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Yes, it's true... I've redesigned my photoblog once again. Though I should have known it better, I used Wordpress as backend for the "old" photoblog. The template/theme was actually pretty fancy, but managing a photoblog with Wordpress is hell!

So I searched for a better solution. One requirement was the possibility to fetch photos from my flickr account. After some investigation I found a plugin for Pixelpost (which I used as photoblog already some time ago) which is able to import photos from flickr into it's local installation. So I gave it a try.

After some tweaking (the documentation of that plugin is horrible) I got it running and it actually worked pretty well. Anyways I was missing some stuff- e. g. the script did not import the exif information of my photos into the local database. Also geolocation data from flickr would be nice to display in the photoblog. So I sat down and added some functions to the addon, which "fixed" these issues. The script is now able to import and translate exif information from flickr, as well as it is able to grab geolocation data from flickr (if available).

As template I used "Pixelfy". I was very pleased with the basic layout. Some tweaks and adjustments to match my needs were done in very less time. I only had to do a couple of CSS changes, layout adjustments and also add the new parameters which I introduced with the flickr-import stuff.

To make the story short... my new photoblog is ready and I _really like it (I think I can stay with this at least a couple of month now ). Have a look at it and let me know if you like it or not: http://foto.grafie.net

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Today I noticed, that Lightroom doesn't work very well with the script I've written to geotag my photos. Though the GPS data is in the EXIF tags, Lightroom doesn't recognize them and (what's even worse) it's doesn't include them into an exported JPG. So you either have to re-run the script over the JPGs or life w/o GPS data in the JPGs.

This wasn't really satisfing for me, so I did a little reaseach on why LR doesn't handle my GPS data correctly. Instead of a real answer to that question, I found a plugin for Lightroom which basically does what my script does, but it's seamlessly integrated into Lightroom. The plugin works really great and has a couple of more features than my script could ever have. Therefor I won't do any further development on the script an use the plugin instead (the funny thing is, that in the background, the script is using perl as well ).

You can find the plugin here.

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As you know, I recently received my new iPhone. One cool feature of the iPhone is the built-in GPS module (I know a bunch of other mobile phone do have this feature as well). As I was already searching for a simple solution to geotag my photos w/o much efforts (in terms of money and work), I looked for a way to track my photo trips via the iPhone and later syncronize the GPS data with my photos.

After some searching I found a pretty cool iPhone app. It's name is GeoLogTag (you can grab it for 4$ from the AppStore). The App is as simple as cool. Simply enable it and it'll track your trip and when you are back at home you just press the "GPX" button and the App will transform into a simple webserver where you can grab your GPX files via WLAN.

Now as I found a way to track my trips via iPhone I still needed a tool to get the GPS data into my photos. There are a bunch of tools out there in the internet which will let you sync your GPS geolocation date with your images, but most of them are limited to JPGs. As I am shooting exclusivly in Canon's RAW format with my EOS 5Ds (CR2-Format) these tools won't work. I also found some commercial tools which support CR2-Format, but they are very costly and are running on MS Windows only. So also not the solution I was searching for.

So finally I decided to develop such a tool on my own. My language of choice was (of course) Perl. The good thing is, that there are already modules to parse GPX data as well as a module to process EXIF information. To make the story short... I just finished the first version of the tool. It's pretty simple but effective. You can specify one or more image filenames and a GPX data filename. The script will read out the creation date of the images and will compare it to the dates of the GPX datapoints. If a datapoint doesn't differ more than $X seconds from the images timestamp, the script will tage the longitude and latitude and will write this information into the EXIF metadata of the image. If you specify the "-k" parameter, it'll also add these data as "geo:" keywords.

As the script is written in Perl, it should easily run on any UNIX, MacOS and Windows. It has been written and tested on MacOS X. In first place I wrote this script to support Canon's CR2-Format, but the good thing is that Image::Exiftool supports a bunch of other formats as well, so it may be useful for non-Canon users as well. Feel free to download it and give it a try and let me know how you find it.

Requirements
- Date::Manip
- Log::Log4perl
- Image::ExifTool
- Geo::Gpx

To see the script in action, click here.
Download it here.

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Yesterday I tested the B/W feature of the EOS 5D Mk II. Works pretty nice- directly out of the box. The results of my first test footage are really impressive.

B/W Guitar from Winfried Neessen on Vimeo.

Please don't mind my bad playing... I was only doing a rough test

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Here are the guitar chords for Ella Larsson's "Lara's Song" (you probably know that song from the T-Mobile ad ("[...] such a peaceful, peaceful christmas")). I'm not sure if this is 100% correct, but at least this is how it sounds to me and how I play it.

(Tuning: Half-step down)

C* Csus2/B F C

C* Csus2/B F C

F C* G C

F G C* C*

* = Play the C as barré or with G on high E-string)

I suggest to use fingerpicking instead of stumming (just stumm the last note).

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Yay! The first snow in Cologne \o/

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Here is a brief example of how to quickly fetch the latest 5 photos in you photostream and put them into a quick and dirty HTML output. It is written in Perl and uses my Ipernity::API module

View it as plain text

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Wow, it has been quite a bit since I wrote s. th. here in my blog, but I was either busy with my work or just to lazy to write something. But today I decided to put an update... 'cause my favourite Photo Sharing Community has opened it's doors to external applications by releasing their public API. It's still beta and some features are missing, but though it's there and can be given a test drive.

I took the chance and developed a Perl module for the API. With this module you can easily access the API and process the data of your Ipernity account within your perl scripts. Some features might be not there yet or need to be tweaked a bit, but basic functionallity is given. You can download it here (I am still waiting for my CPAN account).

To install, simply download and extract the package, then run: "perl Makefile.PL && make && make test && make install". That's it!

Let me know what you think about it!

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(Download MP3)

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I tought it would be cool to make a "music video" with different voices/instruments all played by the one-man-band



Unfortunately my video cutting software messed up the format and it's not complete in sync, but well.. not too bad for a first try

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I'm a Ford Mustang!

You're an American classic -- fast, strong, and bold. You're not snobby or pretentious, but you have what it takes to give anyone a run for their money.

"Take the Which Sports Car Are You? quiz.

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Happy 9th Sysadmin Appreciation Day to all of you who share the burden of being just bit more clever with computers than the average sales guy

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Today I've been invited to join a press conference with Steve Lukather to take some photos as part of the Rock Legends Adventure 2008. It was a pretty cool event and I was able to take some nice (well...) "ok" shots. Even better, I was able to get a picture of him and I as well as a autograph "to Winni, thanks Steve" on one of the CDs of his new album. All in all really cool event.

Here is a shot that I think succeeded at least a bit:

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