shift or die

Gestern war ich beim »Masters of Darmstadt« und habe ein paar Fotos gemacht. Hier ein paar erste Impressionen, mehr bald auf pics.alech.de.

Für die Strobisten unter Euch: So sah mein Hauptsetup aus (bis einer der Snowboarder in meinen Lightstand bretterte und es dabei meinen Mittenschuh nach Minolta-Adapter zerriss):

Interessant fand ich auch, dass da jede Menge Hobbyfotografen mit Strobistequipment oder sogar Studioblitzen herumsprangen, die wohl größtenteils zu den Teams gehörten.

I have recently stumbled over the 2009 Photo Challenge, which provides a topic each day for a photo to be taken.

Today I managed to pull out my freshly acquired Strobist gear and shoot something for today's topic, »Yellow«.

Strobist info: seamless black background, HVL-F56AM on camera right, Nikon SB-26 camera left for rim light mainly, black paper in a DIY macro studio. Minolta 50/2.8 Macro & some Gimp.

I was lucky to be sitting in the speaker's corner at 25C3 when the MD5 hackers met before the talk and was asked to take a picture of them.

I quickly set up my newly purchased Strobist gear and caught the following shot:

The uncropped version can be seen over at the CCC events blog, and for those who need it, here is the original version in its complete 12 MP glory. Everything is released under CC-BY, so I am happy if you use it, but please credit me accordingly (»Photo: Alexander Klink.«).

I was not quite happy with this version, but I learned the typical photographer's problem: the subjects only have a limited amount of time. Once we (risktaker, POCsascha and myself) had set up a better version with two flashes and a softbox, they were already on their way to their talk ... :-( — which was awesome, of course.

Cynops recently bought a RFID DemoTag, a device that is made by the IAIK people at TU Graz. Its main use is to be able to copy a Mifare card's »unique« ID. Not having had a reader for Mifare cards, I wasn't able to play with it all week — not until the mrmcd, that is.

Luckily, local and not-so-local RFID hackers where present and willing to play with it — thanks to Collin and starbug. Here are some pictures of us spoofing a Mifare card with ID »DEADBEEF« :-)

Here is the device with two different readers:

This is how it looks on the client — you connect to the device via the serial port and tell it to be the tag with ID x, and you can see the communication between the reader and the tag:

And this is how it looks on the reader side — DEADBEEF received correctly :-)