Schonhose

Just the other day I had a lively discussion with a friend of mine about photography. One of the points we discussed is the RAW vs JPEG issue, which is haunting so many people out there. Well, here is my take on the whole RAW vs JPEG issue.

I shoot RAW, it is an essential part of my preprocessing. At the early stages I shot primarily JPEG, but I found I was limited in my preprocessing using Adobe Photoshop. With the arrival of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom working with RAW files became so much easier and allows me to really push it to the limit in terms of preprocessing. Learn more about RAW @ Wikipedia.

Let me make it clear, I’m not against JPEG. If you’re the type of guy/girl that only wants to make nice pictures and do not care about preprocessing then JPEG is definitely the way to go. However, in my humble opinion (and I’m sure people will hate me for saying this): don’t use a fancy DSLR just to shoot JPEGs. It will be like using a Ferrari to do grocery shopping at the store just around the corner. Sure, it works (depending on the amount of groceries, there isn’t much space left in a Ferrari) but you’re not using the car to its full potential.

One of the major arguments of my friend to not use RAW is the space it occupies. This a non-argument, prices of both storage cards and hard drives are really low. Space is not an issue anymore. Another argument he had is more or less valid. Processing RAW, especially when you have a lot, it time consuming and the effects are not always eminent.

My feeling and experience is that shooting RAW puts lots more control at your fingertips than using JPEG. Instead of letting the camera decide what is good, you can make you’re own decisions. Perhaps you don’t know this, but if you use JPEG your camera makes some predefined decisions about boosting colors and other preprocessing steps and save the image in a lossy compression file format. Besides loosing perhaps valuable information you need if you do want to edit your image, you have to live with what the camera thinks is right. And to be honest, on average the camera will get it right. But there are some situations the law of averages does not work out well.

But to each his own, I’ll just continue shooting RAW and by doing so, spend a considerably amount of time doing preprocessing. It is, after all, my choice.

Back in the days I loved to spin the records at the club. My style was mostly vocal trance or, depending on my mood, German based hardstyle. I haven’t mixed live in a long time and I was wondering if I could still do it. Today, being a day off, would be a nice day to try to find out just how much my skills have diminished.

Obviously I haven’t kept my music collection up to date, so I was stuck playing some old records. Those songs brought back a lot of memories and most of them where fun. However, there was one song which brought back some more ‘painful’ memories, although the event in question could have happened to anyone.

While mixing in a record during a set at the club one of the needles of my decks broke. Normally this wouldn’t be much of a problem, while playing vinyl I keep at least one compact-disc ready when this happens. Not this time. And to make things worst, Menthal Theo was taping his show “Menthal Theo on the road” for the musicstation TMF. At least he was quick to help fill the silence by using the audience. What did he do? Well, perhaps this clip on YouTube provides some insight. Needless to say I provided the beats as quickly as I could.

Afterwards Theo, who spend some time on the decks himself, told me not to worry about it. It could have happened to him as well. And to be honest, if I didn’t break it he probably would have. So I guess I saved him.

Today I finished two mixes of about 2 hours, one containing the more vocal trance and the other more hardstyle. At least I got something to fill my iPod with when I pick up running again.

One of the things I really wanted to add to my basketball statistics program was the possibility to export statistics for a game to a PDF file. After the initial thought a long search on the internet was needed to find a good class that can generate PDF files.

Nearly every class I have tried have some severe or minor flaws in the generated file. After much searching and trail & error I decided to stick with mPDF,based on FPDF, HTML2FPDF, and UFPDF, with a number of enhancements.

Although several CSS tweaks, for example the use of background images in tables, aren’t supported yet, this was the only class that actually made something readable from the HTML output I presented it with. If you’re interested in seeing an example of the output, you can find it here (700kB).