Its a dark wine cellar, the picture is a bit weird since I focus on the back walls instead of the wine bottles, but I was mostly doing it to test the lens. The picture is shot at f 1.4 1600 iso and 1/50 seconds the shutter speed is a habit I have from the 50mm where I have to have shutter speeds of between 1/30- 1/50 to get clear images. I found out later that with this lens I can easily shoot at 1/10 and the picture is still not blurry.

The reason I post this picture is that I am amazed by how much is actually in focus even though it is shot at f 1.4.

This is actually a very dark cellar, I wanted to try out how light I could make it look. The settings are iso 2500 f 1.4 shutter speed 1/20 no flash, (handheld) I couldn’t have done this shot with any other lens, I haven’t photoshopped it at all, its amazing that it looks like it is shot in daylight, in a dark cellar. I have tried something similar earlier with a tripod and long shutter speed with another lens, but then the colors are skewed.

I had to try a HDR picture in daylight as well, the Karlstein castle is beautiful although it is too much of a tourist trap for my taste. This picture is taken using 9 different shots on a tripod with 0.7 steps per picture and combined to one picture using Photoshop and Photomatix.

The new lens is so much better than my 24-70 2.8 sigma lens that I am thinking about selling it since I don’t think I’ll ever use it again, it is dead sharp even shot on f 1.4 there is virtually no lens vignetting or barrel distortion, the colors are close to perfect. Some of the pictures I can take with it seems impossible, I don’t understand how I can suddenly shoot at 1/6 s and still get pictures that are not blurry handheld I thought 1/20 would be the limit when 1/40 is my limit on the 50mm and it somehow seems to break some rules of physics when it shoots at f 1.4.

Zyzlife was an attempt to create a social network site where users could create their own social network sites. Zyzlife was the hub where you could go from site to site, the left menu would change depending on which network you where in. Users could create social network sites by dragging and dropping elements like forums, galleries, chat, html pages and so on, and you could also make your own design for each network. The reason I made it was that I already had two social networks Darkdate, a site for alternative people in Norway and Lolitasnap, a fashion site for people who like goth lolita, EGL and other Japanese styles. Lolitasnap had a very pink and cute design while Darkdate had varying black designs. The experiment worked very well with Lolitasnap that got more than 3000 new members and had a lot of activity (more than 5000 members). Darkdate is another story.

Darkdate was once a very active community with 18000 members and 3000 daily visitors, when I started working with it the activity had dropped enormously, I attributed the fact to Facebook, the general drop in the number of alternative people in Norway and the fact that Darkdate was a very old fashioned social network site. It didn’t have forums, communities, you had to pay to have more than 5 pictures in the gallery and the coding was done in Norwegian. My goal was always to create a new more modern Darkdate. The problem was that the drop in daily visitors was so extreme that I launched the new site way too early, I was afraid that no one would be left when I made the new site, since in just one year the daily activity had dropped from 3000 to 700. Half of the drop came before I started working with the site. The new site was full of bugs, navigational issues and other flaws, and we had some problems transferring information since everything was coded in Norwegian. It was a big mistake of me launching it that early and the reaction I got on it was not pretty.

I kept working on Zyzlife for 2 more years, and in the end I was actually very happy with the result, the site had 30.000 members and some really cool features that no other social network sites have, but it still needs a lot of work, Facebook is a difficult network to compete with and I have other projects that are more successful at least money-wise. Zyzlife has always been my pet project and I spent a lot of money on it, but it is just too much work for me alone with very little returns.

I am thinking about making Zyzlife an open source project or a collaboration project so if anyone is interested in working with me on this let me know.