Endlessly Curious

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LUMIX S 50mm F1.8

From Panasonic:

The LUMIX S 50mm F1.8 is a large-diameter standard lens is compatible with all L-mount cameras for maximum versatility, yet it has a compact size and weight. Ideal for a wide range of photography, it’s an excellent choice for video, suppressing breathing during focus, and realizing smooth exposure change by micro step control of the aperture, enabling high-quality video expression.

Official Website

Panasonic Lens Firmware Updates

Reviews:

YouTube:

LUMIX S 14-28mm f4-5.6 Macro

From Panasonic:

With an ultra-wide-angle zoom, the LUMIX S Series 14-28mm F4-5.6 ASPH. lens S-R1428 achieves high optical performance and stunning mobility fit to LUMIX S5 series cameras for both photo and video. With excellent video recording performance and beautiful bokeh, this lens features a common overall length and position of control parts to provide practical advantages in use.

Official Website

Reviews:

YouTube:

LUMIX S 20-60mm f3.5-5.6

From Panasonic:

The LUMIX S 20-60mm F3.5-5.6 is a compact, lightweight standard zoom lens in a L-mount/full-frame format. Covering from ultra wide 20mm to standard 60mm focal length, it supports versatile shooting opportunities from landscapes to snapshots. Wide view angle makes it easy to shoot indoors where room space is tight and minimum focusing distance of 5.9-inch supports close-up photography. L-MOUNT COMPATIBLITY: Designed for compatibility with LUMIX S-Series Full-Frame digital cameras.

SIGMA 24mm f2 DG DN Contemporary

From Sigma:

The all-new 24mm F2 DG DN Contemporary delivers exceptional edge-to-edge rendering power in an ultra-compact, all-metal body. This impressive, wide-angle, I series prime is now available for L-Mount and Sony E-mount systems.

The 24mm F2 DG DN | Contemporary premium compact prime is the latest prime lens to be added to Sigma’s growing I series range. It joins four existing I series lenses as well as the new 90mm F2.8 DG DN | Contemporary, offering superb optical performance, a bright F2 aperture, an all-metal build and a manual aperture ring. Designed from the ground up for mirrorless systems it feels perfectly-balanced on modern full-frame bodies, and boasts exceptional resolving power that can keep up with the latest ultra-high-resolution cameras.

SIGMA 28-70mm f2.8 DG DN Contemporary

From Sigma:

The Sigma 28-70mm F2.8 DG DN | Contemporary redefines the standard zoom for mirrorless cameras by combining outstanding optical performance, an F2.8 constant aperture, and a lightweight and compact body. The design of the 28-70mm F2.8 DG DN | Contemporary is based on the existing 24-70mm F2.8 DG DN | Art, but with a focal range starting at 28mm, making the lens body significantly smaller and lighter while maintaining superb optical performance. It is the smallest and lightest lens in its class. Remaining true to the Contemporary line’s core concept of maintaining an optimal balance between optical performance and lens size, this new optic delivers professional quality results in a body small enough to take on a casual outing. In addition to prioritizing portability, Sigma’s optical engineers introduced a new combination of coatings and structural elements that make this standard zoom well-equipped for use in a wide range of shooting environments. Likewise, the latest production and manufacturing techniques were employed to ensure exceptionally high build quality. The 28-70mm F2.8 DG DN | Contemporary introduces another fast, high-performance, large-aperture zoom lens to Sigma’s mirrorless line-up, offering a more compact alternative to the existing 24-70mm F2.8 DG DN | Art.*

LUMIX S PRO 16-35mm f4

From Panasonic:

The LUMIX S Pro 16-35mm F4 (s-r1635) is a versatile wide zoom lens that provides high resolution Images despite its compact, lightweight profile. It boasts high descriptive performance in both photo shooting and video recording. It features high power despite its small size, achieving a maximum 480 fps high-speed sensor drive. Fast, high-precision AF ensures you never miss a shot.

