Annual review 2023

Today is the year in review for 2023 and again it was very warm at the turn of the year, but there was also a lot of rain, too much in some areas.

First of all, I would like to wish all my visitors to the blog all the best for 2024 and, above all, that you have had a good start to the New Year. The blog is now in its 11th year with many posts, especially on the topics of photography, video and IT.

Despite a few warnings, I still managed to publish a post every week, sometimes with a video on my YouTube channel. In total, I published more than 1,213 posts, mainly about photography, video and, of course, IT.

And here I have to admit that the topic of IT has taken up more space in the last year. On the one hand, I’ve done a lot in terms of IT, made changes etc. On the other hand, it’s becoming more difficult to find really new topics in the field of photography.

This started at the beginning of the year, when I wrote several posts about my experiences with a 10GBit network.

It wasn’t easy and there were also some problems with the Asus network card, for example. With the 10GTek card there were no more problems and I was able to achieve full speed. However, I also found that even a hard disk array in a RAID is hardly capable of delivering the performance that is theoretically possible on a permanent basis.

Even with a cache I wasn’t able to achieve this, so I have to say that as a single person you are practically unable to really have or utilize this speed.

Photo-wise, I’ve added a Sigma 150-600mm/5.0-6.3 to my Lumix S5 kit, which has proved to be an excellent telephoto zoom. It produces very sharp images and is only minimally improved by stopping down. But this plays a rather subordinate role in animal photography, for example.

Of course, due to its weight of 2.1 KG, such a lens is not a lens that you always have with you. It’s a nice lens to take with you because of the monopod, which in my opinion should always be used, even if the Sigma has very good stabilization.

In terms of software, AI has increasingly found its way into 2023, as it did last year. More and more functions are being implemented with AI support. Above all, Luminar NEO has a lot to offer here. But Photoshop and Da Vinci Resolve also offer more and more functions that rely on AI. The AI Denoise function in Lightroom and Adobe Camera RAW should also be mentioned here.

However, the downside is that you now have to look at photos and videos more than three times to determine whether they are “real” images or videos or fakes.

I then bought a small mini PC, the Asrock Desktop Mini H470, mainly for home office work. Equipped with 16 GB RAM and an Intel i5 CPU, this small and inconspicuous device was my work PC for many hours in the home office.

I later replaced it with an Asrock X300, which, with an 8-core CPU, has almost as much power as my now aging desktop PC with the Ryzen 1700X, except for the graphics card. But the latter also gave up its life in October after almost 7 years, so I will certainly be looking for a new PC in the new year.

The small Asrock is perfectly adequate for Lightroom and Photoshop, but for video editing it simply lacks a dedicated graphics card.

I then converted the Asrock H470 into a Proxmox server. Various services are hosted there in different virtual machines, LXC or even in a Docker environment.

So my Nextcloud, which until now has always run on a Raspberry, has now moved to this machine. In addition to the articles about software products, there were of course also articles about hardware. PiHole is also hosted here and I’ve also started working with Paperless-NGX.

And over time I have installed a number of applications, such as several databases, including a PostgresQL, which stores my projects from DaVinci Resolve. This makes my work easier and is also an advantage when backing up if you keep everything in a central location.

I had already bought the Dell U2722DE because my old Dell just didn’t want it anymore. But at the beginning of the year, the LG UN880B was so attractive that I couldn’t resist. I now had a 4K 32-inch monitor which, for the relatively low price, is also suitable for the photo/video sector as it can be calibrated perfectly.

Maybe I’ll manage to concentrate more on photography/video than blog topics again in 2024. However, it has to be said that hardly any real innovations are to be expected in this area. It will be the small improvements that count.

Yes, that was the year 2023 in key words relevant to this blog. I hope you enjoyed the articles and will remain loyal readers of the blog.

ciao tuxoche