While at the Farewell party yesterday, I documented some of the little details of kindergarten, before it's over.

Farewell party at the kindergarten today. Only one more week! 😱

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Immich update: Processing of the files finished sometime today. The facial recognition is mixing up my daughters quite a bit, which I have to fix manually, I guess. I activated the backup feature on my phone and it is currently syncing photos. Halfway through it has only found a handful of screenshots that for whatever reason, weren't part of the backup I used for the inital import.

Football match at the kindergarten. Since Suvi is not interested in football at all (I can't blame her), she and her friend were given the role of first aiders – with deployment during the match. (The ref didn't seem that interested either and was climbing the tree at some point. 🤷‍♂️)

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Homeserver/Immich update: The import was done after around 15 hours (give or take), but the processing (creating thumbnails, face recognition) is actually still ongoing! Currently still 35k+ images in the queue for OCR and almost 1k videos are waiting to be transcoded.

DIY kite.

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Made some progress with the homeserver today. Started the import of my iCloud library into Immich. This will take at least half a day – if not longer. I'll probably write a post about my setup, once it is done.

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Dedicated photography time with Daniel is always a delight. We took a longer drive this time to check out Hasper Dam. The surroundings were not super photogenic, or at least I wasn't super inspired. I still enjoyed being out with my friend – which is the main point of these trips anyway. We didn't get any (meaningful amount of) rain, although it looks like it would start pouring down any second in the images. Daniel made a Polaroid, which I am sure he will post today. Update: Here it is!

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Went into the city to buy swimsuits for the kids.

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In completely unrelated news I finally got started on turning my old 2013 MBP (which has suffered a broken screen) into a homeserver. Very minimal (headless) setup. Installed Immich as the first service on it. Still need to figure out how to best import all the iCloud photos. Tomorrow: Setting up remote access. It has been fun so far! :)

Next week is the farewell party at the kindergarten. 😢 How did this happen so fast?

Early morning Gruga walk.

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Playing school. Almost time for the real deal!

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Didn't get anywhere with Darktable with this one. I wasn't getting any detail in her hair without using a mask, which I really don't want to bother with at all. My post processing usually takes a couple of seconds – highlights, shadows, whites, blacks – done. Couldn't be bothered today, so Lightroom this was.

Sisters. ❤️

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Processed the above image using darktable. I actually worked on the image in Lightroom first and used that as a reference trying to match the adjustments in darktable. There is a shit ton of modules you can lose yourself in. (The Contrast Equalizer looks really powerful!) I guess I'll try to get down the basics and see how natural it feels at the end of the week.

A scraped knee and – finally – a little bit of rain.

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Went swimming in the Ruhr river yesterday. My first time! The neighbors showed us a great spot with very slow current. I was a bit surprised my kids actually went into the water with me (they are a bit on the squeamish side when it comes to water and whatever could be living in there), but they really enjoyed it. Saw these clouds from our spot. They signaled some relief from the heat, but the storm was too far east to hit us. We should get some lower temperatures tomorrow though. 🤞

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I removed the comment form and reverted to the previous version of plain text links. I liked the idea of the form but I think it is confusing and less people used it compared to the regular links. Also shamelessly copied the copy-URL-for-webmention from Jasper's site.

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The only way to live in this heat is with your feet in (very) cold water. Admittedly, the pool used to feel much larger when the kids were much smaller, but it still gets the job done. Thank God this new garden has a tap, so filling it up was a lot easier. Stay hydrated people!

I am melting over here. 🫠 Photo taken during my bike commute.

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I want to finally give Darktable a good try. Cliff shared a link to darktable.info, which looks like it is a good resource to get started. I am aware that I won't replicate my current workflow in two weeks. It will take more time. But, if I never start, I'll be stuck with Adobe forever.

I also want to put Aphera through its paces. I am not sure how I feel about the way it works from my brief, initial tests – basically layering a bunch of "filters" (I am not doing it justice, I am sure) – but I am willing to also give it a proper test run.

So, hopefully starting in the next few days, I'll start with one of them and post only photos processed with it for a whole week. (Maybe I'll document how I get along with each app, but don't hold your breath.)

Too hot to sleep. Might as well watch the match. 🤷‍♂️

Ulya bought a fan today, the little one put it to use right away. It is too hot to do anything in the afternoon. Just brutal.

Lumi was off school early today because of the excessive heat. It is a pity that there doesn't seem to be a direct translation for the German "Hitzefrei" (which basically means "free because of heat"). I think she used her time very wisely.

Bike ride with the little one. (The forest was nice and cool, so that's where we went.)

More music at Fête de la Musique. All the locations were pretty close by. But the kids did not fancy the high temperatures, so we didn't last long.

Gruga Park Vibes.

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I am sure I'll be out to shoot some images today, but I have a couple left from yesterday, which I don't want to let go to waste. Also I didn't want to mix the horizontal with the vertical images. In general I don't like vertical images that much on the blog, very much for an A4 zine for example though, but I digress. It will be incredibly hot today, so I am glad I have this one task off the list this early! Have a great day!

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Nice evening walk. Took different route than usual to get a change of scenery. I think I might do this more often.

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Man, I can't wait for kindergarten to be over. Filled another spot on the infection bingo card today.

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Today's school festival had various games and prizes. The ones involving water were quite popular due to the high temperatures.

Went out for a quick evening walk and got greeted with a blinking red battery light in my view finder. Still managed to get a couple of photos by turning the camera off immediately after taking a shot. I can only remember one time I ran out of batteries when out shooting. 🤷‍♂️

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Mike wrote a great post about photography as a distraction and he was kind enough to feature a quote from me. 😊

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Early morning walk. I imagine the bird on top of the aviary talking shit to the poor fellows inside.

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Love that this looks like it was somewhere in the middle of the woods, but it is actually in Gruga park, where we spent the morning.

Pretty similar image to yesterday's (but taken today). 🤷‍♂️ I liked the bird, but a longer lens would have helped a lot. I still like the composition.

Really struggling to say something along these images lately, so I am just not gonna… (I need some dedicated photography time soon!)

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Oh yeah, just as I was hitting publish, I remembered that yesterday was the 2,000th post on this blog! Kind of a cool milestone right there. Took ~9.8 years or 3,577 days to get here. That is one post roughly every other day for nearly a decade! 🤯

Got nothing today. (At least not to share, so, the image above is from a couple of days ago.) This whole week was really not great in terms of photography so far. The weekend can't start soon enough!

Observing color.