Domis Tech Blog

Why I take pictures with an external camera?

2021-12-22T00:00:00-06:00

Why would you carry a external camera?

I was always one of that people that thought my smartphone is good enough to take pictures and keep memories but after some years I realized that good is not good enough for me. Yes the smartphones nowadays take great pictures that is true but after my little one was born I wanted to keep those memories in the best quality I can with most of the flexibility. I wanted to take pictures in a loss less format and with a high resolution to print them both on paper and on canvas. If you ever tried doing so with a JPG taken by phone you will find out its okay, but if you are someone that wants details and really good results there is no way around taking pictures in RAW and with a good optics (Camera + Lens). Yes it is also some more things and weight to carry but nothing that would for me personally not be worth it. Summarizing my personal points that make me carry a camera and equipment:

Image Quality
Editing flexibility
Speed
Learning something new

What are you using?

I was reading and comparing a lot and found that a Sony Alpha 6000 is a great camera for a decent price. However, I already switched to the newer Alpha 6400 and sold the a6000 again (Better low light performance, more buttons, better display etc.) Besides the cam body which is not the most important I would say I do own some lenses. I have the Sony 18-200mm f/3.5-6.3, the Samyang 12mm f/2.0 and the Viltrox 23mm f/1.4 those lenses have surved me great in the last years and I used them for different purposes. Mostly for traveling and casual photography I do use the 18-200mm from Sony it has a wide range and you can do a lot while on the road, however if you compare the image quality to a prime lens as the Samyang 12mm or the Viltrox 23mm of course you will see the prime lenses will win. But that is a compromise like a lot in photography you need to decide on. For example with 18-200mm you can “Zoom” a lot and have a lot of possibilites but it comes to the cost of image quality of course. As mentioned photography is about compromises for example the Sony a6xxx series is also not a full format series its APSC which means there sensor is a “cropped” version of a fullformat one. That has good and bad things of course.

First the good things you pay much less for the camera body also the lenses are cheaper, on top because you literally need less glass the weight of the whole system is less. About the bad things: Of course the image quality is different because the sensor is smaller it can catch less light obviously which means you may have more noise in different circumstances (low light for example). Of course the higher priced fullformat bodies are targeting a different group of users which makes them offer more buttons, bigger displays, more SD slots and so on. But that should be it why an APSC and not a fullformat basically weight and money (at least for me).

What else I do carry: Normally I do have a tripod while traveling to take family selfies or do night shots etc. I bought a cheap one from amazon really small and light weight but still high enough. On top I have some extra batteries, a strap to carry it, a camera backpack to carry all the stuff (Which I would have anyways because on traveling you do need a backpack), I also have several sd cards (you can never have enough), on top I also own a external flash and also a remote flash controller. The flash I do use normally inside while taking pictures of family events to also have decent quality in bad light conditions for example candle light around christmas. Last but not least I also have some filters: ND filters for long exposure shots and a polarization filter to remove reflections.

In general I think thats it nothing more here is a full list of equipment (I do not carry everything all the time only the things I need for the case):

Backpack
A6400 Body
Lenses
- Sony 18-200mm
- Samyang 12mm
- Viltrox 23mm
Tripod
Batteries & SD Cards
Filters
- ND 8 up to 1000
- Polarization
External Flash & Remote
Strap & Camera clips (attached to backpack)

Which pictures do you take?

I want to add a gallery section also on this page but first let’s link to my Instagram @neristancecam Normally I upload most of my non private photos to instagram. Sometimes it takes a bit of time for me to post but from time to time new pictures will appear, I do not upload any photos of my private life or people I know so its mostly travel pictures or places I visited.

These are some examples, as mentioned I will add more galleries for different topics in future so stay tuned. Also if there is interest I will explain how I did take some of the pictures because some of them require a bit more effort and postprocessing.

Which tips do you have?

At first I would give the tip of checking if you need to have a external camera or is your smartphone good enough? Second a good option is to rent a camera and lens from a friend or some shop, there are some possibilities that of course cost money but to see if that is the right thing you can rent a camera for a vacation and check. The next point which is imporant: Get used to photography, its rules and principles as well as best practices. My plan is to also write some articles about specific topics when I have time for it ;)

Once you decided to buy your own hardware its worth to not by the top notch and maybe the series before the current top model or wait until something new is released to get some good discounts. A good option is also to buy used lenses, especially APSC lenses you can get for much less then the market price. That is mostly because people decide to switch to fullframe or did not check the points mentioned before, get frustrated and sell there hardware again.

