stephan mantler

EOS Movie Theater

stephan mantler — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 06:41:39 +0000

Had the chance to take a peek at the EOS Movie Theater yesterday. First opened in 1921, it showed silent movies with live music (counting up to 60 musicians!). It was in pretty much continuous operation until 2004 – making it one of the oldest operational movie theaters in Vienna. The movie theater is protected as a historical monument, although its exact future remains unclear.

Thanks Armin!

Simplicity

stephan mantler — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 10:46:43 +0000

Went out to the Bikepark Semmering last night to shoot a few pictures at the 24h downhill race that went down this weekend. As expected for such a shooting, the car was packed with gear. The trolley filled to the brim with assorted lenses, an Elinchrom Quadra pack and two additional Nikon flashes for light, light stands, etc.

At the race site I decided to first check out the course with minimal gear, just to get a feel for the course and good angles. So I grabbed the D700 and a fast lens (85mm f/1.8), and set off to explore the mountain. Four hours later, I came back with so many keepers that I couldn’t be bothered to set off again with significantly more gear.

Simplicity wins.

On the Move

stephan mantler — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 08:59:23 +0000

In case you’re wondering why I’m not posting too much lately – we’re currently moving. Also, Food & Foto is on summer break and will commence later this year; probably changing the format a little bit and doing the occasional away game.

But summer is for being outdoors anyway, not for reading or writing blogs. So go outside and play!

Location Scouting with Max

stephan mantler — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 20:55:14 +0000

Pro triathlete and friend Max Renko and I had been thinking about a portrait series for a while, and now we finally managed to get together and check out a few possible locations. No big setup involved, just Max doing his thing and me doing mine. Checking out which angles might work, where the composition lines up and looking for nice backgrounds. Had a few good ideas, I think.

Zoom, zoom, zoom

stephan mantler — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 09:22:06 +0000

After shooting a few panoramic images in Iceland, I figured I’d need a reasonable way of displaying them. And since screen resolution doesn’t really let you appreciate the amount of detail in 4×5″ slides, why not find a solution that also works for zooming into other large sized images?

I’m now playing with the Zoomify viewer, and am fairly happy with the result. Check out the new Panoramas & Large Images section of my homepage for a few samples. I especially like the fishing boat; it really has a crazy amount of detail…

Despite the huge detail, this ~100MP scan is actually limited by my scanner. According to this chart, the actual film resolution is about 3x better yet.

Iceland

stephan mantler — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 11:03:09 +0000

How do you describe a country where elements collide, fire and ice wage war, where the sun doesn’t set in summer and night falls for half a year in winter?

You don’t. You stand back in awe and hope your feeble attempts at capturing its beauty photographically, although doomed to fail, at least convey a glimpse of what it really is.

Inga also created a wonderful set of images that can be found in her Flickr Set. Also, zoomable versions of my panoramic and large format shots can now be found in the new Panoramas & Large Format section.

Kjölur

stephan mantler — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 16:48:17 +0000

Taking a break on the Kjölur highland route near Storisandur. Eating skyr for lunch. Wind blowing, rain pounding on the jeep. iPod playing Zoë Keating’s Tetrishead.

Perfect.

Mountains, rivers, rain & all-terrain horses.

stephan mantler — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 12:39:08 +0000

Iceland

stephan mantler — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 17:20:41 +0000

We’re in Iceland for a little while, so please don’t expect too many updates. But I promise it’ll be worth the wait once we’re back!

Backup Strategy

stephan mantler — Mon, 31 May 2010 21:38:59 +0000

In the last week, file systems on all three major operating systems failed on me.

First off was my Linux server. I’ve got a few virtualized xen servers running on the actual host, and everything had been humming along nicely with a decent uptime (about 300 days) until suddenly the file system (either the md2 software raid or the ext3fs running on top of that) killed an inode that belonged to the database server’s disk image, causing *that* to attempt to read beyond its (emulated) disk limit.

Ka-boom.

New disk image, restored database from backup, and up and running again in a few hours.

Right about the same time, I received a Windows Vista 7 laptop to debug one of our applications. Shut down. Go home. Boot. “Disk K: needs to be checked for consistency. 10 … 9 … 8 .. 7 .. 6 .. 5 .. 4 .. 3 .. 2 .. 1 .. ”

… nothing.

Chkdsk stuck at ’1 second’, and no way in hell to actually abort the check.

Turns out this is a known bug, MS Knowledge Base 975778. Not one that deserves any official treatment, you need to register your email and wait for the download link. Of course, the hotfix implies that you find a way to circumvent the hang in the first place, which apparently amounts to pure luck.

And finally, my MacBook Pro decided to join the cool kids and trash its file system. Cross-linked inodes are apparently something neither fsck_hfs nor TechTools Pro can fix (despite some claims to the contrary). Ended up just wiping the disk (7-pass secure to make sure any hardware failures would be detected), and reinstalling from Time Machine.

Which brings me to a very important point:

Make sure your backups are A-OK. You never know when you’ll need them. They’re the difference between losing some time while you’re restoring stuff, and losing all the data you’ve been working on.