Official Website

Reviews:

YouTube:

LUMIX 24-105mm f4 Macro

From Panasonic:

The Panasonic LUMIX S-R24105 24-105mm F4 Macro Lens with O.I.S. is a versatile standard zoom lens covering wide-angle to medium-telephoto with high-descriptive performance across the entire zoom range. The LUMIX S Macro Lens enables 0.5x macro shooting with a minimum focus distance of 0.3m so you can photograph small subjects at very close distances.

Official Website

Panasonic Lens Firmware Updates

Reviews:

YouTube:

LUMIX S PRO 24-70mm f2.8

From Panasonic:

The LUMIX S Pro 24-70mm F2.8 is a large-aperture standard zoom lens that boasts high descriptive performance across the entire zoom range. The optical performance is remarkably high to clear stringent Leica standards. Ensuring versatile use for landscapes, snaps and portraits with its 24-70mm focal length, the lens features stunningly high resolution and high contrast at each focal length point.

Official Website

LUMIX S Pro 70-200mm f4 O.I.S.

From Panasonic:

The Panasonic LUMIX S PRO S-R70200 70-200mm F4 Telephoto lens with O.I.S. provides high-resolution, high-contrast images across the entire zoom range making it perfect for portraits to sports. The Panasonic LUMIX 5-Axis Dual I.S. (Image Stabilizer) system can be used with the LUMIX S PRO as a lens for a full-frame mirrorless camera system.

Official Website

LEICA Vario‑Elmarit‑SL 24‑90mm f/2.8‑4 ASPH

From Leica:

The Vario-Elmarit-SL 24–90 f/2.8–4 ASPH. is very fast and offers a large range of focal lengths. A close focusing limit of 0.3 meters at its wide-angle setting and a maximum reproduction ratio of 1:3.8 at the telephoto end of the zoom range provide fascinating opportunities. Its optical image stabilisation (OIS) compensates for up to 3.5 stops of camera shake.

Official Website

Reviews:

YouTube:

SIGMA 500mm F5.6 DG DN OS Sports

From Sigma:

Clear, sharp images and amazing mobility. A handy-size 500mm that offers a whole new shooting experience The Sigma 500mm F5.6 DG DN OS | Sports is an ultra-telephoto prime lens exclusively for mirrorless cameras that features a 500mm focal length with outstanding image quality in a remarkably compact and lightweight body. By incorporating multiple large-diameter, exclusive low-dispersion glass elements that are challenging to process, Sigma succeeded in significantly downsizing the lens construction without the use of diffractive optical elements. At the same time, the lens has achieved high resolving power that meets the expectations for a 500mm prime lens. The lens body, composed mainly of high-precision engineering plastic parts, has excellent build quality and weather resistance, including dust and splash resistant structure, despite its compact size. With its rich descriptive power and incredibly compact size for its focal length, the handy-size Sigma 500mm F5.6 DG DN OS | Sports offers a whole new photographic experience for wildlife, aviation, sports and other fast-action photographers.

Mirador de la Figuerassa

About one and a half hour drive from Barcelona, the Mirador de la Figuerassa is a panoramic viewpoint at more than 1500m height. It overlooks the “Pantà de la Baells”, a fresh water basin, and the small city of Berga on the other.

You also have a fantastic view of the Pyrenees snow-topped mountains in the background. The views are quite spectacular.

You can drive right up to the viewpoint by car, even though the last 9km are unpaved gravel road, but not too difficult to drive. Just be careful with Google Maps instructions, which will lead you astray. The access is easiest to find by driving towards the Restaurant de la Font Negra and then following up the signs or directions up to the Mirador.

Festival des Lanternes

Over the holidays, we had the chance to visit the “Festival des Lanternes” in Montaubaun, which is just about a 40m drive from Toulouse in the south of France.

The Lantern Festival is based on an old Chinese tradition and more than 2500 giant lanterns are installed in one of the main parks of the city from December 1st until February 5th.

It’s a beautiful and very creative installation for sure. Ranging from very classical imagery to including modern and French cultural references, such as this installation showing a dragon with a Rugby team or dozens of parachutes in the trees.

Mastodon

Goodbye, Elon

To the Metaverse – and beyond

Warner Brothers just premiered the latest trailer of the upcoming Christopher Nolan film Tenet – in Fortnite. This got a lot of attention in the media. As a marketing coup, it’s safe to say that it has worked spectacularly well given all this additional buzz and exposure.

