Wednesday, December 23, 2015

Christmas Greetings

I wish you all a happy festive season and Merry Christmas!

Frohe Weihnachten - Merry Christmas - Joyeux Noël - Καλά Χριστούγεννα - Buone Feste Natalizie - Feliz Navidad - Feliz Natal - Zalig Kerstfeest - God Jul - Wesołych Świąt Bożego Narodzenia - Sarbatori vesele - prazddnikom Rozhdestva is Novim Godom - Prejeme Vam Vesele Vanoce a stastny Novy Rok - Kellemes karácsonyi ünnepeket kívánok nektek - Glædelig Jul


Christmas Time in Leipzig

Sunday, December 06, 2015

Saturday, November 21, 2015

In the Autumn Forest

Walking in an autumn forest in the low mountains of the Westerwald / Germany.

In the Autumn Forest by Achim Reeh on 500px.com

Sunday, November 15, 2015

Tuesday, September 29, 2015

Sun and Moon Calculator: The Photographer's Ephemeris

When you are planning outdoor photography in natural light, e.g. landscape and urban sceneries, a sun and moon calculator is a helpful tool.

I found an interesting application "The Photographer's Ephemeris" which can show sun and moon positions on a Google map and that provides also information about sunrise and sunset, moonrise and moonset and the begin and ending of the dawn.


The basic usage is fairly easy. One chooses a place, sets a date and with the slider at the bottom one can adjust the time, so that the lines for the current sun and moon positions are adjusted properly. In the example above the pin is located on an outlook point in the Rhine gorge and date and time are choosen that the sun goes down over the Castle on the other Rhine bank.

The application comes in three flavors: a desktop browser web app, an Android and an iOS mobile app. Here are links for

Saturday, February 07, 2015

IFTTT - If this than that

Recently I saw an interesting service called IFTTT, which allows to connect a lot of different services in the web with each other or with your smartphone. A simple example is automated crossposting of photos to different photo platforms.

IFTTT (pronounced like "gift" without the “g”) allows you to create simple rules called recipes, that consist of a trigger condition (i.e. 'if this') and an action which is executed, when the trigger fires (i.e. 'than that').

The services that can be integrated by IFTTT are called channels and they offer triggers and / or actions. I.e. the Flickr channel allows triggers like

  • Every time you upload a new public photo to your photo stream, then ...
  • Every time you favorite a public photo, then ...

The action that can be executed on this channel is:

  • Upload a public photo to Flickr

The triggers and actions can also have parameters that are called fields. The action fields can be filled with values of the corresponding trigger fields or with own data. The recipes can be created with an easy to use web interface, see below the example of crossposting Instagram to Flickr:

The action fields in the example are mostly set from the Instagram post.


There are currently over 160 different channels implemented by IFTTT. Some interesting channels for photographers are
  • Instagram, Flickr, 500px, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Blogger, Wordpress 
  • but also storage providers like Dropbox, Google Drive or Onedrive.
BTW: There are also channels available to control your smart home, e.g. your Philips connected bulbs. So it is easy to create funny recipes like
“Every time one of my photos becomes popular on 500px, blink the lights at home”.
As a conclusion IFTTT seems to me an interesting service and I will follow how it further evolves.