Tag: Microsoft

Small handsets with great cameras …

 

A year or two ago I got hold of the Red EPIC, a professional camera that is able to shoot in 4K resolution. It was part of the project related to my bachelor thesis. The EPIC is rather affordable, starting at $29,000.00 and going beyond $50,000.00, at least compared with other cameras used in the film industry. Since then I had the dream to make a short film, something with little speech and plot but with stunning pictures. But an EPIC or any camera in the film industry is everything but mobile. The battery literally lasts just 30 minutes and with well beyond 2 kg (if fully equipped) it is a quite heavy device. The price tag for the camera alone settled the matter for me anyway.

Today I saw footage shot by National Geographic photographer Stephen Alvarez with a Lumia 930 in 4K and I got awed again. To think I could just pull out my lightweight phone and make such great footage excited me. The footage looks so great, it made me want to have a phone like that. Though I can wait a little. Anyhow for that to happen the phone would need a SD-card with at least 64GB better yet 128GB and a high writing speed else the internal storage would be full in no time. Currently, the Lumia 930 doesn’t support an external SD-Card but I trust that microsoft will think of that in the future.

With this dream I think once more that a dream doesn’t die just because you haven’t dreamed it a long time. It can be anytime that it awakes. I really like my dreams. I like how they can carry me. I hope one day on this blog I’ll be writing about the short film project when it is in the making.

And here is the aforementioned footage

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAsKY2BKumY

About the long search for a digital drawing tool …

… and the reason why my gravatar is black and white…

Since I bought my first tablet, a Surface Pro 2 which came with a stylus I was excited to use it as a drawing tool. I thought that’s the first thing you would want to do, at least if you are fond of sketching, right? That was me, the guy who is fond of sketching and had a tablet + stylus.

So one of the first things I did was going to the app store, and what I found were two drawing / sketching apps, I guess, first freshpaint and second sketchbook express. I tried the first one and couldn’t achieve anything pleasant looking. I think that was because it’s more targeted at painting as opposed to sketching. And right now I am more into sketching and don’t find my talent in painting and also I didn’t like the overemphasis of the look and feel of real paper, pen and paint. Then I tried the second one and found it to be of some use. It was clearly more tailored for the purpose of sketching. But then again since it was an express version I can’t really say it was tailored at all. Yes, it did a decent job and that for free but it was a bit buggy and lagged some/many features that are crucial, at least to me. But for a year or so I did stick with it and made some sketches but nothing serious.

Meanwhile I looked out for the possibility of buying a license of a previous photoshop version because I didn’t want to pay some 12 € a month for a Creative Cloud subscription especially since I didn’t know how often I would come to sketch. It just didn’t feel right. I also tried Gimp on my main PC for as long as a year or so but I just never came along with it and didn’t thought of it as a sketching tool to try on the Surface. I think there are people who swear on Gimp … I’m not one of them. Otherwise Gimp is a good thing: It is free and open source, and to have alternatives is mostly always a good thing. But my desire to make sketchings on a PC/ tablet dwindled more and more.

Continue reading About the long search for a digital drawing tool …

A story of babel …

As I started to write blackLogger a couple of days ago I asked myself which language would be best suited for writing to a rather large world full of awesome people that I wanted to reach or rather making a part of me available to. But have no fear this isn’t going to be all about me. I think it really won’t be more than a little bit about me and a whole lot more about all kinds of other interesting stuff. Anyhow. Back to topic. Very early I decided to use English as my language of choice but I wondered if that would induce problems with German readers. I did consider writing both parts but with the limited ways provided by wortpress.com to customize your blog (or any entry) I think the result only would be a rather long and ugly post. I tried to figure out a better way to bring it all to you in English and German … but I failed to come up with something good … for now.

Continue reading A story of babel …