Here, I am more interested in another angle: how much of that is a gimmick? Would any media outlet still report excitedly about a movie trailer being shown exclusively in a video game in 2-3y? Will watching an entire movie from within a video game become the norm? And how much of that means that we are all about to dive into the “Metaverse”?

"Some People"

A few months ago during the final season of Game of Thrones, I’ve read many article claiming how it would be “the last show we watch en masse together”, given how it is more common nowadays for people to being able to watch whatever they whenever they want. A kind of bitter-sweet sadness of no longer having these cultural high-points of “all of us are in this together”.

Turns out, there is something in which we are all together: Coronavirus. Ironically, it also has more people watching streaming TV than ever and, in defiance to “social distancing”, services like Netflix Party pop up that allow and encourage watching together.

Hugo with continuous integration

As I wrote earlier, I am using a static website generator called Hugo now. So far, I am really liking it. It’s super fast and since the generated site is, well, static it also loads super snappy fast in the browser. On the flip side though, it’s not as convenient per se to make updates to the site.

For starters, I just used FTP. So the workflow basically was:

  1. Update site locally
  2. Build site locally
  3. Transfer / synchronize newly built site via FTP to my hosting provider

It works but it has several disadvantages:

Commuters - a small photography project

This summer I bought a new full-frame camera (a Panasonic S1). Since then, my interest into photography and the desire to learn more have grown quite a bit. I started carrying a small camera with me at all times. This has gradually turned into a small street photography project I would call “Commuters”.

I’ve never really considered “doing street photography” - not the least because I didn’t really know what that’s supposed to mean. I still don’t if I am honest. But I figured it’d be ok to call “taking pictures of people and things in public places in the city” a sort of street photography.

An Introduction to Skill Ratings and Match-Making in Competitive Games

Any game that has a competitive element will face the problem of how to select the right opponent for a player. This does not only apply to video games. Chess, Tennis, Champions League etc. all apply varying methods of measuring the “skill” of a player or team and aim to provide a good match.

The goals can be different. In tennis, for example, it is more exciting to see a final match of Federer against Nadal rather than seeing them face off in the first round. In chess, a game of pure skill, you want to have a worthy opponent for an interesting match. The alternative would be a match in which you beat your opponent in 10 moves – or vice versa.

Five Simple Actions to Improve Creative Problem Solving in Teams or Groups

When it comes to idea generation, particularly in teams, we immediately think of brainstorming as the go-to technique to generate lots and lots of ideas. However, teams suck at this. Given that this is a very common activity in the games creation process, I thought it might be useful also for others to summarize what I’ve learned about it through research and using it.

One of My Favorite End-of-Year Lists

Tom Whitwell has been sharing his “52 things I learned” lists for a few years now on Medium. They are truly a treasure trough of surprising, intriguing, shocking, and funny facts and figures I enjoy a lot.

Some highlights from this year’s list:

Or:

You can also find the previous years’ lists from 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, and 2014 on Medium.

Stupid Problems

The beauty of a static website is course its simplicity: you don’t have to deal with SQL servers, rights-management yada yada.

The problem with resurrecting your old webhosting site is, of course, legacy.

In this particular case stupidity and legacy. I transferred the static generated Hugo page to my webspace and the designated /www directory, which was, supposedly, completely empty. The problem: the site wouldn’t serve. Unless I specifically addressed the sites index.html.

Let's get started!

I’ve been meaning to blog for a while. At the same time, I did not want to go back to Wordpress & Co and the whole set up and headache it involves with databases, overkill amount of plugins etc… I wanted something simple.

It quickly was clear that, for my needs, a static website generator would be best. And there are literally hundreds of projects out there.

Rule #1: When in doubt, start with the biggest (as in: most popular/used) tool.

About

Sporadically, I like to write about stuff like guitars, photography, games, or whatnot.

You can find more photos on Instagram and the occasional tweet about games, life, the universe, and nothing on Mastodon.

I also write the Delicious Digest Newsletter.