The beginner list of things to learn

Here are some helpful things that helped me to get started a bit, of course I’m not the expert but I read a lot and I think its nice to share with the world.

Check the manual of your camera what it offers and what it does in which mode and settings
Learn the basics of exposure e.g. the exposure triangle ISO vs. Shutter Speed vs. Aperture
Check the different forms of picture composition
Start with taking JPEGs if that is not enough then shoot in RAW however, be aware you need some software to post process
Try to redo pictures other people did take. I don’t mean you should copy but you should try to understand what they did in order to achieve the specific image. For example if you see pictures with “milky” water it very likely was a long exposure so try to take a similar picture

The list above is already a lot and I constantly learn as well, for example I mostly have still some issues finding the right image compositions, sometimes that is also not easy because you are in a city walking with your family and you simply don’t want to spent hours on the same spot trying to get the best composition. But I do have some basic set of rules I follow for example the rule of thirds. Also while walking around in cities etc. I barely use my tripod and do try to have a fast enough shutter speed to always have sharp images instead of blurred once for example.

Closing words

I started this blog post to explain a bit why I take pictures and it ended up in telling even more, I may have used some terms that I did not explain but that would be a whole book in the end. Also I do not want to write about things I may not 100% know about. But in future I want to push out some more posts about photography.

Happy holidays see you next time!

How to communicate as an engineer

2021-10-03T00:00:00-05:00

Prolog

At first you may know that from your workplace or your past: People do talk in meetings, they write mails or they chat with you and suddenly you think What the ....?. I know sometimes it may not be the intention of people but most people I have seen are pretty bad in communication and that leads to problems. The problems can be very different starting from not talking anymore throughout anger, screaming etc. Let’s hope at least no fight ;) To stop that for my self I try to follow some simple steps while talking or writing. On the other hand I also do try to apply similar approaches while listening to someone or reading someones messages. I think it makes sense to write about it because it is also one of the key reasons why this blog or website even started. Also I want to mention that I’m not a professional on this topic and not even somebody that studied or read lots of books about it, I simply want to share how I approach it and what I learned.

How does communication work?

So most people did at some point hear about the concept of Sender and Receiver while communication, and also that its mostly bi-directional so even if you are not talking and just listening e.g. beeing the Receiver you still do communicate back in different forms either by mimic, by sounds or just not writing back in chat even if you can’t see someone etc. it is a form of communication. And that is also what people need to understand you will always have bi-directional communication except you maybe receive a mail, but even then if you never answer that is a form of communication because you tell the otherone I don't want to answer.

If you understood that then you already have 70% solved and know that you should take care about your self while listeing as well ;)

I oversimplified a lot but if you are interested to read more I think wikipedia will guide you to the correct sources Models of Communication Not that wikipedia would be my source here, I had some trainings and other learnings in the past and for me it made sense to link to some resources for people interested to find out more.

What are the actual problems?

Let’s step into more concrete problems you may face and then later see how we can solve them or at least make them better. Sometimes you do read messages or even write messages and people get angry but the intention was the complete opposite. So why’s that? The simple answer is people are sometimes not able to express what they want in a proper and friendly way, that is because they may not be a native speaker, the receiver may not be good in the language used or the set of words is limited. For me personally I do work in environments where everybody speaks english but that doesn’t mean everybody is on an equal level speaking the language. Having said that you can guess that some things may sound very unfriendly to some people even though the writer may be really friendly in that moment but just limited with his speaking or writing skills.
Another problem is not about the language itself it is more about the audience for example if you are an engineer like I’m then you may talk in a technical language with your coworkers, but if you do so in the same way to let’s say marketing people they will either not understand you or take something away from the conversation that may not be true or you don’t want them to take away. That is the second problem I often see and people should be clear about that people listening or reading may have a different background and may not understand what you have been telling them and a lot of times people are afraid to ask.
The third point I do see happening is the point of detail in communication e.g. sometimes people do express things very long, complex or even talk about unnecessary things this brings people to the point that they stop listening or reading, which is the worst because here the direct communication has ended and in a lot of cases people spent time again at another point to get the rest of information that may have been provided after they stopped listening.

What can we do to solve it?

And now the gamechanger ;) I followed some simple principles in the past years when it comes to communication, that helped me a lot to not have such conflicts and situations so lets list them and then do explain them a little bit more.

