Life is short and when it comes to decisions you have to listen to your heart and your desires.
Since I was a young boy I always remembered myself on a motorcycle, back then it was behind my father (a motorcycle rider as well) riding into the dreams, and nearly all over Greece, when I became 19 I had already travelled to most parts of Southern Greece, Islands, Mainland all over Greece with my father and his motorcycles.
I soon had my passion, I knew someday I would have my motorcycle; I had to have my motorcycle and nothing would change this!
Years passed, I finished school and became a University student, I had also my first job and everyday life was so busy and hard for me I had nearly no free time to anything, or when I had some free time I wanted to rest and relax from my everyday pressure.
A few years later (1999) and I receive my driving (well actually it should be called riding) license, and I also had the honor to choose a new bike! Yes that would be my father’s gift! I soon decided and I was on 2 wheels, striving to find myself running along the roads of Athens, I had a small bike so long trips where out of the question!
Years passed and many different motorcycles passed my life, I had the opportunity to ride different styles and taste the differences between each other. I soon ended falling in love with street bikes and since 2005 I am deeply in love with my Honda CBR 1000RR, a motorcycle that offered me so many happy moments, traveling and cornering, short and long adventures!
The addition of photography into my hobbies / passions created the need to find ways to reach more abandoned places in Greece, that meant 2 available choices, either get a driver’s license (car) or get a second bike which has the capability to reach the more abandoned places (I am not even considering miss-treating a lady not build to be treated like that –that’s the CBR -) it didn’t take too long to reach a decision, a second bike would be added into my parking lot!
The search was not that intense, it only took me around 1 week to reach my choice! BMW 1150GS 2002 model is going to be the second addition to my motorcycle list!
I already have planned my winter trips totaling something over 6000km’s around Greece, routes have been planned, information is being collected and additionally I am looking over Italy, Alps, Germany and Holland as the big trip taking place somewhere around June next year (hoping everything is going to be fine!).
I also had a pleasant surprise from an old friend when I heard that he will join the photographic adventures! I didn’t have any news from him for a long time, until recently when I received a phone call from him; it made me rather happy to hear that apart from motorcycles he was also into photography the last few years, so now there is another fellow 2 wheel companion to join the routes!
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Can't say much, only the lyrics of my favorite summer song come in my mind:

I've got a feeling
with the wrong people
and I can't control my thoughts

I wish that I could sleep
and just get this over with
...this is only high school bullshit...

I just want to feel

I was warned
absolutley numb
no good around people
everyone knows and watches me

how did I get here tonight?
what am I doing here?
how did I reach this state?
how did I lose my sight?

I'm lost... I'm freaking
and everybody knows... everyone's watching

...so here's all my hopes and aspirations
nothing but puke
god, it's so lonely...

I just want to feel

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Some recent favorites:

