2 minutes, however it seems there are some artefacts coming up in the resulting picture. It looked like maybe (with a second 2 stop filter on top of it) there were some reflections between the two filters, but it was some rectangular imprint, so it must be something like a light leak on the mount or some reflections through the lens adapter, don't know yet, but for 30 sec and one filter it seems to be OK.

Otherwise zero post processing or cropping, the black and white is also straight out of the camera.

Oh yeah, and what do you think of the crane? Art?

Oh, actually this is a macro lens, which is very practical in itself with f/2.0, which can be just as well used as a normal lens. Actually I am surprised, it is one of my favourite lenses, thought I haven't had any picture with it published on the blog yet. And even this time it is no close up photo - for which I like to use this lens very much.

Sunday, July 06, 2014

Stop Fracking

In Germany!

Right now there is a campaign on Campact.de (454.367 votes so far) against a new law planned to allow Fracking in Germany in order to get to the shale gas.

I don't know much about the technology, but here is a longer Youtube video explaining a bit and the experience they have with it in the USA: WARNING Fracking An Inconvenient Truth



Personally I have no idea about chemical stuff and so, but it doesn't appear very wise to me to pump a chemical cocktail deep in the ground with the potential to poison our ground water for some limited gain…

Here is a Spiegel article about the law they plan:

Riskante Gasförderung: Gabriel plant Fracking unter Auflagen

Studien gehen davon aus, dass der deutsche Gasbedarf mit den Vorkommen über zehn Jahre lang gedeckt werden könnte. Allerdings gelten 14 Prozent der Fläche als Wasserschutzgebiete, somit ist das Förderpotenzial weit geringer. Im Mai 2013 war ein erster Anlauf für ein Gesetz gescheitert, unter anderem weil die CDU in Baden-Württemberg zu große Risiken für das Gebiet rund um den Bodensee befürchtete.
Die Grünen kritisierten Gabriels Vorhaben und zogen in Zweifel, dass dabei wirklich Umweltbedenken berücksichtigt werden. "Laut dem Schreiben von Gabriel soll Fracking in Zukunft auf 86 Prozent der Landesfläche erlaubt werden, damit handelt es sich um ein Fracking-Ermöglichungsgesetz"

As one commenter on the page remarked, basically Germany is willing to mess up its underground water, for a 10 year supply of gas! Maybe can rally up everyone via social media to prevent this madness in Germany.