Auswanderer Quatsch

What a trip! Nürnberg – Frankfürt – Ljubljana (Slovenia) – Skopje (Macedonia) – Ohrid and back in 4 days. That was exhausting, but so worth it. Rolyat, thanks for organizing everything.

The goal of the trip was two lectures to the second year Software Engineering class of the University of Information Science and Technology in Ohrid (Republic of Macedonia) and of course to say hi to Rolyat and his family in their new home :] ) Thanks to all the students of the UIST and the few professional devs that attended the lectures for their attention and questions. I hope they got (or will get after some digestion) as much from it as I did.

The subjects of the lectures were “writing code for a living” and “living for writing code”, respectively two joint visions of the same subject: writing code professionnaly ; based on my short experience. The first presentation was dedicated to the way we organize ourselves in order to be efficient in creating software. It touched the ideas of plan driven approach, agility and empirical processes with an example of a mini Scrum project. The second presentation was about the practices that developers use to increase the quality of the code they produce and what each programmer can bring to a team / how he can prepare himself to the task. I described the practices of XP (eXperience Programming) and the idea of Software Craftsmanship as exposed by Uncle Bob.

On a totally different topic, it was actually my first trip that far in the Balkans and I come back from it the head full of wonderful images of astonishing landscapes, various curiosities and fantastic meetings. But I keep all this for a following article.

Update (2011.04.27): here’s the link to the first presentation, and here’s the link to the second one. Here’s also the link to the first half of the first presentation.

We reached +10°C this afternoon, which is 20° more than when I came back in Germany after the Xmas break. Still it is so sudden that the snow did not have time to properly melt… yet…

Here we go again with another strange night shot from my now very-well-known bus stop. I had 10 minutes to spare, so I did some manual shooting again. This one was not really 10 minutes long but a 25 seconds exposure at f/8.0.

I particularly like the red lines going out on the right side, it somehow breaks the monotony/parallelism of the whole picture…

Yeah… not much more to say…

Have you already tried to play with motion blur? You sure know there are two very different types of blur in photography:

• “Motion Blur”, coming from a subject moving too fast in regard of the chosen exposure time,
• “Shake”, coming from the photographer moving while holding the camera.

The motion blur will result in a sharp background with some blurry forms where your subject used to be. Beside messing up with scores of underexposed party pictures, this is an effect that can be really interesting for photographers. The shake blur on the other hand is way more annoying because it will mess with the picture as a whole. One way to disminish this unwanted effect is to use a tripod or stabilized lenses / onboard chips that will reduce the unwanted shake and help to some extend prevent this type of blur.

Both types of blur are of course deeply linked to the exposure time and the aperture you will use. The longer the exposure, the more likely you are to get something blurred on your picture. And since the smaller aperture you use, the longer you are to expose…

Today, I’d like to tell you about an experiment I did playing with both blurs at the same time called “filé” in French (if anyone can point out the English name for that… don’t hesitate).

Try taking a picture while quickly moving your camera horizontally ; what you will get is a blured picture displaying some horizontal lines. Now imagine what it would look like if you had a static sharp object in the foreground… yes, the object would appear to be moving, that’s the neat effect of the “filé”.

To achieve this, you must first tweak your camera to expose quite a long time (0.5 -> 1.5s in my tests). Then simply point your camera at the moving object you want to capture and move with it. The whole idea is to take a picture of this moving object while making it appear static to the camera. You achieve this by moving the camera at the same time so that the object stays exactly at the same place (for your camera’s chip) during the whole exposure.

I took something like 50 tram pictures this week… and all the pictures you can see below are the ones that are not totally screwed-up… one tip though; pick yourself an object that come back frequently… not every 5 min like a tram >_<

… so what do you think? Have you already played with this effect? What would you advise in this case?