Hello everyone!
I hope the summer is “rolling” nicely for everyone, I am still waiting for my holidays (around 2 weeks far away) to relax for the madness of the big city and the loads of work I find everyday in my office.
But enough with desks work and big cities, we are here to discuss art, photography and all those nifty little things that make our everyday life more enjoyable!
So first of all let me share my joy with you! It’s been nearly 2 months since I stopped smoking and I already feel like I never felt before! I used to be a heavy smoker for more than 15 years and I made the decision to quit smoking 7 weeks ago, it was not that hard (although I had times that it was hard) it was more a mind decision! If you are thinking of making such a move just go on don’t be afraid of anything! And more importantly don’t even think you will be missing something!
I would like also to exploit the opportunity of this journal and inform you regarding Hitech filters (since a lot of people are asking my opinion on them lately); Hitech filters are superb in terms of quality! I use the 100mm x 150mm system (which is the biggest) of theirs and they are truly wonderful, I have not had a single problem with casts or whatsoever with them and I believe in their quality they are similar to the Lee ones.
Support of the company is fantastic! Whatever I have asked them I never had any problems! When I initially received my filters there was a small scratch on the 2stop GND, rather small and probably not affecting picture quality, but I felt I had to mention it to them, I received an immediate answer from them stating that they would send me a replacement, and so they did!
Few weeks later I found out that the 3 stop GND filter was just a tad bigger from the filter holder which resulted minor scratching on the sidewalls of the filter when inserting or removing it. The scratching again had no effect on the filter since it was on the area of the filter which is hidden inside the filter holder, I again contacted them, and they again send me a replacement! Wonderful people they never asked me questions, they never requested a return of the products, they just did whatever they could to resolve my problems. But you say are you satisfied with the filters? Then why the problems? Well I believe the minor scratch could be possibly due to the transportation of it, or maybe a small defect when they produced the filter, the good ones had no single problems! What about the 3stop? Scratching on the filter system? Well the filter as a filter was perfect, but it seems just a few mm’s bigger on the sides, I had not problem since the company replaced it immediately, and now I also have a spare 3stop GND which I can use on more severe conditions (and not worrying that much that it will be scratched). The only thing I would change on the Hitech filters is the packing of them, they are packaged on a plastic wrap which is scratch resistant though but it feels a bit cheap, a more hard cased housing would be probably be better, but that’s again something easily fixed with a 3rd party filter housing (which can be found rather cheap around the Internet).
Finally I was looking for a replacement of my Computrekker backpack, I love this backpack since it allows me to carry nearly all my equipment (along with my tripod attached externally to it) but it felt heavy and not that operational when shooting close to my home or whenever I wanted movement freedom or quick access to my equipment. I started looking for an additional bag I could carry with me which would allow me to carry my camera, my filters, my filter adaptor, the polarizer case (for swapping between the GND holder and the polarizer) and most important that I would be able to have quick access to filters or other stuff you make excessive use on field.
After searching I found the Lowepro Inverse 200AW belt pack, and I must say I am really happy with the decision to buy this! Firstly I was not looking for a replacement of the Computrekker but rather an addition to it, something I could carry along (whenever I was travelling for a few days away) and that I could use it with ease!
The Inverse is a wonderful; it feels small but yet again holds nearly all the necessary equipment for the field! It can be used either as a waist or as a shoulder bag! Or both (when carrying lots of stuff) and has an AW cover which protects the equipment in the case of rain!
I was able to fit inside it:
1) Canon 5D with the 17-40L attached (lens hood reversed)
2) My GND filters (100mm x 150mm, hard stop, 1,2,3 stops)
3) 3 additional batteries
4) Hitech 100mm filter holder + adaptor ring
5) Extra CF card
6) Cable release
7) Marumi glass filter + filter case
8) Microfiber lens cleaning cloth (for quick cleaning when necessary) + 1 small bottle of lens cleaning liquid.
9) Blower (I use it when shooting in windy and dusty environments, to blow off dust and particles from the filters or the camera body).
That’s all for a back which costs around 70 euros! And I believe it deserves every single penny!

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So I was bored the other day and I decided to transform my laptop from acer aspire, to acer macspire (laughs!). I decided to give MacOS for x86 another try! Downloaded Ipc and installed on my laptop, finally for the second time I have a working MacOS on my laptop (dual booted to windows vista). I sacrificed my Linux partition on this one, since I had limited HDD space but nevertheless I am really happy!
Nearly everything works on it, Graphics adapter (nVidia GeForce 9500M GS, with QE enabled), audio is ok, wired networking is ok (with small hacks) and the only part I had some problems was my wireless card. I decided to hack even more in it, so I ordered from ebay a mini pci-e wifi replacement (Dell 1490) which is fully compatible with MacOS and I am waiting next week for it to arrive in my hands.
I didn’t test my Bluetooth connection (rarely use it), my webcam (never actually used it as well), and my card reader (does not support CF cards, so I never use it as well) although I am sure the last will most certainly not work, since most onboard card readers are not functioning.
The experience is wonderful, and everything seems to be running smoothly and nicely, I have given photoshop a try, and I also downloaded aperture to run a test on it (I am totally ignorant with aperture since I have never used it before!).
The hackintosh project is steadily growing and more people are getting involved, hardware is a small issue with the community, since it’s on a very early stage! Not much out there, but most laptops are good to go since the decision of Apple to move to Intel based hardware.
I made a nice test, and worked on a few images inside osx and photoshop, I was really impressed with the way osx handles everything! If you have Linux background experience it’s rather easy to find your way around the osx, and even easier to make you necessary hacks to get your hardware up and running.
My next step once my wifi card arrives will be trying a retail installation! A bit more advanced as a task, but worth trying (allows you to have vanilla updated straight from Apple).
I hard stressed the system to see if there would be any kind of bugs or problems, and I must say I had zero! No problems whatsoever, under heavy photoshop work (TIFF files open for editing) and quicktime playing a few avi files (Lost ) just to see how everything would respond, and indeed it worked flawlessly!
Furthermore there is a photography contest ongoing localy in Greece, and we have a few participants (me included) from DA! KirlianCamera, and Justeline are also taking part at it (actually they were the ones that first mentioned and I found out!) so If you are bored, or if you like any work from us, just shoot a few stars toward our direction (although I am left really behind! LOL)
My entry is:
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KirlianCamera entry is:
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And Justelines entry is:
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And now some recent favorites:

I thought of creating this second part of a question and answer template, I believe it would be easier for everyone. So let’s move on with questions and answers!

Are all TN panels lousy? And why?
Not all TN panels are lousy, color wise TN has made great steps the last few years and there are quite a lot TN panels out there that perform really well color wise. The problem with TN panels is mostly the viewing angle. The technology used inside them does not allow multiple viewing angles (compared to PVA panels for example), this means that there is significant color and contrast shift when viewing from a different angle. Additionally 6bit technology is inferior compared to 8bit panel. Note though that there are 8bit TN panels available on the market!

If my monitor gamut is smaller than sRGB what can I do?
Well the first thing is hardware calibrate your monitor, so that you make sure there are no strong casts that affect your color managed workflow. After calibrating you can still work on it, but your color critical work will be compromised by the monitor inferior quality. This is mostly for laptop displays, since TN panels found on LCD screens usually match the Srgb color space. But yet again they need a good hardware calibration for them to be able to closely match the correct colors. Most LCD panels are way off out of the box with only a very small percentage of them being close to good color reproduction.

How can I evaluate a monitor?
Well if you are planning on buying a monitor you should be searching for gamut, and calibration validation. There are plenty of sites offering such information. Generally most monitor oriented review sites (avoid the plain all hardware sites). A good review should be able to provide a gamut plot of the color space of the monitor and additionally some validation reports before and after the calibration.
Validation reports represent the color accuracy before and after calibration and it’s measured in deltaE. There is no need to get in space science, just remember that deltaE should be under 1 for excellent color rendering, around 2 for good color rendering and if it matches or is greater than 3 then things are quite different on your monitor.
Most LCD panels after calibration can reach around 1.8 deltaE which means that color reproduction is very good, PVA panels (and some TN panels as well!) can reach around 0.6 ~ 0.8 which means they have excellent color reproduction!
You can evaluate your monitor calibration if you download a evaluation of basiCColor software, it has a evaluation section where you monitor is metered and evaluated.
Evaluation is not total, and it’s performed for every single color, so you can have a pretty much detailed information of the results of each color among midpoints, grays, blacks and whites!

Can you recommend any sites?
There are a few:
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Face to face offers you direct comparison with plenty of details! It provides also gamut plots and monitor evaluation results before and after calibration.
So you mean I have to spend a lot to get colors nicely rendered?
No! I believe you don’t, most people upload their final work in sRGB color space, even TN panels can quite nicely achieve this. Viewing angles as mentioned before are crucial to the correct color accuracy but still it doesn’t mean that if you can’t spend 2000 euros on a good monitor that you are doomed.
On the other hand if you are a color freak, then a 2000 euro monitor is the only way.

Wide gamut monitors, what are they?
Wide gamut monitors are the latest “trend” of displays. They are called so because they do actually cover a greater gamut color space than sRGB. This allows you to work with colors even better since you are not restricted to a small color space. But it has its own problems, a wide gamut display means that you are able to reproduce more colors than an average monitor can, this leads to loss of color reproduction when transforming for a color space or a monitor that does not support it. This is also the reason that many times you can see oversaturated or hue shift colors in final images of people working with such monitors.