Before you speak or before you write and especially before you sent a message think about it/read it again once or in the beginning twice. Focus on how would other people understand this? Would they understand me? Do they understand the problem? Do they have enough knowledge to understand? That is going to help you reflecting towards the audience how they will feel about it or how they will react about it. Let’s do a simple example: I can not implement that text in screen X vs. In Screen X (http://example.url) is a headline which we need to present but I'm unable to implement it because the text may be to long in different languages Can you spot the difference? At least I hope so, this was of course a quite simple example but it should teach you something. Instead of simply telling you can’t do something you do give the audience some context by describing exactly which text at which point in which screen and most important why it is not possible. Of course in this case I assumed that it is a message going to be read by a group of technical people or at least people that know the overall context.

If you think about the audience it is also quite often good to limit the amount of information you do provide, for example a CEO might not be interested in the exact details why something may not work. In that case you rather need to explain something is not working because X and in the same time if you have a solution provide it. If you want to convince right away you may give it a forcast how long it may take and/or how its going to look like. Maybe with a screenshot/picture etc. visual things do really help people to understand better. Important is also the more detail you add to something the more questions you may get back. Don’t get me wrong you should not hide problems etc. but to get to the point and have proper discussions it’s good to discuss on a higher level because the more detail there is the more likely it will be that more and more people want to take part in the discussion and the more likely it is that the discussion drifts away from your original request.

Also try to limit the audience to people involved or important e.g. don’t put your whole department on a mail if only you and your product owner may be important ;)

One little thing also happening often is that people take things for granted even you may not be sure. But if so then you should state this and make it really clear e.g. If I remember correctly... or Please correct me if I'm wrong... it all helps to make clear that you know something but you are not a 100% sure which will be okay in most of the scenarios I know because you want to get some confirmation or to help others getting reminded with that.

Last but not least if you have not enough words to express something in short then try to make clear what you mean by describing it around or ask somebody else to read what you want to write or ask them for there opinion :) That is anyways a real good approach in the beginning to practice you can give your texts for example to someone who is more experienced and ask how they understand it or if they even do understand.

Let’s summarize it for the fast readers:

Check the audience
- Am I writing to the right people?
- Is it too many people?
- Do they understand “my” language? E.g. technical vs. non-technical
If you are not sure about something mention it
Let somebody more experienced read your messages first
Do read your own messages again/Think again what you want to say first
Add enough detail but at the same time leave out unimportant things to keep the conversation focused
If possible visualize what you mean
Be friendly

Having said all that I hope it can help you! As mentioned before I may be wrong in some things or some cases of course but writing all the possibilities down is way too much effort and I wanted to give a simple hands on guide that people can adopt and practice with. If something does not work for you that is all fine it is mainly about getting a clear picture how you communicate and how you can get better.

Cheers Domi :)

Hello World!

2021-09-28T00:00:00-05:00

Hello World!

How it came to this website and blog

First of all I need to say I do run a bare metal server for years already and I do have several domains registered as well. I did never use those to publish a website, so mostly they where running into default pages and thats it. However, I did use those for E-Mail, running my little projects (I do want to write about them as well here), running game servers in the last years just Factorio :) As said I was never running any real website behind any of my domains but a nice collegue mentioned to me I should write a book or at least start running a blog writing about what I’m doing.

He actually does know only how I communicate with others public and in private and what I do at work which surprised me. Thinking about that it actually made a lot of sense to me and I decided to give this Idea a try. That is why you do read this now :D

Why a blog?

As mentioned previously there is a nice collegue that likes how I talk and yes I think he is write over the years being a professional Software Engineer I learned how to talk to people, both verbally and in written text form. Always when there where difficult projects or things to discuss or aline I could manage to do that in a productive, friendly and good way. Multiple people even mentioned that to me over the years that I can do that in a very good way. Honestly, I need to admit that I do mistakes nowadays often enough also because I’m not a native english speaker. But in case I do fail it was never a problem since it is about how to handle it and not about how to blame me or anybody else :)
So why a blog now? It is easy to answer I dont wan’t to write a whole book and I think it is worth to share important things and learnings I had over the years in different fields. So here we are on this first blog post about how its started.

What to see here?

In this blog I want to write about things that other people may need, things they are interested in or stuff that just helps. A list of topics I have in mind is following: Learnings from my professional career, photography and videography which I do as a hobby and post on my public instagram account, little projects I did for myself for example a fertilizer machine for our fish tank at home and also a feeding machine for it, 3D printing and more. I hope it will help some people or better say people gonna find it through google and other sources so it may help them.

Stay tuned and see you soon