If I hardware calibrate does it mean that what I see is what I get?
No! Calibration is the process of correcting your monitor’s colors, and then during development of a picture you are just sure that the blue you are seeing on screen is blue. What you see is what you get will happen only when you soft proof for the output device.
Soft proof is achieved through your image editor and with the use of the correct ICC profiles.
Why this happens? It happens because every device is different and covers a different color space, say if your monitor can handle 16 colors and your printer only 12 then your printer will print 12! You need to soft proof for your printer and transform the image specifically for that device if you want to be precise!

What about the Internet?
This is the troublesome part of color management. The internet is a beast full of users with different O/S, different monitors, different capabilities and finally different browsers.
The standards mention that untagged images should be rendered as sRGB without any color management. But this is not the case for the Apple users; Apple renders untagged images using the monitor color profile, on most monitors we are talking about a color space close to the Srgb gamut, but not the case with laptop displays (even Macbook pro owners) or wide gamut displays.
On the other hand windows users do actually enjoy this feature; untagged images are rendered as sRGB without any color management.
So here the questions arise, how should you treat images? Well the first and most obvious is that you need to develop them for the sRGB color space, since this is the standard of non color managed systems. Secondly you should consider your target audience, does it use color management? What kind of O/S are they working on, and mostly which browsers do they use? If IE is the answer with windows then you only need to consider color management inside the sRGB color space and what you see on your monitor when you soft proof for windows RGB.
The best way is to work on the working color space (proPhoto or AdobeRGB) make your adjustments and then convert to the sRGB color space, finally save for the web, I believe by adding the ICC profile (there should be an option inside your image editor) things are more clear for color managed applications (since we have differenced between Apple and Windows users).
Applying the color space tag on the image instructs the browser to render the specific color space with your monitor profile and so everyone is happy! Not assigning a tag in your image is a total different beast, windows will translate to sRGB NON color managed, but Apple will translate this to your monitor profile. In the case of LCD screens it will be close to sRGB hence no much difference! But in the case of laptop users, we speak of a total different image!

I am little lost with all the previous things, color spaces, monitor gamut’s, deltaE?
Simple words, your monitor has a predefined color space, it means that it’s able to reproduce a certain amount of colors! This differs from monitor to monitor, some monitors are very limited in color reproduction (Laptops) and some are very wide (wide gamut), the gamut of the monitor is always predefined when the monitor is manufactured.
Hardware calibration is the process of metering the colors the screen reproduces and discovering flaws, so you may be viewing a blue color but due to casts (which are introduced in a combination of monitor luminance, room lightning, and your video cards signals) you may be looking to a slight different version of colors.
What is actually happening and you need monitor calibration? You need it because you have based your workflow on what you see on the screen, if your screen is on the cool side (bluer cast) you will tend to develop over-warmed pictures! This is strongly found on portrait photographs, for example I saw all my portrait pictures look yellowish! Why? Because before calibration I believed the pictures looked “cool” with colors and I tended to add more yellow in the color palette, off course I could not actually see this on my monitor because I was presented with a well rendered image on my un-calibrated monitor, after viewing them under a calibrated monitor I was able to distinguish this flow!
Another example has to do with your monitor’s luminance level, what you believe is a bright image it might actually be a normal image or even worse it might be a under-exposed image, you develop and you are pleased only to find out later on a different monitor that your image looks totally different from what you where working on!
Some other monitors tend on the warm side, so you will be producing more cool pictures than you imagine. This is all the hardware calibration process! Making your screen respond correctly with colors, and fixing any possible casts there are there.
Gamut is just the area of color space a specific device or predefined color space can reproduce.
deltaE is the measurement and evaluation of colors and luminance, it provides information if your monitor is reproducing correctly the colors:
DeltaE > 3 -> What you see on your monitor is far away from the real color.
2 < DeltaE < 3 -> Color is not the closest match, but still you can work on it, it will need a very experienced viewer to detect color anomalies in your picture.
DeltaE < 2 Good color reproduction, monitor color is nearly spot on to the true color of the image!
DeltaeE < 1 excellent color reproduction! Your monitor is achieving a close to perfect color, this means that colors you see on the image are actually colors you expect to see on a different calibrated device!

Now some recent favorites as well: